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.
Gerrard Viergever and his famous moustache
We found 66-year-old age pensioner Gerrard Viergever on the dilapidated side of St Vincent Street in the old run-down Port Town Hall Café.
One of a growing team of people in the Port who are not constantly complaining and waiting for the government or the council to resuscitate our city, he’s turning the old St Vincent Street café into a first class but inexpensive French restaurant with a special purpose licence. He simply ignores all the negative thinking about the place.
Gerrard Viergever discusses his plans for his French restaurant 'Moustache'
It’s not the first time Gerrard has created a new restaurant and he admits he’s had “some elaborate and disastrous failures.”
“I’ve been through a very dark time and I could have just sat in the corner on the pension, but I saw this run-down cafe; it was a disaster zone, but I needed shelter at a reasonable price.
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Keith Ridgeway at the wheel of 'Falie'
In the first of our series on characters of The Port, Semaphore and Largs Bay, we honour the remarkable Keith Ridgeway, who was born in another port, Fremantle, and came to Port Adelaide as a 16-year-old merchant seaman.
He first went to sea at 14 as a deck boy and spent 52 years sailing round the world; today, as skipper of the Archie Badenoch, he’s still on the water regularly, taking groups of school students out on the Port River for the Maritime Museum.
His first job in Port Adelaide was on the passenger ship MV Minnipa which plied between Port Adelaide and Port Lincoln.
He remembers that whenever the Port Magpies had a big game on, a huge band of young Port Lincoln fans would sleep on deck both ways just to get to the game.
[Read more …]
