The Clare Valley is Australia’s benchmark region for dry Riesling — a high, continental pocket of South Australia whose combination of altitude, broken-slate soils and cold nights produces some of the longest-lived white wines in the country.
Old roots, sacred vines
Wine came to the Clare in the 1840s; the English immigrant John Horrocks is usually credited with the first vines, near Penwortham. But the region’s most enduring origin is religious: Jesuit missionaries, arriving from central Europe in 1848, planted vines at Sevenhill in 1851 to make sacramental wine. They named the place Seven Hill after the seven hills of Rome, and the creek the Tiber. Sevenhill Cellars is the Clare’s oldest winery and still makes sacramental wine alongside its table range — an unbroken line back to the region’s beginnings.
A high, continental climate
Despite lying in warm South Australia, the Clare Valley drinks cool because it sits high — most vineyards between 400 and 500 metres, some higher. Altitude cools it (temperature falls roughly a degree for every hundred metres of elevation), and its continental, inland position gives it a wide diurnal range: summer days near 30°C collapse to nights around 13°C. That swing is the engine of Clare Riesling — the warm days ripen the fruit while the cold nights lock in the searing natural acidity that defines the wines and lets them age for decades.
Two soils, two Rieslings
The Clare’s identity is written in two contrasting sub-regions, and no producer illustrates them better than Grosset, who bottles one Riesling from each:
- Watervale, in the south, has more limestone in its soils and gives a rounder, more overtly floral Riesling — orange blossom and citrus, approachable earlier.
- Polish Hill River, further north and higher, sits on poor, broken slate, and gives a tighter, flintier, intensely mineral wine that unwinds slowly and ages exceptionally.
Same grape, same maker, a few kilometres apart — a clear lesson in how soil shapes a wine.
The screwcap heartland
The Clare Valley is also where the screwcap revolution began: in 2000 its Riesling producers, led by Grosset, switched away from cork en masse to protect exactly the pure, slow, reductive ageing their wines are prized for. It was a regional decision that reshaped the whole Australian and New Zealand industry — fitting for a region whose reputation rests on wines built to be opened many years after they are made.