Barossa Valley

Fast Facts

  • Latitude:
    34°29'S
  • Altitude:
    250-370 m
  • Heat degree days:
    1710
  • Growing season rainfall:
    160 mm
  • Mean January temp:
    21.4°C
  • Harvest:
    End February to late April
  • Chief viticultural hazard:
    Drought

Discover the wines and wineries of the Barossa Valley

Discover the Barossa Valley with James Halliday's Wine Atlas of Australia

In the new millennium Australia prides itself as a multicultural society, yet by the 1850s the Barossa Valley was that and more. On the one hand came the British gentry, led by George Fife Angas (who gave his name to Angaston), Joseph Gilbert (Pewsey Vale, 1847), Samuel Smith (founder of Yalumba in 1849) and William Salter (Saltram, 1859). On the other side were the far more numerous and usually less wealthy Lutheran emigrants from Prussia, who left en masse in protest against a new Reformed Church prayer book proclaimed by Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm III. These pioneers included Johann Gramp (1847), Joseph Seppelt (1851) and William Jacob (1854). Today family winemaker names include Basedow, Dutschke, Glaetzer, Jenke, Kaesler, Kalleske, Kies, Kurtz, Lehmann, Liebich, Roehr, Schilde and Schubert, among countless others content to grow and sell grapes.

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Special Value

Wines considered to offer special value for money.