We produce cool-climate wines. The fruit is grown in our Tamar and Derwent Valley vineyards.
Our new winery focuses on a much smaller - and very high quality-output. It uses gravity-flow to make boutique, ultra- premium wines. We use estate fruit that is grown in a sustainable manner, with organic and bio-dynamic techniques.
Our signature varietals are Riesling, Chardonnay, Gewurztraminer, Pinot noir and Syrah. We've also got a top notch Vintage Brut.
This is our winemaker, Conor van der Reest. He's from Canada and he joined us in 2007.
His approach is to combine the best of old and new world techniques. He aims to make complex and structural varietal wines that represent the vineyard from which they came, or their own terroir.
Great wines are made in the vineyard, says Conor. As such, we've started moving towards organic and bio-dynamic techniques, so we can sustainably and responsibly grow our fruit.
Our wine styles may change yearly: Conor chooses them to best compliment the fruit they came from and the vintage they embody.
Claudio Alcorso, an Italian textile merchant, founded Moorilla in 1958. He had been told it was a bad idea to plant grapevines in Tasmania. It wasn't.
He commissioned two houses by celebrated modernist architect Roy Grounds - the Round House (now our library), and the Courtyard House, which forms the entrance to Mona.
Claudio was a passionate arts and music patron. He'd be delighted by the site's current incarnation, or possibly horrified. Who knows.
Image Credit: Paul County
Our designer, Leigh Carmichael, had a traumatic experience in his first few weeks at Mona (and many, many since. In fact he's probably having one right now).
Anyhow, in those first weeks, he worked painstakingly to present David Walsh, his new boss, with his ideas for rebranding Moorilla Wines, focusing on the heritage and cultural significance of the brand and site.
David said, 'Nope. That's not it,' and gave him this: The Greek of antiquity was caught up by the seriousness of the truth that [in wine] pleasure and pain, enlightenment and destruction, the lovable and the horrible, lived in close intimacy. It is this unity of the paradoxical which appeared in dionysiac ecstacy with staggering force.
-The myth and cult of Dionysus
'Ah ha,' said Leigh - hence the labels.
Ours is one of the oldest vineyards in the state. And the newest: we've just had a new winery built on the Moorilla site.
The vineyard was planted by the Alcorso family along the length of a peninsula on Hobart's River Derwent. The family bought another in the north of the state, the St. Matthias vineyard in the village of Rosevears. St Matthias was a separate winery for a long time; when we took over, it became our main vineyard.
In 2007 we started to use organic, bio-dynamic principles at Moorilla, and the vines are healthier for it. In 2010 we started using the same techniques at the main, St Matthias vineyard, which has been renovated to remove diseased blocks, and replanted using clones to better suit our unique conditions.
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