This is the text of Andrew's masterclass, delivered at the Australia Day tastings in London on 19 January 2011.

I spent 15 months in Australia, between January 09 and April 10, in part visiting wine growers and regions in order to research a book. That book will be called Ancient Earth: Terroir and the Australian Wine Landscape, though it won't be out for a year or two yet.

The first thing to say is obvious, but worth saying nonetheless: not every wine need be a terroir wine.

The word terroir means nothing to most British wine drinkers, to most English-speaking wine drinkers, and to most of the world's new wine drinkers. These millions of people just want a nice glass of wine which doesn't cost too much and is easy to enjoy. That's what most Australian wine producers have struggled to provide down the years. They've generally done it with great success. That will continue to be the case.

I'm an enthusiast for wines which possess a sense of place, but I'm not a terroir extremist and I don't believe all wines should be articulated in that way. If you don't want to make wines of place, you don't have to. It's just one approach among several.

That said, terroir's now a fashionable concept in Australia. Most back labels for wines costing $15 or more make some allusion to the cluster of ideas which go with terroir, such as 'respecting the vineyard', 'expressing the place', or using 'restrained' winemaking.

This makes good economic sense. In 2009, Australia had 2,320 wineries. But Australia will never have 2,320 equally successful wine brands. Branded markets have a few big winners and many small losers. What makes perfect sense for Wolf Blass will never make sense for Ashton Hills in Piccadilly, or Frankland Estate in Great Southern, or Bannockburn in Geelong.

Terroir offers an alternative, and it's one which is economically as well as aesthetically compelling for smaller producers.

Every vineyard owner has a place — so if the sensorial expression of a wine is founded on the uniqueness of that place, then he or she can offer the consumer something which big brands can't, and which even the winery down the road can't.

Terroir is therefore the ambitious small producer's best chance. Any small producer who doesn't want to rely on a local or tourist market, bulk sales or low prices, and who wants to sell their wine at economically sustainable prices in restaurants and big cities around Australia and around the world, is beginning to realise that.

There are, though, drawbacks. Not every terroir is great terroir. Some are merely good, and some are problematic. What do you do if you have a problematic one? Trying to produce wines of place may not be the best option. It may then be better to make wines of method.

The sense of place in wine, moreover, always reaches the consumer through two screens. Getting these screens right - or if you prefer, making them as transparent as possible - are the two biggest challenges for anyone trying to make wines of place.

The first screen is grape varieties. If you imagine that a terroir is a piece of music, then the grape varieties are the instruments with which that piece of music is played. They two need to be well-adapted to each other: the best varieties for the place. You can play Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata on a swanee whistle, but it's better on the piano. Orchestral versions of Rolling Stones hits are schmaltz.

Sixty three per cent of Australia's vines in 2010 were Shiraz, Chardonnay or Cabernet Sauvignon. Nice instruments - but only three of them. A lot of work lies ahead in finding the most appropriate varieties for Australia's differing terroirs. The fact that we are seeing all of Australia through the screen of a limited range of grape varieties still holds the expression of terroir in check.

The second screen is the human component in wines of place. The terroir is the music; the varieties are the instruments; the winemaker is the performer. Music only exists when it's performed. Wine only exists when someone makes it.

If you want to make wines of place, there is one very important starting point for any winemaker: you must respect the integrity of the raw materials. They are how the place reaches you. Both physically, via the gentlest handling you can manage to achieve the end you desire. And chemically: via respect for the chemical constituents of the must, which are the gift of those varieties in that place in that vintage.

Once you start to alter the integrity of the raw materials, you begin to walk away from terroir. You begin to erase the contour lines of aroma and flavour engraved in the grapes by the place and the season. You begin to put different contour lines of aroma and flavour into the wine. And the more you change, the less sense of place you'll retain in the wine. There may be good reasons for doing that, but you should be aware that that is what you are doing.

Aboriginal boy in Australia's North WestlinkThis is what I mean by 'trusting the vineyard'. After 15 months in Australia, it seems to me that trusting the vineyard is still the biggest challenge for those who want to produce wines of place in Australia.

Much of this is to do with inappropriate varieties being planted in warm locations. But it is also because wine students are trained to distrust the vineyard, or to regard grapes as raw material which always needs correction. Logically enough. That's the safest approach. Most students are going to be employees who aren't paid to take risks. They are paid to win medals at shows, and adjustment is no bar to medal-winning.

It's also a challenge because true wines of place will usually taste odd, strange or challenging at first. They may also look — according to the figures — like risky propositions in the Australian context. But Barolo and Madiran and Beaujolais are odd wines, too, when you first come across them.

A red-wine pH of over 3.7 is regarded as untenably risky in Australia, yet Margaux and Mouton 2009 have reported pHs of 3.8 and Haut-Brion 2009 of 3.9. Few employee winemakers would be allowed to produce red wine with those pH figures in Australia.

There's nothing wrong with adjustment, and many wine drinkers — including most in Australia — enjoy the bright, upfront, high-impact flavours that a forceful adjustment strategy delivers. But you shouldn't then claim to be making a wine of place. Some adjustment is sometimes necessary - when the pH is over 4, for example. Nevertheless if you want to make wines which reflect Australia's greatest viticultural sites, a bond of trust with the raw materials is the essential starting point. That's more or less what all the wines we are about to taste in fact do.

'More or less', not 100%. I am not advocating a rigorous, 'natural wines' approach; I am merely arguing for wine which allows you to see the potential of the terroir. Modestly adjusted wines will of course allow you to do that, though the closer you can get to unadjusted, the better. Australian fine wines are unquestionably heading in that direction.

