Sangiovese

Sangiovese is Tuscany’s grape before it is anything else: the backbone of Chianti, Brunello di Montalcino and Vino Nobile di Montepulciano, and for the families who’d grown up around Treviso and the Veneto, it carried the specific weight of home rather than commercial calculation. When the King Valley’s tobacco farmers turned to vines in the 1980s and 90s, Sangiovese wasn’t a market bet: it was one of the first things planted, alongside Pinot Grigio, simply because it was the wine those families actually drank.

That distinction matters. Most of Australia’s “alternative variety” movement was driven by growers reading the climate and making a calculated import decision. The King Valley’s Sangiovese arrived because the people planting it already knew exactly what it was supposed to taste like.

Sangiovese wants exactly what the King Valley’s higher elevations provide: warm days for ripening, cool nights to hold onto acid, and enough diurnal swing to keep the wine from turning heavy. The result carries the variety’s hallmark tension: bright sour-cherry fruit riding over savoury, almost tomato-leaf notes and a grippy, persistent tannin that’s built for a plate of food rather than a quiet sip alone.

It is a genuinely difficult grape to get right even in Tuscany, prone to uneven ripening and thin skins that punish careless canopy management, which is part of why King Valley Sangiovese, made by growers with decades of hands-on experience with the variety specifically, tends to outperform plantings elsewhere in the country.

Adelaide Hills, Heathcote and pockets of Margaret Riverall grow serious Sangiovese today, but none of them carry the King Valley’s specific origin story: a crop transition driven by memory rather than market research. The valley that Sangiovese helped rebuild is also home to Australia’s Prosecco story, planted by the same generation of families for the same reason: they wanted the wine from home, and decided to simply grow it themselves.