Wine

Effervescent Evolution – A History of Australian Sparkling

The course of Australia’s answer to the great sparkling wines of Champagne is long and winding –
and is just now coming into its fullest expression to date, as Max Allen details. 

Australians have always had an uncommon thirst for sparkling wine. From the earliest colonial days, we’ve not only consumed more imported Champagne every year than most other English-speaking countries (we still do today), but we’ve also been very keen to produce our own fizz. 

The first commercial vineyard in Tasmania, planted in 1823 by an ex-convict named Bartholomew Broughton, sold “wine in the imitation of Champagne” to the colonists of Hobart. In many ways, Broughton (remember that name) was two centuries ahead of his time – as we’ll discover. 

Imported French Champagne was so popular in the early years of the Port Phillip settlement (present day Melbourne) that visitors in the 1840s reported the streets were “thickly strewed with champagne bottles”. This prodigious thirst grew into a frenzy during the gold rush, and by the 1880s – the era of “Marvellous Melbourne” – Champagne was firmly entrenched as the wine of choice. This is also the era in which local wine producers got serious and started producing sparkling wine in earnest. 

THE FIRST GOLDEN AGE OF AUSTRALIAN SPARKLING

In the mid-1800s, many Australian winemakers – such as Dr Henry Lindeman in the Hunter Valley – had produced a “champagne” as just one of many styles in their range, along with “hock”, “burgundy”, “claret” and so on.

Vigneron James Fallon had attempted to start a sparkling wine business at Albury on the Murray River in the 1870s, and even employed a specialist French winemaker to help him, but the summer heat caused all the bottles – under pressure because of the secondary, fizz-producing fermentation – to explode. 

Utilising European – mostly French – expertise would, however, turn out to be the key for the success of subsequent Australian sparkling wine ventures. In the late 1870s, flamboyant Melbourne entrepreneur Dr Louis Lawrence Smith established a “champagne manufactory” in the cellars of the city’s Eastern Market, and employed a French winemaker, Auguste D’Argent, whose sparkling wines went on to win awards around the world. 

By the early 1890s, Ballarat businessman Hans Irvine was expanding the underground cellars originally built by Joseph Best at Great Western, and, with former Pommery Champagne maker, Charles Pierlot and a team of French cellar workers, began to build a global reputation for Great Western “champagne”. 

The celebrated Salinger sparkling section of the historic underground cellar tunnels of Seppelt Wines Great Western. 

Australia’s sweet sparkling history 

It’s not just drier styles of sparkling wine modelled on Champagne that have been lapped up by Australian drinkers over the years. Back in the late 19th and early 20th century, sweeter styles – whites called “Sparkling Hock”, reds called “Sparkling Burgundy” – were also all the rage. In the 1950s, with the introduction of cool-fermentation pressure tank technology from Germany, a new style of very fruity, sweet, effervescent white wine was introduced. Orlando’s Barossa Pearl was the first and most successful, leading to a host of copycat brands, including Kaiser Stuhl’s Pineapple Pearl (made by a newly-arrived young German winemaker called Wolf Blass), and the short-lived Penfolds Blue Rhapsody, a sweet fizzy wine dyed blue. These brands had all disappeared by the 1980s, but their spirit was revived a decade later when Brown Brothers developed their first Moscato, a lower alcohol, “frizzante” sweet white that led to the development of a whole new wine category that is still with us today.

At the same time in Adelaide, another Frenchman, Edmond Mazure, started making sparkling wine on a commercial scale at Auldana cellars, near Penfolds Magill Estate in the outskirts of the city. And in 1902, James Angas, the new owner of the old Minchinbury vineyard west of Sydney, employed German-born winemaker, Leo Buring (who had worked at Great Western), to help him expand the winery into sparkling wine production. 

The stage was set for a new century of fizzy expansion, consolidation, and consumption. As Mark Twain wrote about Australia’s thirst for bubbles after attending the Melbourne Cup in 1895, “The champagne flows, everybody is vivacious, excited, happy; everybody bets, and gloves and fortunes change hands right along, all the time.” 

AUSTRALIAN “CHAMPAGNE” GOES MAINSTREAM 

For most of the 20th century, the domestic sparkling wine market was dominated by a handful of large, South Australian-based brands. Penfolds bought Minchinbury from James Angas in 1912, and the Seppelt family bought Great Western from Hans Irvine in 1918, and both companies expanded production of their now-famous “champagnes”. 

In Adelaide, Edmond Mazure left Auldana after the First World War and established a new business that eventually became Romalo Champagne Cellars. As well as producing successful brands of bubbly, Romalo was also home to what became a dynasty of sparkling winemakers: Mazure’s protegée, Hurtle Walker, and Hurtle’s son, Norm, who made Champagne-method fizz at Seaview in the 1970s and in turn mentored other winemakers. 

Although the methods used to produce many of these mid-century wines were inspired by Champagne, the grape varieties and growing conditions were often nothing like those of the French region. Seppelt, for example, used an obscure grape called Ondenc as the base of their Great Western fizz, and Penfolds Minchinbury vineyards were positively sub-tropical compared to the cool-climate regions we recognise today as being crucial to the production of fine sparkling. 

