Small winemakers' friend Jane Harris
Teacher-turned-businesswoman Jane Harris grew her wine company from a school fund-raising idea — she bought excess but top-quality wines from smaller wineries, labelled it and sold it through schools.
In a very short time it became a full-time job and Adelaide Cellar Door is now marketing choice South Australian wines into China and Hong Kong.
Adelaide Cellar Door
She’s moving more than 5000 cases a year at the moment, mainly through word of mouth, and plans to use the internet to reach a 25,000-case target.
“What we were doing was buying wines that were excess — growers only bottled their top 10 barrels of wine and may have had another 40 barrels they did not want to bottle,” she said.
“If they labelled the whole lot, that would have been too much wine and they would have to discount.
“But there are really outstanding small producers who are concentrating on quality in their regions. They have trouble marketing their wine. They can’t put it into supermarkets because they don’t have the output,” she explained.
“We have a panel of winemakers to look at the wines and if they fit into the quality and interest that suits what we are doing and we can sell it for a reasonable price, we will take it.
“The most important thing is quality — we are fussy about quality.”
Find out more at the Adelaide Cellar Door website.
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