Victoria’s Five Wine Pillars
Home to over 600 cellar doors, Victoria may be Australia’s second smallest state, but it’s home to the largest number of individual wineries — all of which are easily accessible from the cultural and culinary hub of Melbourne.
To provide visitors with easy-to-navigate guidance on how to enjoy Victorian varietal while also experiencing the best of the state’s food, nature, and local culture, there are five distinctive wine destinations, each with its own unique flavour and visitor experience.
Victoria-wide
The state of Victoria has five distinct premier wine-making destinations that produce signature wine styles, including shiraz, pinot noir, chardonnay and more, all within easy driving distance of the world-class city of Melbourne.
Shiraz Central
Ballarat, Bendigo, Goulburn Valley, Grampians, Heathcote, Macedon Ranges, Pyrenees, Strathbogie Ranges, Sunbury, Upper Goulburn
In the wild heart of Victoria’s Highlands, you’ll find Shiraz Central.
It’s a place where the gold rush simply never ended. Only now, the gold grows on vines. Its name? Shiraz.
There, scattered among the old gold mining towns, 250 wineries benefit from long sunny days and cool nights. The region’s pioneering winemakers work at one with nature to produce a cool, spicy Australian shiraz, notable for its complexity and finesse.
Pinot Coast
Geelong, Mornington Peninsula, Gippsland
If there’s one thing you’d expect from a wine-growing region that encompasses 261 wineries along 750 kilometres of Australian coastline, it’s variety.
But more and more, there’s an overwhelming consensus that this coastal wonderland was made to grow one grape above all others: pinot noir.
Maybe it’s the way the sea breeze hits the grapes on the vine; maybe it’s the fact that the Pinot Coast has far more than its fair share of world-class winemakers. If you like pinot and other cool climate classics, you’ll love the Pinot Coast.
Muscat of Rutherglen
Muscat of Rutherglen is a uniquely Australian grape. It means so much more to its home than just wine. It is the grape upon which the region was built and the grape to which generations of winemakers have dedicated their lives.
For the past 140 years, Rutherglen winemakers have benefited from the area’s long ripening season, which helps create wines with an intense flavour. This goes for the area’s array of table wines, as well as Muscat of Rutherglen.
Like the grape, you’d be hard pressed to find a place that offers the intensity of flavour for which Rutherglen’s wines have become famous.
Yarra Valley
The Yarra Valley is Victoria’s oldest wine-growing region, where the first vines were planted in 1838.
Just a short drive from Melbourne, you’ll find a region filled with passionate, innovative winemakers. They are master craftspeople who work a diverse range of soils and altitudes to create some of the world’s best cool-climate wines.
The area is famed for chardonnays that are unrivalled in complexity, texture and finesse and known the world over. The elegant pinot noirs are also not to be missed.
King Valley
There would be no Australian prosecco if not for the King Valley.
The easy-to-drink Australian favourite came to be when Otto Dal Zotto, an Italian farmer, began playing with varietals from his homeland in the 1980s. It just so happens that the region’s long days and warm nights make it the perfect place for growing prosecco varietals.
Decades later, and King Valley’s Prosecco Road is famed across the country for its world-class offering of prosecco, sangiovese and other old and new-world varietals.
