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.
Read more about Victorian Wine: History, Wine Regions
Famous quotes containing the words victorian and/or wine:
“Conscience was the barmaid of the Victorian soul. Recognizing that human beings were fallible and that their failings, though regrettable, must be humoured, conscience would permit, rather ungraciously perhaps, the indulgence of a number of carefully selected desires.”
—C.E.M. (Cyril Edwin Mitchinson)
“I begin to find out that nothing but virtue will do in this damned world. I am tolerably sick of vice which I have tried in its agreeable varieties, and mean on my return to cut all my dissolute acquaintance and leave off wine and “carnal company,” and betake myself to politics and Decorum.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)