McLAREN VALE
SHANTEH WALE
Before the clinking of glasses, bustling cellar doors, and tractor vibrations, there were deeper sounds — shifting earth and rumbling seas — that composed the song of McLaren Vale’s making. Let’s begin with the great landmass of Gondwana, which began to break apart around 180 million years ago. The separation was slow, advancing only a millimetre each year, with Australia and Antarctica finally parting ways 45 million years ago. In South Australia, this tectonic movement formed the wedge-shaped St Vincent Basin, situated between the Mount Lofty Ranges and the Yorke Peninsula, now covered by the Gulf St Vincent. The basin’s faulting created a step-like structure and lifted the Mount Lofty Ranges. Two triangular, almost leaf-shaped fault angles emerged within the basin — the Willunga and Noarlunga Embayments. Within these coastal indentations lie soils shaped by Cenozoic marine limestones, and river and wind-blown sediments, deposited as the ocean advanced and retreated over millennia. Interspersed throughout are ancient layers of rock unearthed by shifting tectonic plates, revealing formations up to 750 million years old. It is here that we find the wine region of McLaren Vale. Home to the Kaurna people, who, for hundreds of generations, lived in harmony with the open grassy plains, dotted tree lines, and native inhabitants. With colonisation came dramatic change and development — a stark change when considering that for over 65,000 years, the world’s oldest continuous culture lived in step with nature and made minimal impact on its landscape. The region first became focused on cereal crops and cattle farming when, down the line, the region’s viticultural story began as John Reynell and Thomas Hardy, both of English origin, planted the first vines in 1838. McLaren Vale became South Australia’s first wine-growing region. Its Mediterranean climate — warm summers, moderate winters, and low humidity — proved ideal for producing dry table wines, and later for ripening red varieties destined for fortified wines that found favour in the UK and US during the mid-20th century. By the 1970s, large-scale government-sponsored immigration programs brought an influx of Italian families whose horticultural knowledge and love of
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The Vintage Journal
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