Increasing trend for reservation versus walk-in winery tastings

Last week I had a look at How much we pay to visit wineries, within the USA. There is also the matter of whether we need to book a reservation for that tasting, or whether we can just walk in unannounced. I look at that this week.

First, I have noted that I originally developed my wine interest via walk-in wineries, in Australia in the early 1980s, because winery tastings were usually free and without appointment — we could just drop in during business hours. Indeed, we can still do that in some parts of Australia, even today in these very different times.

This is important because, as the recent 2025 Tasting Room Survey Report notes:

In such turbulent times, it is advised to focus on what's within one's control. For wineries across the United States, the single most important source of sales and engagement is the tasting room. In a flat, fragmented and fluctuating U.S. wine market, the tasting room crowds may not be as dependable as years past, but gleaning sales from the visitors who do make it to wine country is that much more important.

The recent Silicon Valley Bank 2025 Direct-to-Consumer Wine Report also tackles this same topic, on pages 32–45, when it notes for the USA:

The most meaningful change in tasting room service styles during the 2010s was moving from walk-in standing bars to seated by-reservation tastings. The change lessened visitation numbers but increased the average order value. The question today is whether the ‘experience arms race’ has reached its peak. Only 26% of wineries exclusively offer by-appointment tastings, while 8% are exclusively walk-in. With declining visitation, the largest group of wineries, 66%, is opting for greater flexibility and offering both service styles.

These data are shown in the first graph (above).

Obviously, the fees charged for reserve tastings are pretty much double those of the standard fee, as shown in the second graph. More sadly, those fees have been continually increasing over the past 5 years. As Per Karlsson commented on my previous post:

The SVB analysis is really interesting. In some ways it is worrying, it shows a trend towards moving wine more and more towards a beverage for the rich (perhaps it is already - in particular in the US).

This point is emphasized when we look at the tasting fees charged, compared to the suggested retail price (SRP) of the wines produced by that winery, which we do in the third graph (below). Clearly, the more you pay (wine) then the more you pay (tasting).

Also, the lower is the SRP then the more likely it is that the winery provides walk-in tastings, as shown in the final graph (below). All of this also relates to the U.S. wine-producing region, as Napa and Sonoma charge above average fees (both standing and reserve), with Oregon, Santa Barbara, Paso Robles, Washington, etc charging below average.

As was recently noted: In a slower market, physical spaces are your biggest asset. In the modern on-line world, younger generations are showing a strong trend towards valuing their experiences above all else. So, the tasting experience is very important for modern wineries — after all, it cannot become digital. It was important back in My Day, too, of course. However, almost every survey shows that wine sales are declining, in both volume and dollars, and will continue to do so. We therefore need to connect to potential customers, and a tasting room is one way to do that — even in these different times, wine should still be fun, as well as a learning experience.

How much do we pay to visit wineries?

Back in “my day”, last century in Australia, winery tastings were free and without appointment — we could just drop in during business hours. However, it was expected that you would want to buy some of the wine — after all, why else would you be there? So, day trips to the Hunter Valley, north of Sydney, or Mudgee, to the west, were all the rage on weekends. (My Day was also the time when Australian wine started to come to international attention.)

As evidence that I can still do this in some parts of Australia, here is a relatively recent picture of myself at Granite Hills winery, in Victoria, with Llew Knight the proprietor / winemaker. (I can highly recommend the wines.)

Another common way of selling direct-to-customer wines (in a country with a Three-Tier System, requiring a middleman for distribution, like the USA) is a winery club, which in many cases is built up from people visiting the winery, in the first place. It has been suggested, however, that the average length of club membership is not necessarily all that much (The tough questions wine clubs face).

So, my modern question is about the charging of a fee for visiting a winery. The recent Silicon Valley Bank 2025 Direct-to-Consumer Wine Report tackles this topic on pages 38—49, with regard to the USA. I will look at a few of the take-home messages here.

The basic reason for charging tasting fees is that after the 1980s:

“Tasting fees were first levied to discourage tasters who treated wineries like
their local pub. Charging tasting fees proved effective in discouraging those
who were taking advantage of the winery’s generosity and diminishing the
experience for others.”

The fees currently being charged in the USA are pretty steep, as shown in the next two graphs, for different years and then different regions.

That is a pretty continual increase over the years. Tasting fees seem now to be an essential part of a winery’s revenue model, rather than merely offsetting the cost of the wine poured (as it was, originally). Clearly, some regions are also doing much better than are others.

When asked: “In what circumstances do you waive tasting fees?” the US winery responses were:
    for joining a wine club (the most common option)
    for purchasing a specific number of bottles
    for purchasing a specific dollar amount 
    no reimbursement (14% in both 2023 and 2024).

Clearly, given current economic circumstances, we can also ask: “Has your winery reduced tasting room fees to improve visitation?” Answer: very few. For those who have done so, we can then ask: “If your winery lowered tasting room fees, has it improved visitation?” Answer: for about one-third it has improved, and one-third it has stabilized.

We will not, of course, ever see a return to “my day”. However, to return to my original point, this final graph shows just which US winery regions do manage to get some wine purchases from their visitors, and how much. Napa is currently doing very well for itself.

Where in the world are the oldest vineyards and wineries?

This title is actually two separate questions, because the oldest wineries are not necessarily associated with the oldest vineyards, and vice versa. So, I need two lots of data to answer this question, at the global level.

Wine-making itself goes back a very long way, of course. It has been noted (The oldest vineyard in the world is 6,100 years old) that:

The Greeks had Dionysus — the ancient Greek god of wine, among other things — who was worshipped as early as 1,500—11,000 BCE and is referenced in the works of Homer and Aesop. Mentions of wine can be traced back to Georgia in 6,000 BCE, Iran in 5,000 BCE and Sicily in 4,000 BCE; and the Egyptians also tried their hand at winemaking with all kinds of grapes, as well as with figs, dates and pomegranates. The alcohol is even mentioned 231 times in biblical literature. 

It was during a 2007 research expedition in Armenia ... that a drinking bowl, grape seeds, desiccated vines, pottery sherds and fermentation jars were discovered and dated as 6,100 years old ... This discovery is said to be the earliest example of wine production — with the grapes in question most likely the Vitis vinifera species, according to botanists.

However, there are no extant wineries this old. Indeed, the World Atlas tells us that The oldest wineries in the world are apparently as shown in the table above. According to this information, Germany has by far the oldest known winery (at 1,161 years old), with France also having one at c. 1,000 years old. Italy’s oldest seems to be 882 years old. By comparison, Spain’s is only 474 years old, with Switzerland right behind. Outside Europe, Mexico’s oldest is 426 years old, and South Africa’s is 335 years old.

