Mount Avoca

The Organic Story
Mount Avoca is Australia’s most highly awarded organic winery, offering a beautiful and relaxed cellar-door experience along with unsurpassed quality in its fully ACO-certified wines. It’s not just our wines that are better for the world; our three ‘Eco-Luxe’ lodges were designed by architects using ecological principles, meaning every aspect of your visit to Mount Avoca reflects a commitment to the natural world.

Accidentally Organic
Matthew Barry, our owner, was brought up with a ‘clean and green’ ethos, thanks to his father being a pioneer in the Ausvit minimal spray program in the 1980s. In the 1990s, the winery began to use native Australian insects to attack caterpillars and has since made use of other natural pesticides while avoiding fungicides. Becoming a fully certified organic winery was the natural next step.

Following a tasting of organic and biodynamic from all over the world, Matthew realised that going organic was a way to ensure that our wines had a vitality and pep that would stand them apart from the majority of wines on the market. So, Mount Avoca took the dirt path less travelled and treated the vineyard like a garden, doggedly pursuing that elusive purity flavour and vivaciousness.

This search for quality led to a completely natural and chemical-free philosophy. The organic certification is really a by-product of growing the best-quality fruit, so we like to think of ourselves as being ‘accidentally organic’. As Matthew says, ‘Our holy grail was always totally amazing wines with a purity of flavour and no chemical residue. The certification was a happy side effect.’

History
Mount Avoca began with the dream of a Melbourne stockbroker who wanted a tree change 30 years before the term had been coined. He landed in the Pyrenees, which is one of the oldest wine regions in Australia, just outside the historic Gold Rush town of Avoca. A 400-acre property off Moates Lane was purchased and the first vines were planted in 1970. Over the following decades, the vineyard was expanded and 1000 olive trees were planted, of which 600 remain.

Matthew Barry, a second-generation owner and winemaker, has continued the environmental ethos and practice instigated by his father, achieving Australian Organic Classification in both the vineyard and the winery. Three stunning Eco-luxe lodges were opened in 2009, providing the perfect place to just hang out, unwind and bask in the peaceful and largely untouched Pyrenees.