Tasmanian sparkles glisten the brightest of Australia’s fizzy wines. Or do they?
It is an article of faith that the Island State produces Australia’s best sparkling wines – as it should. The state’s southerly latitude offers the continent’s best chance of grapes ripening with the acidity required for the style.
Even so, mercatorial fans of Tasmania’s map should be reminded that it’s not nearly as close to its polar equivalent as France’s Champagne region. The heart of Champagne lies eight degrees further from the equator at 49 degrees north – a latitude generally considered to be about the northerly frontier for the style’s main varieties. Well– that was the case before global warming returned reliable grape cultivation to southern England for the first time since the Middle Ages.
Of course, the foundations of great wines don’t just lie in their co-ordinates. Which is perhaps why Tasmanian sparkling wines are outnumbered in this year’s list of the top 10 best Australian sparklings.
Victoria – Tasmania’s closest neighbour – accounted for four of the top ten. And the Education State (formerly known as the Garden State before it had to rely on foreign fee-paying students to prop up its finances) enjoyed slightly higher average scores than their southern neighbour when looking across the top 20.
However, Tasmania wasn’t far away with three in the top 10. And it resumed its place at the top of the heap when the list is expanded to the Top 20. Tasmanian fizz took eight of the widened list’s places compared with Victoria’s six. South Australia was in third place.
But none of these sparkling heavyweights took this year’s first place. Top honours in 2025 went to a NSW producer who was also that state’s only contender in the top 20. The winning fizz took home six trophies from nine shows and collected as many medals.
As is often the case, the winning wine wasn’t the most expensive, either. Indeed, it is almost half the price of the runner-up label and slightly less than the average price of the other Top 10 placers. This reinforces our typical observation that price remains a poor indicator of wine quality. Lower priced wines do cluster towards the bottom of the sparkling rankings but the correlation between the two is weak.
Our list of Australia’s Top 20 sparkling wines is drawn from 1538 sparkling wine scores awarded by Australian wine shows in 2025. The shows surveyed 640 individual sparkling labels which collectively earned a median published score of 87 points.
Our list of the Australian sparkling wines ranked 11-20 including their medal counts and tasting notes is shown below:
The Top 10 sparkling wines can be found here