Northern Tasmania

Fast Facts

  • Latitude:
    41°07’S (Pipers Brook), 41°27’S (Launceston)
  • Altitude:
    190–210 m (Pipers Brook), 81 m (Launceston)
  • Heat degree days:
    1020
  • Growing season rainfall:
    310 mm
  • Mean January temp:
    17.2°C
  • Harvest:
    Early April to late May
  • Chief viticultural hazard:
    Spring frost

Discover the wine and wineries of Northern Tasmania

Discover Northern Tasmania with James Halliday's Wine Atlas of Australia

All of the recorded grapegrowing and winemaking activity in the nineteenth century took place in the south of the state. From the 1890s to the mid 1950s there was no activity in either north or south; it was the official view of the Tasmanian Department of Agriculture that the island was unsuited to commercial wine grapegrowing. A Frenchman, Jean Miguet, working with the Hydro Electric Commission, had other ideas and between 1956 and 1960 planted 1.3 hectares at his La Provence vineyard (he came from Provence) at Lalla, just to the north-east of Launceston. He returned to France in 1974, and died there. Another 20 years passed, and the ever-vigilant French authorities got wind of the name, forcing a change to Providence.

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