The best McLaren Vale wineries

What’s the definitive McLaren Vale experience? Take a sunny hillside, stripe it with rows of mature vines, insert a photogenic 1850s stone farmhouse down a long dirt driveway, add an olive grove and a conifer or two … then open a bottle of fine shiraz as the sun tracks its way towards the western horizon. Coriole delivers – and does so without a whiff or haughtiness, exclusivity or braggadocio. 

Coriole is big on solar, native revegetation, rainwater harvesting, composting and organic gardening. The restaurant here, Gather, with its clattering tables and chairs and local Willunga slate floor, uses vegetables and herbs grown on-site. Book ahead for a set-menu degustation lunch from Thursday to Monday. Or swing by the Arbour Bar for a bottle of Estate Shiraz and watch the late-afternoon sun do its thing. McLaren Vale defined.

Even if Chester Osborn hadn’t invented the undeniably amazing d’Arenberg Cube, the winery itself would still be somewhere near the top of the list of McLaren Vale’s best. But he did – and now d’Arenberg has evolved from being merely an excellent winery to become an essential McLaren Vale ‘experience’, its towering Cube the posterchild for all and sundry regional promotions.

In the tasting room on the top level, sip your way into d’Arenberg’s dizzying array of reds and whites (the Dead Arm shiraz and Broken Fishplate sauvignon blanc are perennial faves) – then launch into some harissa chicken wings or a cube-shaped Reuben sandwich at casual Eat@Polly's on level three. Looking to amp up the style? Book a table at the enduring (and endearing) d’Arry’s Veranda Restaurant in the adjacent 19th-century homestead – still one of SA’s best regional restaurants.

If a show-stopping view is what you’re looking for in a cellar door, then stop the show right here. Samuel’s Gorge winery occupies a picture-perfect 1853 stone farm shed, sitting high on a ridge above a gorgeous gorge. Far below, the Onkaparinga River snakes its way through the green of its namesake national park. What a spot! 

The vibe at the cellar door is handmade and unpretentious, with no sign of the glass-and-steel architectural glam of many of its neighbours. Instead, Samuel’s Gorge is all stone, timer and weathered corrugated iron, surrounded by rambling flower beds and herb gardens.

Glamorously poised by the roadside in McLaren Vale’s slightly higher, slightly cooler Blewitt Springs subregion, Beresford is worth a visit on design principles alone – before you even get to the wine. This modernist, angular tasting pavilion is an exercise in magazine aesthetics, enticing clientele to match (don’t turn up in footy shorts and thongs). This isn’t to say that Beresford is at all snooty; being here brings a sense of serenity – of bearing witness to the building’s great beauty and becoming a player in the architects’ grand designs. 

A visit to Beresford is a chance to feel beautiful, too, as you enjoy the bounty of the estate’s 28 hectares. Tasting experiences (from $10) meander through lush grenache, shiraz, cab sav and chardonnay offerings, offset by pizzas and regional cheese platters – best enjoyed on the deck or by the suspended fireplace inside if it’s wintry.

An old chapel hung in there for 100 years, functioning variously as a schoolhouse, community centre and place of worship until 1965, when it was boarded up and left to its own devices. But wandering professor Thomas Nelson saw the potential and bought the pace, planting his first vines in 1972 and praying for a result. And what a result! Tom’s cellar door opened in 1979. 

These days, Chapel Hill honours its lofty position with lofty standards when it comes to sustainable winemaking. Composting, rain harvesting, recycled water irrigation, minimal spraying and evaporation minimisation are all part of a day’s work here – a sensitive approach that turns out brilliant pinot gris, vermentino, cabernet sauvignon, chardonnay, zinfandel, and of course, shiraz.

It’s perhaps ironic that one of McLaren Vale’s most widely recognised wines – Wirra Wirra’s eternally popular allrounder Church Block – is a blend, not a purist varietal. But really, when a blend is this palatable (merlot/shiraz/cab sav), there’s not much room for singular snobbery.

You could spend the whole day here, cavorting on the lawns; exploring the historic, vaulted-brick facilities (parts of which are 125 years old – tours from $40); and quaffing coffee and eating panini at Harry’s Deli. But most folks are here to lean on the woody tasting bar and enjoy some of McLaren Vale’s richest, most fulsome wines and decadent stickies (tastings from $10 – book ahead). Check out ‘Woodhenge’ on your way out – a quirky fence made from massive chunks of McLaren Vale redgum.

