Tasmania, 200 years of sparkling wine: in 1826 the first Australian bubble

Two hundred years of sparkling wine. Tasmania celebrates in 2026 the bicentenary of the first Australian sparkling wine, produced with grapes from the 1826 vintage at Prospect Farm, New Town, today a suburb of Hobart. It was made by Bartholomew Broughton, one of the pioneers of the island’s viticulture. A story that today takes on particular significance: two centuries later, more than four out of ten bottles of Tasmanian wine are sparkling.

Documentary proof of Broughton’s experiment actually comes from the following year. On 16 February 1827, the Colonial Times and Tasmanian Advertiser carried an advertisement offering for sale 200 gallons of “grape wine, made in imitation of Champaigne”, obtained from the previous year’s grapes. It is precisely from that reference to the 1826 vintage that Wine Tasmania traces the history of Australian sparkling wine.

Broughton had planted the Prospect Farm vineyard in the early 1820s, probably around 1823, on the banks of the Derwent. That estate is considered Tasmania’s first commercial vineyard. The character, moreover, is anything but ordinary: arriving in the British penal colony as a convict, he would become one of the first protagonists of Australian viticulture.

There is, however, a detail that makes the story even more interesting. The 1827 advertisement speaks of wine sold in 20-gallon casks. Anthony Walker, author of one of the main historical reconstructions of Tasmanian viticulture, points out that it is unclear how an effervescent wine could be marketed under those conditions. Other documents from the period indicate, however, that the wine was also bottled and tasted by various personalities in the colony. Contemporary accounts judged it surprisingly close to Champagne.

More than certainty about the techniques used by Broughton, what remains is a historical fact difficult to ignore: in 1827 in Tasmania a wine from grapes harvested in 1826 was being marketed that openly declared its intention to imitate Champagne.

The prophecy contained in that rudimentary commercial advertisement would need a long time to come true. The first phase of Tasmanian viticulture was exhausted during the nineteenth century and the modern industry was reborn only in the 1950s, thanks also to European pioneers such as Claudio Alcorso and Jean Miguet.

For sparkling wine, the turning point came even later. In the 1980s the collaboration between Heemskerk Wines and Champagne Louis Roederer helped demonstrate Tasmania’s potential for Chardonnay and Pinot Noir destined for sparkling wine production. From that experience the Jansz project would be born, one of the symbols of the modern rebirth of the island’s sparkling wine.

Today the numbers explain how far-sighted that choice was. According to Wine Tasmania, in 2026 11,163 tonnes of grapes were processed, for an estimated production of around 806,000 cases of 12 bottles. Of all the wine produced, 41% is sparkling. In 2025, a record vintage, the share had even reached 43%.

The bicentenary arrives, however, in a decidedly unusual vintage. The 2026 harvest recorded just 11,163 tonnes, against 23,002 in 2025. A 52% decline according to data collected by Wine Tasmania, linked mainly to an exceptionally cold, dry and windy spring, which compromised flowering and fruit set. The result is one of the smallest productions in recent years, equal to around 10 million bottles.

Scarcity continues, however, to be accompanied by very high value positioning. The declared average price of Tasmanian grapes in 2026 was AUD 3,870 per tonne, against a national average of AUD 570. For grapes destined for sparkling wine the figure rises to AUD 4,081 per tonne.

Favouring the sparkling wine vocation is Tasmania’s cool maritime climate, characterised by mild summers and generally slow ripening, conditions that allow acidity and freshness to be preserved in the grapes. Pinot Noir and Chardonnay are in fact among the fundamental varieties of the island’s viticulture.

2026 thus becomes a symbolic year for Australian wine. Not only because of a curiosity preserved in the Hobart archives, but because the territory that two centuries ago was trying to make a wine “in imitation of Champagne” is today one of Australia’s most recognisable poles for cool-climate sparkling wine.

The bicentenary will also be celebrated from 13 to 15 November 2026 with the Tasmanian Sparkling Immersion, an event dedicated to the island’s sparkling wine that will bring together, among others, winemakers Ed Carr, Natalie Fryar and Andrew Pirie. An anniversary that ideally closes a circle begun in New Town with Broughton and the grapes of the 1826 vintage.

Two hundred years later, that first and still partly mysterious “wine in imitation of Champagne” no longer appears as a simple colonial eccentricity. Tasmania today produces almost half of its wine in the form of sparkling wine. And what in 1826 was an intuition has become one of the island’s strongest wine identities.