However, as I noted, this has little to do with the oldest vineyards. Plants have an upper limit to their life-times, and we cannot expect the above sorts of numbers for their ages. For this reason, there is an Old Vine Registry available online, which lists information about all of the known old vineyards. To quote from the website:

The Old Vine Registry is a grassroots, volunteer effort inspired and begun by wine critic Jancis Robinson and several of her colleagues. Robinson first started writing about the heritage of old vines more than 15 years ago, and in 2010 she and writer Tamlyn Currin began compiling a registry of old vines, triggered by a growing sense that these old vineyards were important elements of cultural and scientific heritage, as well as the source of some particularly beautiful wine. 

The launch of the Old Vine Conference provoked a lot of interest in the Old Vine Registry, and it got to the point where all parties involved realised they needed something more searchable, more accessible, more elegant, and more useful. The project needed to become an online database, somewhere people could go to find old vineyards, learn about them, track down the wines made from them and the people farming them. With the help of Alder Yarrow, author of Vinography.com ... (who handily has a background in digital marketing and user experience), funding was found, talented developers were tracked down, and under Yarrow’s direction, the real Old Vine Registry was born.

By and large, the Registry lists vineyards that are at least 35 years old, with currently more than 2,650 entries listed worldwide. I will explore these data in more detail in future blog posts; but for now let’s simply take an overview of the oldest vineyards. The graph above shows a count of how many vineyards there are for each of the ages greater than 50 years old. (Note that the vertical axis is on a logarithmic scale.) Surprisingly, there are 2,335 such vineyards, scattered over the whole globe. Seriously, would you have guessed such a large number?

It is worth noting, as an aside, that not all of the actual ages are necessarily perfectly precise. For example, you can see that there are three odd peaks in the data (ie. the top three points in the graph). These three points denote vineyards listed as being planted in 1930, 1960 and 1970, respectively. Clearly, these are simply approximate times, presumably based on memory rather than written records. [Update: please see the first Comment below.] However, the other entries seem to be quite precise.

Anyway, here is the list of the locations and ages of the very oldest vineyards. You will note that eastern Europe gets mixed in with Germany and Italy, in comparison to the above list of wineries, and that France and Spain are quite some way down the list. Note, also, that only the top 5 vineyards would actually make it onto the wineries list, and that none of these are actually in that list, anyway. The oldest wineries and vineyards really are not connected at all.

Thanks to Alder Yarrow for providing me with direct access to The Old Vine Registry’s data.

Success and failure of visits to winery tasting rooms

There have been a number of recent reports about problems getting visitors to come to winery tasting rooms (cellar doors), at least in the numbers that they were in before the Pandemic (e.g. Tasting room visitation is down). I have wondered: is this a bad thing, or not? After all during the Pandemic, because wine enthusiasts weren’t allowed to travel, many wineries went to them, instead, online (How Sonoma County wineries are navigating a post-pandemic tourism world). This makes for a different direct-to-customer future, but not necessarily a worse one. *

Mind you, I do like visiting wineries. So, these thoughts have prompted me to wonder about the quality of the winery-visiting experience before the Pandemic. One potential source of such information is the user reports compiled by the travel-planning site TripAdvisor. To this end, a report in 2022 used this source to examine: What went right and what went wrong in my cellar door visit? Here, I will look at some of the conclusions from this report.

The authors were interested in what they call Service Quality (SQ), which derives from comparing perceived expectations (E) of the service to perceived performance of that service (P), so that SQ = P—E. That is, Service Failure is defined as service performance falling short of customer expectations.

To look at this quantitatively, the authors note that:

According to the rankings on the TripAdvisor platform, based on the number of reviews, the top five wine destinations in the world are: Tuscany (Italy), followed by Napa Valley (the USA), Hunter Valley (Australia), Stellenbosch (South Africa), and Mendoza (Argentina).

So, these are the five regions that the authors studied, using what they describe as a combination of “sentiment analysis” and “natural language processing”, as applied to 89,672 TripAdvisor reviews (from Jan 2010 to Apr 2021). ** Their analysis divided these into Positive reviews and Neutral/Negative reviews, which allowed the authors to identify what they perceive as both the Service Quality components and the Service Failure components. The review comments associated with these two groups turned out to be:

Service Quality:
wonderful tasting experience
knowledgeable friendly staff
interesting informative tour guide
good / nice wine
small family winery

Service Failure:
rude people / staff
worst winery tour
poor customer service
bad / terrible experience
disappointing visit

From this analysis, the authors concluded that: “the issues most linked to service quality and service failure are as follows (in order of importance):

the quality of the main wine product,
the experience in the tasting room,
the organized tours,
the empathy of the staff,
the reliability of the staff, and
the setting of the cellar and landscape.”

So, now you all know what to focus on when visiting a winery (or when people visit your winery).

The authors also noted that these themes were common to all five wine-tourism regions. However, there was also some notable difference between the regions, if we look at the final (overall) scores assigned for Service Quality versus Service Failure. These are shown in the above graph, where each point represents one of the regions, mapped with its Quality score horizontally and its Failure score vertically (which is negative, of course).

As you can see, four of the regions follow a simple pattern of inverse relationship between Quality and Failure (shown by the red line) — Quality declines as Failure increases. On the other hand, the Napa Valley, has the least Service Failure score while still not doing all that well on the Service Quality score (ie. second last) — there is some disconnect here between Quality and Failure, which would be worth exploring further.

However, in all five cases the Quality scores are greater than the Failure scores, which is what we want to see in the wine industry. Unfortunately, the authors do also note that customers are more likely to remember service failures than remember excellent service.

Regarding differences between the regions, the authors note that: “Tuscany, and especially Stellenbosch, are characterized by the complementarity between wine and food, and Mendoza, Napa Valley, and Hunter Valley by the presence of organized tours.”

There is nothing necessarily negative here, even in the failure aspects. After all, it should simply “remind us that our greatest lessons are those learned from failure, and that sometimes these lessons are hard won” (quoted from: How engineers learn from failure). So long as we are always trying to do better, then we will learn from both success and failure (for a hint on success, check out: The best thing you can do to prepare tasting room staff for the busy summer season).

Personally, I have enjoyed every one of my winery visits, to one extent or another, whether in Australia, the USA, or Europe. This has enriched my life, obviously!

---

* This in addition to the environmental factors that affect winery visitation, from time to time (e.g. NSW wineries at breaking point from decimated crops, declining tourism after floods), as well as the effects of Climate Change (e.g. Queensland's wine industry calls for stronger action on climate change after horror season of hail, flood and fire).

** I have used TripAdvisor a lot in the past, when my wife and I travel, and so I am well aware of its limitations, and especially its biases. So, the data here do need to be interpreted carefully.

