Meadowbank

When Gerald Ellis started planting vines on his sheep farm in 1976, conventional wisdom said you couldn’t grow grapes in the cold wilds of Tasmania. Too wild, too unpredictable, too ‘at the edge of the world’, they said, ‘it can’t be done’. They would have been right, except that he did, and it could: the Meadowbank vineyard is today held up as one of the jewels in Tasmania’s wine firmament.

High in Tasmania’s Derwent Valley, hidden at the end of a winding dirt road, Meadowbank’s vines are rooted in loose sand and sandstone overlying dark brown coffee rock, rich in iron oxides and organic matter. This is what our gumbooted wine grower friends might call ‘quality dirt’, and it is a terroir that has developed an impressive fan base, ranging from Kate Hill, Domaine Simha, Glaetzer Dixon and Ministry of Clouds to larger producers such as House of Arras and Bay of Fires.

While the vineyard operation has long been positioned at the pinnacle, the winemaking fortunes of the Meadowbank label had ebbed and flowed over the years. In late 2015, all that changed with the arrival of Peter Dredge. 

When the news of the partnership broke in 2016, Campbell Mattinson wrote, “Peter Dredge at Meadowbank? Now that should be interesting.” He wasn’t wrong.

Aside from being a ‘natural’, Dredge arrived at Meadowbank with a cast-iron Curriculum Vitae. Immediately before his partnership with the Ellis family, Dredge spent five years as the leading man at Bay of Fires and House of Arras when Accolade was Meadowbank’s largest customer. Before that, there was a long stretch at Petaluma under Brian Croser. He’s one of Tasmania’s and Australia’s finest (and cheekiest) winemakers, respected and admired industry-wide, and when a talented winemaker meets the established vineyards of a renowned grower, the results can be explosive.

Following four major vineyard expansions, Meadowbank now spans 52 hectares, of which just eight, planted on their own rootstocks, are cherry-picked for the Meadowbank wines. Gerald’s passionate and thoughtful daughter, Mardi, is the current custodian, and the vines are managed without herbicides with the plan being to explore complete organics—something scarce in Tassie and an evolution that can only result in even higher quality.

Heading the range are Meadowbank’s pristine Chardonnay and lacy, ethereal Pinot Noir. There’s a juicy and spine-tingling dry Riesling, a lip-smacking Gamay (complete with its own cult following), and this place clearly has something exciting to say with Syrah. In 2022, Meadowbank released its first wines from its Traditional Method sparkling wine program. Peter Dredge has a storied history with sparkling wine, and the initial results are predictably impressive; both the Blanc de Blancs and Blanc de Noirs shimmer with crystalline purity and exciting breadth of flavour.