When Gerald Ellis started planting vines on his sheep farm in 1976, conventional wisdom said you couldn’t grow grapes in the cold wilderness of southern Tasmania. Too wild, too unpredictable, too “at the edge of the world”, they said. “It can’t be done.” Ellis and his family have certainly kept the cynics busy. “I tip my hat to Dad for starting all this 50 years ago,” Mardi Ellis told us. “There's an element of luck that it happened to be a tremendous site that he planted and cracked on with. It's amazing to be able to produce such a broad spectrum of wines that express this place, from sparkling to aromatics, textural wines like Chardonnay and Gamay, all the way into Pinot and Syrah.”Nowadays, of course, Tasmania’s cool climes are the hottest property in Australian wine, with the Ellis family firmly in the vanguard. However, it has taken this fortuitous site and the family’s dedicated farming to convert that advantage into wines that speak of place and call you back to the glass. Meadowbank’s position about an hour up the Derwent Valley from Hobart gives it a relatively high degree of continentality, with warm days and more exaggerated swings to the cool nights in the ripening season. “Ultimately, we look for balance, and love the state of tension between fruit flavour and freshness,” says Mardi. “With our typically lighter, sandier soils, as well as Pete’s ‘soft’, nurturing hands, the wines tend toward lighter, aromatic and more ethereal in style.”This is one of those rare polyamorous terroirs that seems to fall in love with every variety it meets. Chardonnay and Pinot Noir are nominally the headline act, both for Pete Dredge’s pristine table wines and knockout sparkling base. Yet equally at home with Riesling and Syrah, both of which count among Tasmania’s finest examples of these varieties. New Chardonnay and Pinot Noir plantings have been added, too, to prevent Meadowbank clawing back grapes from their clients to cover demand, plus a hectare of Chenin—a relative novelty on the Apple Isle. Few would bet against it thriving in Meadowbank’s soils.After a four-year stretch of drier, cooler, lower-yielding years, 2024 marked what Ellis tentatively calls “normalised”, with generally moderate temperatures, timely rainfall and reasonable crops. The resulting wines are exceptional, from the Chardonnay's white peach and whetstone complexity to the crunchy, spiced raspberry of the Gamay. There’s a very classy, floral-tinged 2023 Syrah, too, and a killer pair of sparkling wines (and if you haven’t tasted the Meadowbank-Dredge Blanc de Noirs and Blanc de Blancs, do yourself a favour). If, to borrow Nick Ryan’s phrase, validation is faith’s greatest reward, then Gerald Ellis must be bathing in it.