Winemaking

Winemaking

Winemaking has been a big part of our family history on Metala.

William Formby, my great, great grandfather bought Metala in 125 years ago from Herman Daenke, the original settler. His son Arthur Formby planted our original vineyards of Shiraz and Cabernet Sauvignon in 1891 and they are still producing today. From the late 1890s until 1910 Arthur made his own wines in a cellar adjacent to these early plantings. Some of the old open fermenters are intact today although one row was pulled out to make room for storage at some stage in the past. These wines were carried by horse drawn wagon to Milang where they were then dispatched by rail to Adelaide or by River Murray steamer to other parts of Australia. Early records say that in the 1903 vintage Arthur Formby made 9,000 gallons of wine, which in the Langhorne Creek area was second only in volume to Frank Potts of Bleasdale fame.

It wasn’t until our generation that the desire to build and run a winery on the property rose again. After the success of the 1998 and 1999 Brothers in Arms vintages we realised that we needed to design and build a facility in order to produce the best wine quality possible and we needed it to be efficient and incorporate modern technology. This underpins one of our great strengths as a brand - we have input and control from the soil to the bottle.

A major factor is that the winery is set up for batch treatment to express the personality of the vineyard. We have computer-controlled fermentation and everything post fermentation is gravity transferred by the lifting tank - so there is no pumping after fermentation. The fermenters were also tailor made and there is capacity to ferment 200 tonnes at any one time. It's very efficient which gives us time for quality control.

It's a unique winery and we've had plenty of industry members come and have a look at it which is very flattering - most visitors have been very impressed.