Barely 20 minutes' drive from Hobart and home to the heritage town of Richmond, the Coal River Valley enjoys a cool temperate climate with an abundance of summer sunshine and a generally dry autumn. So it's no surprise that niche farming – including winegrowing – has been a big success since it first emerged here in the 1970s.
With countless bare vines across the State now enjoying their winter dormancy, July is normally a fairly quiet time in the vineyard. But not this month. If you'd been a fly on the wall at Bay of Fires winery on Friday, you would have probably heard a whole lot of whooping and a-hollering going on.
Vineyards are renowned for transforming people's lives. One minute they're just sticks and ploughed earth, and the next thing you know they're a maze of shoots and leaves, with grapes galore. And that's the fun part, say Ghost Rock owners Alicia Peardon and Justin Arnold.
When Huon Valley couple Rosemary and Terry Bennett first planted vines on their Ranelagh property in 1992, the couple had little understanding of what would be needed to turn the project into one of Australia's most highly regarded Pinot Noir operations.
Too cool for viticulture. That was message being given to prospective vineyard owners in Tasmania back in the 1950s and 1960s. Today, few people would doubt our island's capacity for producing elegant, European-styled wines.
You don't have to look far these days to see that winegrowing has become a very successful adjunct to traditional farming operations. For a small handful of producers, the fruits of their labours can be very sweet indeed.
As a young Tasmanian agricultural science student, all Fiona Kerslake planned to do on graduating from university was to work in the field of animal production. She never imagined that in less than a decade she would become a Tasmanian Institute of Agriculture (TIA) Junior Research Fellow.
