Grape escape

Melbourne might have myriad attractions to keep the visitor fixed firmly within its city limits, but cast your net farther - by driving northeast for an hour - and you could find yourself perched in the Green Point Winery tasting room-restaurant, trying out top-rated tipples while gazing through enormous picture windows at lush, vine-clad hillsides.

Green Point Winery, also known as Domaine Chandon, was established by French champagne house Moet & Chandon in 1987 for the production of Chandon sparkling wine.

Besides the tasting room in its idyllic setting, this Yarra Valley vineyard offers guided tours of its winemaking operations. And if you time your visit before the harvest in late March, you may be allowed a stroll among the vines to observe pinot noir, pinot meunier, chardonnay and shiraz grapes at various stages of ripening.

The riddling room is one of the most intriguing areas at Green Point. It's a cavernous, chalk-walled cellar created to imitate conditions developed centuries ago in Champagne, France. Illustrating a centuries-old practice, thousands of bottles in wooden racks are turned (or riddled) daily to force yeast sediment to the neck of the bottle. From there it's later frozen and removed.

Today, most bottles are riddled in large, slow-moving, machines outside the cellar. Metal walkways overlook these robots and the conveyor belts along which most bottles travel to have their frozen yeast extracted before fermentation.

Visit the winery in late March or April and you'll find the air thick with the heady aroma of the first fermentation of grapes. Not that there's any bad time to visit. The award-winning, 30-minute tours, led by knowledgeable but laid-back guides, provide accessible winemaking information easy enough to grasp for those showing an early interest in oenology. And although all commentaries are in English, supporting notes are available in simplified Chinese, French, German and Japanese.