Victorian wine

Victorian wine is wine made in the Australian state of Victoria. With over 600 wineries, Victoria has more wine producers than any other Australian wine-producing state but ranks third in overall wine production due to the lack of a mass bulk wine-producing area like South Australia's Riverland and New South Wales's Riverina. Viticulture has existed in Victoria since the 19th century and experienced a high point in the 1890s when the region produced more than half of all wine produced in Australia. The phylloxera epidemic that soon followed took a hard toll on the Victoria wine industry which did not fully recover till the 1950s.

Today winemaking is spread out across the state and features premier wine regions such as Heathcote, Rutherglen and the Yarra Valley. Single varietal wines produced in the region include the Australian mainstays of Shiraz and Chardonnay as well as the more obscure Viognier, Pinot noir, Graciano and Tannat. The style of wine ranges from full body red wine to Madeira-like fortified wines such as Liqueur Muscat.

Some of the earliest commercial plantings in Victoria were near Yering and established by Hubert de Castella, a Swiss immigrant who came to the region in 1854. The devastation of France's vineyards by the phylloxera louse opened up an opportunity for the British wine market with traditionally heavily favored French wine. Castella was very ambitious and laid out his plans for Victoria to produce enough wine to supply all of England's needs in his treatises John Bull's vineyard. Unfortunately before Castella's grand plan could be fully realized, phylloxera made its own way to Australia and the viticultural setback was compounded with the development of a domestic temperance movement as well as economic uncertainty and labor shortages during the first World War.

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