I should also briefly stress that my concern about these matters goes beyond the desire to taste a sense of place in wine. In fact it sprang from a visit I made to Australia in 1998, from a column I wrote after that visit, and from my growing belief that drinkability is both a vital wine quality and one which the wine press routinely underplays, precisely because most published wine notes are tasting notes and not drinking notes. To summarise brutally, I am convinced that drinkability (and digestibility) in wine is intimately related to naturalness in wine, and that energetically adjusted wines may be fun to taste and may be technically unimpeachable, but are in fact very hard to drink. It's a truism, but only drinkable wines will retain the long-term affection of drinkers.

That, if you like, is a second compelling argument for trusting the vineyard. Respecting the raw materials will not only give you wines with a sense of place to them, but it will also give you wines imbued with the vital quality of drinkability and digestibility.

Anyway, judge for yourselves.

These, by the way, are not my 'eight greatest Aussie wines'. I've tried to get a representative balance in here - of places and prices and endeavours. But I do think they are all lovely wines in various ways, and I think they are all sincere endeavours to make wines of place.

Now as I mentioned, 63% of Australian plantings are Chardonnay, Shiraz or Cabernet, so three of the wines I have chosen are Chardonnay and three are Shiraz.

Yes, I think there's too much Chardonnay and Shiraz in Australia - but I also think that these are the two most adaptable and site-sensitive grape varieties in the world.

Furthermore Chardonnay seems to me to be Australia's most consistently successful varietal at present. I am very happy to look at three examples of each.

In between, we have a Roussanne and a Viognier - but I might equally well have chosen a Sangiovese, a Tempranillo or a Nebbiolo. I chose those two whites because I like them, because they are reflective of their sites, because I think Australian white wines are more uniformly successful than Australian red wines at present, and because both push agreeably at the boundaries of the acceptable.

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Tamar Ridge 2008 Kayena Vineyard Chardonnay

Cool climate, old stones ... TasmaniaLet's begin in Tasmania, with the Tamar Ridge 2008 Kayena Vineyard Chardonnay from Northern Tasmania.

Mildura has 90 days a year over 30C; Hobart has just seven. However you look at it, Tasmania in general is the coolest part of Australia, and much cooler than Tumbarumba, Henty and the aggregated Yarra Valley, which on paper are the coolest Gis on the big island. In general, the further west you are on Tasmania, the wetter it will be, and the further east, the dryer. (The median Growing Degree Day figure for Northern Tasmania is 1034, compared to 1343 for the perhaps misleadingly aggregated Yarra Valley, 1354 for Henty and 1496 for Tumbarumba.)

As we all know from Champagne and Alsace and Germany, though, the precise site in a cool area is of immense significance, and there are some warm sites in cool Tasmania, which is how Domaine A can produce convincing Cabernet in the Coal Valley in southern Tasmania and how Brian Franklin at Apsley Gorge in the eastern region of Freycinet can make his wonderfully statuesque Pinot and Chardonnay.

The Kayena Vineyard site which 52% of the fruit for this wine comes from is mild rather than warm, and very maritime. The broad Tamar Estuary is about a 20-minute walk away, and you could be down the Estuary and into the Bass Strait in about ten more minutes. We're just ten to 30 metres above sea level at this point, making this the lowest-grown wine of the eight.

Humidity in Australian vineyards is in general lower or much lower than in Europe - but not here: the relative humidity in April, which was when this wine was picked, is about 60%, which is exactly the same as both the Bordeaux and Dijon September figures (though they are higher in October). That humidity is one reason why the botrytis Riesling from here is, in my opinion, Australia's best.

The topsoil is loamy sand over heavy yellow clay, with a soil pH of about 6.2 - very different to the red basalt-derived soils which are a marked feature of the Pipers River area further east. Rainfall is a fairly generous 810 mm a year, though the vineyard still has a little irrigation in the summer months. The gently sloping, north-facing vines are hand-pruned to Scott-Henry for fruit exposure, and the fruit is all hand-picked - at around 12.5° baumé, which gives a final alcohol level of 13%. But note that it gets to this level in early April — in other words after a full growing season of slow ripening; it's not an early-picked wine.

As I mentioned, the majority of the fruit from this wine is from Kayena, but it also contains 48% of Chardonnay from the younger and higher sited White Hills vineyard. That's in a less maritime location about 10 km south of Launceston at 80 m and higher, with lower rainfall (680 mm) and higher January maximum temperatures (23.2°C compared to 20.3°C at Kyena); the soils for the Chardonnay vines there are black clay, with a more neutral soil pH of about 6.8. The Tamar Ridge team tell me that the very maritime Kayena fruit has a bright lemony character with juicy qualities, whereas the White Hills portion has notes of slate and sea-shell, with pithier, zestier fruit characters.

This particular wine is a selection of the best free-run juice, almost all of it given wild-yeast fermentation based on unsettled juice with no enzymes, no added acid and no yeast nutrient. It ferments in French oak with about 20% new and the rest second, third and fourth use (in roughly equal proportions). It stays in barrel for nine months with fortnightly lees stirring; 51% goes through malolactic.

The final figures are 13.0% alcohol, with a TA (expressed in tartaric) of 5.9 g/l and a pH of 3.32.

That means that this Chardonnay from one of the coolest locations in the country actually has lower finished acidity than most Australian warmer climate red wines. Strange but true. Bear in mind that 2008 was a warm year for Tasmania, though, and the Tamar Ridge team tell me that acidity levels would normally be a little higher - though personally I hope not too much higher.