Vineyards and wildfires — clear management conflicts?

As the northern hemisphere moves into spring, media articles are starting to appear concerning wildfires, which can be a feature of summer in some locations. By wildfires, I mean those that burn in forests, shrublands and grasslands, not those confined to urbanized areas — your house may burn down in a wildfire, but most house fires may also start independently. Some of these new media articles are in the wine literature, and therefore natural fire is a topic worth looking at in this blog.

You see, two decades ago, I spent a lot of my professional working time studying the interaction between wildfires and the vegetation of South-Eastern Australia; and so it is part of my professional experience. Basically, the leaves of the plants have volatile oils that guarantee that the plants will burn every few years; and, in return, the fires provide the conditions that the plants need to turn their seeds into young plants (ie. seed release from the parent and/or germination in the soil). That is, the fire is advantageous, and therefore to be encouraged. This means that the plants themselves must have adaptations to survive each individual fire.

From our perspective, like it or not, conservation of the natural environment may thus require an acceptance of wildfires, in this case. However, the local foresters and agriculturalists are not necessarily impressed. Indeed, the wildfires are often a direct threat to any attempt to make a living out of the non-burning plants nearby. For example, in the USA: “Throughout much of the last century, federal and state land management agencies viewed wildfire as an adversary and sought to suppress fires entirely. The US Forest Service, in particular, regarded wildfire as a threat to timber harvests.” This quote comes from Matthew Wibbenmeyer: Trends and solutions in wildfire management, which provides a good overview of the more recent change in attitude discussed below.

This conflict surprises no-one, because human beings are so often in conflict with their environment (eg. global warming). For our purposes here, one of these conflicted groups is grape-growers; and I will discuss here their attempts to grow grapevines without their plants incinerating.

Obviously, we are not talking about all grape-growers, here. Only some of them have to deal with nearby wildfires, usually in what we scientists call Mediterranean-Type Ecosystems — those with hot dry summers and cool wet winters. This includes southern Europe, western North America, western South America, and south-eastern and south-western Australia (see Delineations of Mediterranean climate in Lodi & the rest of the world).

Now, there are two clear requirements for a wildfire, plus the obvious extra one of an ignition source (which may be natural or entirely artificial). The first main requirement is suitable weather, which is usually “hot and dry”, often over an extended period of time. In Australia, they have roadside signs indicating five increasing possibilities of local fire weather, as shown above. (Note: in the modern world, there is now an extra category: Catastrophic.) When it is Extreme, don’t you even think of throwing a cigarette butt out your car window!

The effect of weather is complex — hot and dry encourages fires, while cool and wet encourages plant growth, which can then burn later (Why historic storms are ‘both a blessing and a curse’ for California's fire season;   How winter’s atmospheric river storms could supercharge California’s wildfire season). In turn, of course, wildfires can change the local weather patterns (Extreme wildfires make their own weather); and they can affect, for example, future drought conditions. Everything ties together!

The second main requirement for a wildfire is a minimum amount of burnable vegetation, which we call the “fuel load”. Obviously, the more fuel there is, in terms of both area covered and amount of plant material per unit area, then the bigger the fire will be. Most wildfires start off small, especially if the ignition source is artificial; but they can spread pretty damn fast. (Indeed, faster than you can run, as many people have learned to their cost.)

Fuel management is a complex topic, which I will not go into here. An important point, though, is who should be doing the managing, and what is the goal of the management (for example: conservation within native vegetation versus property protection nearby). You can guess what parts of the wine industry think (Leave fire management to farmers, says Aussie wine boss); but other organizations are involved as well (Napa County works on fire hazard road standards). Things can get worse either way (UC Davis Study: California wildfire growing stronger as fuel management practices adapt).

The effect of the fire on the burnt area is obvious to all observers; and, so, those landholders in nearby areas are quite correctly concerned about how far any given fire will spread. After all, they don’t want their cash crop incinerated (Vineyard recovery from fire damage), or their buildings burnt (Fire destroys Hunter Valley’s Tamburlaine Organic Wines function venue;  Fire destroys outbuilding at Napa County winery). As an example of the possible magnitude:

From 2017 to 2020, wildfires burned through more than half of Napa County's land area and destroyed more than 1,500 structures. The valley’s fire risk has had major repercussions for wineries — and all North Bay landowners.

However, there are also other potential fire effects on the surrounding areas (ie. the non-burnt part), notably smoke, and heat. Both of these are of serious concern to grape-growers, for example. Smoke is becoming a topic of more interest (How much wildfire smoke can California wine grapes sustain? A new bill aims to find out); and clearly there needs to be a management strategy (A clear objective for smoke research).

Obviously, there are only three possible management strategies for unwanted fires:

avoid  /  mitigate  /  ignore

Over the decades, the first one has been shown to be basically impossible in Mediterranean-Type Climates (this is what a lot of the previous scientific research has been about). The third one is easy to do, but will obviously not be successful in the long term (and farmers are usually more pro-active than this!). That leaves the second option.* There are many aspects to this (Napa Valley to host wildfire resilience summit), and the planning needs to take into account fire mitigation as well as ecosystem restoration. This also includes appropriate insurance, of course (Napa Valley wineries, seeking insurance relief, show steps to lessen wildfire risks;  Farm Bureau continues advocacy on Napa Valley wildfire issues). Whole books have been written about this topic; and there is now a UN-REDD program for Fire Management (inspired by the interaction between climate change and increasing propensity of fires).

Sadly, dealing with wildfires is not the only thing that a grape-grower needs to deal with:  California farmworkers cope with wildfire smoke, pesticides, roaches and rodents, survey says. It is much easier to drink wine than to be a part of making it! (Especially in Argentina, just at the moment.)

---

* A classic example is what in Australia is called a “fire-block” — an open piece of land around something valuable, which can act to stop the progress of an oncoming wildfire. Well, one such piece of land in the Clare Valley (South Australia) is now home to the Fireblock vineyard. This is of interest to me, personally, because it is owned by Bill Ireland (and his wife Noelene), who is the person who first taught me to appreciate wine, when he used to hold free tastings of new wines in his Summer Hill Wine Shop (in Sydney) on thursday nights (late-night shopping night). The Fireblock wines are not exported to many places, but Sweden is one of them!

The Real top wineries of New Zealand

A few weeks ago, I discussed a possible listing of The Real top wineries of Australia. What I did was look at the winery rankings from The Real Review, a web site run by Huon Hooke and Bob Campbell, along with their collaborators (listed here). Huon is an Australian and Bob a New Zealander, so both countries are covered by the website. Here, I look at the New Zealand wineries.

