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The Oldest Producing Vines on Earth Are Not in France

South Australia grows roughly half of all Australian wine — some counts put the state's share of the national crush at 55% — and about 80% of the country's premium output. It has over 680 wineries across 18 official wine regions and around 74,521 hectares of vines, more than double New South Wales.

But the interesting number is a date.

In the Barossa Valley, at Langmeil, there are Shiraz vines planted in 1843 that are still producing fruit.

They should not exist. In the late nineteenth century phylloxera, an aphid that attacks vine roots, destroyed the vineyards of North America, then Europe, then eastern Australia. Almost every vine in France, Italy and Spain today is grafted onto resistant American rootstock, because the originals are gone.

South Australia was spared. Isolation helped, and then quarantine restrictions were imposed and enforced, and the Barossa remains phylloxera-free to this day. The result is that some of the oldest continuously producing vineyards on Earth are not in Bordeaux or Burgundy but a ninety-minute drive from Adelaide.

The first vine in the state was planted in 1836, in North Adelaide. Dr Christopher Rawson Penfold arrived at Magill Estate in 1844 with cuttings he had carried from France. German Lutheran settlers fleeing persecution in Prussia built the Barossa from the 1840s.

The clock: South Australia is half a step out from its neighbours in another way too.

Adelaide runs on UTC+9:30, one of the world's half-hour zones, sitting between Western Australia on UTC+8 and the eastern states on UTC+10. Rather than round to either, the state split the difference. In summer it goes to UTC+10:30, staying exactly half an hour offset from Sydney and Melbourne all year round.

A state that stayed half an hour apart from its neighbours on the clock, and stayed apart from the rest of the wine world by keeping an insect out.

Both kinds of separation turned out to be worth having.

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