This is a great example of naturally made, unameliorated Northern Tasmanian Chardonnay - those varieties in that place. I find this deliciously nuanced, subtle and shapely. It's not hugely showy, but it grows on you as you drink it and it is very food-friendly. The fruit is racy, but it also has an inner depth, width and richness, and that will improve with vine age.

The wine's imported to the UK by Awin Barratt Siegel, and is essentially on-trade and independents. It's very good value at around £11 or £12.

Kooyong 2008 Faultline Chardonnay

On to wine 2: the Kooyong 2008 Faultline Chardonnay from the Mornington Peninsula.

The Mornington Peninsula is a growing location with some similarities to the Northern Tasmanian one we just looked at, and it's certainly part of the ideal target zone for Chardonnay in Australia.

The region as a whole is notably warmer than Northern Tasmania, with median growing degree day (GDD) total of 1514 (compared to 1034 for Northern Tasmania). Once again, though, much depends on the exact site, with the nuances generally coming from altitude and orientation - specifically, the lower the warmer, with a sheltered north-facing site adding more warmth.

Does everyone understand GDD figures? It's basically a way of measuring heat. You subtract 10°C from the average temperature recorded each day from 1st October to 30th April (in the southern hemisphere), then add up the results for each day over 0°C — i.e. over 10°C. You'll often see a different and lower set of figures quoted in Australia. These are generally biologically effective degree days (BEDD), and they are arrived at with a number of corrections to the GDD figure. They are perhaps more useful if you are wondering what to plant - but if you're trying to understand terroir, I prefer the growing degree day figures. Why? Because every input counts in the assessment of location. You can't write off heat, even if it is heat which makes the plant shut down. It's still a part of the place.

Sandro Mosele of KooyongMornington Peninsula is the long hook of land which forms the southern boundary of Melbourne's Port Phillip Bay, separating the Bay from the Bass Strait - so with water on two sides, the Mornington is very much a maritime environment with high, European-style humidities during the summer and early autumn months. The vineyard has irrigation but Sandro Mosele who runs Kooyong and makes the wines says it isn't always used.

The Faultline vineyard is higher than Kayena and White Hills on Tasmania, at around 120 m, though there are other vineyards on the Main Ridge which are higher still, up to 315 m or so. There are also lower vineyards - such as Moorooduc, for example, giving richer styles.

The Faultline vineyard is planted N-S is on a very gentle north-facing slope (3%), and the soils here are not the typical basaltic red soils which give the Red Hill sub-zone its name, nor the sands which you find at Moorooduc, but instead acidic sandy clays with a pH of around 6 or so. There's some pebbles in the clay, but not as much as in the neighbouring Farrago vineyard.

The soil picture on the Mornington Peninsula is a very complicated one (see a PDF available from www.dpi.vic.gov.au ).

In general, soil nuances only come into play once you have actually found a highly propitious zone in climate terms - but I think we can now say that about the Mornington Peninsula, so I'm sure we'll see characters emerging based on soil type there over the coming decades. (In general, climate still remains the key terroir factor in Australia.)

The vines are hand-pruned and hand-harvested - in this case harvested with a baumé of 11.9° on the 22nd February. That's a key figure to keep in mind when you compare this wine with the previous one. What we have, in other words, is an analogous terroir — but a very different approach to giving that terroir a voice.

It was harvested a full 6 weeks in advance of the Tamar Ridge Chardonnay, yet the difference was only 0.6° baumé. Remember that a 22nd February harvesting date is the equivalent of harvesting on August 22nd in the northern hemisphere.

Early harvesting is widely practiced now in Australia, particularly in the Yarra and Mornington, the aim being precisely to avoid having to make acid additions, and to make wines with tightness and linearity, both of which are critically admired qualities in Australia. I'm not always convinced by the results, particularly for red wines, but it's difficult to be dogmatic about the point as some wines made in this way work well. This delicious wine is a good example.

The finished figures are 12.3% alcohol, a TA of 6.4 g/l and a pH of 3.14. In other words, it is lower in alcohol and pH, and higher in acidity, than the Tamar Ridge, despite coming from a warmer location. The answer to that enigma is harvesting date - and malo; this wine does not go through any malolactic.

Sandro, by the way, tells me that this is an unsually low pH for this wine, and it is usually closer to 3.2, and that the alcohol can go up to 13.5%. In other words, the picking decision is taken when he finds the flavour balance he is looking for, which can be at different baumé levels.

The hand-harvested fruit is pressed directly to barrel, and the fermentation is carried out using wild yeasts, with no additions of either acid or yeast nutrient. There's no lees stirring, as Sandro doesn't want to enrich the wine any further. Because it doesn't go through malo, it's both cold-stabilised and filtered prior to bottling.

The taste profile you get with wines make with these harvesting stratagems can seem quite austere to European palates, and aromatically the wine is recessive until you have had it in the glass for a while. On the palate, it is very pure, very long, very fine-grained, yet the quality of fruit is such that it has exciting length and depth. It's got a lovely juicy deliciousness, and a kind of cascading quality; it's actually very drinkable (and the 12.5% helps in that respect). I still suspect you might get a bit more completeness with a bit more ripeness, and I think the comparison with the Tamar Ridge shows that. Yet this fruit quality is marvellous, better than Tamar Ridge. It's a poised, moreish, chic wine.

It's imported by Great Western Wines, now a part of Bibendum, and retails at around £25.