New Zealand wine has become globally recognized. For example, the JamesSuckling.com site has just released their notes for the 760 bottles that they rated in the past year and a half (New Zealand comes alive: Vibrancy, diversity and a Goldilocks vintage). The average quality score was 91.8 (with a median of 92); and one wine scored 100: Kumeu River Chardonnay Kumeu Mate's Vineyard 2020. The report summary notes:

Freshness is something that really stood out in our tastings and ratings of top New Zealand wines ... The wines have an uncanny texture and vibrant flavor profile that combine in a unique way — not only with ripe and transparent fruit character but also with round mouthfeel, brightness and length.

Each year since 2018, The Real Review has presented a ranking of the wineries from New Zealand. The rankings are based on the average scores for all of the wines they have tasted during that year, from each of the wineries. However, it is important to emphasize that only a subset of the wines of New Zealand get tasted in any given year. In this sense, it is entirely possible for a winery to not be ranked in a particular year, even if it has scored highly in other years, simply because insufficient wines were rated that year (the minimum necessary appears to be 2).

Many wine commentators seem to see their job as encouragement, and thus present optimistic wine ratings, for example. The Real Review, on the other hand, prides itself on being much more realistic. In this sense, their wine scores and winery rankings might well be a very good place to start listing top wineries.

As I did for Australia, what I have done is download the winery lists for each of the four years (2018, 2019, 2020, 2021). These simply list the wineries in rank order of their wine scores, with a different number of wineries each year. I then pooled the yearly lists for each country, giving me a combined list of 262 wineries for New Zealand, which I will report on here.

From these combined lists I extracted the data for only those wineries that appeared in all four yearly lists, which is 99 (38%) of them. (Number of wineries that appeared three times: 51, appeared twice: 51, appeared once: 61.) These consistent wineries were then given a new rank, within each year, based solely on this subset of the wineries. I then averaged these rankings, thus producing a list showing those wineries that rated consistently well across all fours years.

This final list is included at the bottom of the post.

Bizarrely, if we compare this list with the Wine & Spirits Top 100 Wineries of 2021 (“as determined by their performance in the magazine’s two-step blind-tasting process, and celebrated for their exceptional wines”), then we find no wineries listed at all. Australia and Chile each get three wineries listed, and Chile and South Africa get one each, but New Zealand gets absolutely nothing.

On the other hand, The World’s Best Vineyards is “an annual listing that highlights the very best winery destinations in the world ... [This] provides an insight into the best all-round winery experiences.” From the list below, we find Craggy Range (11th), Felton Road (52), Black Estate (63), Ata Rangi (69), Man O'War Vineyards (79), and Kumeu River (91). Missing from our list is Rippon Vineyards, from Central Otago (15th), which had insufficient wine reviews to be included in the Real Review listing.

Interestingly, if we peruse the regions from which these wineries come, Marlborough accounts for 30% of them, although it produces 75% of New Zealand’s wine. Hawke's Bay comes next, with 18% ow the wineries, followed by Martinborough, with 11%.

Finally, The Real Review does have a list of Top Value Wines of New Zealand. However, this may not do you much good this year, since it has been noted that NZ wine lovers are facing shortages and higher prices, due to a small vintage and massive international demand.

---

New Zealand’s top wineries, as consistently ranked by The Real Review

Rank 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

Average score 97.5 96.8 96.8 95.5 94.5 93.5 88.5 88.0 85.3 84.5 84.0 84.0 83.5 83.0 83.0 80.3 79.5 79.3 76.8 76.5 71.8 71.5 70.5 69.8 69.3 69.3 68.8 67.8 67.3 66.3 65.8 65.5 65.5 64.5 63.8 62.3 61.8 61.3 61.0 59.3 58.8 58.8 58.5 56.8 56.5 56.0 54.0 53.0 53.0 50.3 50.0 50.0 50.0 48.0 44.3 43.5 41.3 40.3 39.8 39.0 38.0 37.5 37.0 36.5 35.3 33.8 32.3 30.0 29.8 29.5 28.8 28.3 28.3 27.5 26.3 25.3 25.0 24.0 24.0 23.8 23.0 22.0 21.8 21.8 21.3 20.3 20.0 16.8 16.5 16.0 14.3 13.8 12.5 11.5 9.5 9.5 9.3 8.5 7.0

Winery Craggy Range Destiny Bay Felton Road Wines Framingham Kusuda Wines Dry River Wines Pegasus Bay Quartz Reef Trinity Hill Elephant Hill Estate Clearview Estate Winery Te Mata Estate Villa Maria Church Road Vidal Estate Greystone Wines Pyramid Valley Vineyards Terra Sancta Smith & Sheth Ata Rangi No 1 Family Estate Blank Canvas Seresin Estate Te Whare Ra Wines Akarua Fromm Winery Esk Valley Giesen Wine Estate Rockburn Wines Astrolabe Wines Kumeu River Man O'War Vineyards Mills Reef Neudorf Clos Henri Misha's Vineyard Stonecroft Margrain Vineyard Dog Point Vineyard Black Estate Palliser Estate Valli Sacred Hill Wines Tantalus Estate Amisfield Chard Farm Saint Clair Family Estate Foxes Island Wines Obsidian Nautilus Estate Escarpment Grasshopper Rock Mondillo Vineyards Forrest Estate Matt Connell Wines Tony Bish Rapaura Springs Domain Road Vineyard Te Awanga Estate Te Motu Soho Wine Co Mudbrick Two Rivers Luna Estate Nga Waka Hunter's Wines Urlar Alpha Domus Coopers Creek Huia Mahi Wines Lawsons Dry Hills Wines Whitehaven Johanneshof Cellars On Giants Shoulders Sam Harrop Wines Jules Taylor Wines Isabel Estate Vineyard Mount Edward Johner Estate The Elder Pinot Wines Borthwick Vineyard Clark Estate Lamont Wines Te Kairanga Estate Yealands Estate Wines Ash Ridge Wines Cable Bay Vineyards Tohu Pask Moutere Hills Wither Hills Zephyr Mission Estate Allan Scott Family Winemakers Two Sisters Vineyard Black Barn Vineyards Mt Beautiful Peregrine Wines

The Real top wineries of Australia

We have recently been told that the Number of Australians drinking wine has gone up significantly in 2021 (it is now 46%). Most of them drink Australian wine, for obvious reasons, with a reasonable number of imports from New Zealand. There is also, of course, considerable international interest (Why Australia’s latest wines are making waves). It therefore seems reasonable to ask whether we can work out which are the top wineries in Australia.

Well, we could at least try.

