Cellar flight
$34Five pours at the barrel table — rosé, white, two reds and whatever is being topped up that week. Bread, hard cheese and cold water on the table.
Duration 45 minUp to 6 guestsPours 5 × 50 ml
Two hundred and forty barrels, eleven plots, one hill that has held the same temperature since 1908.
A nine-hectare estate winery whose tasting room is the barrel cellar itself — nine metres under the hill, at the same table where the wine is topped up.
18+Tastings are for guests aged 18 and over. We check ID at the door. Please enjoy responsibly.
Chapter I
Two hundred and forty barrels, each one a slow argument between fruit and wood. French oak for the tannin, Hungarian for the spice. Nothing is bottled before the wood has finished speaking.
Chapter II
Thirteen degrees, eighty per cent humidity, no draught and no daylight. The hill does the work — the lamps are here for guests, not for the wine.
Chapter III
Every barrel carries a chalk tag: plot, harvest day, the date it was last topped up. Twice a year the wine is drawn off its lees — and twice a week a table is laid between the rows.
Walk the corridor end to end, then take the stairs up to the table. Flights from $34, barrel tours from $58.
Book a tastingEverything is grown, pressed and aged on the estate. Prices are per 750 ml bottle at the cellar door; a tasting flight pours five of them.
Graphite and red plum, 20 months in second-fill oak. The house red poured at every table.
750 ml · 13.0%Grown on the stony shoulder above the cellar. Black pepper, dried fig, a long dry finish.
750 ml · 13.5%Half in steel, half in old wood. Quince and salted butter, no new oak anywhere near it.
750 ml · 12.5%Four hours on skins, pressed at dawn. Wild strawberry and stone, made to be drunk cold and soon.
750 ml · 12.0%One plot, one barrel row, 30 months in wood. Released only when the chalk tag says it is ready.
750 ml · 14.0%Blended at the barrel table from the nine best lots of the vintage. 1 940 bottles, numbered by hand.
750 ml · 14.0%Every visit happens downstairs, in the cellar you just walked. Groups stay small enough that one person pours and answers — six at a table, twelve on a tour.
Five pours at the barrel table — rosé, white, two reds and whatever is being topped up that week. Bread, hard cheese and cold water on the table.
The whole corridor with the cellar master: press house, the 1908 vault, chalk tags and racking, then six pours including one drawn straight from the barrel.
The far end of the cellar to yourselves: candles, eight pours, a cold supper board and the run of the chalk board. Priced per table, not per guest.
An hour in the rows above the cellar, then the blending bench downstairs: build your own three-lot blend, bottle it, label it and carry it out.
The cellar came first. It was cut into the ridge in 1908 to keep milk and root crops, and it has held thirteen degrees ever since. The vines were planted on the slope above it in 1994, once someone worked out that the hill had been a wine cellar all along and nobody had told it.
Nine hectares run from the lane up to the treeline — eleven plots, each picked and pressed on its own. What goes into oak is decided at the barrel table with a chalk board, and what leaves the cellar is decided the same way, two to three years later.
Two people work here full time and a dozen more come for the harvest. That is the whole reason a tasting is six people and not sixty: the person pouring your glass is the person who topped up that barrel in March.
— the cellar master, on the chalk board by the stairs
“We were sat between two rows of barrels with a candle, and the woman pouring had chalked the tag on the barrel behind us that morning. You cannot fake that.”
“Booked the tour on a wet Saturday expecting a queue and a script. Twelve of us, ninety minutes, one pour straight out of the barrel with a thief.”
“I drove, so I had the juice and the same walk for sixteen dollars, and nobody made it strange. We left with four bottles and a blend we made ourselves.”
The lane leaves Wrenfield Hollow by the old mill and climbs for two kilometres. Park on the gravel by the press house; the cellar door is the low arch on the left.
| Cellar door | Hours |
|---|---|
| Monday | Closed |
| Tuesday | Closed |
| Wednesday | 12:00 – 19:00 |
| Thursday | 12:00 – 19:00 |
| Friday | 12:00 – 19:00 |
| Saturday | 11:00 – 20:00 |
| Sunday | 11:00 – 17:00 |
Tell us the day and the party size. We answer by email within one working day with the hour and what will be open on the bench that week.
Book. There is one table in the cellar and one guide, so a walk-in usually means waiting for the next flight or going home. A day’s notice is normally enough; Saturdays fill about two weeks out.
Yes to both. Under-18s are welcome on the tour and at the table, but we do not pour wine for them — there is juice pressed from the same rows. Drivers and anyone not drinking pay $16 for the walk, and we will happily call a car at the end of the evening.
Thirteen degrees all year, eighty per cent humidity, and eighteen stone steps down from the yard. The floor is wet stone in places. If stairs are a problem, say so when you book and we will open the level side entrance by the press house — the same tasting, no steps.
Bottles are sold at the door from $28 to $96, and what you paid for the flight comes back as credit against them. We pack cases of six and twelve for courier within the county at $18 a case. Nothing is sold or delivered to anyone under 18.