McLaren Vale

The Freeway Exit That Changes Everything

McLaren Vale is unreasonably close to Adelaide — thirty-five minutes on the freeway south — and this proximity has shaped it in interesting ways. It’s too close to have remained entirely sleepy but too wine-focused to have become a suburb. What it’s settled into is a kind of concentrated intensity: a small region, densely planted, with cellar doors that seem to appear every hundred metres and a food culture that has grown up alongside the wine in a way that feels mutual rather than additive.

I arrived on a weekday in March, which I recommend. The weekend version of McLaren Vale is busier and slightly more performative. On a Tuesday morning the cellar doors are quieter and the people pouring the wine have time to talk.

The Shiraz Question

McLaren Vale Shiraz is a different proposition from Barossa Shiraz, and understanding the difference is one of the small pleasures of spending time in both regions. Where Barossa tends toward power and concentration — the product of old vines in deep red soils — McLaren Vale gives you something more textured, more savoury, with a characteristic dark chocolate note that I’ve reliably found here and almost nowhere else. The soils here are varied in a way that keeps the wines interesting: sandy clay in some patches, red ironstone in others, all of it close enough to the Gulf St Vincent that maritime air moderates the summer heat.

d’Arenberg is the theatrical option — the Cube building, the art installations, the sprawling cellar door — and the wines are genuinely worth the visit despite the production value around them. But I found more to think about at smaller producers: a single-vineyard Grenache from an old planting that had a delicacy I hadn’t expected from this latitude, or a Nero d’Avola that made absolute sense in this landscape.

Willunga and the Farmers Market

The town of Willunga, at the southern end of the Vale, runs a Saturday morning farmers market under established fig trees in the main square that I put in the category of markets I would actually restructure a trip around. The produce comes from the Vale and the surrounding Fleurieu Peninsula — almonds, olives, the inevitable wine, but also extraordinary stone fruit in season and a vegetable range that reflects how well this Mediterranean-climate corner of South Australia grows things.

I bought half a kilo of Willunga almonds and ate them over the next two days and now I think about Willunga almonds whenever I eat inferior almonds elsewhere, which is often.

The Coast Is Right There

The thing that doesn’t always appear in descriptions of McLaren Vale is how close the sea is. Drive twenty minutes west from the main strip and you’re at Sellicks Beach or Port Willunga — long stretches of open coast with cliffs and sea caves and water that is cleaner than you might expect this close to a major city. The afternoon light on the Gulf St Vincent has a particular gold quality that a painter would struggle not to mention.

Lia found a sea cave at Port Willunga that you can access at low tide, and we sat in it for an unreasonable amount of time while the swell moved in and out below us. We’d had a very good lunch first. That helped.

When to go: March through May is ideal — post-harvest energy in the cellar doors, settled weather, and the stone fruit at the Willunga market. October and November have beautiful blossom on the almond orchards. Avoid peak school holiday weeks in January for any hope of a quiet cellar door experience.