About 70% of all Australian wine by volume comes from the three big inland irrigated wine regions: Murray Darling, Riverina, and Riverland. In my youth, these were treated as environmental disasters, as the routine flood irrigation of the well-leached semi-desert soils simply brought all of the salts back up to the surface, making agriculture difficult. They are usually mentioned just in passing in wine books. However, the winemakers recently announced that they were forming a new association, Australian Commercial Wine Producers Limited (ACWP), to lobby for more of a say in Australia’s wine policy.

At the other extreme, the Canberra District has less than 500 ha of vineyards, with 34 wine producers (although only a dozen are well-known). Needless to say, all of these cool-climate wines are of premium quality. Obviously, it is likely to be these sorts of wineries that appear in any list of the best.

The method I will use in this post is to look at the winery rankings from The Real Review, a web site run by Huon Hooke and Bob Campbell, along with their collaborators (listed here).

Each year since 2018, they have presented a ranking of the wineries from New Zealand (by Bob Campbell) and from Australia (by Huon Hooke). The rankings are based on the average scores for all of the wines they have tasted during that year, from each of the wineries.

Many wine commentators seem to see their job as encouragement, and thus present optimistic wine ratings, for example. The Real Review, on the other hand, prides itself on being much more realistic. In this sense, their wine scores and winery rankings might well be a very good place for me to start.

However, it is important at the outset to emphasize that only a subset of the wines of Australia and New Zealand get tasted in any given year. In this sense, it is entirely possible for a winery to not be ranked in any given year, even if it has scored highly in other years, simply because insufficient wines were rated that year (the minimum necessary appears to be 2).

So, what I have done is download the winery lists for each of the four years (2018, 2019, 2020, 2021). These simply list the wineries in rank order of their wine scores, with a different number of wineries each year. I then pooled the yearly lists for each country, giving me a combined list of 690 wineries for Australia, which I will report here.

From these combined lists I extracted the data for only those wineries that appeared in all four yearly lists, which is 197 (29%) of them. (Number of wineries that appeared three times: 117, appeared twice: 153, appeared once: 223.) These consistent wineries were then given a new rank, within each year, based solely on this subset of the wineries. I then averaged these rankings, thus producing a list, showing those wineries that rated consistently well across all fours years. (Note: Neal Hulkower has recently noted that this approach is called the Borda Count.)

This final list is included at the bottom of the post.

This list is not too bad, given the limitations of the original data. While we cannot say that all of the top wineries are included, or that they have necessarily risen to the top of the list, those wineries that are listed at the top are definitely among Australia's top wineries.

I could, of course, argue with some of the rankings. For example, based on my own recent experience, some wineries do seem to be a bit low down the list; for instance: Lark Hill, Tim Adam, Margan, Leconfield, O'Leary Walker, Stanton & Killeen, and Baileys of Glenrowan.

There are also wineries that scored well on those few occasions when they appeared in a list, including: Bindi Wines, Silkman Wines, Houghton, Bekkers Wine, Poonawatta, and Wendouree. I can also think of a few good wineries whose wines I drink, but that are not present in the lists in all years, or are missing entirely, including: Peel Estate, Knight Granite Hills, FireBlock, Paracombe, Delatite, Pauletts, Tahbilk, Brand's Laira, Dandelion, Josef Chromy, and Logan Weemala.

I know of no alternative list of wineries; so this one is what we have. If you want to learn a bit more about some of the Australian wineries, then James Halliday’s Wine Companion site has notes about more than 2,000 of them (not all still extant). There are, of course, ranked lists of individual wines, such as the Langton Classification of Australian Wine (based on auction prices), but not of the wineries themselves.

So, we could compare this list with one alternative, which produced somewhat different results. This is the Wine & Spirits Top 100 Wineries of 2021, “as determined by their performance in the magazine’s two-step blind-tasting process, and celebrated for their exceptional wines”. This lists only three Australian wineries, which is one less than the number listed for Greece! These are: d’Arenberg, Penfolds, and Woodlands.

---

Australia's top wineries, as consistently ranked by The Real Review

Rank 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197

Average score 192.0 191.5 190.8 190.3 188.0 186.5 185.3 184.5 182.8 180.3 179.8 178.8 177.0 174.8 173.3 171.5 171.0 170.5 170.3 169.0 167.3 164.0 162.8 161.5 160.3 159.5 158.8 158.3 158.3 157.0 156.5 155.0 153.5 153.3 152.8 152.5 152.3 150.3 150.3 149.5 148.5 148.3 148.0 146.3 144.5 144.5 142.8 140.3 138.8 137.0 136.8 136.5 136.0 133.8 132.8 132.5 131.5 130.8 130.8 130.0 129.5 128.5 126.3 124.8 123.8 122.3 121.3 120.8 120.8 118.5 117.5 117.3 117.0 115.8 115.8 114.3 113.8 113.5 112.5 112.3 112.0 112.0 111.0 111.0 110.5 110.5 110.3 109.3 108.0 107.3 103.3 103.0 100.8 100.8 100.5 100.0 99.5 99.3 98.0 98.0 97.5 97.0 96.8 96.0 95.3 94.5 93.5 89.8 89.0 89.0 88.0 87.5 86.3 85.5 84.8 84.3 84.0 82.8 82.5 79.5 78.3 78.3 75.0 73.5 73.5 72.8 72.5 72.3 71.3 71.0 70.5 70.5 69.0 68.3 67.3 65.5 64.3 63.5 62.3 60.0 60.0 59.5 59.5 59.3 58.8 58.3 58.0 57.0 56.5 53.5 52.8 52.5 52.0 51.5 51.0 50.8 49.0 48.3 47.8 46.5 46.3 45.5 44.8 44.5 44.0 44.0 43.8 43.5 43.3 41.5 41.3 39.5 39.3 38.8 38.5 38.3 37.8 36.0 35.5 33.8 33.0 32.8 32.5 32.0 30.8 29.0 24.8 24.5 24.3 23.0 22.5 21.8 18.8 18.0 17.3 16.5 16.3

