Wolf Blass





	The Barossa Valley is the home of the South Australian wine industry and many claim the birth place of great Australian Shiraz. It is the Barossa that houses many of Australia's largest and best known wineries, as well as some of the smallest micro wineries with huge reputations. It has been the home of Wolf Blass since 1966. While Shiraz is the region's undisputed hero, Cabernet Sauvignon also is richly flavoured and complex and the region also produces high quality Semillon, Chardonnay and Riesling - particularly in the cooler climes of the adjacent Eden Valley. An icon of Australian winemaking, the Barossa remains one of the major grape producing regions in the country.

	Main varieties: Shiraz, Grenache, Cabernet Sauvignon, Mourvedre, Merlot, Riesling, Semillon, Chardonnay

	New Varieties to watch for: Viognier from the Eden Valley

	Harvest Period: late February - late April

	Location: 34°29'S, 139°00'E

	Annual Rainfall: 520mm

	Mean January temp: 21.4°C

	Sunshine hours per day: 8.8

	Soil types: Barossa soil types vary from alluvial sands and rich fertile black soils of the Valley floor to the unfertile slopes overlaying the limestone of Eden Valley to sandy loam over clays of the western Barossa.

	Area under vine: 7000HA

	South Australian Wine Region


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	Vineyard Key Milestones


	By the 1840s the first Silesian immigrants were settling the Valley floor while English and Scottish free settlers settled towards the Eden Valley around Angaston.

	By 1847, local wines were being exhibited within the region.

	Australian colonial wines were encouraged to enter Britain in 1860.

	From 1850-1870 many of the patriarchal families arrived and dominated the region for the next century, including Seppelt, Gramp, Smiths and Henschke.

	By 1900 the Barossa produced almost half of the ten million litres of wine South Australia produced annually.

	1966 Wolf Blass buys an old army shed on the Stockwell Road north of Nuriootpa and call his "winery" Bilyara, the aboriginal word for Eaglehawk.

	In the 1970s and 1980s, the Barossa began to fall from favour as winemakers looked towards cooler regions.

	In the 1980s the disastrous government sponsored "vine-pull" scheme encouraged growers to pull out old, low yielding vines.

	Since the 1990s, small and large wineries continue to make robust reds, wood-matured whites and fruity, flavoursome Rieslings.