Penfolds 2008 Reserve Bin 8A Chardonnay

Our third wine is Penfolds 2008 Reserve Bin 8A Chardonnay, Adelaide Hills, SA.

We've now moved away from Tasmania and Victoria to South Australia. That means changed latitudes. In European terms, our first wine was produced on an equivalent latitude to Tarragona in Spain, and our second wine to Córdoba in Spain. Now, in terms of equivalence, we're just north of Rabat in Morocco. All of this has an impact in particular on day length and sunlight intensity, which is why I think we should be wary of the theory of homoclimes when they are based on temperature and precipitation data alone.

Basically Australian places are different to any other places anywhere in the world. These are all cooler, moister places than those European latitude equivalents — because of the presence of the Great Southern Ocean, the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean. It's only when the north wind blows from the interior of the continent - as it will three or four times a summer — that they become similar. But because of that difference in latitude, even Australian places which appear to have identical temperature summations to Dijon are in fact very different to Dijon.

The key to the Adelaide Hills terroir is altitude. The Adelaide Hills GI has a median altitude of 392m and there are vineyards in the hills at over 600 m. Drive down into the Adelaide Plains GI and the median altitude is 23m. That's why the Adelaide Plains has a Growing Degree Day total of 2209 compared to 1530 in the Adelaide Hills. (Remember that Mornington was 1514 and Northern Tasmania 1034.)

The topography of the Adelaide Hills is hugely complex, as complex as Piedmont or Tuscany, so individual sites count for a lot here. There is also a spectrum of soils, mostly acidic loams, derived from typically ancient quartz, sandstone and siltstone. The Hills are in fact the eroded and re-uplifted remains of a very ancient and very large mountain range which existed here around 500 million years ago.

Peter Gago of PenfoldsThis wine is different from everything else we are looking at, because it isn't a single vineyard or single estate wine - but it is a single region wine. The Penfolds Bin A series began as a kind of second wine to Yattarna, made using the leftovers, but the quality of the Chardonnay coming out of the Adelaide Hills asserted itself to such an extent that it has morphed into being an Adelaide Hills wine, and it also now has a slightly more exuberant style than Yattarna. In Peter Gago's words, the team is looking for something "very different to the … more controlled, precise and taut style of Yattarna. Less tension, more flamboyance." The team is also looking for "the incorporation of other elements, other colours: a greater range of soil and site-endowed flavour and structural variables."

The actual sourcing of the fruit varies annually, but it usually comes from around five key growers. In the 2008 vintage, that meant one parcel from a very high-density vineyard in a very sheltered site close to Piccadilly, two from the Balhannah/Woodside area and two from Gumeracha. The altitudes of these vineyards are all between 340 m and 400 m - whereas the highest Adelaide Hills vineyards are over 500 m. The Penfolds team says that at these slightly lower altitudes the fruit quality is more consistent, even though it entails some frost risk. Soil-wise, according to Peter, "the ideal fruit is sourced most consistently from deeper alluvial, loamy, soils without too much clay. This soil type seems to allow the vine to grow deeper roots down into the colder soil layers, with easy access to nutrients and water, and the vines tend to maintain their freshness more easily."

This is all I10V1 clone - the major Chardonnay clone in the Adelaide Hills, which came from Davis. Penfolds puts a lot of emphasis on shoot-thinning for even ripening and disease avoidance. None of these vineyards is organic or BD at this stage.

Everything is hand-picked, with ripeness levels between just under 12° baumé to just under 13° baumé - though, as at Kooyong, it's all done on taste. Peter's looking for "a balance between crisp mouth-watering acidity and and intense citrus/white stonefruit flavours". Remember that Kooyong was picked at 11.9°B and Tamar Ridge at 12.5°B, so this wine has some of the ripest Chardonnay we are tasting as well as some very nervy Chardonnay. All picked before the 2008 March heatwave in late February and early March.

It's usually cooled before pressing, then whole-bunch pressed, with the juice going directly to barrel. There is no acidification, no use of enzymes, and the fermentation is 100% indigenous yeast. Everything goes through malo: a big contrast to Kooyong. Of our three Chardonnays, this has the highest percentage of new oak - 65%, but it varies from year to year. It gets 9 to 10 months on lees, and everything is then tasted prior to final blend assembly. Peter tells me that there are always downgrade barrels from both Yattarna and the Bin A series which go into the Hyland Chardonnay, and there are sometimes enough top-class leftovers to make an Adelaide Hills Cellar Reserve Chardonnay, too.

The finished figures are 13% alcohol, with a TA of 6.2 g/l and a PH of 3.11.

So despite the stylistic richness, and despite the fact that it is unadjusted, and despite the fact that it has all gone through malo, this actually has the lowest pH of any of our three Chardonnays. That may well be further evidence - in addition to the wine's complexity and succulence and deliciousness — that the Adelaide Hills is a propitious Chardonnay terroir. This wine has won trophies galore - I love its combination of fleshiness and creaminess with lively aromatic lift.

Obviously Penfolds has its own importing arm, and the wine is around the £25 mark.

Giaconda 2009 Aeolia

On to wine four: the Giaconda 2009 Aeolia from Beechworth in Victoria.

This is one of two wines we will be looking at which come from inland Victoria, continental Victoria, in contrast to the maritime location of Mornington Peninsula. This is from Beechworth and our final red wine will be Bendigo.

