Australian sparkling wine

Australia has made sparkling wine since the nineteenth century. At Great Western in Victoria, gold miners dug cellars into the hillside for Joseph Best in the 1860s. Hans Irvine bought the estate in 1888 and hired Charles Pierlot, who had worked for Pommery in Champagne, and in 1890 they laid down Great Western's first 2,000 bottles of sparkling, red among them. In South Australia Edmond Mazure was making sparkling burgundy, the sparkling shiraz of its day, at Auldana by the mid-1890s. Seppelt bought Great Western in 1918 and still makes sparkling shiraz there.

Tasmania came much later. Heemskerk planted at Pipers River in 1975, and in 1986 Louis Roederer joined it there, choosing the island for a climate like north-east France's; that venture became Jansz. Ed Carr founded House of Arras in 1995. When he first visited in 1988 the whole state had 46 hectares of vines.

Traditional method. The second fermentation happens in the bottle you buy, and the wine sits on its yeast for years before it's released. Tasmania, the Macedon Ranges, the Upper Yarra and the Adelaide Hills make it.

Prosecco. The second fermentation happens in a pressurised tank, which keeps it fresh and fruity and priced to open on a Tuesday. Almost half of Australian prosecco comes from the King Valley in Victoria, where Italian families settled and Dal Zotto planted the first vines in 1999.

Sparkling shiraz. A true Australian original, first made at Great Western in the 1890s, when it was sold as sparkling Burgundy. It's red, it's dry or close to it, and it's a Christmas table fixture.

Moscato. Sweet, low in alcohol and only lightly sparkling, made to drink young and cold.

Tasmania is built around it: in the 2025 vintage 43% of every grape the state picked went into sparkling wine. It makes about 1.2% of Australia's wine by volume and 6.5% by value.

The Macedon Ranges are the coldest wine district on the mainland, with vineyards at 300 to 800 metres. The Yarra Valley became a sparkling region in 1986 when Chandon arrived, and the move now is to the high, cool sites of the Upper Yarra. The Adelaide Hills grow chardonnay and pinot noir with a mineral edge. The King Valley is prosecco country, with nights that drop 10 to 20 degrees on the Alpine wind.

At home, yes, and that isn't changing. Under the free trade agreement Australia and the EU reached in March 2026, Australia keeps prosecco as a grape name for wine sold here. On exports the name is phased out over ten years. Australia is the only country outside Italy with that right. Most Australian prosecco sells for $10 to $20, and it's 80% of the prosecco Australians buy.

Tasmanian traditional method is built to keep: the best vintage wines have drinking windows running ten years and more past release. Sparkling shiraz is famous for it, and the benchmark Seppelt Show has a window into the 2040s. Prosecco and moscato are made to drink young.

These are the windows Barello runs on for a vintage bottle, counted from the vintage. Tell it where the bottle is kept and it moves them to match; a non-vintage bottle has no year to count from, so it gets none.

Prosecco at 6 to 8°C, sparkling white and rosé at 8 to 10°C, and sparkling shiraz a little warmer at 10 to 12°C. Straight from a kitchen fridge a bottle is about 4°C, so give a good one ten minutes on the bench before you pour.