Steve Pannell spreads his ambitions beyond just McLaren Vale, doing good things with grapes from as far afield as Langhorne Creek and the Adelaide Hills. This means some excellent cool-climate wines also receive Steve’s loving attention – sauvignon blanc, riesling, pinot gris and pinot grigio among them. It’s also fair to say that Steve isn’t afraid to try a new direction or two with his winemaking, taking visitors to his McLaren Vale HQ on a tour through fields of fiano into barbera and touriga nacional country.

S.C. Pannell is also one of the bigger cellar doors in McLaren Vale, its vast terrace scoring bonus points for bedazzling views across vine-lined fields to the western sunsets. This means Pannell’s is prime territory for weddings, parties and anything else that needs a bit of elbow room.

The antithesis of McLaren vale’s slick, mainstream, big-turnover cellar doors, Foggo conjures up crafty, unaffected and handmade vibes, with small-batch wines to match. Inside the low-slung brick structure is an equally modest brick-and-timber tasting room with a compact bar and a chesterfield or two.

But what wine! Handcrafted from Foggo’s compact 20-acre holding, sustaining some of McLaren Vale’s oldest and gnarliest-looking vines, Foggo’s shiraz, cab sav, grenache and chardonnay are rich and full-bodied, textured by the French and American oak barrels they’ve been stored in.

When the new Mitolo cellar door arrived on the McLaren Vale scene a few years ago, everybody went, ‘Oh wow! So that’s what a cellar door/restaurant can look like!’ And indeed, Mitolo is a beauty: a mod-industrial pavilion linking a series of charcoal-grey steel shipping containers with expansive glass walls and timber decks – a sleek cargo-meets-cubbyhouse architectural hybrid. 

Inside, the cellar door vibe is sophisticated and formal, with tasting flights ($20 to $40) taking Insta-worthy guests on a journey through Mitolo’s range of Italian varietals. It’s all very glam and classy – a mood which extends into the Little Wolf Osteria (lunch Friday to Sunday; dinner Saturday) in another zone of the same complex, where delicately crafted Italian masterpieces are steeped in house-made, house-grown and locally sourced ethics.

Before the d’Arenberg Cube rose from the McLaren Vale landscape, the word ‘iconic’ was most often used around here to describe Hugh Hamilton’s cellar door. Draped in vines, this circular hilltop eyrie opens-out to impressive 270º views across the Hugh Hamilton estate.

On the wine front, they’ve had some fun here inventing kooky wine names: the Trickster, the Black Sheep, the Strutter, the Mongrel, the Intruder, the Ratbag, the Villain… It mightn’t be immediately obvious what’s inside the bottle (anything from merlot to mourvèdre), but drinking wine is supposed to be about having fun, right? It’s easy for wineries to take themselves too seriously – an allegation you could never level at Hugh Hamilton. There are almonds to crunch on, olives to suck on, and non-alcoholic shiraz for the kids.

The winery has expanded since its first vintages in the early 1990s, buying-up pastoral leases and wine blocks around ‘Ingleburne’, a handsome two-storey stone homestead from pre-20th century days. Ambitious, sure – but why not, when the dirt underfoot (sandy loam over clay) is so conducive to growing grapes. Shiraz and grenache are the leading lights here—but winemaker Alexia Roberts also knows a thing or two about wine from the adjacent Adelaide Hills. Tapping into the Hills’ altitude, chilly nights and valley mists, cool-climate sauvignon blanc from Kuitpo and chardonnay from a Piccadilly Valley holding broaden the tasting experience at the Penny’s Hill cellar door. Such a shame the restaurant has closed!

The soil, sun and soakage here are just the same as down the road in the McLaren Vale – minus the traffic, tourists and tractors. 

If you’ve made the effort to get here, Woodstock does its best to hold onto you, with a cellar door (tastings $10), wine bar, restaurant, wildlife park and accommodation. Woodstock wines follow suit, covering plenty of bases to please the masses—from sparkling white, riesling and rosé to the mandatory shiraz, finishing off with a sticky selection of muscat, tawny and sundry fortifieds. Offset the liquids with some solids at the Coterie Kitchen, open from Friday to Sunday for lunch, serving grazing platters, nibble plates and crispy German flammekueche flatbread (don’t ask, just enjoy). 

Treat your guilty conscience (and your sense of humour) to a cellar-door session at the Confessional. Absolve your sins then create a few new ones as you move through the tasting list, which is surprisingly diverse for a relatively new winery. Reds steal the show – shiraz (of course), grenache, cab sav, montepulciano, sangiovese plus a few blends – or there’s a very decent chardonnay and vermentino for a hot SA afternoon. Then, suitably riddled with guilt, head to the confession booth (yes, there actually is one) where you can record your dirty little secrets onto camera and have them posted to the Confessional’s website for all to judge. Trust us, you’ll feel better afterwards.