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Yalumba celebrates 175th anniversary with tour of Museum and aged wines

Sixth generation family member Lucy Hill-Smith was joined by long-term winemaker Louisa Rose, who guided guests through comparative vintages of The Caley, The Octavius, The Menzies and The Signature, with highlights also including a Yalumba FDR (Fine Dry Red) 1A Claret from 1974, underpinning the latest 'Museum' (older vintage) releases. 

Running through some of the family and estate’s history, Rose said that in addition to celebrating Yalumba’s and Australia’s vinous heritage, the masterclass was “also about showing the evolution of some of these wines… with Barossa being one of the most benign and successful places to grow grapes in the world, with Coonawarra also playing a significant role in Yalumba’s wines.”

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With the ’74 in excellent shape, this taste of history was more than an indulgent treat, showing just how well a variety of vintages from the past couple of decades can and had developed with age, underscoring Australia’s ability to deliver world class fine wines.

“This was an atrocious vintage in the Barossa, very few made red wine in this year, but this has turned out beautifully – these are wines that just age so slowly,” said Rose; a point that was backed by the rest of the tasting.

And, while The Octavius and The Menzies clearly celebrate the best of old vine Barossa Shiraz and Coonawarra Cabernet respectively, the inter-regional The Caley blend and Barossa-focused The Signature were also billed by Rose as important statements of Australia’s ownership of Cabernet-Shiraz blends. And again, their ability to deliver the highest quality of wine – especially from often very old vines – while ageing with grace and balance was much in evidence.

“Shiraz-Cabernet is not talked about much around the world, but it’s clearly a great Australian style… and with two varieties, there’s twice as much to talk about,” Rose quipped.

The Virgilius Eden Valley Viognier and Tri-Centenary Grenache from Barossa Valley (both 2022, with the latter from 1889 vines) also proved useful signposts as to the quality achievable from these two increasingly fashionable varieties, ahead of a further slew of The Signature and The Caley vintages over lunch at Oswold’s La Loma restaurant in Piccadilly.

Referring back to the time when wines (such as the FDR) were labelled ‘Claret’ and ‘Burgundy’ as an indication of aspiration in style, Rose said that European rules introduced in the early ‘90s to block such Australian labellings, “helped the country to grow up and really start to appreciate our own sense of place”.

This was when the Australian predilection to label by variety, rather than style, really took hold, with the domestic wines industry, “which had really all been about brands”, gradually evolving a greater understanding of those varieties and their places in Australia’s differing regions and soils. That, in turn, set Australia on the journey to its ever more assured and regionally-rooted portfolio of fine wines, of which Yalumba and the Hill-Smith family have played such a major part since 1849.

• Australian wine
• Yalumba
• The Caley
• The Octavius
• The Menzies and The Signature
• 175th anniversary