Adelaide Hills, South Australia
Adelaide Hills sits just behind the city of Adelaide — close enough to reach in 45 minutes, but climatically a world away from the warm, sun-baked reputation South Australia usually has. While Barossa and McLaren Vale built their names on big, powerful Shiraz, Adelaide Hills became the state's answer to a completely different question: what happens if you go up into the mountains instead?
The first vines here were planted in 1839, and the region's wine made a notable mark early — Queen Victoria received the first gift of Australian wine to an English monarch, sent from an Adelaide Hills vineyard in 1843 or 1844. But cool-climate viticulture was genuinely hard in the 19th century, and most of those original vines had been pulled out by the 1930s — the climate that makes the region special today simply wasn't well understood yet.
The modern Adelaide Hills is essentially a late-1970s invention, built on a single confident bet. Brian Croser planted Chardonnay in the high-altitude Piccadilly Valley in 1979, having recognized the region as one of the best spots in Australia for cool-climate varieties — a hunch that built the foundations for the Croser, Petaluma, and Tapanappa labels. Stephen George followed in 1982, founding Ashton Hills and planting a wide range of grapes to see what would thrive; Pinot Noir was the standout. Geoff Weaver, Tim Knappstein, and the Henschke family all planted vineyards in the neighboring Lenswood district in the early 1980s, and Michael Hill Smith and Martin Shaw of Shaw and Smith joined soon after. Within a decade, a region that had been essentially abandoned sixty years earlier was being reinvented from scratch by people who actually understood its climate.
That climate is the whole story. Vineyards sit on steep, small parcels across varied microclimates, often requiring hand pruning and picking, with elevations ranging from 350 to 600 metres above sea level cooling things down significantly compared to the valley floor below. The result is a genuinely white-wine-dominant region in a state famous for reds: Adelaide Hills splits roughly 65% white to 35% red, with Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay as the two leading plantings. Adelaide Hills Sauvignon Blanc is often considered the benchmark for the style in Australia, and the region leads South Australia for high-quality Pinot Noir. There's also room for surprises — Larry Jacobs and Mark Dobson of Hahndorf Hill brought Grüner Veltliner over from Austria and planted it in 2006, and it's become something of a regional specialty since.
Curiously, despite all that white-wine and Pinot Noir focus, parts of the region still manage serious red wine: west-facing slopes in the north are warm enough for Cabernet Sauvignon, and producers around Balhannah and Macclesfield have had real success with cool-climate Shiraz — a different, more elegant expression than the powerhouse styles found elsewhere in South Australia.
In this collection you'll find Adelaide Hills' benchmark Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay alongside elegant Pinot Noir and cool-climate Shiraz — proof that South Australia has more than one register
