HEATHCOTE, Australia — If you study wine long enough, across not only a span of vintages but also across national wine cultures, you begin to perceive certain “truths.” One such verity — the ur-truth, if you will — is that if a culture seeks to create fine wine, it will inevitably pursue and celebrate the power of place.

This is what makes Australia such a fascinating 21st-century wine experience. The finewine ambition has taken almost ferocious hold in Australia. One such example is a district called Heathcote, about 70 miles northwest of Melbourne. It takes its name from a small, three-pub town in the middle of the district.

Heathcote, we now know, has a vocation with the shiraz or syrah grape variety. As is so often the case in newly lustrous wine zones, a prophet showed the way. Heathcote’s local wine Moses is Ron Laughton, the 60-year-old owner and winemaker of Jasper Hill Vineyard (www.jasperhill.com), who, with his wife, Elva, planted vines in this sheep and cattle-grazing area in 1975.

“I was looking for a place to grow grapes without needing additional water, “said Mr. Laughton, a tall, rangy sort who has that deft Australian ability of being simultaneously affable and laconic.

Mr. Laughton’s vines receive no irrigation, which is no small hurdle in this drought-prone land. Yet his initial insistence on dry farming led to a realization that shaped Heathcote winegrowing for nearly all those who followed in Mr. Laughton’s pioneering footsteps.

“Heathcote has an unusual soil type called Cambrian,” Mr. Laughton said. “The old soil maps of the area showed it clearly. A Cambrian soil spine runs north-south through the center of the district, extending about 31 miles in length but little more than half a mile wide at its widest point.”

A dark-red soil, Cambrian has a critical capacity to hold water. What’s more, it runs deep, upward of 13 feet, according to Mr. Laughton. Adjoining expanses of a grayish soil of different composition lacks the water-retention capacity. Vines grown on that soil not only require regular irrigation, but appear to bear less characterful fruit.

This soil-based “truth of the land” is straight from the French wine playbook. Yet Mr. Laughton, a former food scientist and chemist with Kraft Foods, freely concedes his original innocence.

“I only went to France about nine years after we started the vineyard and were making wine. Most of my ideas about how to grow grapes and make wine really just came out of my head. Then I got to France and discovered that they had arrived at these same ideas hundreds of years earlier!” he said, laughing at his naiveté.

Almost from the first vintage in 1982, Mr. Laughton’s original two named-vineyard shiraz bottlings — Georgia’s Paddock (40 acres) and Emily’s Paddock (7.9 acres), labeled after his two daughters — attracted critical acclaim and today command high prices. They are exemplars of what has now appeared as classic Heathcote shiraz, with flavors of rich blackberry jam delivered with a certain mineral zip and bright, refreshing acidity.

A tasting of numerous vintages going back to the 1983 vintage shows not only that both wines reward extended cellaring, but that the truth of the soil is inherent. Emily’s Paddock is the earlier maturing, with a strawberry jam scent and a taste that captivates even in the youngest vintage. Its soil is Cambrian going down about three feet, then transitioning into schist.

Georgia’s Paddock shiraz is a chunkier, meatier shiraz. Denser and less accessible than that from its sister vineyard when young, Georgia’s Paddock emerges over time as the richer, stronger, and more profound wine. The soil here is Cambrian to a depth of at least 13 feet, according to Mr. Laughton.

The winemaking for both wines is identical: six weeks fermentation and maceration (which is unusually long by modern winemaking standards); a coarse filtering just before bottling; just 20% new oak barrels, and no acid adjustments. Although not formally certified as such, Mr. Laughton’s grape-growing and winemaking are biodynamic, which is an extreme type of organic cultivation, he said. This is winegrowing at its most transparent and non-interventionist.

Jasper Hill shiraz is a collector’s wine selling for $80 to $100 a bottle in America (a small quantity is available in New York from several retailers including D. Sokolin). Today, other wineries have emerged, most notably neighboring Heathcote Estate, which makes superb shiraz, to carry the Heathcote name further.

Happily, the Laughtons have persevered long enough and survived to tell the tale and reap the reward. Pioneer wine sagas such as theirs don’t always have such a happy ending.