Clare Valley: The Home of Australian Riesling

The Clare Valley is a string of small valleys about 100 kilometres north of Adelaide, and it is the home of Australian Riesling. Not the sweet German kind. Clare Riesling is bone dry, smells of lime and tastes like biting into one, and it is the wine that made Australian winemakers stop apologising for the grape. The valley also makes serious Shiraz and Cabernet, and in 2000 it started the screwcap revolution that the rest of the world eventually copied.

Table of Contents

1. Where it is and why it is cool up there
2. The Riesling
3. The screwcap story
4. A short history
5. What to buy
6. What to eat with it
7. Visiting
8. Frequently asked questions

Where it is and why it is cool up there

Clare sits at the northern end of the Mount Lofty Ranges, about ninety minutes’ drive from Adelaide. On the map it looks too far north and too hot for a delicate white grape, and by the numbers it is warm: the average January temperature is about 22°C, a couple of degrees warmer than Coonawarra. The trick is height. The vineyards sit between 190 and 609 metres, and the nights are cold. A 40°C day followed by a 1°C night is not unusual during ripening, and that swing is what keeps the acid in the grapes while the sugar builds during the day.

The region is about 35 kilometres long and 5 to 10 kilometres wide, with 5,093 hectares of vines and around 50 wineries, most of them small and family-owned. It grows less than two per cent of Australia’s wine, but about a fifth of its Riesling.

The Riesling

Young Clare Riesling is pale, almost water-white, and smells of fresh lime, lemon zest and sometimes green apple or white flowers. In the mouth it is dry, light, and sharp enough to make you sit up, with a chalky, almost salty finish. There is no oak, no sweetness and no fat. It is the wine to drink with fish and chips, Thai food, oysters or anything you would squeeze a lemon over.

Then something strange happens. Leave a good bottle for eight or ten years and it turns gold, the lime softens into marmalade and buttered toast, and a note appears that wine people call kerosene or petrol. That sounds terrible and tastes wonderful. Clare Riesling is one of the few Australian whites that ages as well as a red, which is why Grosset Polish Hill sells out the day it is released.

The valley has two famous sub-districts and they taste different. Watervale, in the south, has limestone under the soil and makes the softer, more perfumed, citrus-blossom style. Polish Hill River, to the east, sits on broken slate and makes the tighter, steelier, more mineral style that takes longest to open up. If a label names one of them, that is what it is telling you.

Grape	Share of the valley	Style
Riesling	About 38 per cent, the biggest planting	Dry, lime, chalk, ages for a decade or more
Shiraz	Second	Riper and fuller than Coonawarra, with the cold nights keeping it fresh
Cabernet Sauvignon	Third	Blackcurrant and mint; Jim Barry’s The Armagh and Wendouree are the cult bottles
Others	Small	Malbec has a long history here and Grenache is growing

The screwcap story

In 2000, 13 Clare Valley Riesling makers, led by Jeffrey Grosset, put their whole vintage under screwcap instead of cork. They were sick of losing one bottle in ten to cork taint and of watching delicate Riesling turn flat and brown under leaky corks. Restaurants sneered, customers thought it meant cheap wine, and within a few years almost every Australian and New Zealand white had followed. Today most Australian wine at every price is under screwcap, and it started in this valley with one grape.

A short history

Settlers arrived in the late 1830s and planted vines with their first villages in the 1840s. The oldest winery still running is Sevenhill Cellars, founded in 1851 by Jesuit priests who needed sacramental wine and, being practical men, made plenty. The Jesuits are still there. Through the twentieth century the valley was known for hearty reds and fortifieds; the Riesling reputation was built from the 1970s and 1980s by families like Barry, Knappstein, Mitchell and Grosset, and by the screwcap decision in 2000.

What to buy

Clare Riesling is one of the best-value wines in the country, because the grape is unfashionable and the wines are made by families rather than marketing departments. These are on the shelves of the big chains; prices are Dan Murphy’s shelf prices on 9 September 2026 and will move about; BWS stocks many of the same names.

Wine	Price band	Why
Jim Barry Watervale Riesling	About $17 to $20	The best cheap Riesling in Australia, year after year. Start here
Tim Adams Riesling	About $18 to $22	Slightly rounder, very reliable, a great fish-and-chips wine
Knappstein Clare Valley Riesling	About $19	Classic lime-and-slate style from one of the original families
Pikes Traditionale Riesling	About $24	Polish Hill River. Tighter and steelier, and it ages well
Rieslingfreak No. 34	About $25	A specialist who makes nothing but Riesling; this is the Clare one
Petaluma Hanlin Hill Riesling	About $31 to $40	Single vineyard, built to keep for ten years
Grosset Polish Hill Riesling	About $88	The benchmark for the whole country. Buy it, hide it, open it in 2036

Also worth hunting down at independents and cellar doors: Mount Horrocks, Kilikanoon Mort’s Block, Skillogalee, Pauletts and Sevenhill’s own Riesling. For reds, Jim Barry, Kilikanoon and Tim Adams make Shiraz and Cabernet at fair prices, and Wendouree, which sells only by mailing list, is the valley’s most famous cult red. Our Riesling guide explains the grape and how the Clare style compares with Germany and Eden Valley.

Heads up: the boxes below link to Just Wines, our partner shop. If you buy through them we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Prices were checked when this was written and move about.

The partner shop has the valley’s reds. For the Riesling itself, BWS and Dan Murphy’s both carry Jim Barry Watervale, Pikes Traditionale and Knappstein.

What to eat with it

Anything you would put lemon on. Fish and chips, grilled prawns, oysters, whiting, calamari, a Thai green curry or a Vietnamese salad. Young Riesling cuts through fried and fatty food and stands up to chilli far better than an oaked white. Aged Riesling, with its toast and marmalade notes, is a match for roast chicken, pork belly and washed-rind cheese. Serve it cold, about 8°C, and do not decant it. Our guide to how long wine lasts once opened covers keeping the rest of the bottle; a screwcap Riesling is fine in the fridge for four or five days.

Visiting

Clare is the easiest wine region in South Australia to do without a car. The Riesling Trail is a 35 kilometre sealed path built on the old railway line, running through the villages of Auburn, Watervale, Sevenhill and Clare, and it passes the gates of a dozen cellar doors. Hire a bike in Clare or Auburn and roll downhill from Clare with the wind behind you. A car gets you to Grosset, Kilikanoon, Jim Barry and Skillogalee, which are off the trail.

Sevenhill is the one stop everyone should make: the Jesuit winery, the stone church and the crypt where the priests are buried. The Clare Valley Gourmet Weekend in late May, after vintage, is the busiest weekend of the year; book beds early. Spring, when the valley is green, and autumn, when the vines turn, are the best times. Summer is hot.

Clare is one of the Australian regions in our guide to the world’s wine regions, and if you like this style of Riesling, the Eden Valley in the Barossa ranges is the other place to look.

Frequently asked questions