Beechworth is the more northerly and the more elevated of these two GIs, lying in the northern foothills of this part of the Great Dividing Range. The modern era in Beechworth was pioneered by Rick Kinzbrunner of Giaconda, more or less on gut instinct. In my opinion, Rick is one of the greatest wine craftsmen in Australia as well as a winemaker of very broad perspectives and considerable independence of spirit, and the fact that he has made such a success of his wines has attracted other creative and unconventional souls to the area including Julian Castagna and Keppel Smith of Savaterre.

A bit about Beechworth overall. On aggregate, the GI is actually higher than the Adelaide Hills (475 m compared to 392 m) and it's also further south, both of which should mean cooler — but the continentality of its site in fact gives it a warmer growing season than the Adelaide Hills, though not by much - 1574 growing degree days compared to 1530. That is part of the explanation why Chardonnay works so well here, but it's also beautifully in the frame for Rhône varieties like the Roussanne we have here, and Italian varieties are doing very well, too, including Julian Castagna's Sangiovese and Rick's Nebbiolo.

In rock and soil terms, Beechworth is a junction between an area of ancient Ordovician sandstone and slightly younger Devonian granites, and with a lot of weathered material in the gullies to muddle the picture up further. What we can say for sure is that the combination of acid rock material and a continental climate pattern is one which Rhône varieties are traditionally happy with.

This wine comes from Graham Warner's vineyard rather than Rick's own Giaconda vineyard. It's higher - Giaconda is 390-430 m whereas Warner is at 500 m. There's less of a slope than at Giaconda - Warner is gently east-facing, on granite with some silty alluvial wash on top. It's a very acidic soil medium - the soil pH is about 5. The Roussanne is a tricky variety, Rick says - it needs some sun exposure in order to get the typical rusty red colour into the berries, but if it gets too much the berries drop off, and given that the rows are NS in this vineyard the canopy has to be carefully managed. Roussanne doesn't like too much water stress, so it gets some irrigation. From this vintage, there is also around 10% Marsanne in this wine, also from the Warner vineyard. Quantities are tiny - under a hectare in total.

It's hand-harvested at about 13.5°B - so much riper than Sandro's 11.9°B. It's cooled, then very lightly pressed on its bunches, and settled overnight before being barrel-fermented in Rick's amazing Wagnerian underground cellar, blasted out of the granite. No enzymes, no yeast nutrient, all indigenous yeasts and indigenous malolactic bacteria, and the wine also goes through full malo. Rick usually makes a small acid addition, and this was a very hot year so he added more than usual - 1.5 g/l, though that is still a modest tweak in the Australian context. (The difficulties of this dry, hot vintage means that there will be no Giaconda Chardonnay or Shiraz from 2009.) Minimal new oak - just 7 per cent. It stays on its original lees for 10 months, with an occasionally stir (about once a month). There's no racking, and the wine is fined but not filtered.

The alcohol is 14%, with a TA of 4.9 and a pH of 3.63.

So despite the small acid addition this wine has a totally different balance to the Kooyong Chardonnay, with about 1.5 g/l less acidity and 1.5% more alcohol. There is certainly a harvesting philosophy at work there, but the difference in the figures also reflects the warmer, more continental conditions of Beechworth compared to cool, maritime Mornington. I love the density, languidness, glycerol, aromatic complexity, range of allusion and finishing minerality of this wine. It's the kind of thing I could sip happily for hours, teasing suggestions out of. I think Beechworth will be one of the greatest of Australia's many granite terroirs.

This wine is imported to the UK by Berry Bros/FMV, and it retails at around £40.

Millbrook 2008 LR Viognier

Our fifth wine and our final white is the Millbrook 2008 LR Viognier, from the Perth Hills in Western Australia.

Margaret River is a fantastic growing location, but there is a lot more to WA than Margaret River. I am particularly excited about both Frankland River (for Shiraz) and Geographe (for lots of things), and I'm sure there are some great pockets in areas like Blackwood Valley, too.

This wine comes from further north than any of those areas - from the Perth Hills. Viognier can be very good here, as it can in Geographe, too - look out for the Capel Vale version.

With every one of our whites, we've moved to a slightly warmer growing zone. This is the warmest of all - by a long stretch.

Beechworth has a growing degree-day total of 1574 - and the aggregated Perth Hills figure is 2341. That's a warmer growing zone than any of the reds we'll be looking at, in fact.

It's a low-latitude site - in Eurasian terms, Perth would lie south of both Tehran and Baghdad. It's about the same latitude as Jerusalem.

There are mitigating factors. As the name suggests, this is hilly country - a median height of 270 metres. That's not quite as high as the median height of the Adelaide Hills at 392 metres, but it's still enough to mean that there are cooler, less well-exposed sites as well as very warm ones, and the Fremantle Doctor regularly cools the vineyards down from the afternoon onwards. The vastness of the Indian Ocean lies nearby, giving this warm climate a maritime cast.

This wine comes from a single vineyard in the Chittering valley, one of the main sub-valleys in the Perth Hills, sited at around 300 m. It is the Reserve level - the very best Viognier material that Millbrook has. In fact it actually comes from the bottom of the vineyard, which is the least sloping part.

In soil terms, much of Western Australia is dominated by laterite, which is the iron-rich, heavily weathered remains of granite parent material in this case. There is also gneiss, quartz-feldspar and mica-schist in the Chittering Valley - all acid rocks which the Viognier flourishes on in France. The laterites, by the way, which dominate viticultural WA to a staggering extent, are some of the oldest vineyard soils in the world - the parent rock has been in place for about 1100 million years, and there aren't many parts of the earth that have been continually exposed for that length of time. The soils sometimes have a 40 or 50 million year history, which is also unbelievably ancient. This vineyard is on laterite and brown loam derived from those acid rocks over yellow clay, planted E-W to minimise sunburn, and the Viognier is 12 years old here. The wine is made by Damian Hutton, Bill Pannell's son-in-law.

