ADELAIDE HILLS SUMMARY TONY LOVE REVIEWS TONY LOVE AND TIJANA LAGANIN
The beauty of the Adelaide Hills is about its breath-taking landscapes. Its valleys and high points. Around its forever-winding roads are views that drag you into a lingering reverie. Its long vision and close-up focus. Its florid autumn colours, wintry mists, and spring and summer verdancy. And, in every season, its relaxing breaths of fresh, enlivening air. As you crisscross the region, in seemingly every corner there is now a vineyard amongst the old orchards, dotting the old dairy land or dressing steeply angled slopes. Everything about the region comes in plurals. It is so long – a crazy 75km – that within it are multiple variations on the Hills theme: from scary drop zones to epic rolling country spilling out from its eminent central western pinpoint, Mt Lofty. In the northern reaches it touches the southern Barossa. In the southwestern corner, it could easily be called McLaren Vale Heights. While considered in Australian wine classifications as generally cool climate, the temperature nuances are enough to define sectors of the region as more prized for grapes that revel and ripen in colder sites, such as Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Grüner Veltliner and Pinot Noir. Conversely, warmer settings at the extremities are suited to varieties like Shiraz, which can still show off their cooler climate personalities. Such differences in growing conditions: sunshine hours during the growing season, altitudes and orientations of vineyards from slope to gully, north, south, east and west, and all the elements of mesoclimate variation are key to understanding the complexity of the Adelaide Hills wine region. Even within the same varietal classes, the wide diversity of site influences means it is often pointless to tie down generalist character and style guides to the wines of the Hills. In many ways, it is a region where terroir has triumphed. And hand in hand with that, where winemaking individualism has prospered. Add to this the unusual scenario of the greater geographical indicator (GI) region containing within it two smaller official GI regions: Piccadilly Valley, where the modern era of Hills winemaking began in the late 1970s with the arrival of Brian Croser and his Chardonnay vineyard and accompanying original Petaluma winery,
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The Vintage Journal – Regional Focus
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