Wine, Wineries and Breweries

THE SECRET GARDEN AND THE PERFECT WINE

Whether you’re a wine connoisseur or collector, someone who simply enjoys a glass or two with friends, or are just plain curious, then prepare yourself to experience some truly unique sensory pleasures.

Our gifted location and a quirk of fate have conspired to create wines that cannot be found or replicated anywhere else in the world.

North eastern Victoria and southern NSW are blessed with the greatest diversity of altitude, soil types, rainfall and temperature in the country. This provided far-sighted winemakers with the rare opportunity of growing vines in cool climate alpine valleys, on hot plains, in rich sandy loams, granite-based soils and volcanic soils, to produce extremely different styles of wines in a relatively small area.

Today, our vineyards create the full range of classic wines for every palate, from intensely fruit flavoured Chardonnays, Rieslings and Pinot Noir to rich Cabernet Sauvignon and sparkling Shiraz, crowned by the legendary Ports, Muscats and Tokays of Rutherglen. All of which can be personally appreciated and bought at cellar doors from Beechworth and the Alpine surrounds to Rutherglen and its neighbours north of the Murray River.

However, it took a couple of ironic twists of fate to turn our unique growing conditions and vines into the secret garden of glorious creation that it is today.
 
By the late 19th Century the area’s productive attributes, brilliantly exploited and led by the pioneering wine families of Rutherglen, had built our region into the largest wine growing area of Australia. Then, towards the end of the 1890s, the twin disasters of phylloxera and a decade of drought struck the state.

Phylloxera is a vine root eating insect that is more devastating than a plague of locusts. Brought in by ships from France, the nasty bug soon found its way into the soils of Rutherglen. As a precaution and prevention, the whole area was quarantined, and it remains isolated to this day.

Like the Great Wall of China, which was originally built to keep out the foreigners but also served to keep in the natives, so the great quarantine of Rutherglen stopped the spread of phylloxera and any of its root stock from leaving the area too. Which means that there are lineages of grape and vines growing here that no longer exist anywhere else in Australia or the world.

Following on the heels of the imported disaster, came a local one in the hot shape of a ten- year-long drought, to unknowingly add to Rutherglen’s future good fortunes. The drought caused economic hardship, making wine hard to sell. Together with no water for irrigation, many of the state’s vineyards disappeared. The consequences of these misfortunes provided Rutherglen, and its now rare vine stock, with a very unexpected and prosperous legacy of wines that are unique in the world.

The Very Original, Very Different Durif

Durif is a very rare red grape variety whose original imported selections came directly from its creator, Dr Durif who first bred them in France in the 19th Century. Today, very little Durif remains in France but it has flourished in our abundant sunshine, which fully develops the fruit’s intense colour and rich flavours. The original lineage makes our Durif different ( and we think superior ) to the other varieties that exist. It is now regarded as the region’s flagship red wine. 

The father of Chardonnay is alive and well and still producing.

A few years ago, researchers from the University of California were studying the lineage of sixteen of France’s finest wine grape varieties and made a startling discovery. Somewhere in the distant viticultural past, grape nobility in the form of the classic Pinot got together with the lowly Gouais blanc to produce three highly gifted and regarded children - Chardonnay, Aligot and Gamay noir.

Despite its extraordinary offspring, the humble Gouais was so poorly regarded by winemakers that it is no longer planted in France, leaving the Chambers Rosewood vineyard in Rutherglen with the only commercial producing Gouais vines in the world.  

The Muscat and Tokay voted 100 out of 100

The Muscats and Tokays of Rutherglen are regarded as being amongst the greatest wines in the world, and have become the icons of their category.

James Halliday of the Australian Wine Atlas observed: “It is truly remarkable that virtually every observer I have ever spoken to or read pays unstinting homage to the Muscats and Tokays of North Eastern Victoria. These are wines of superb quality; they are a unique style among the great fortified wines of the world. And they are enormously, indeed dangerously, enjoyable.”

In fact, their quality is so impressive that leading international wine judge Robert Parker Jnr has given both Chambers Rare Muscat and Rare Tokay the extremely rare accolade of the perfect 100 out of a 100 score.

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