Winery Hardys Cullen Wines Penfolds Yarra Yering Wine By Farr Wynns Coonawarra Estate Henschke Mount Pleasant Yering Station Oakridge Wines Château Tanunda Yalumba Best's Great Western Lake's Folly Clonakilla Giant Steps Howard Park Wines Pooley Wines Mount Mary Vineyard Torbreck Brokenwood Wines Stonier Tyrrell's Wines Tolpuddle Vineyard Hentley Farm Wines Vasse Felix Moss Wood Head Wines Taylors Morris Frankland Estate Yangarra Estate Vineyard Woodlands Yeringberg Langmeil Winery Robert Stein Vineyard Handpicked Wines Cape Mentelle Pewsey Vale Grosset Xanadu Vinden Estate Levantine Hill TarraWarra Estate Balgownie Estate Wolf Blass Yabby Lake Vineyard Jim Barry Wines Moorilla Estate Crawford River Wines Stella Bella Wines St Hallett Tapanappa Voyager Estate Thompson Estate Hayes Family Wines Mount Langi Ghiran Vineyards Hickinbotham Clarendon Vineyard John Duval Wines Pepper Tree Wines Fraser Gallop Estate Devil's Lair Terre À Terre Polperro & Even Keel Wines Bellwether Quealy Brown Brothers Shaw + Smith Ten Minutes by Tractor d'Arenberg Leeuwin Estate Petaluma Seppeltsfield Bird in Hand Dr Edge Seppelt Hoddles Creek Estate Gundog Estate Sittella Wines Mayer Eldorado Road Fighting Gully Road Aphelion Freycinet Vineyard Crittenden Estate Wirra Wirra De Bortoli Flametree Domaine Naturaliste Coriole Hurley Vineyard Ross Hill Keith Tulloch Wine McHenry Hohnen Vintners Delamere Mount Majura Vineyard Huntington Estate Michael Hall L.A.S Vino Stefano Lubiana Wines Soumah St Hugo House of Arras Singlefile S.C. Pannell Peter Lehmann Montalto Vineyards Mewstone Wines Evans & Tate Wantirna Estate Mount Horrocks Home Hill Stargazer Thistledown Wines Curly Flat Kreglinger Wine Estates Glaetzer Wines Elderton Sidewood Sons Of Eden Cloudburst Samuel's Gorge Chaffey Bros. Wine Co De Salis Longview Vineyard Allegiance Wines Baileys of Glenrowan Gemtree Vineyards Port Phillip Estate Bream Creek Eldridge Estate Primo Estate Balnaves of Coonawarra Z Wine First Drop Wines Bremerton Wines Schmölzer & Brown Artisans of Barossa Gala Estate Deviation Road Stanton & Killeen Domaine Chandon Pressing Matters Tertini Wines Lake Breeze Wines Juniper Estate Windows Estate Karrawatta Jacob's Creek Clyde Park Vineyard Flowstone Pikes Chapel Hill O'Leary Walker Wines Derwent Estate Helm Meerea Park Robert Oatley Vineyards Two Hands Wines Geoff Weaver UMAMU Estate Kalleske Schwarz Wine Company Bay of Fires Wines Calabria Family Wines Leconfield Foxeys Hangout Philip Shaw Grace Farm Castle Rock Estate Margan Family Shingleback Prancing Horse Estate The Lane Vineyard Snake + Herring Craiglee Tim Adams Kilikanoon Massena Vineyards Alkoomi Higher Plane Wines Lark Hill David Hook Wines Tim Smith Wines Geoff Merrill Wines Moppity Vineyards Pike & Joyce Lou Miranda Estate Vinea Marson Oliver's Taranga Vineyards Sandalford Thorn-Clarke Tenafeate Creek Wines Bleasdale Vineyards Brown Magpie Wines Catlin Wines Heroes Wines

Why beer companies should never buy wine companies

On the face of it, there seem to be two arguments here. On the on hand, accountants at brewing companies seem to think to themselves something like this: “Beer has alcohol in it and so does wine, and therefore buying another (currently profitable) alcohol company would create administrative synergies, which would lead to economic efficiencies, which would in turn lead to even bigger profits.”

On the other hand, even Blind Freddie can see that the economics of beer making and the economics of wine making have almost nothing in common, even though one of the ingredients of the end-product is the same. This seems to lead to the conclusion that the accountants at any given brewing company should not be allowed within 10 miles of any wine company, because they will destroy it.

There are, sadly, quite a few examples of the latter (destruction of wine assets), and almost no examples of the former (an efficiently run combined company). One extremely unfortunate example lead to the creation of what is now called Treasury Wine Estates, which has been in the news recently, for having financial problems even as a single wine company. It is a simple story, in principle: a large beer company bought a large wine company, for a lot of money, then systematically destroyed the wine company's assets over only a very few years, subsequently spinning it off as a separate wine company again, and then selling if for only a fraction of what it originally paid.

Economics

The issue here is very simple. Beer companies do not usually produce any of their ingredients themselves, but instead buy them from primary producers. All the company needs, in principle, is some brewing equipment, to process the ingredients, and a bottling / canning line to package the output. Yes, this does make them dependent on the grain and hops growers, but there are plenty of them, should any given relationship turn sour (no pun intended). Brewers are thus not primary producers, they are intermediaries between the growers and the drinkers. Moreover, beer does not take long to make, even if one does mature the brew for a while before sale; and it can be made all year long. So, the return on investment is quite fast — they get their money from the buyers not long after they have to pay the growers. Finally, it is not hard to adjust volumes to market conditions, due to high turnover.

Nothing could be more different from being a wine company, could it? These companies are almost always primary producers, as part of their activity. They often own very large tracts of rather expensive land, made even more expensive by having to grow grape-vines on it; and the bigger the company, the more widespread these tracts of land are likely to be. Grape-vines are not fast to establish, not cheap to maintain, and not easy to modify should you decide to change the mix of ingredients (in this case, grape varieties). All of this requires a massive up-front investment, which will not produce much of a return for at lest 5 years, if you start from scratch.

Then, having got the ingredients, the company needs a winery, or two, to process the grapes and bottle / can the output — this can happen only once per year. Furthermore, in between the annual input and the final output there may also be a requirement for a large number of oak barrels, in which the nascent wine will be stored, for one or more years. This requires a large area of controlled storage conditions, which is also somewhat expensive. This all leads to a situation where the company is not likely to get its production money back for at least a year after it spends it, and, for many wine types, several years. And let's not contemplate for too long the nightmare of trying to adjust volumes to prevailing market conditions, or trying to deal with environmental effects, like smoke taint.

So, it should be obvious that you cannot run a wine company the same way you run a beer company. Maybe you could run a spirits company in somewhat the same manner as a beer company, although it often needs some barrels, too. But the economics of wine is another thing altogether.

A specific example

So, why do beer companies sometimes buy wine companies? It cannot possibly turn out well. Let me briefly describe the example mentioned above, although it is perhaps an extreme one. It comes from Australia, so open a beer and settle yourself into a comfy chair.

The beer company involved is (or was) called Foster's Group Limited. While probably known internationally as a particularly Australian brand, Foster's beer is actually quite rare in Australia itself. Its biggest market is the UK, where it is apparently the second highest selling beer. Like all big companies, Foster's has a long history. It started in Australia in 1888, but in 1907 the company merged with five other brewers to form Carlton & United Breweries (CUB). Courage Brewery (from Britain) was acquired by CUB in 1990, which by that time had been re-named Foster's Brewing Group. In 2011, CUB and its products were bought by the conglomerate SABMiller, which in turn was incorporated into the multinational Anheuser-Busch InBev in 2016. CUB is currently being sold to Asahi Breweries.

