Australian winemaking can be traced back to vines brought from the Cape of Good Hope to the settlement in Sydney in 1788. While early viticulture concentrated on the production of table grapes as a source of fresh fruit, wine production soon spread across the new settlements.
The Hunter Valley in New South Wales, cultivated in the early 1800s, was one of the first regions to be developed. Wine grapes were grown in Tasmania as early as the 1820s. Western Australia's first winery was built around 1830, followed by Victoria's Yarra Valley first put under vine in 1838. Many of South Australia's early vineyards developed between the 1830s and 1860s and vines were planted in Queensland around the 1860s.
In 1831, James Busby, a Scottish immigrant, returned to Europe to study viticulture and collected some 650 vine cuttings. Unfortunately, only 362 varieties survived shipping and were planted in the Sydney Botanic Gardens, yet this collection, along with one in the Adelaide Botanic Gardens provided cuttings for vineyards throughout Australia.
In the mid-1800s, phylloxera (fil-ox-era) wiped out millions of acres of grapevines across Europe. A tiny yellow aphid-like insect, phylloxera lives and feeds on the roots of grapevines, destroying the root system until the vine dies. While phylloxera spread to some vine areas of Australia in the late 1870s, strictly-enforced quarantine legislation, which still exists today, helped prevent its spread to many parts of Australia. In fact, some of the oldest vines in the world can now be found in places like the Barossa, where vines are still growing on their original roots, which came from European and South African vines, before they were destroyed by phylloxera.
While Australian wine making has evolved without the restrictions of an appellation system, such as those used in Europe, it is moving towards a Geographical Indication (GI) system for its wine zones. Wines carrying a regional name must contain 85% fruit from that region.
