Australian Wine Region Maps has been around for about 6 weeks now. About 350 wineries in 40 regions have been marked. Thanks to our mate Darby at Vinodiversity.com and a few wine forums, we’re getting there to our initial target of 500 wineries by March. But we need more help!

So far finding wineries within regions has been relatively arbitrary. People keep asking ‘why don’t you just download the Yellow Pages or something?’. If only it was that simple. So many wine regions (especially the Coonawarra region) require expert knowledge, because 200 metres is the gap between one cellar door and the next! A few locals have been up to the challenge and been a great help.

The phone book won’t tell you which is which. It seldom even gives you street number in the addresses. And if you check out some other sites that use Google Maps, the locations are really approximate (eg the middle of a national highway). We’re making a concerted effort to get locations as exact as possible.

Another hurdle is identifying wineries by satellite imagery. In an area such as Sunbury in Victoria, this is a no brainer. Rows of vines stick out pretty clearly in satellite mode, if only because you’re guaranteed only one winery per about 5-10 kilometres. Go to Murray Darling/Mildura and it’s the complete opposite. The Murray region is so fertile that it’s near impossible to identify a winery without local knowledge. Almost every square inch of land is fertile with orchids, vines who knows what else. So there’s a bit of an inbalance between regions.

So if you operate a winery, cellar door or vineyard in the Murray Darling region, or really know your way around, why not drum up some free publicity for yourself and add your site to the maps. You can put a link to your own site from the maps too. Other regions that we could use expertise are the Riverina (NSW), Sunbury (VIC), Denmark (WA) and Tasmania.