There are actually two wine conglomerates involved. The first one in our story was called Mildara Blass, a highly profitable business, seen in the industry as a model for return on investment, driven by the big volume Yellowglen, Jamiesons Run and Wolf Blass brands. It was formed in 1991, when Wolf Blass Wines and Mildara merged, each being a large well-run company in its own right. Wolf Blass Wines International had been formed in 1973, and was publicly floated in 1984. Although founded earlier, the Mildara trademark dates from 1937. It remained largely a “sherry” producer until well into the 1960s, but during the 1970s and 1980s it expanded rapidly, acquiring a series of high-profile wineries.

Fosters moved into the wine business in 1996 by acquiring Mildara Blass, which itself acquired other wineries (eg. Rothbury Estates and Saltram). By 1999, the wine company claimed c. 40% of the Australian sparkling wine market and 25% of its premium table wine market. Then, in 2000, California’s Beringer Wine Estates joined Foster’s wine business, and the name changed to Beringer Blass Wine Estates (shortened in 2004 to Beringer Blass). However, by then the difficulty of running an international wine business had become apparent. For example, in the year to June 2004 the wine division returned just 4% on its AU$4.4 billion of assets, compared to the beer division’s 25% on AU$2.2 billion of assets.

The second wine conglomerate in our story was called Southcorp Wines, a name that dated from 1994. It was then the owner of many of Australia’s greatest and oldest wine brands, including Wynns Coonawarra Estate, Penfolds, Seppelt, Lindemans, Leo Buring, Coldstream Hills and Devil’s Lair. In 2001, it merged with what had been the highly successful Rosemount Estate. However, the two entities did not work well together, from the management point of view. Even worse, both their local and their export combined market shares were decimated — retailers were not going to be dictated to by this now enormous supplier — according to Chris Shanahan, they “learned the hard way that they were the tail, not the dog; and the big retailers would wag them, not the other way around.”

So, just 4 years later, in 2005, Foster’s moved in, paying top dollar for Southcorp. Sadly, the downhill movement continued (eg. a 10% slide in wine sales during the first half of 2006–2007). As described by Shanahan:

Foster’s first major blunder after the acquisition was to funnel all sales across it vast beverage portfolio through a single sales force. Friends in the trade at the time said it was farcical. And the loss of market share experienced by the merged Southcorp-Rosemount was repeated by the merged Southcorp-Foster’s.

There were therefore repeated write-downs of assets. David Farmer cites an estimate of around AU$8 billion being used to build Foster’s wine assets, but by 2010 these same assets had an estimated value of just AU$2.5 billion. That is one helluva write down!

In 2010, Foster’s Group finally saw sense, and decided to split its global beer and wine divisions into two separate companies, to be listed on the Australian Stock Exchange. In the process, it changed the name of its wine business from Foster's Wine Estates to Treasury Wine Estates (TWE). This gave TWE control of its own destiny, based on whatever it could salvage of its wine assets. This strategy seemed to work for a decade, based on the strength of its premium holdings, notably the Penfolds and Wynns wines. It also moved strongly into the emerging Chinese wine market, leading the concerted Australian attempt to take over from the French in that market.

As a sad postscript, is Treasury Wine Estates doing particularly well, 10 years later? Obviously not. Its current income is far below previous expectations, for various reasons; and the current pandemic plus the current trade war between China and Australia have made things even worse. As a result, TWE currently has at least two class action suits against it (one; two), for deliberately misleading investors with forecasts of forthcoming riches. Ironically, it has been considering de-merging its portfolio of wines, taking us right back to the 1970s.

Why would anyone want to own a high-profile and expensive wine company? Freddie may not be as blind as his name suggests, but accounts sometimes seem to be.

From the sublime to the ridiculous in winery architecture

Before I became a professional scientist, I considered becoming an architect. I have lots of books on the subject, from my teen years, and a few odd designs of my own. The architecture of buildings associated with vineyards is therefore of special interest to me, including wineries and their restaurants.

I am a bit of a classicist, myself, preferring the 1800s styles to more recent stuff. Indeed, what is called Modern Architecture is rightly maligned by many commentators, because it places great emphasis on buildings looking functional, irrespective of whether those buildings are actually functional in any practical sense. This is called the functional aesthetic, dating back all of 100 years now, and eschews any connection between humans and their actual environment.

However, I grew up in Sydney when they were building the Opera House, so I got used to modern design along the way. This structure is supposed to have been inspired by the sails of the boats on Sydney Harbour. However, the original architect’s sketch had to be heavily modified, in order to make the building actually stay up; and inside things are not good at all (see my discussion of The acoustics of the Sydney Opera House). It is a classic case of the functional aesthetic at its worst.

In the wine world, many organizations have tried to make contributions to architectural novelty, but not always with artistic success, in my opinion. I believe that architects call it “eye-catching architecture”; but, to me, the eye does not always wish to linger. Obviously, I am not going to review all possible architectural styles here, but merely look at some that I like and dislike, and most of which I have seen, at least from the outside (click on the images to expand them). What I wish to discuss here is whether any of these buildings is worth looking at, rather than whether they are functional.

Spain has long been a hotbed of innovative architectural design, and so we can expect the Spanish to have their fair share of interesting winery buildings. Let’s start with one that follows the Opera House in using its environment for inspiration. The roofline of Bodegas Ysios (Rioja) nicely reflects the hills that form the backdrop as you approach for your tasting. The form matches the environment, just as it does in Sydney.

Sadly, the same cannot be said for Bodegas Protos (Ribera del Duero), which looks like a set of quonset huts, or a bad airport terminal.

What I find particularly distressing here is that this building is at the foot of the hill on which stands the 15th century Castello di Peñafiel. This houses the local wine museum (Museo Provincial del Vino), which also conducts tastings of the local wines. Why couldn’t the architect have used this for inspiration, instead?

Just as bad is Codorníu, the oldest wine-making company is Spain. Their winery was clearly based on an old railway terminus, but without any of the architectural elegance often associated with the steam age. Cava production deserves better.

More amusingly, in a different Spanish-speaking part of the world, the Clos Apalta Lapostolle Winery (Colchagua Valley, Chile) looks like it was modeled on a dinosaur skeleton. For heaven's sake, why?

For comparison, we can move on to Germany, and look at Schloss Johanisberg (Rheingau), which has been making wine for 900 years. This is just the way an old-established winery should be, with all of its historical elegance perfectly preserved.

Nearby, Schloss Vollrads is pretty good, too (although its name is pretty inexcusable, even in German). The tasting room is at the bottom of the tower, set in a small lake.

