Scott Ireland is the man behind Provenance, a wine brand based in southern Victoria’s Geelong. Ireland was the winemaker at prominent Geelong district winery, Austin’s of Barrabool, for many years and began making his own wines under the Provenance label as a sideline.

Ireland hasn’t deviated from his original catchment area when he began Provenance in the 1990s: he takes grapes from three western Victorian regions: Geelong, Ballarat and Henty, loosely known as the Golden Plains. More recently, he’s added one in Macedon Ranges. Some of his wines are single vineyard, some single region, and some are Golden Plains wines – blends of all three Western Victoria regions. The vineyards, numbering nine, include his own vineyard at Scotsburn, and no, it’s not named after him – it’s actually a village near Ballarat. There he’s planted close-spaced pinot noir on predominantly basalt soils, deposited by the lava flow from the nearby extinct volcano, Mount Buninyong.

It’s interesting to note that Scott also takes pinot noir and chardonnay grapes from his neighbour’s vineyard, Sinclair, which is just a few hundred metres away but not on basalt. “The lava didn’t flow there,” says Scott. Instead, the soil is derived from very old Ordovician rocks with quartz – the kind of gold-bearing land for which Ballarat became famous in the 1860s.

The name Provenance celebrates the differences between regions and individual vineyards – differences that can arise because of soil differences alone. After all, these two vineyards are at much the same altitude (about 500 metres) and are similar in many ways. But the wines are different.