Sparkling Shiraz is one of the only wine styles in the world that belongs entirely to Australia, and there's a good reason you won't find it on a cellar door list anywhere else. It's a wine born of improvisation, Barossa fruit, and a bit of French know-how, and more than a century later it's still the wine most Australians reach for at Christmas.
An Answer To What Wasn't There
In the late 1800s, a handful of Australian winemakers set out to make traditional Champagne-style wine using méthode champenoise, the same slow, patient process used in France. There was just one problem: hardly anyone had planted Chardonnay, Pinot Noir or Pinot Meunier, the grapes Champagne is built on. So they reached for what was already growing in abundance, Shiraz.
The first attempt came out of Melbourne around the 1880s, when Auguste D'Argent produced a rosé coloured "sparkling Burgundy" for the Victorian Champagne Company. The venture didn't last. It took French winemaker Edmond Mazure, working at the Auldana winery near Adelaide around the 1890s, to properly marry the traditional method with Shiraz fruit, and from those early trials the modern style we know today began to take shape. Seppelt followed a similar path up in Victoria's Grampians, using Shiraz for exactly the same reason everyone else did: it was what the country actually had in the ground. Before French appellation law tightened the use of the term, the style was simply known as Sparkling Burgundy.
Roots In The Barossa
Shiraz's whole story in Australia runs straight through the Barossa, and so does ours. Our family's ancestor, Christian Auricht, planted the world's oldest surviving Shiraz vineyard back in 1843, on land adjacent to what our family still farms today, six generations later. The grape that eventually gave Australia its own answer to Champagne was already established in these valleys well before Mazure ever set up his presses in Adelaide. When we talk about the history of Sparkling Shiraz, we're really talking about our own.
Why It Belongs On The Christmas Table
There's a reason Sparkling Shiraz shows up on Australian tables every December and almost nowhere else in the world at Christmas. It's a wine that does two things at once, carrying the deep fruit, warmth and spice of a proper Barossa Shiraz on the same fine bubbles you'd expect from a bottle of Champagne. Poured cool alongside a Christmas ham, a plate of prawns or the last of the pudding, it manages to feel festive, generous and properly Australian all at once, a glass that genuinely couldn't have come from anywhere else.
Ours Is Coming
Our own Sparkling Shiraz is moving through its final stages ahead of bottling later this month, and we're genuinely excited for you to taste it. Keep an eye out over the coming weeks, we'll have more to share very soon, in plenty of time for it to find its way onto your table this Christmas.