It wasn’t until the 1980s that Australian winemakers began to take advantage of the “right” varieties – Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier – grown in the “right” regions – higher altitude, lower latitude – to propel local sparkling wine quality to the next level. And started taking the “champagne” name off their labels. Again, it was the influence of the French that often helped us change. 

Brian Croser, founder of Petaluma and of Croser Wines, helped put Adelaide Hills on the map for sparkling. 

Jennifer Doyle, vigneron of Janz, which helped spearhead the move to premium sparkling in Tasmania. 

HERE COME THE CHAMPENOIS 

Australian winemakers had only started growing Chardonnay and Pinot Noir on a meaningful scale in the newly emerging cooler-climate wine regions since the 1970s. Seppelt planted the two varieties at their new, cold Drumborg vineyard in far-southwest Victoria, and in 1984 used that fruit to produce the first Salinger sparkling wine, which went on to triumph in wine shows across the country. 

Other pioneers were thinking along similar lines at this time. Brian Croser planted the two varieties in the cool reaches of the Piccadilly Valley in the Adelaide Hills to produce his eponymous sparkling wine brand in the mid-80s. Another Ballarat businessman, Ian Home, partnered with another French winemaker, Dominique Landragin, to produce sparkling under the Yellowglen label. John and Ann Ellis established a Chardonnay and Pinot Noir vineyard in the cold climate in sight of Hanging Rock for sparkling wine. And Brown Brothers planted the same varieties at their very high-altitude vineyard at Whitlands in northeast Victoria. 

The rise and rise of Australian Prosecco 

In 2004, winegrower Otto Dal Zotto and his family released the first commercial Prosecco in Australia, grown at their property in Victoria’s King Valley. Dal Zotto, originally from the Veneto, was keen to make wine like he’d grown up with and had found some Prosecco vines in South Australia, taken cuttings, and planted his own vineyard. His first wines came out at a time when interest in Italian Prosecco and spritz culture was beginning to boom around the world, and the Dal Zotto example inspired many others – notably Brown Brothers (again!) – to plant the grape and make fizz from it. The style resonated with the drinking public: within a decade, local Prosecco had become an everyday wine in Australian households.

The major commercial turning point came in 1985 when Champagne giant, Moet et Chandon, invested in a winery and vineyards in the Yarra Valley, employing leading winemaker Tony Jordan to helm the ambitious new venture. This was the ultimate validation of Australia’s potential for producing high quality fizz and led to a boom in vineyard planting in cooler regions – although, ironically, many of the Chardonnay and Pinot Noir vineyards established in places like the Upper Yarra in the late 1980s and 1990s to supply the burgeoning demand for sparkling base are now the source of some of Australia’s best still examples of those grapes. 

Chandon wasn’t the only Champagne house interested in Australia. In South Australia, Bollinger bought into the Croser brand, and Deutz went into a short-term partnership with Yalumba to develop a new sparkling wine, Yalumba D. But arguably the most influential investment was by the Champagne house of Louis Roederer, who formed a joint venture with Heemskerk vineyard in Pipers River in Tasmania in 1985 to develop Jansz, a successful sparkling wine brand which was bought by Yalumba’s Hill-Smith family in 1997. 

A contemplative Ed Carr of House of Arras – perhaps Australia s most successful and celebrated sparkling winemaker. 

SPIRIT OF TASMANIA 

Over the last 30 years, the centre of gravity for sparkling wine in Australia has undeniably shifted south, across Bass Strait. Not in terms of volume – Tassie still only accounts for just over one per cent of the country’s total wine production – but in terms of quality, value and global critical acclaim. One of the first to realise this potential in the 1990s was winemaker Ed Carr, whose Arras sparkling wines, produced first for the giant Hardys wine company, are arguably now the benchmark for Tasmanian sparkling quality. Indeed, in 2024 Carr became the first Australian to be named Sparkling Winemaker of the Year at the International Wine Challenge in London. 

The success of Arras, Jansz and other mainland-owned Tassie sparkling wine brands such as Taltarni’s Clover Hill (established in the late 1980s), helped attract others to invest, notably Brown Brothers, who purchased Tamar Ridge – including the Pirie sparkling wine brand – in 2010.

Now the island is awash with smaller-scale independent producers releasing exceptional quality fizz, including Natalie Fryar (ex-Jansz, now with her own Bellebonne brand), Fran Austin (ex-Hardys, now co-owner of the Delamere vineyard), and long-established vignerons such as Stefano Lubiana, Claudio Radenti at Freycinet vineyard, Andrew Pirie with his Apogee brand, as well as newer sparkling specialists, Henskens Rankin. 

Certainly, the rush to fizz has seen Tasmania buck all national industry trends: Tassie’s vineyard area has doubled over the last decade, with the vast majority of that new planting being Chardonnay and Pinot. It’s estimated that over 40 per cent of the state’s wine production is now sparkling. 

Bartholomew Broughton would be proud.