The Cork Chronicles
The grapes behind the tours

Thirty wines.
Thirty Australian stories.

Every wine region is really a story about a grape that found its place. Start with the grape, end at the cellar door.

  1. Hand-painted botanical plate of a Cabernet Sauvignon vine cane with small blue-black berries and deeply lobed leaves, from Viala & Vermorel, 1901–1910

    Red · Twenty kilometres of red dirt

    Cabernet Sauvignon

    Coonawarra’s terra rossa is a strip of crumbled red loam over soft white limestone — and it makes Cabernet like nowhere else on Earth.

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  2. Hand-painted botanical plate of a Chardonnay vine cane with golden-green bunches, from Viala & Vermorel, 1901–1910

    White · The grape that changed its mind

    Chardonnay

    Australian Chardonnay went from butter to flint in one generation. Margaret River is where the correction became a style.

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  3. Hand-painted botanical plate of a Chenin blanc vine cane with golden-green bunches, from Viala & Vermorel, 1901–1910

    White · The West’s quiet keeper

    Chenin Blanc

    It arrived with the Swan River Colony, carried the West’s wine industry for a century, and nearly vanished for being useful instead of famous.

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  4. Hand-painted botanical plate of a Durif vine cane with tight blue-black bunches, from Viala & Vermorel, 1901–1910

    Red · The grape France forgot

    Durif

    A nurseryman’s accident from the 1880s, all but abandoned at home — and adopted so completely by Rutherglen that it became the town’s second signature.

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  5. Hand-painted botanical plate of a Fiano vine cane with small golden bunches, from Viala & Vermorel, 1901–1910

    White · Two thousand years of drought training

    Fiano

    An ancient Campanian grape with thick skins, stubborn acid and no thirst — planted in South Australia as a bet on the climate that’s coming.

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  6. Hand-painted botanical plate of a Gewürztraminer vine cane with rose-pink bunches, from Viala & Vermorel, 1901–1910

    White · The grape that smells like an argument

    Gewürztraminer

    Lychee, rose petal, Turkish delight: Gewürztraminer is the most polarising white in the glass, and Tasmania’s cold, slow ripening is what keeps it from tipping into perfume.

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  7. Hand-painted botanical plate of a Grenache noir vine cane with loose dark bunches, from Viala & Vermorel, 1901–1910

    Red · The bush vine dividend

    Grenache

    For a century Grenache was fortified filler. The old bush vines of McLaren Vale — squat, dry-grown, untrellised — turned out to be treasure.

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  8. Hand-painted botanical plate of a Syrah vine cane with deep blue-black grape bunches, from Viala & Vermorel, 1901–1910

    Blend · Three grapes nobody wanted, blended into something everybody does

    GSM

    Grenache, Shiraz and Mataro were all planted as fortified-wine insurance in the 1840s. A century later, someone worked out that blended together, dry, they made one of Australia’s most distinctive reds.

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  9. Hand-painted botanical plate of a Côt (Malbec) vine cane with small dark bunches, from Viala & Vermorel, 1901–1910

    Red · France’s black wine, replanted before Argentina’s

    Malbec

    Everyone assumes Malbec is South American. Mudgee has been growing it since the 1850s, old vines that predate Argentina’s entire modern Malbec industry by decades.

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  10. Hand-painted botanical plate of a Marsanne vine cane with pale golden bunches, from Viala & Vermorel, 1901–1910

    White · The world’s biggest planting, in a town of 6,000

    Marsanne

    The Rhône’s Marsanne nearly vanished from its own homeland, and the largest single planting left anywhere on Earth is a century-old block in Victoria’s Goulburn Valley.

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  11. Hand-painted botanical plate of a Mourvèdre vine cane with tight dark bunches, from Viala & Vermorel, 1901–1910

    Red · The third grape everyone forgets to name

    Mataro

    Grenache and Shiraz get top billing in the blend. Mataro is the old bush vine doing the quiet structural work underneath, and it’s just as old, just as overlooked, and just as good on its own.

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  12. Hand-painted botanical plate of a Merlot vine cane with rounded blue-black bunches, from Viala & Vermorel, 1901–1910

    Red · The grape everyone plants, nobody credits

    Merlot

    For decades Merlot was Cabernet’s silent partner: the softening agent, never the headline. Margaret River is where it started demanding its own bottle.

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  13. Line study of a grapevine leaf and cluster, standing in for Montepulciano

    Red · Not the town. The other one.

    Montepulciano

    Confusingly, Vino Nobile di Montepulciano is made from Sangiovese, in a town called Montepulciano, while the grape actually called Montepulciano comes from nowhere near it. Australia grows the grape.

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  14. Hand-painted botanical plate of Muscat à petits grains, pale golden berries on the vine, from Viala & Vermorel, 1901–1910

    Fortified · Liquid time from Rutherglen

    Muscat

    Some barrels in Rutherglen have never been emptied since Federation. Their contents pour like dark honey and taste of a century.

