Meet an in-depth guide to the Tasmanian wine industry

Want to know more about wines from Tasmania and the people who make them?

Who better as your guide than wine writer Mark Smith, who has been covering Tasmania and its producers for over 30 years.

Smith has recently launched his impressive labour of love wineintasmania.com, which is full of useful info for both serious wine lovers and those with a casual interest.

Smith says he was motivated to launch the free website by the increasing number of wine producers on the island, and the growing interest.

"I figured that if it’s getting hard for me to keep up with Tassie developments, it must be hard for media and industry folks more generally who are trying to keep up with the industry," Smith says.

"The industry has expanded so rapidly of late that few people have been able to keep up, even within the business."

So if you want to know the history of Small Wonder, or where Sailor Seeks Horse comes from then wineintasmania.com delivers.

Good news: The site has nothing to do with selling wine. No ads, endorsements, product placements, subscriptions.

The site features more than 450 pages of content and covers more than 180 Tasmanian wine producers.

For the more serious, there is site specific climate data for single vineyards, news/back stories about what’s going on at the moment and plenty of archival material, including vintage reports.

The site is fully navigable with a search box in the nav bar.

Want to know about Tasmania's only/first gruner veltliner, baco noir or chenin blanc? You'll find the info here.

There is still work to do. As Smith explains: "With 3rd and 4th generation ownership of vineyards, very few know the full story about how their vineyard came into being and evolved."

Still to come: distributor details, an events calendar, vineyard map locations and more.

I know that this is a site I will be referring to an a regular basis. Well worth bookmarking.  

Image: Mark Smith