Winemaking

Danial Conte is the 3rd generation in the family business. He has  worked full time in his parents vineyards for over 14 years. In his younger days he spent hundreds of hours helping out inbetween school, and operating all types of vineyard machinery including a mechanical harvester from age 12. His life long involvement and dedication later included winemaking. From the year 2000 completed 2 years of full time science and winemaking (oenology) at universities of Flinders and Adelaide. Now at age 32, his love of the outdoors, passion and ability for winemaking and strong commitment to his work, family and their livelyhood has become a great assett to the business. He has a lifetime of practical experience, a keen sense for detail and a desire for learning which has led to him being a consistantly exceptional and humble young winemaker.

Winery owner and Danial's father, Steve, is a 2nd generation Conte in McLaren Vale. He contributes to the winemaking but mostly on an advisory level. At age 69, he keeps Danial in touch with the traditional Italian methods, resulting in wines that have a 'blend' of both Old and New World wine making influences. He also manages and works full time in the vineyards.   

Young Steve Conte in 1958, aged 17. Photo taken on the vineyard with one of his pet greyhounds that he also used for rabbit and fox hunting.  

Winemaking methods have reflected their desire to remain the sole owners and operators thus ensuring product integrity . Their philosophy of truely being a family owned and run vineyard and winery is to physically grow the grapes, harvest the grapes and make the wine with their own hands. With this in mind, the winery has a relatively small size of production. Wines are made with small batch methods including hand plunged open ferments and barrel maturation. There is plenty of time given for wines to settle, clear and become stable enough to bottle. Therefore there is very little or no fining or filtering. As a result there are no fining additives such as egg white, fish or milk products. The only preservative used is a minimal amount of sulphur dioxide, which is a natural preservative. Also during alcoholic fermentation, sulphur dioxide occurs naturally from the yeast.