Adelaide Hills: Wine Country and Heritage Villages on the City's Doorstep

The Adelaide Hills rise directly behind the city to provide a dramatically different landscape from the flat Gulf St Vincent coastal plain where Adelaide sits. The hills' elevation, reaching more than 700 metres at their highest point, creates a cooler and wetter climate that sustains the apple orchards, berry farms, and increasingly the cool-climate wine producers whose Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Sauvignon Blanc have established the Hills as one of South Australia's most important wine regions alongside the more famous Barossa and McLaren Vale.

Hahndorf, the oldest surviving German settlement in Australia, provides the Hills' most visited heritage destination, where the main street's German-heritage architecture, food producers, artisan shops, and the Beerenberg strawberry farm and condiment producer combine to create a tourism experience that draws visitors from Adelaide and interstate. The town's authenticity has been somewhat diluted by the commercial tourism development that its popularity has attracted, but the underlying German heritage is genuine and the food producers who have grown from the original immigrant community's agricultural traditions provide products of real quality.

The Adelaide Hills wine region's cellar doors, concentrated around Hahndorf, Balhannah, and the Piccadilly Valley, provide tastings that introduce visitors to the distinctive character that the Hills' cool climate creates in varieties that warmer regions express differently. Shaw + Smith, Petaluma, and Bird in Hand are among the producers whose wines have established the region's premium reputation and whose cellar doors provide the tasting and dining experiences that wine tourism requires.

Cleland Wildlife Park in the hills provides the native wildlife experience that visitors seeking Australian fauna find at its most accessible. The park's walkthrough enclosures allow close encounters with kangaroos, wombats, and koalas in a natural bush setting that differs from the cage zoo environment in ways that visitors respond to positively.

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