It's all hand-pruned and hand-picked in whole bunches, the bunches are sorted and then cooled overnight to 6°C. The picking date in this warm location varies from the end of January to the third week of February; this was picked on February 15th. This is not a location for long hang-time, but I'm not sure Viognier needs that.

The grapes are then pressed to barrel without settling, with no additions of any sort - no acid, no enzymes, no nutrient, not even any sulphur; it's an indigenous yeast ferment. The barrels are kept topped up and the lees are stirred weekly. It's bottled after 9 months.

Analytically, the alcohol is 14.5%, with a TA of 4.5 and a pH of 3.69. Big, brave figures for Australia! That's the lowest acid and highest pH of any wine we are tasting, reds included.

I loved this wine when I first tasted it, and I still love it - it is a very true, very faithful statement of that variety in that place on earth. A very courageous wine in the Australian context. It is ripe, voluptuous and head-turning - but that's Viognier in the Perth Hills. It's a total contrast to Riesling from Albany or Denmark.

By the way this excellent winery has no UK representation at present. Someone should import Millbrook.

Cumulus 2008 Shiraz

Cumulus above Cumulus, in high country OrangeLet's move on to our red wines. The first of these is the Cumulus 2008 Shiraz from Orange in NSW.

In terms of relief, Australia's major landform is the Great Dividing Range. It's eccentric, splitting Sydney and Brisbane from the rest of the country. It runs from Queensland to Victoria, but all of the highest land is in the south, in NSW and Victoria, which is good news for wine producers; it would be much less helpful if it was the other way around.

You can mitigate heat by latitude, or you can mitigate heat by altitude. Our first two wines were from zones where it is mitigated by latitude. The Giaconda wine from Beechworth, this wine from Orange and the next wine from Hilltops all come from places where heat is mitigated by altitude, and that altitude is acquired in each case thanks to the Great Dividing Range and its associated tablelands.

The eastern slopes of the Great Dividing Range are open to the tropical influences of the Pacific Ocean, which is tough for viticulture as it means hot wet summers - though when it works, you get something very interesting and unique in world terms, like the best wines of the Hunter.

Things are much easier on the western side of the Range. You sometimes get tropical spillover, but basically the climate pattern is continental: hot dry summers and cold winters. The exact level of heat depends on the height.

Orange is in fact the only GI in Australia where altitude is part of the zonal definition - everything in Orange lies above 600 m, and the median altitude of the GI is 835m. So this is the highest-grown wine of all of those we are tasting.

That requirement poses interesting challenges for the large Cumulus estate, because not all of its vineyard lie above 600m. Those that comes from vineyards above 600 m have the Orange GI, and those which come from vineyards below 600 m simply have the zonal denomination of Central Ranges.

I said large - the whole estate is actually 508 ha, which is enormous. It's now owned by the Portuguese Berardo family, who have a lot of wine interests back home include Quinta do Bacalhôa and JP Vinhos, as well as being the joint venture partner with Eric de Rothschild at Quinta do Carmo.

The estate lies in the far north of the GI, and in general is a little lower than the estates which are clustered abound Orange itself, and around the relatively young volcano of Mount Canobolas, where Chardonnay is very successful. (That's young in Australian terms - the volcano came into being just 11-13 million years ago.)

Red wines do very well in this sector of Orange. The median GDD of Orange is 1551, but the range in Orange varies from 1200 at 950m to 1670 at 600m — so this part of Orange is probably similar to Beechworth. It's also the driest sector of Orange, with under 700 mm of rain compared to over 950 mm in the highest parts. As with all the three red-wine regions we are looking at, there are marked diurnal temperature differences. Debbie Lauritz, the winemaker at Cumulus, tells me that those day-night swings were on average about 18°C to 20°C during the ripening and harvest period in 2008. Those are big diffences, exceeding anything you'd find in France's classic regions.

In soil terms, Orange is complicated, but volcanic basalt plays a big role, and this vintage of the Cumulus Shiraz is grown on Block 23 of the vineyard, which is a basalt-soiled block, so this is the only wine we are trying from volcanic parent material. That parent material is the youngest rock of any of the wines we are trying today.

(There is also older limestone in Orange too, though, and the 2007 and 2009 versions of this wine came from Block 51 of the vineyard, which is a limestone-soiled block. The two blocks seem to give quite different balances.)

The 2008 vintage was quite cool here - without the March heatwave experienced by other regions. Debbie tells me that this basalt block does best in cool years and the limestone blocks are better in the warmer ones. This vineyard is at 605 m and is gently south-facing, with east-west rows and relatively low density of 1,660 vines/ha; the soil pH is 6.5. It has some irrigation, though there was pre-harvest rain here in 2008. This was the last vintage when this vineyard was machine-picked; it has subsequently been hand-picked.

The fruit for this wine was crushed and then run into two small fermenters with some enzymes but no acid or tannin additions. It was inoculated with selected yeast rather than fermented with indigenous yeasts, and has one addition of DAP yeast nutrient. Fermentation temperatures go up to 30°C, with twice-daily pumpovers over a 10-day period to dryness. The wine is then racked into barrel - 40% new, with 60% French oak, 30% other European oak and 10% American, for 12 months. Debbie says there is a small tannin addition during barrel ageing. There is one filtration at racking, but it is bottled without fining or filtration.

