Ask most people about Tasmanian wine, and they’ll name the usual suspects: Tolpuddle, Pooley, House of Arras, Stefano Lubiana. Fair enough. These are the names that helped convince the rest of Australia, and frankly plenty of the world, that this small island means serious business.
Visit them, absolutely. Admire Pooley’s beautiful heritage-listed estate. Drink the Tolpuddle Chardonnay; it’s won the International Wine Challenge Best Australian White Trophy two years running. But don’t mistake the headliners for the whole show.
What makes Tasmania so exciting is how much it packs into such a compact space, from the cool-climate Huon Valley in the south to the wild, windswept North West Coast looking out to Bass Strait.
It’s not just about geography either. Tasmania is famous for Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and (of course) its sparkling. But there are less expected varieties worth seeking out, too, and more ways than ever to drink them beyond the usual cellar door. So yes, visit the big names, I insist, but consider these seven more reasons to book that flight.
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Sailor Seeks Horse
My favourite description of Sailor Seeks Horse is très rustique, and that’s exactly what makes it so good. There’s no formal cellar door to speak of, and tastings are strictly by appointment, so you’ll need to slide politely into their DMs first. Get lucky, and you could end up tasting some of the country’s most sought-after Pinot Noir and Chardonnay off the back of Paul Lipscombe’s ute, poured without ceremony and with plenty of care.
This isn’t somewhere you casually wander into on the way to somewhere else. The vineyard sits on a steep, sandy slope at Cradoc in the Huon Valley, one of Australia’s coolest wine regions, right on the edge of where Pinot Noir will ripen. It’s under an hour south of Hobart, but a world away from the busier cellar-door circuits of the Coal River and Tamar valleys.
If you’d rather try before committing to the drive, I’ve got a particular soft spot for the 2024 Pinot Noir. But if you make it down, ask about the Trousseau and Chenin Blanc. These newer plantings are still finding their feet, but it's precisely these sort of wild cards that make Tasmania’s evolving wine scene so exciting.
Stargazer
If you’re looking for the insider pick, it’s Stargazer. Sam Connew is about as respected as a winemaker gets, and her wines have long been a hospitality favourite. I’ve heard her Pinot Noir described as drinking silk, and it’s hard to argue, though there’s a savoury depth that reminds you the Coal River Valley can pack a punch too. It’s the obvious place to start. The catch? There’s never much of it. Demand is high, and bottles disappear onto allocation lists and into restaurants soon after release.
The good news is you can go straight to the source. In late 2025, Connew opened a brand-spanking-new tasting room on the vineyard at Tea Tree, half an hour from Hobart. It’s a sleek, intimate space, with 12 seats around a single handcrafted table and a decent chance that Sam herself will be pouring. Book ahead, and don’t leave without trying her Riesling: limey, mineral, and razor-sharp.
Dr Edge
Speaking of great Riesling, Dr Edge has a cult following, and that’s as much about Peter Dredge as it is about the wine. After nearly 12 years at Petaluma and five years running Bay of Fires, he went solo in 2015 to make wine on his own terms.
In practice, that means serious, precisely made wines that refuse to take themselves seriously. The clues are everywhere: label art by Massive Attack’s Robert Del Naja, a “Tyrannosaurus dREDge” Pinot Meunier (named after a co-worker who called him a dinosaur), and a winery that runs on hip-hop because, as he puts it, it keeps the ferments from sticking. What’s not to love?
He nails the classics, but the Riesling is my favourite, and a good window into how he thinks. This isn’t the squeaky-clean, all-citrus-and-steel Tasmanian style; it’s hands-off, textural, with real meat on its bones.
Visits are by appointment at his production space in Cambridge, a few minutes from Hobart Airport. There’s no tasting room to speak of; you’re there for an hour with the man himself.
Ghost Rock
Wine aside, the best thing about Ghost Rock might be the timing. Fifteen minutes after stepping off the Spirit of Tasmania in Devonport, you can be sitting down to lunch, glass in hand, gazing over the vines at the same stretch of Bass Strait you’ve just crossed.
Better still, you don’t have to leave. The elegant three-bedroom Vineyard House sits on site, so you can spend your last night among the vines and roll back down to the terminal in the morning.
It would be easy to treat somewhere this convenient as a fleeting pit stop. The Arnold family has spent more than two decades arguing otherwise, making the case for the Cradle Coast as a wine region worth lingering in.
Everything is grown, made, and bottled on the estate, alongside a seasonal Eatery that changes and takes full advantage of the view.
Pinot Noir might be the star of the show, but Ghost Rock is hardly a one-trick pony. Try the same grape from the estate’s highest, sunniest block, and its lowest, most sheltered one, bottled separately so you can taste what a change of scenery does to a wine. Then there’s the Supernatural range, the looser, lo-fi sibling, home to a white Pinot Noir. Spooky.
Small Wonder
Small Wonder may be the new kid on the Tasmanian wine scene, but it’s already making a strong case for turning a quick tasting into a long lunch. Its Tamar Valley cellar door and restaurant pairs winery tours and tastings with a seasonal menu built around local produce. Taste your way through the vineyard, then sit down and eat from it too.
In the kitchen, head chef Konstantin Putkin brings experience from Michelin-starred kitchens, with a particular passion for foraging and fermenting. Think buttermilk-fried chicken with fermented cherry hot sauce and wattleseed tiramisu.
There’s plenty to experience in the glass too. Small Wonder makes wine from two vineyards at opposite ends of Tasmania: a certified-organic site in the Tamar Valley and a drier, more continental one in the Coal River Valley. You can settle in and taste the difference between the two without spending two and a half hours on the road. And if you fancy celebrating your excellent decision-making with a glass of bubbles, well, House of Arras is just across the river.
Two Tonne / Havilah
Not every winery visit needs a designated driver. Ricky Evans has seen to that, taking his cellar door out of the vineyard and planting it in central Launceston instead. Havilah, on Charles Street, is part wine bar, part kitchen, part bottle shop, and the city home of his Two Tonne wines.
Evans started Two Tonne in 2013 with, naturally, two tonnes of Pinot Noir. Since then, it’s grown into an excellent snapshot of Tasmania’s sub-regions, with Pinot, Chardonnay and Riesling that each tell a different story about where they come from. At Havilah, they share the shelves with grower wines from Tasmania and Europe, plus a few cocktails for anyone who’s had quite enough wine, thank you very much.
Havilah makes wine culture less ceremonial, more natural wine bar than formal tasting room, but if you’d rather work through the Two Tonne range properly, book one of the hour-long tastings. Better yet, make it your first night in Launceston. A glass or two here should give you a few ideas about where to point the car tomorrow.
Decades
I’m cheating slightly with this one, because you can’t actually visit Decades. But it feels impossible to write about Tasmanian wine right now without mentioning this rising star.
Decades is the work of two best mates: Steve Flamsteed, who spent two decades making wine at Giant Steps in the Yarra Valley, and Brad Rogers, who co-founded Stone & Wood. They met in 1991, bonded over punk and Pinot, and spent the next three decades talking about making wine together.
The plan was simple: farm good fruit, stay out of the way, and let the site do the work. Two wines and two vintages in, Decades was named Halliday’s Best New Winery for 2027, while Flamsteed took home Winemaker of the Year. That’s an absurdly good debut by anyone’s standards.
The Chardonnay is the one to hunt down, though with only around 200 dozen made, you’ll need to be quick. Failing that, find it on a local Tassie wine list. I’m convinced it tastes better on home soil anyway!