Yarra Valley Wine Tours

The Yarra Valley sits about 50 kilometres northeast of Melbourne, which sounds close enough to drive. People try. Then they discover that Victoria’s blood alcohol limit is 0.05, the cellar doors are spread across a valley floor up to 15 kilometres apart, and someone in the car has to spend the day watching everybody else taste. That arithmetic is why almost every visitor arrives on a bus, and why the tours on this page exist.

What follows is the part the listing titles leave out.

The tour is the transport

Public transport gets you to the edge of the valley and stops there. A Lilydale train and a connecting McKenzie’s bus will put you in Healesville or Yarra Glen, but the cellar doors are scattered on country roads several kilometres beyond the towns, and the buses do not serve them. There is no hop-on shuttle running a wine circuit the way there is in some regions.

So a Yarra Valley wine tour is not a premium way to do something you could do cheaply. For most visitors it is the only practical way to reach more than one winery in a day and still have a drink at each. Once you see the ticket that way, the $71 you pay at the bottom of the market stops looking like an indulgence and starts looking like a train fare with a guide attached. We break the options down in detail on Yarra Valley without a car.

“Wine tour” is a loose description here

Of the 39 tours on this site, 22 put a venue on the itinerary that pours no wine at all. The Yarra Valley Chocolaterie, Four Pillars gin in Healesville, a cheese room, a cidery, a wildlife park, a redwood forest, a cherry orchard. On some days the day out visits two cellar doors and three other things.

This is not operators cutting corners. It is how the valley sells itself, and for a family or a mixed group it is genuinely the better day. But if you came to taste Chardonnay and Pinot Noir seriously, a title reading “Wine, Gin, Whisky and Chocolate” is telling you exactly what you are buying, and you should believe it. Count the wineries in the itinerary before you count the stops. The tours that visit four actual cellar doors are listed on Yarra Valley winery tours and tastings; the bundled days have their own page at wine, gin and chocolate tours.

Lunch is usually a stop, not an inclusion

Read the inclusions line rather than the itinerary. Most group tours here pull in at a winery restaurant around half past twelve and you order and pay at the table, often with a weekend surcharge on top. The tour has delivered you to lunch; it has not bought it.

One operator puts its lunch stop at about A$25 to A$35 a head in its own listing, and a two-course meal with a glass of wine at a winery restaurant costs more than that. Either way it is enough to reverse the ranking of two tours whose headline prices are $30 apart. A handful of operators do include a set lunch, and those are collected on Yarra Valley wine tours with lunch.

One more wrinkle on the valley’s most-booked tour: you can opt out of the group lunch and book your own table at Domaine Chandon instead, but doing so means leaving the group early and missing the St Huberts tasting. It is a real choice, made the day before, and it costs you a cellar door.

Per person or per group — the headline prices are not comparable

Twenty-six of these tours are priced per person. The other thirteen are priced per group, and every one of them quotes a different group size: up to two, up to three, up to four, up to six, up to seven. A $494 tour and a $935 tour can work out at the same money per head or at twice it, and nothing on the card tells you which.

Divide before you compare, then check whether tasting fees and lunch are inside the number or outside it. Several private listings are selling a vehicle, a driver and a day, with every fee paid at each stop. That can be excellent value for four or five people and poor value for two. The maths, with the real figures, is on private Yarra Valley wine tours, and the whole price range from a $29 walk-in tasting upward is broken down on Yarra Valley wine tour prices.

What you will actually taste

The Yarra is Victoria’s oldest wine region — the Ryrie brothers put the state’s first vines in the ground at Yering Station in 1838 — and it is cool climate, which shapes everything in the glass. Expect Chardonnay and Pinot Noir to be what the good cellar doors are proudest of, alongside sparkling wine made by the traditional method, most famously at Domaine Chandon. Cool-climate Shiraz and Cabernet turn up too, lighter and more peppery than the warm-climate Australian reds most visitors arrive expecting.

If sparkling is the reason you are coming, the tours built around Chandon are gathered on Yarra Valley sparkling wine tours — the pick of them is the Chandon and kangaroo day, which takes eleven guests. If you want to know which cellar doors are worth insisting on, start with the best Yarra Valley wineries.

Choosing between them

Group size and format matter more than price for most people: a twenty-four-seat coach and a fifteen-guest van run the same roads to different effect. The single most-tested day in the valley is the Wine, Gin, Whisky and Chocolate tour at $93, and the cheapest with transport is the Food, Wine, Chocolate and Gin day at $71. If you are not sure which shape of day suits you, our guide to choosing a Yarra Valley wine tour walks through the trade-offs with the current prices attached, and best time to visit Yarra Valley wineries covers when to come.

When you have settled on a shape, check availability — every tour here has free cancellation up to 24 hours before departure, so a held date costs nothing.