McLaren Vale: Pushing the Envelope of Refinement

BY ANGUS HUGHSON | APRIL 22, 2025

There are few better places in Australia to discover cutting-edge wines than McLaren Vale. Formerly a key home for large-scale commercial winemaking, McLaren Vale has transformed into a base for artisanal, terroir-driven winemakers with an increasing focus on single-vineyard wines of distinction. The 2022 vintage in particular offers insights into an exciting future.

It has been two years since my last extended trip to McLaren Vale. Thanks to December timing, winemakers had broad smiles on their faces and a spring in their step, with dry, warm, clement weather a very promising early sign for the 2025 vintage. This comes as a welcome relief from the relative challenges of recent years.

As a quick refresher, McLaren Vale is an incredibly historic Australian wine region, located only an hour’s drive south of Adelaide and situated between the Southern Ocean and the foothills of the Mount Lofty Ranges. McLaren Vale’s proximity to Adelaide led to it being one of the first South Australian wine regions planted, beginning in the late 1830s. The region has remained a winemaking centre for nearly two hundred years. The first vintage of Penfolds Grange included fruit from the northern quarter of McLaren Vale (which is now located under the expanding suburbs of Adelaide), and to this day, McLaren Vale fruit remains a key component of many highly regarded South Australian blends, including Grange.

While some other Australian regions may have greater fame, McLaren Vale has often done the heavy lifting. As such, despite some star wineries, it has not frequently received the kudos and recognition it has been due, nor have its various unofficial sub-regions been adequately covered. For the larger producers that used to rule, sub-regionality was also an unnecessary distraction that drew attention away from their brands. That may have been sound reasoning at the time, but today, in a world where many consumers are increasingly interested in the minute details of their favourite wines and regions, an increasing focus on sub-regionality can only help to tell this region’s story. Those large, generic brands have now almost disappeared, leaving behind a vacuum and an opportunity that the best local vignerons have embraced.

The vineyards of Blewitt Springs.

The Rise of the Artisans

There is something genuinely exciting happening in pockets of McLaren Vale, and that is the growing band of small artisanal winemakers and winemaking. In the past, larger wineries would hoover up much of the available fruit, blending individual components away. While the prices growers could command for their fruit could be good, these large operations did not exactly encourage growers to maximise quality, in particular through yield and canopy management. The exit of these wineries from the region, while initially painful, left some prized vineyards without a home for their fruit. It also offered enterprising winemakers an opportunity to seize an undervalued resource, either working with growers or purchasing vineyards outright. Take the low-yielding Smart Vineyard, for example, which has become one of the most highly sought-after fruit sources in McLaren Vale. Back in the 1990s, the fruit was sold relatively cheaply and used to make a commercial Rosé, while now, some of the wines off this site fetch close to $100 a bottle and are well worth it.

Visiting the region and tasting the local wines, it has become increasingly clear that there are two dominant schools of thought with regard to winemaking. First, there are the traditionalists focused on broad regional expressions and crafting dependable wines. For these producers, single vineyards and nuanced winemaking are less important, thereby continuing the theme of McLaren Vale offering generous, open-knit wines with broad market appeal. As with any generic approach, the finer details are lost in a quest to create wines that tick all the boxes for a mass market, even at a premium price point. If it was not already obvious, McLaren Vale does “upfront appeal” very well, which is why the region was so popular as a source of blending material for wines from other regions in South Australia.

At the other end of the spectrum are the artisans and the dreamers, generally tied to a clutch of small, hand-tended vineyards, with viticulture and winemaking overseen by small teams. Production size for these entities is naturally limited by the number of hours in the day and the number of vineyards that can be managed at the requisite high level of quality. That micro-management in the vineyard can also help to cope with more challenging vintage conditions. There are plenty of regions that can turn out simple, generous, dependable red wines, so this artisanal movement, with its focus on finely nuanced wines, has the potential to be a key part of McLaren Vale’s future. Importantly, large-scale production and artisanal methods are not mutually exclusive. Some larger wineries are playing well in this space thanks to investment and focus on improving the quality of their offerings. Paradoxically, while it is generally easy to make good wine in McLaren Vale, this is a region that does require an uncommonly focused approach to vineyard choice, management and winemaking in order to showcase the finest terroirs.