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The History of the Winery and Distillery is quite interesting.

“St Peters was established with the utmost good taste and a seemingly limitless budget by Count Sassoli d’Bianchi and his son Count Andrea Sassoli d’Bianchi in 1978. Its function was truly bizarre: to produce that most unwanted of all alcohol commodities brandy.” (James Halladay)

Even though they spared no expense setting up the winery even bringing trades artisans from their home country of France to install and commission the distillery they failed in their endeavours. My investigations showed that their focus was on brandy production and despite having the best distillery of the day in the Southern Hemisphere their endeavours failed because of poor demand for brandy, a limited understanding of how the spirit industry operated in Australia and in particular a failure to properly account for the onerous tax system in Australia in relation to the spirit market.

Supposedly putting it out of it’s misery the Saxonvale Stanley group purchased the property in 1983 intending to mothball they distillery and focus on the production of wine.

They took it over to produce branded wines and whilst they had a well designed and lavishly equipped winery at their disposal they failed to achieve their goals. Based on my investigations it seems that whilst the bottled wine industry was really taking off in Australia Saxonvale Stanley failed to understand how difficult it would be to win, as large a share as they had budgeted on of the bottled wine market.

Given that it was such a well designed and equipped winery and that the wine industry in Australia was really starting to move forward it was not long before a couple of local “investors” who already had a small foot hold in local wine production in the Riverina Region started to think about buying the winery and distillery. They were not able to fund the purchase of the property and the winery and distillery sat vacant for a couple of years.

At that stage, early 1989, I was Chief Executive of an expanding group of companies under the banner of B&W which was located in Wollongong and the principals of that group were interested in expanding into the wine industry.

Ultimately with the investors mentioned above coming in as minority shareholders and lessees of the winery and distillery B&W purchased the property and business and tidied it up ready for the 1989 vintage. Whilst the winery progressed slowly it didn't meet B&W's profit expectations and coupled with the emerging hard times in the late 80's and Prime Minister Paul Keating's "depression we had to have" B&W decided to focus on its core businesses and announced it intended to sell it's wine industry investment.

I was very enthusiastic about the future of the wine industry and B&W's decision gave Julie and I the opportunity of putting forward a management buy out plan for the winery & distillery property, plant and equipment and the business. This was a bold step by us given the history of the facility basically being a failure to that time. The detailed analysis that I undertook before making that step led to a business plan which the Commonwealth Bank decided to back. That plan moved away from bottled wine production being the core business and focused on the winery becoming a bulk wine manufacturing facility selling bulk wine to other Australian and Export customers. This took the winery away from the initial focus of the Count on brandy production and of Saxonvale Stanley and then B&W of selling bottled wine that had failed for the Counts, Saxonvale and B&W. We did introduce a couple of wine brands such as Wilton Estate but rather than seeing them as developing a presence in the bottled wine industry the brands were there to give us the opportunity of competing in wine shows to enhance our reputation.

That last element was a key to this chosen way forward and we worked in a very focused way to produce very competitive wines for that first years wine shows. We won three medals from just three entries to the Sydney International Wine which gave us the desired leg in the door to sell our first vintage of bulk wine and lock in contracts for most of the following years vintage ... it was a good business plan which we diligently stuck to.

Over the 11 vintages that we were involved in the winery and distillery we were very successful on the wine show circuit which helped us build a reputation for the production of competitively priced premium quality bulk wines.

The winery business that Stephen & Julie owned is located at Yenda just outside Griffith which was the second largest wine region in Australia. To put that into perspective the Barossa, as the largest Australian wine region was producing around 23% of Australia’s wine.

When Julie and I purchased St. Peters Winery and Distillery, the 8 or 9 wineries in the Riverina were producing around 20% of Australia’s wine and the Hunter Valley region was producing just 2% of Australia’s wine. From humble beginnings the annual production capacity was grown to three million litres of wine and the ability to store, in stainless steel tanks, over four million litres of wine. By 2000 that production and storage capacity placed the winery in the top 10% of production capacity of all the wineries in Australia

In 2000 Julie and I were approached by a local grape grower family who was interest in buying the winery. Their motivation was sound in that there was a surplus of grapes emerging in the market and they saw the winery as providing them with the opportunity to vertically integrate their grape production with the next level in the wine industry supply train. As growers they were at that stage producing enough grapes to utilise the then current production capacity of the winery which was three million litres of wine.

The purchasers changed the family name changing its name to Tyrrel Estate and unfortunately deviated from our very successful business plane and were seduced, or perhaps forced into by market pressures by the emerging over supply of wine, to focused on selling wine mainly as bottled wine with its main brand beings Zalia. Unfortunately Zalia and their other bands were not accepted in the market and the business struggled for a couple of years eventually closing its door in about 2004.

Given our success we were very sad to see that happen.

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