Slate Fermenters
The Slate Fermenters were originally built in 1863 and are made from massive slabs of stone quarried locally in the Willunga Hills. They are thought to be the last of their type remaining in Australia – and quite possibly the world.
It dawned on me when launching Ox Hardy Wines that the fermenters hadn’t been used since the original winery stopped processing nearly a century ago. We’d always dreamt of restoring the winery to its former glory, so I washed out and re-sealed the seams of two of the fermenters using beeswax. We then made the wines using only a bucket, shovel, plunger, and the natural yeast from the vineyard – the epitome of natural, inefficient, hand-winemaking.
To our delight, this laborious winemaking exercise was a revelation, with the wines showing a unique minerality and structure compared to the same fruit processed in our normal facility. There’s a unique tension and flavour profile to the wines made in these fermenters which I can’t explain, but there’s irrefutable proof in the glass. It’s fascinating!
Each year since that first release in 2018, we’ve bucketed Shiraz fruit from our Moreton Bay Block into the Slate Fermenters, and everyone’s pitched in to plunge the fermenters three times a day. Then with the ferments complete, we’ve dug them out by hand and basket pressed the skins – essentially making wine exactly the same way my great great grandfather did over a hundred years ago.
