Two Hands Wines and The Louise: Drink a Barossa vintage from your birth year

It's safari time in the Barossa and we're hunting down the Holy Grail. A Land Rover carries us through a landscape striped green with vineyards and gold with autumn grass. Turning off-road we spy a mob of kangaroos bounding across a hillock as though to greet us. But they're alerted by the dust kicked up by our tyres; they screech to a halt, turn tail and hop away until they've dissolved on that immense, golden-blue horizon.

"They don't eat the grapes, which is surprising," says Pippa Merrett, my guide from Two Hands Wines. "They eat the wheat, though."

Full bellies – confirmed by the 'roos' chunky flanks – are a theme for this fecund valley located around an hour's drive north-east of Adelaide. After all, agriculture was the drawcard for the original British and Lutheran settlers in the Barossa; with its rich bedrock nourishing vineyards and farmlands, hunger and thirst are readily slaked here. Before us, Two Hands' Mataro grapes adorn the squat bush vines so characteristic of this region.

"You see a lot of them throughout the Barossa simply because the original settlers didn't have infrastructure like trellises," Merrett says.

Behind us are the Holy Grail Shiraz vines, held aloft on stakes and cropped now of their voluptuous fruit. Merrett uncorks a bottle of this very vineyard's 2019 vintage, and we discern its essence –treacly, aromatic, intense – while gazing across those cornrow vine plantings towards the avenue of date palms demarcating neighbouring Seppeltsfield Winery.

The Barossa's story of sustenance is told most poignantly, perhaps, in this avenue of palms planted after the Great Depression by winery workers grateful they'd been given free board and lodging. If those satiated workers and their families could see Seppeltsfield Winery today, their tummies would rumble anew. For lunch we sit beneath a clutch of trees – transplanted from that original plantation during Seppeltsfield's 2014 restoration – at beloved South Australian institution Fino, relocated here, too, from its previous home in McLaren Vale's Wilunga.

Platters heave with smoked duck and fresh figs, falafel, shishito peppers and preserved lime, Giardiniera and olives and braised leeks with ricotta and capers; our glasses condense with a crisp Sicilian Vermintino – a relatively new varietal for this region, planted around six years ago. But the estate is custodian of far older harvests: secured in its Centennial Cellar are barrels of every vintage dating back to 1878 – a 143-year collection believed to be the world's only unbroken lineage of single vintage wines.

"Benno Seppelt [son of Seppeltsfield's founder, Joseph] had the vision to dedicate the first cask and mature it for 100 years," says Seppeltsfield spokesman Nigel Thiele.