Silesian Lutheran settlers, fleeing religious constraint, planted the Barossa Valley's first vines in the 1840s — and because phylloxera never reached South Australia, some of those plantings still bear: Turkey Flat's 1847 block is among the oldest producing shiraz on earth. For a century the valley's grapes went mostly into fortified wine, Australia's staple export.
The turn came in 1951, when Max Schubert of Penfolds began the experimental bottlings that became Grange, proving Australian shiraz could age like the great clarets he had seen in Bordeaux. Barossa Shiraz became the country's flagship style: blackberry essence, dark chocolate and sweet earth, drawn from dry-grown old vines whose gnarled trunks are the region's living archive.