Tasmania | Wine Terms

WINE TERMS

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Tasmania

This beautiful Australian island state is about the size of Ireland. It sits roughly 150 miles off the southeast corner of the mainland, directly south of Melbourne. Tasmania is Australia’s southernmost area and the closest to Antarctica, which is about 1675 miles across the Southern Ocean. Hobart is its capital and most populous city. Although Tasmania’s wine history goes back to 1823, when vines were first planted near Hobart, within two decades most commercial winemaking had been abandoned. There wasn’t much interest in Tasmanian VITICULTURE until the 1950s and even then the wine industry grew sporadically over the next several decades. Today its vineyard acreage makes up less than 1 percent of Australia’s total, its wine production less than 0.5 percent. Under the Australian GEOGRAPHIC INDICATIONS rulings, Tasmania is a zone but doesn’t have any officially recognized regions. Unofficially, there are a number of areas that are distinct. Around Hobart in the southeastern corner of the state are the Derwent, Coal River, and Huon Valleys; along the east coast are various isolated growing areas grouped under the East Coast designation; near the city of Launceston in northern Tasmania are the Tamar Valley and the Pipers Brook-Pipers River areas; and to the west of Launceston is an area called simply Northwest. There are about 2,300 vineyard acres in Tasmania. This far south the climate is very cool (although some areas can be warmer than parts of VICTORIA on the mainland), so cool-climate varieties of PINOT NOIR and CHARDONNAY are the most popular. They’re used for both STILL WINES and SPARKLING WINES, while some grapes are shipped to the mainland for the winemaking process. Other grapes grown here include CABERNET SAUVIGNON, RIESLING, SAUVIGNON BLANC, PINOT GRIS, and GEWÜRZTRAMINER. The state’s largest producing area is Pipers Brook-Pipers River, one of the cooler regions, which hosts the state’s dominant winery, Pipers Brook Vineyard.