Rutherglen
"Rutherglen makes a fortified wine so rare and so good that some of it can only be replaced by the same vine, in the same barrel, once a generation."
A small wine town near the Murray that makes fortified Muscat so good the French have quietly conceded the point, decanter by decanter.
Rutherglen doesn’t get anywhere near the tourist traffic of the Yarra Valley, and every winemaker I spoke to there seemed almost relieved about it. This is fortified wine country, and specifically it’s the home of Rutherglen Muscat and Topaque (what used to be called Tokay before an EU trademark dispute forced Australian producers to rename it) — dark, viscous, intensely sweet wines aged in a solera-like system where old barrels are topped up with younger wine rather than fully emptied, some containing material going back four generations.
At All Saints Estate, housed in a genuinely startling Victorian-era castle complete with turrets, built by an eccentric nineteenth-century winemaker who apparently just wanted a castle, I tasted a “Rare” classification Muscat — the top tier of an official ageing classification system unique to this region, minimum twenty years average age in barrel — and it tasted like burnt toffee, raisins, and a kind of concentrated, liquid autumn. The cellar door manager poured it like it mattered, in small glasses, and it did.
The Winery Walkabout Weekend every June long weekend turns the whole district into a rolling open-cellar-door festival, with live music and food trucks at properties that are usually appointment-only — I happened to time a visit right and ended up at three wineries in one afternoon that I’d never have got into otherwise.
When to go: June for the Winery Walkabout Weekend, or any weekend in autumn (March–May) when the vines turn colour and the fortified wines feel exactly appropriate to the season.