History

Established in July 2000 Hunter Wine Services (Australia) Pty Ltd is a relatively new business. However the founders, Rex DAquino and John Hordern have between them 80 years of wine making experience and 200 years of winemaking history. Rex is the 3rd Generation winemaker of the DAquino Family wine business whose roots stem back to early 1900's of Sicily. Italy, while John is the 5th Generation winemaker of the Anthony Hordern wine and retail business of the early 1850’s in Australia.

The two founders, both graduates of Oenology at Roseworthy College in Sth Australia saw the need to establish a contract wine making facility to produce small 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 of 2001 will see the winery crush 3000 tonnes of grapes from 40 vineyards in South Eastern Australia producing many fine batches of premium wine.

The winery itself has its own history being the “Old Oak Milk Factory“ situated ideally at Muswellbrook in the Upper Hunter Valley. It was built originally in 1951 to process fresh and powdered milk products and is a large “art deco” brick building with its own dual level maturation cellars below ground (ideal for wine) .The Winery property is 10.5 hectares leaving plenty of room for expansion in the years to come.

The winery is still a small enterprise by Australian national standards, crushing 5000 tonnes with a storage capacity of 6,000,000 litres. However, there is a large program that involves blending and bottling of batches of wine from 20 different regions of Australia. This results in individually styled batches of wine with consistent high quality.

Facility

Hunter Wine Services (Australia) Pty Ltd is HACCP accredited for quality assurance and offers the following services:

1. Contract winemaking
2. Contract bottling
3. Full laboratory facilities
4. Consulting services for grape growing winemaking and marketing
5. Contract storage and maturation of bulk wine
6. Contract storage of packaged wine
7. Cellar door sales of all products produced on site
8. Export Licensing and container packing