HUNTER WINE SERVICES - CONTRACT WINEMAKING

Contract winemaking

Founders Rex D'Aquino & John Hordern saw the need to establish a contract wine making facility to produce individual batch, high quality wines for the burgeoning population of small vignerons of South Eastern Australia, who although were growing premium grapes did not have the means or opportunity to make the wine from those grapes. The first commercial vintage in 2001 saw the winery crush approximately 2000 tonnes of grapes from numerous vineyards in South Eastern Australia.

Hunter Wine Services provides consulting services for grape growing, winemaking and marketing specific to the clients own needs and can help you plan your vintage grape crush to suit your winemaking requirements to include:

  • Musting, juicing, chilling, rotary drum vacuum filtration and centrifuge;
  • Red & white grape ferments with delivery ex the press and gross lees;
  • Post vintage tank & barrel storage;
  • Post vintage winemaking, malo lactic fermentation, cold & heat stabilization, filtration, blending and barrel management;
  • Preparation for bottling, and full bottling via two modern packaging lines;
  • Dispatch to bulk tanker or shipping container

With our own in-house laboratories and tasting rooms, we're able to afford a comprehensive range of tests and analyses to regularly monitor the maturation of wine in the cellar..

We can obtain the NATA tests and arrange your VI-1 and continuing export approvals when you are ready to export your wine.

The list of options of our laboratory services are:

  • Grape maturity sample preparation and analysis;
  • Complete wine testing and analysis;
  • Stability testing;
  • Fining trials;
  • Trade sample preparation and dispatch;
  • Show sample preparation and dispatch;
  • NATA testing, VI-1 and export approvals arranged;
  • Blending trials;
  • Alcohol by distillation or alcolyser;
  • Gas chromatography;
  • Tasting room.

Contract storage of packaged wine and maturation of bulk wine is done by sourcing the grapes from the wine region or vineyard of your choice, making the wine to your specification and storage in either stainless steel tanks or wood maturation (after confirmation of quoted costs) and post vintage winemaking through to bottling. We can manage bottling and/or shipping in bulk to anywhere in the world.