The final figures are an alcohol level of 14.3%, a TA of 6.7 and a pH of 3.53.

That's over 2 g/l more acidity than the Perth Hills Viognier we just tried, but it is all natural and is what this Shiraz vineyard in this place has delivered in this season within the context of fully ripe fruit. This is a cool-season balance for this vineyard, and remember that this is also the highest-grown wine of any of those, white or red, on the table.

I think it could do with less oak and longer on its skins, and I'm sure the hand-harvesting will add purity and precision of flavour. But I love the cherry freshness of the wine - there's almost a crunchiness of fruit behind the oak. It's a light, bright, energetic, naturally articulated midweight with good drinkability and poise to it. This estate has lots of potential, so it's a shame it's not on the UK market yet - though there is a European office. In addition to this wine, I very recommend the 2008 Climbing Shiraz from a limestone parcel, which would be outstanding value in the UK at around £10.99. This wine is pitched more ambitiously, at just under £20.

Clonakilla 2009 Shiraz

Our second red is the Clonakilla 2009 Shiraz from Hilltops in NSW.

This area is also sited on the west side of the Great Dividing Range, and also takes advantage of its height and broadly continental weather pattern.

This GI lies south of Orange, and is closer to Canberra. The relief is much less pronounced in this area, and in overall terms it is lower - the median height of the GI is 465 m. Note, though, that that still makes it the second highest of all the Gis in our tasting.

Its GDD figure is, in fact, 1942 - which I find puzzleing, since that would make it warmer than either the Barossa or McLaren Vale. I don't taste that kind of warmth in the wines I have tried so far from Hilltops.

Altitude may be part of the answer - the weather station in Young is at the airport, which is in an open site to the west of the town at 400 m, whereas most of the vineyards in the area are in the higher parts of the GI, and the GI peaks at 713 m. Tim Kirk confirms that the three vineyards whose fruit goes into this wine all lie at over 500 m.

The overall basement geology of most of Hilltops is granodiorite, locally called granite, with areas of sandstone, siltstone and mudstone to the east. Many of the soils are decomposed granodiorite, and the combination of those decomposed acid rocks and the continental climate pattern is one that Shiraz loves in Australia as it does in France. The northern part of the GI has greater levels of granodiorite composition than the southern part of the GI.

However a sporadic feature of many Australian vineyard areas which are open to the north is that the soils themselves are often fine wind-blown material from the red centre, and those blood-red, iron-rich, loess-like soils are also a feature of Hilltops, in layers of 200 mm to four metres. That profile of red wind-blown soils over weathered parent material is similar to Coonawarra, though this is a much warmer as well as higher region, and the basement materials are acidic rather than calcareous as in Coonawarra.

You will all know Tim Kirk and the beguiling wines of Clonakilla. Tim has had several disastrous Canberra frosts, and it was after the 1999 one that he decided he had also to source fruit from a less vulnerable region. The first Hilltops Shiraz was from the 2000 vintage.

It's 130 km from Murrumbateman to Young, and Hilltops is warmer than the Canberra District, but the basic combination of soils based on decomposed acidic rocks and a continental weather pattern with marked diurnal temperature differences is the same - and Shiraz also seems very happy here.

Tim's journey as a winemaker came alive with a road-to-Damascus visit to the Rhône valley and to Marcel Guigal. Tim is a spiritual soul, and was hugely impressed by the 'ethereal, pure' quality of the wines he found there. That led him to experiment with the inclusion of Viognier into his Shiraz - and to other things, too, like cold soaks, the use of whole-bunch percentages including stems, and warm ferments.

This wine comes from two main vineyards in Hilltops - Grove Estate and the Old Rifle Range vineyard, with some more fruit from the Jenner estate which is next to Grove. I haven't seen the latter two vineyards, but Grove Estate is at 520-530 m, with those red wind-blown soils over decomposed granite.

This wine contains 5% Viognier, and it is 80% machine harvested and 20% hand-harvested - because Tim wants 20% whole-bunch material with stems in the wine. He'd like to hand-harvest it all, because the fruit can then be sorted. (All of Clonakilla Shiraz-Viognier is hand-harvested.)

I'll quote Tim on the use of a whole-bunch component, because I love the poetic approach he has to the question. "I've been putting whole bunches into ferments since 1993," he says. "I love it. Something mysterious happens inside the berries still attached to the stems. Some secret aromas are liberated by this intracellular fermentation. The stems too add something, a savoury strain that somehow highlights the allure of the lovelier aromas. Is a rose more beautiful," he wonders, "when presented on a stem with thorns?"

The grapes get a cold soak of a couple of days if possible, then a warm ferment of up to 35°C, with one to two weeks on skins. It goes into French oak once the wine is dry (18 per cent new) where it stays on lees if possible for a year before being bottled with no fining but a filtration.

Compared to Canberra District fruit which tastes 'red', Tim says, the Hilltops fruit tastes 'black'. Sugar levels are higher and acidities are lower in this much warmer location; the harvest date is about three weeks ahead of Canberra District, so the wines are generally in barrel by the time the Clonakilla fruit is harvested. Tim does use indigenous yeast and indigenous malo bacteria with the Canberra District fruit, but he says he has trouble getting fermentations to finish if he does that with Hilltops fruit, so this is fermented with selected yeast and malo is also induced. Tim also adds enzymes, yeast nutrient and tartaric acid, though he says he was too embarrassed to tell me how much.

This is the most adjusted wine of all those we are tasting, in other words — but I still don't think it's garish or caricaturial. In fact I think it's delicious, and poised and complex, but also voluptuous, and those savoury, stemmy notes add real complexity to it.

