Ninth Island

If you have ever drunk a Tasmanian pinot from the Pipers Brook estate, you have already met this island. Ninth Island is the rocky outcrop the vineyard looks out on, twelve kilometres off the northern Tasmanian coast, and Tasmania's most celebrated cool-climate wine brand was named after it. The label is the view from the cellar door.

The island itself is now for sale.

What It Is

Forty acres. 1.3 kilometres long, 550 metres at its widest. Freehold. One of only twelve freehold islands in the entire 5,000-island Tasmanian archipelago, which makes it among the rarest categories of land title in Australia.

Twelve kilometres north of Bridport, in the Bass Strait between Victoria and Tasmania. Accessible only by helicopter from the mainland, under a conservation covenant that has limited land traffic for decades and produced what is now an almost untouched piece of coastal Tasmania.

The Wine Namesake

Ninth Island Wines is part of the Pipers Brook Vineyard portfolio, owned by Kreglinger, the Belgian family company founded in 1797 with registration number one in Antwerp. The label was created in the 1990s and has spent the last quarter-century carrying the island's name to wine lists across Australia, Europe, and Asia. Sparkling, pinot noir, chardonnay, pinot grigio, riesling.

Owning the island that gives its name to a globally distributed wine label is a position with no obvious second. It is a piece of branding history, of Tasmanian terroir history, and of the country's cool-climate wine story, condensed into one freehold title.

The Wildlife

The conservation covenant exists for a reason. Ninth Island is one of the most biologically significant small islands in southern Australia.

• Over 1 percent of the global population of black-faced cormorants nests here
• A breeding colony of an estimated 20,000 birds, including short-tailed shearwaters and other native seabirds
• Resident Australian fur seals along the rocky shoreline
• Little penguins in burrows across the lower slopes
• Bottlenose dolphins in the surrounding waters year-round

For a buyer with a serious interest in conservation or ecotourism, the natural inventory here matches what some Australian states formally protect as nature reserves. For a private buyer simply wanting a wild estate, the island delivers that without any further effort.

The Story

In August 1962, the MV Sheerwater, captained by Peter Donaldson, was wrecked on a reef off Ninth Island during a voyage from the Furneaux Islands carrying livestock to Launceston. The crew were rescued. Donaldson was the grandfather of Mary Donaldson, born in Hobart, who later became Crown Princess and then Queen Consort of Denmark.

The island's history holds other quieter things: a long period of light cattle grazing that has now ended, a 1995 oil spill from the MV Iron Baron that the local wildlife population has fully recovered from, and the long decades of being looked at rather than landed on. The Kreglinger vineyard owners held the title for many years before the most recent private ownership.

The Setting

Ninth Island belongs to the Waterhouse Island Group, in a part of Bass Strait that is increasingly recognised as one of Australia's most refined leisure regions.

The mainland pier at Bridport is the closest point of contact, and Bridport is the gateway to Barnbougle Dunes and Barnbougle Lost Farm, two of the top three golf courses in Australia by national ranking, both designed on the dunes of the Tasmanian coastline directly opposite the island.

The Pipers Brook Estate is twenty minutes inland, with its cellar door, the Tamar Valley wine region around it, and over fifty other cool-climate vineyards within an hour's drive. Launceston, with international flight connections, is roughly an hour from Bridport by car.

The Opportunity

A Development Application is currently in progress with the relevant local authorities, which is unusual for a Tasmanian island in this category and substantially de-risks the next owner's planning timeline. The land permitted for development sits above the Tidal Crown Land that surrounds the shoreline.

What can be built on the island has been the subject of several previous concepts:

• A private residence, with helicopter access, off-grid solar and rainwater systems, and a footprint sized to respect the wildlife covenant
• A small-scale ecotourism operation, with limited-capacity accommodation, in the manner of a high-end conservation retreat
• A vineyard-aligned hospitality concept, in partnership with the wine industry that already carries the island's name

The 360-degree views from the elevated land are widely considered the best of any island in the strait. The island sits high enough that the residence sites command the full sweep of Bass Strait, the Tasmanian coast to the south, and the open ocean to the north.

Access

• By helicopter: approximately 15 minutes from Bridport or Launceston, landing on the island under the terms of the conservation covenant
• By boat: 12 kilometres from the mainland pier at Bridport, a roughly 30-minute crossing in suitable conditions
• Launceston Airport to Bridport: one hour by car, with direct flights to Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane

What the Position Looks Like

Freehold private islands in Australia trade rarely. Ninth Island has changed hands twice in the past decade, and each transaction has been at a price comparable to a two- or three-bedroom apartment in an inner Sydney or Melbourne suburb. The arithmetic is what makes the listing distinctive: forty acres of legendary Tasmanian coastline, a national wine brand bearing the property's name, and a Development Application already in progress, at a number that would not buy a single floor in a Bondi tower.

For the buyer with an eye to Australian heritage assets, this is the rarest kind: a piece of land whose name has already been carried into the wider world, waiting for the next chapter to be written on it.