It's one of Australia’s most isolated, but also most rewarding, wine regions. Coonawarra is midway between Melbourne and Adelaide – roughly a five-hour drive from either – or 45 minutes from Mount Gambier’s pocket-sized airport.
Coonawarra is a place of pilgrimage for wine lovers from around the world – drawn by the magnificent cabernets and shirazes produced locally as a result of the region’s unique terra rossa land which has red-brown topsoil sitting on a white limestone base.
A thin cigar-shaped strip of red soil that runs from the hamlet of Penola in the south along the Riddoch Highway to tiny Coonawarra township in the north this small area produces some of Australia’s very best reds (and some pretty good chardonnays and rieslings) and the winemakers, grape growers and marketers are all immensely proud of their little strip of red dirt – flat as it is.
