Wineries
New South Wales
Discover the wine and wineries of New South Wales
Discover the the wine regions of New South Wales with James Halliday's Wine Atlas of Australia
New South Wales, the most populous state contributes little more than 27 per cent of Australia’s wine, and more than three-quarters of that contribution comes from the Big Rivers Zone, for which one can in practical terms read the Riverina region.
But New South Wales was first out of the blocks. Grapevines came with the First Fleet in 1788, and were planted on the foreshores of Sydney Cove where the InterContinental Hotel now stands, producing a few bunches of grapes the following year, but then fading from history when attacked by what was called black spot.
Other pioneers were Macarthur and Blaxland. Captain John Macarthur assembled a large collection of cuttings during an 18-month trip to Europe in 1815 and 1816; not many survived, those which did formed the basis of a substantial vineyard and winery which the Macarthur family established at Camden Park. Gregory Blaxland produced the first commercial wine at Brush Farm on the banks of the Parramatta River, near the present-day suburb of Ermington. He was the first to export wine to England, in 1823, and again in 1828.
However, the father of viticulture in New South Wales was James Busby, who in the last three months of 1831 travelled across Spain and France collecting 547 ‘varieties of vines’, including six cuttings of Shiraz from the Hill of Hermitage in the northern Rhône Valley. When DNA analysis is refined to the point of being able to identify clones of vines (it is already able to identify the parents of a given variety) it is very likely his Shiraz cuttings will be found to be the mother vines of much of Australia’s best Shiraz.
Between 1815 and 1912 a viticultural map of the state had been drawn, encompassing the (present-day) Sydney metropolitan area, the Hunter Valley, Mudgee and the Riverina. That map was to remain largely unchanged until 1973, when the first vines were planted at Cowra. So it is that 11 of the 15 New South Wales wine regions of today have come into existence since 1973, the majority on the western side of the Great Dividing Range but two on the coast.