Wine
The secret garden & the perfect wine
Whether you're a wine connoisseur or collector, someone who simply enjoys a glass or two with friends, or are just plain curious, then prepare yourself to experience some truly unique sensory pleasures. Our gifted location and a quirk of fate have conspired to create wines that cannot be found or replicated anywhere else in the world.
North eastern Victoria is blessed with the greatest diversity of altitude, soil types, rainfall and temperature in the country. This provided far-sighted winemakers with the rare opportunity of growing vines in cool climate alpine valleys, on hot plains, in rich sandy loams, granite-based soils and volcanic soils, to produce extremely different styles of wines in a relatively small area.
Today, our vineyards create the full range of classic wines for every palate, from intensely fruit-flavoured Chardonnays, Rieslings and Pinot Noir to rich Cabernet Sauvignon and sparkling Shiraz, crowned by the legendary Muscats and Tokays of Rutherglen. All of which can be personally appreciated and bought at cellar doors from Beechworth to Rutherglen.
However, it took a couple of ironic twists of fate to turn our unique growing conditions and vines into the secret garden of glorious creation that it is today.
By the late 19th Century our productive attributes, brilliantly exploited and led by the pioneering wine families of Rutherglen, had built our region into the largest wine growing area in Australia. Then, towards the end of the 1890s, the twin disasters of phylloxera and a decade of drought struck the state.
Phylloxera is a vine root eating insect that is more devastating than a plague of locusts. Brought in by ships from France, the nasty bug soon found its way into the soils of Rutherglen. As a precaution and prevention, the whole area was quarantined, and it remains isolated to this day.
Like the Great Wall of China, which was originally built to keep out the foreigners but also served to keep in the natives, so the great quarantine of Rutherglen stopped the spread of phylloxera and any of its root stock from leaving the area, too. Which means that there are lineages of grape and vines growing here that no longer exist anywhere else in Australia or the world.
Following on the heels of the imported disaster, came a local one in the hot shape of a 10-year long drought, to unknowingly add to Rutherglen's future good fortunes.
The drought caused economic hardship, making wine hard to sell. Together with no water for irrigation, many of the state's vineyards disappeared.
The consequences of these misfortunes provided Rutherglen, and its now rare vine stock, with a very unexpected and prosperous legacy of wines that are unique in the world.
Learn more about Albury Wodonga visit www.destinationalburywodonga.com.au
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