I wanted to show it because I think it's a good shapshot of the potential of Hilltops, which is a region I'm sure we'll hear a lot more of in the years ahead. I like the 'high country but warm country' combination you find there. I'm sure, too, that we will eventually see fine unadjusted red wines from Hilltops, though they won't necessarily be Shiraz.

The actual figures are 14.5% alcohol, 6.2 g/l TA and a pH of 3.57.

The interesting comparison here is with the Cumulus Shiraz from Orange which preceded it, which has very similar figures though they are all unadjusted there, thanks to the higher altitude and cooler site.

(There are other flavour-inducing differences, of course, in that the Hilltops wine includes stems and some hand-harvested fruit, has a slightly warmer fermentation, a slightly longer cuvaison and is all French oak.)

Liberty is the Clonakilla agent and the wine is in Waitrose at just over £16.

Sutton Grange 2006 Syrah

Our final wine is the Sutton Grange 2006 Syrah from Bendigo in Victoria.

Compared to Beechworth, which is where Rick Kinzbrunner's Giaconda wines come from, Bendigo is a much bigger and more heterogenous region. It's further south than Beechworth, and by now we have said goodbye to the Great Dividing Range and its relief, so Bendigo is lower - a median of 212 m compared to 475 m for Beechworth. It's much lower than the Hilltops vineyards at 500 m and the Cumulus Shiraz at 600 m. This is the lowest sited of the reds.

It's even more continental than Beechworth is, and much warmer than Beechworth: the median GDD figure here is 1746 compared to 1574 for Beechworth and around 1670 for Cumulus. It's a cooler location than Hilltops, though.

Quite a lot of Bendigo is on soils derived from sandstone, siltstone and shale, but the southern sector where Sutton Grange is found is on soil derived from granodiorite, and very Shiraz-friendly.

Gilles Lapalus at Sutton GrangeThe modern pioneer of Bendigo was former pharmacist Stuart Anderson who founded Balgownie, now owned by the Forrester family. This wine is made by Stuart Anderson's son-in-law, who is a very hard-working, quiet, intense Frenchman from Cluny called Gilles Lapalus. He makes the wine for the owner, who is a Melbourne businessman called Peter Sidwell.

The vineyard is 12.8 ha, and relatively high-sited for Bendigo - around 300 m. That height, plus the continentality of Bendigo, can give diurnal temperature swings during harvest of up to 23°C between pre-dawn and mid-afternoon, which is into the Mendoza league and even greater than the diurnal temperature swings in Hilltops or in the Cumulus sector of Orange.

There is 4.6 ha of Syrah in two blocks, one called Ram's Horn and one called Hog Block, and from 2008 there will be those two single-block Syrahs as well as the estate blend. Ram's Horn faces south-east and the Hog block faces north, with the granitic material being closer to the surface in the Ram's Horn vineyard, but under sandy loam and clay in the Hog Block. North-south plantings, with a thicker canopy on the west side to protect from sunburn.

This is a biodynamic vineyard, and Gilles said what were super-acid soils initially are now less acid following the biodynamic regime. He is experimenting with dry-grown parcels - which should be easier this year, as the amazing La Niña rain events in Australia have brought double the long-term average rainfall already, after a succession of years when the average seemed unattainable. He hasn't used any copper or sulphur for three years, but has had to this year. All the vineyard work and harvesting is done by hand. The yields in 06 were 15 hl/ha in the Ram's Horn and 30 hl/ha in the Hog Block - the lowest yields of any wines in this tasting.

The grapes are picked early in the day, then cooled and then get a four or five-day cold soak before fermentation with indigenous yeasts. The estate Syrah includes about 10% whole-bunch so there are stems in here, and this particular vintage had just under 1% Viognier co-fermented with it.

The hotter Hog Block parcel is usually acidified by a half-gram per litre, but not the Ram's Horn, and there are no additions of enzymes, nutrients or tannins. Fermentation temperatures can go as high as 35°C, and Gilles uses a combination of pigeage, remontage and delestage over what was in 2006 a 24-day fermentation and maceration period. Lots of time with the skins, in other words, which is something that surprisingly few Australian red wines get, which is a major reason why there are very few truly tannic wines from Australia. The wine then goes into French oak, with 30% new oak in 2006, together with fine lees, and it then gets a little batonnage. Malo is natural, and total time in barrel for the 2006 was 18 months, with just 2 rackings. No fining and only coarse filtering before bottling.

This wine has 13.8% alcohol, with a TA of 5.4 and a pH of 3.71.

Compared to our two other reds, then, the main points to note I think are the longer cuvaison and bigger levels of extract, combined with lower acidity and higher pH - though we're still not into Bordeaux 2009 first-growth league. That gives a fatter, chewier profile with much bigger, true tannins. This is definitely a food wine, and I love its savoury, ferrous character. That's very typical of inland Victoria, and was often noted by wine writers (like W.S.Benwell) prior to the age of adjustment. You also might like to note the slightly lower alcohol, which one might tentatively ascribe to the use of biodynamics. For me, this is the most mineral of the wines we are looking at today. I believe the mineral character in red wines is often connected with time on skins.

Tanners imports the wines of Sutton Grange, and the wine costs about £18.50.

Here's a quick summary of what I hope we've found. A set of interesting and delicious wines, wines with lots of contrasts and differences. Those contrasts and differences are overwhelmingly derived from location and place; the winemakers haven't tried to correct them away. This is what I hope and believe we will see more of from Australia over the next decade.