Royal Adelaide’s links were reshaped by Alister MacKenzie in 1926, the same year he designed Royal Melbourne’s West Course, after the club decided its original layout, which crossed a railway line three times, was no longer good enough. MacKenzie’s short par-three 3rd, played blind over a grassy rise to a green pinched between a ridge and a knoll, survives exactly as he drew it. Royal Adelaide is private; as with Kingston Heath and Royal Melbourne, our guests play here through the relationship we’ve built with the club, not just a letter of introduction from a home course.
Clare Valley sits roughly ninety minutes north of Adelaide on a band of high country settled by English and Polish migrants in the 1840s. Cooler nights than the Barossa make it Australia’s standout region for riesling, particularly around Watervale and Polish Hill River, where red-brown loam over limestone produces a tight, mineral style now recognised internationally.
The Grange opened in 1927, the last of Adelaide’s “big four” sandbelt clubs to form, after Royal Adelaide, Glenelg and Kooyonga were already established. Its West Course was rebuilt by Mike Clayton in 2007, opening up fairways that had narrowed under decades of tree growth. The East Course, redesigned by Greg Norman in 2012, is where Norman won his first professional title in 1976 as a 21-year-old trainee, and has hosted LIV Golf Adelaide since 2023.
An hour north-east of Adelaide, the Barossa was settled by Silesian and Prussian Lutheran migrants from the 1840s, who brought vine cuttings and a winemaking tradition that survived phylloxera, which never reached South Australia. Some Barossa shiraz vines planted in the 1840s and 1850s are still bearing fruit today, among the oldest producing vines anywhere in the world.
Kooyonga was discovered by accident in 1922, when a train strike forced Adelaide solicitor Cargie Rymill onto a tram past a swampy, dune-covered paddock he recognised as ideal golfing land. He bought it, designed the course himself, and had nine holes open within a year. The layout still follows his original routing, including back-to-back par fives at the start and consecutive par threes on the back nine. Walter Hagen called it “a hard test” after playing here in the 1930s, and Gary Player won two Australian Opens on the course, in 1958 and 1965.
McLaren Vale lies forty minutes south of Adelaide between the Willunga escarpment and the coast, where Mediterranean winters and warm, dry summers suit shiraz and grenache particularly well. Vines were first planted here in the 1840s, and the region’s old bush-vine grenache, some over a century old, has become one of South Australia’s most distinctive styles.
Rising into the Mount Lofty Ranges twenty minutes from the city, the Adelaide Hills sit several hundred metres above the Adelaide plain, giving the region a markedly cooler climate than the Barossa or McLaren Vale below. The altitude and slower ripening make it South Australia’s leading region for sauvignon blanc, chardonnay and cool-climate pinot noir.
Coonawarra lies near the Victorian border, around four hours’ drive south-east of Adelaide, on a narrow strip of terra rossa soil, red clay over limestone, running for just fifteen kilometres. The soil’s free drainage and the region’s cool, maritime climate have made it Australia’s benchmark for cabernet sauvignon since the 1890s. The distance from Adelaide makes this a separate leg of the trip rather than a day excursion.