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  15. Line study of a grapevine leaf and cluster, standing in for Nebbiolo

    Red · The grape that refuses to travel

    Nebbiolo

    Barolo and Barbaresco have spent centuries proving Nebbiolo barely tolerates leaving Piedmont. Australia’s handful of serious plantings are a decades-long argument that it can.

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  16. Line study of a grapevine leaf and cluster, standing in for Nero d’Avola

    Red · Sicily’s answer to an Australian summer

    Nero d’Avola

    A grape bred for an island where summer runs five months long, transplanted into McLaren Vale’s own long, dry ripening season without missing a step.

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  17. Hand-painted botanical plate of a Pinot gris vine cane with dusky rose-grey bunches, from Viala & Vermorel, 1901–1910

    White · One grape, two promises

    Pinot Gris

    Gris or Grigio is not a translation problem — it’s a style declaration. Mornington reads it one way, the King Valley the other.

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  18. Hand-painted botanical plate of a Pinot Noir vine cane with tight blue-black bunches, from Viala & Vermorel, 1901–1910

    Red · The cold-climate gamble

    Pinot Noir

    Pinot Noir punishes the wrong site and transfigures the right one. Australia found its right ones at the bottom of the map.

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  19. Line study of a grapevine leaf and cluster, standing in for Glera, the Prosecco grape

    Sparkling · The immigrant’s grape, and the wine he named after himself

    Prosecco

    Otto Dal Zotto smuggled cuttings of his favourite Veneto grape into the King Valley in 1999 and called his first release L’Immigrante. It changed the valley, and started a fight with the EU that took two decades to resolve.

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  20. Hand-painted botanical plate of a Riesling vine cane with small golden-green bunches, from Viala & Vermorel, 1901–1910

    White · Bone dry, by conviction

    Riesling

    Germany made Riesling sweet and immortal. The Clare Valley made it bone dry — and then changed how the world seals white wine.

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  21. Hand-painted botanical plate of a Grenache noir vine cane with loose dark bunches, from Viala & Vermorel, 1901–1910

    Rosé · A colour, not a grape, and a decision, not an accident

    Rosé

    Rosé isn’t a light red or a failed attempt at something darker. It’s a deliberate call, made at the crusher, about exactly how long a red grape’s skins get to touch the juice.

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  22. Line study of a grapevine leaf and cluster, standing in for Sangiovese

    Red · Tuscany, replanted in tobacco country

    Sangiovese

    When the King Valley’s Italian tobacco farms stopped being profitable, the families who’d settled there in the 1950s planted the grape they actually missed.

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  23. Hand-painted botanical plate of a Sauvignon vine cane with compact golden-green bunches, from Viala & Vermorel, 1901–1910

    White · Out of the long white shadow

    Sauvignon Blanc

    New Zealand owns the loud version. Australia answered twice — Adelaide Hills purity, and Margaret River’s barrel-worked blends.

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  24. Hand-painted botanical plate of a Sémillon vine cane with golden-green grape bunches, from Viala & Vermorel, 1901–1910

    White · The wine that ages backwards

    Semillon

    Picked thin and shy at eleven percent, Hunter Semillon spends twenty years becoming the most distinctive white wine in the world.

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  25. Hand-painted botanical plate of a Syrah vine cane with deep blue-black grape bunches and autumn-edged leaves, from Viala & Vermorel, 1901–1910

    Red · The oldest Shiraz vines on Earth

    Shiraz

    France invented the grape. Australia kept the vines alive.

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  26. Hand-painted botanical plate of a Chardonnay vine cane with golden-green bunches, from Viala & Vermorel, 1901–1910

    Sparkling · The grape that isn’t one grape

    Sparkling

    Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, fermented twice, aged on their own dead yeast for years — and Tasmania turned out to be the one place in Australia cold enough to do it properly.

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  27. Hand-painted botanical plate of a Tempranillo vine cane with compact dark bunches, from Viala & Vermorel, 1901–1910

    Red · Spain’s early riser, McLaren Vale’s new local

    Tempranillo

    Rioja’s grape ripens weeks ahead of Shiraz, and in the warm, dry Mediterranean climate of McLaren Vale, that head start turned out to be exactly the advantage Australia was looking for.

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  28. Hand-painted botanical plate of a Verdelho vine cane with pale green-gold bunches, from Viala & Vermorel, 1901–1910

    White · Madeira’s grape, minus the fortification

    Verdelho

    It came to Australia built to survive a sea voyage and ended up defining an easy-drinking style all its own, from the Hunter’s early plantings to the Swan Valley’s heat.

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  29. Line study of a grapevine leaf and cluster, standing in for Vermentino

    White · A coastal grape looking for a coastline

    Vermentino

    Vermentino grows within sight of the Mediterranean everywhere it’s planted at home: salt air, limestone, heat softened by a sea breeze. The Adelaide Hills found its own version of that formula.

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  30. Hand-painted botanical plate of a Viognier vine cane with golden bunches, from Viala & Vermorel, 1901–1910

    White · The white grape famous for what it does to red wine

    Viognier

    A splash of Viognier co-fermented with Shiraz lifts the perfume and softens the tannin, a Northern Rhône trick the Yarra Valley borrowed and made its own.

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