As an aside, Schloss Johannisberg is actually part of the giant Henkell Freixenet group (although very few of their many brands mention this fact on their web sites). Recently, this company announced that Katnook Estate (in Coonawarra, Australia) would be one of the flagships of its portfolio of iconic international wineries. The current winery is almost as Australian as it gets — it is but one step up from the standard corrugated-iron shed you will find elsewhere.

Actually, most modern Australian wineries tend to look like a railway terminus, with a verandah stuck on the front for the customers. It is always a dead give-away when, in spite of lots of pictures, nowhere on the web site does a company show the outside of their winery. This one is from Shaw and Smith, of the Adelaide Hills — you can see what I mean.

One interesting architectural problem is to combine historical buildings with a modern winery, hotel or restaurant, when it is not practical to convert the historical buildings themselves. This business of trying to combine modern and historical buildings is one that is fraught with danger for architects. If they get it wrong, then we no longer need to talk about “the good, the bad, and the ugly” because the bad and the ugly become the same thing.

One successful approach is simply to separate the buildings in space. For example, the Barone Ricasoli (Chianti) winery and tasting room are boring, and are placed at the bottom of the hill, near the main road, while the hilltop Castello di Brolio is pretty neat (and you can wander around the garden, if you ring the bell).

Another approach is to try constructing something that matches the older buildings as best you can. This has been done reasonably well, for example, at Château Pichon-Longueville Comtesse de Lalande (Bordeaux). The winery is in the buildings to the left and right of the 19th century chateau, and built from the same stone, with the maturation cellar underneath the forecourt that connects the three buildings.

On the other hand, if you want to see how to make a complete mess of it, then you need go only a few kilometers south, to Château Cheval Blanc. Here, the winery and cellar building has no architectural connection whatsoever to the adjacent 19th century chateau, looking more like a beached whale, instead. The owners describe the cellar building as “a simple design that seems out of time”, but to me its seems very much out of place, as well. Couldn’t they have put it somewhere else?

A similar example, from Australia, was the original inspiration for writing this blog post. I have written before about the Seppeltsfield winery (in the Barossa Valley), which was the first winery I ever visited. The buildings all come from the 1800s, at which you arrive via a 5 km driving avenue of more than 2,000 Canary Island Date Palms.

Well, in their wisdom, the new owners have decided to build (at great expense) a new hotel and restaurant nearby. To me, it looks just like an alpine ski jump after an unfortunate earthquake. It may well become iconic, but, if so, it will be for all the wrong reasons. [Update: the locals are now going to court to have this development stopped. Second update: sadly, they failed.]

Trying to create iconic buildings is a hazard faced by many architects. Another Australian example is the restaurant building at the D’Arenburg winery, in McLaren Vale. It is, as you can see, based on a half-completed Rubik’s Cube, which inspiration seems to have nothing to do with wineries. It is now closed, after 2.5 years of operation.

However, to me, absolutely the worst example of winery-associated architecture is back in Spain, at the hotel of Bodegas Marqués de Riscal (Rioja). I am told that it is “architecturally cutting-edge”, but it is so clearly out of place that it hurts — it looks even worse in real life than it does in pictures.

Clearly, a child has screwed up some cellophane into balls to decorate their Christmas tree, and Frank Gehry (the alleged architect) then turned this idea into a building. He should hang his head in shame — the nearby 16th century church, Iglesia de San Andrés, seems to be doing so.

Let’s move on to more pleasant topics. Other wineries have, indeed, been inspired by older architecture, rather than trying to be aggressively modern, especially in North America.

For example, the Clos Pegase Winery (Napa Valley) claims to be “inspired by the agrarian buildings of southern Europe”. This appears to be so, although somewhat simplified from the originals.

A similarly inspired winery hails from New Zealand, at Highfield TerraVin (Marlborough).

Perhaps less successful is the Opus One Winery (Napa Valley), at least partly because of some clashing details of style, and the fact that it is half buried, which most traditional winery buildings are not. Indeed, one of the tenets of most architecture has been that we no longer live in caves, no matter how well-insulated they are.

Interestingly, the Mission Hill Winery, in British Columbia, does seem to have been based on a European abbey, one of the very few winery-related buildings to be that way. Some of the architects of the buildings mentioned above should have taken note.

However, it is not necessary for the New World to copy the Old World. Vernacular American architecture, for example, is just as valid a role model as anything else. The best-known North American example is probably the Robert Mondavi Winery (Napa Valley), which reflects the Spanish-mission adobe architecture of California.

In South America, there is the Bodega Catena Zapata (Mendoza), which recently topped the World’s Most Admired Wine Brands list for 2020. The building is, as you can see, inspired by the indigenous Mayan pyramids.

An interesting alternative is for a New World winery to be based on a foreign New World model. In New Zealand, the Mission Estate Winery (Hawke's Bay) looks just like a southern US plantation estate.

At the other extreme, there are more unfortunate examples of architectural inspiration. I am told that the Dominus Estate (Napa Valley) building is “a powerful but subtle composition that makes great architecture out of humble agricultural and industrial ingredients”. To me, it looks like the worst form of military installation — it needs only a barbed-wire fence to complete the illusion.

Mind you, it might be better than the Pacherhof Wine Cellar, in South Tyrol, northern Italy. This is definitely based on a World War II army bunker (the rest of the building is underground). I keep expecting Adolf and Eva to walk past at any moment. Worst of all, it is near a 12th-century abbey, Abbazia di Novacella, which would have been a much better architectural model.

If you are looking for an underground winery, then Cantine Antinori, in Tuscany, Italy, has the most ambitious one, with the roof of the final building being part of the vineyard. No mention is made of the quality of the resulting wine, however.

What they had to do to the hillside does not bear thinking about, however. Here is a construction photo. They excavated 14 hectares (35 acres) of the hillside, and then had to drive 17,000 piles into the unstable soil, in order to achieve this result.

I cannot, of course, end on a negative note. So, I will end with my favorite modern winery architecture. It does not yet, as far as I know, actually exist (it is still listed as a concept). This is for the Shilda Winery, of Kakheti, in the cradle of wine-making, the country of Georgia.

We do not need to be told what the inspiration was for this tasting room, as we can clearly see it for ourselves. To quote various sources around the web:

The 2.5 meter spacing of the vineyard is translated into the structural grid of the building and articulated through a series of curved beams. The form is a considered response to the environmental factors of the area and the qualities of the wine. The building uses the thermal mass of the soil to moderate the internal temperature, where the wine is stored, served and tasted.

This represents everything that I could hope for from a modern architect — architecture that is simple, functional and aesthetic. If I can’t have the classic stuff (and I usually can’t), then this is a very good substitute.