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“SYDNEY MAY HAVE THE BEST HARBOUR, BUT RUTHERGLEN HAS THE GREATEST PORT”

The large billboard carrying this most fundamental of truths has greeted visitors arriving in Rutherglen, North Eastern Victoria for decades. But the once rustic home of some of the worlds greatest and most remarkably affordable fortified wines is gently expanding and modernizing itself.

Recent visits have helped me understand why I’ve always loved North Eastern Victoria and why I like the way its is growing. The people are great, pretty low-key but warm and enthusiastic. Perhaps the character of all the people we met comes from a pretty genuine sense of self-identity about their region, their history and their self-worth. In the lingo of the marketing jargoneers, the integrity of the region is the product.

Perhaps when your product is muscats, tokays and ports that are as astounding as any of the worlds’ great wines then you can be entitled to be comfortable. These wines are sublime, providing a fantasy journey of length, complex flavour and colour in a single glass. A selfish mind says, “Thank goodness they’re so unfashionable in the big smog!” but anyone’s Australian wine spectrum is seriously incomplete without an excursion through these beauties.

And you’re drinking tradition. Rutherglen and the North Eastern Region more widely has an unbroken record of producing wine with character that relates to its origins of floodplain soils, dry summers and generations of winemaking families. However, something is changing around Rutherglen as it looks to grow from its strengths. New generations of winemakers from traditional families are adding new winemaking techniques to traditional varietals. They’re experimenting, often successfully and they’re offering their efforts to us, well let’s call a spade a big, bloody shovel, amazingly cheaply on the whole.

Clean, more fruit driven wines with well balanced earth and savory structures are emerging of such quality to convince me the north eastern region will continue to become ever more interesting in the future. The expanding variety of their wines suits our four seasons, indoors/outdoors lifestyle. If we continue to be adventurous and write our own rules on how to enjoy wine in this country then many great surprises and adventures lie ahead from the great region of Rutherglen and North Eastern Victoria.

PS. There is some ravingly good cooking and comfy hospitality here as well, just in case you don’t drink!!

October 2001

Photo by Rowan Rafferty