Clonakilla

Clonakilla is a family-owned estate at Murrumbateman, in the high country of the Canberra District, and the producer that proved cool-climate Australian Shiraz could stand with the best of the northern Rhône. Its Shiraz Viognier is one of the most influential Australian red wines of the last half-century.

A scientist’s vineyard

The estate was founded in 1971 by Dr John Kirk, a research scientist who had emigrated from the United Kingdom in 1968 to work at the CSIRO. He named the vineyard Clonakilla — “meadow of the church” — after his grandfather’s farm in County Clare, Ireland, and planted it on the granite-derived soils above Murrumbateman at around 600 metres. It was the first commercial winery in the Canberra District, and John Kirk is widely regarded as the father of the region’s wine industry. The first wines, a Riesling and a Cabernet Shiraz, followed in 1976.

The Côte-Rôtie inspiration

The estate’s defining moment came through John’s son Tim Kirk. In 1991, after oenology study, Tim travelled to France and tasted the great Côte-Rôtie of Guigal — La Turque, La Landonne, La Mouline — Syrah wines co-fermented with a little of the white grape Viognier. He resolved to make the style at home, and the first Clonakilla Shiraz Viognier was released in 1992. Tim joined the estate full-time in 1996, took over the winemaking, and served as CEO from 2009 to 2023, when his brother Stephen Kirk stepped into that role. The family still owns and runs the estate.

The flagship and the style

The Shiraz Viognier is a co-fermentation — the two varieties crushed and fermented together, around five to ten per cent Viognier with the rest Shiraz, from a single vineyard. Fermenting the white skins alongside the red stabilises colour and lifts the aromatics, and in the cool Canberra climate the result is a fragrant, peppery, medium-bodied Shiraz far removed from the dense Barossa archetype — the rotundone of a genuinely cool site, carried on fine tannin.

That climate is the whole point. At 600 metres the district has one of the widest diurnal ranges in Australian viticulture: hot days ripen the fruit while cold nights lock in acidity and aromatic detail. Judicious use of older, larger-format oak (see oak cooperage) frames the wine without burying its perfume. Clonakilla’s success reset expectations for what Australian Shiraz could be, and it helped put the Canberra District — an unlikely, land-locked, high-altitude region — firmly on the fine-wine map.