Yarra Yering

Yarra Yering is the estate that restarted the Yarra Valley, and one of Australian wine’s great expressions of a single, idiosyncratic vision. Its numbered “Dry Red” wines are among the most distinctive reds in the country.

The botanist who woke a valley

The Yarra Valley had been one of colonial Australia’s finest wine districts in the nineteenth century, but by the 1920s it had gone dormant. It was Dr Bailey Carrodus — an Oxford-trained botanist and plant physiologist — who woke it. In 1969 he planted an unirrigated vineyard on a north-facing hillside above Coldstream, chosen with a scientist’s precision: silty clay loam over gravel for drainage, on a slope high enough to sit above the valley’s late-spring frosts. His 1973 vintage was the first commercial Yarra Valley wine made since 1921.

Carrodus was a genuine original — famously exacting, indifferent to fashion, and guided by his own experiments rather than convention. That independence is stamped on the wines.

The Dry Reds

The estate’s signatures are deliberately, almost eccentrically, named. Dry Red No. 1 is a five-variety Bordeaux blend built on Cabernet Sauvignon — structured, perfumed and age-worthy, and a fixture of the Langton’s Classification. Dry Red No. 2 is a Shiraz-based wine co-fermented with a little Viognier in the northern-Rhône manner — one of the earliest and most influential Australian cool-climate Shiraz wines, a stylistic sibling to what Clonakilla would later make famous.

Both wines draw on the Yarra’s cool climate and the estate’s own-rooted old vines, and both reward long cellaring — the fruit ripening slowly enough, in this cool corner of Victoria, to hold acid and fine tannin.

Continuity

Carrodus made every vintage until his death in 2008. Since 2013 the winemaker has been Sarah Crowe, who was named James Halliday Winemaker of the Year in 2017 — from among her first Yarra Yering vintages — for work that honours Carrodus’s legacy while quietly refining it. The estate remains what he built it to be: a north-facing hillside, a set of old vines, and a very particular idea of what Yarra Valley red should be.