Giaconda has no cellar door for sales and doesn't encourage visitors.
"Do you get many people up here to visit?"I ask Rick Kinzbrunner,the owner and head winemaker at Giaconda,as he stretches back on a rocking chair in his Beechworth house.
He purses his lips."We try not to."
This,clearly,is not your typical cellar door. In fact the only thing that resembles a typical cellar door at Giaconda is that there is in fact a wine cellar with a large double door. Other than that,nothing is usual here.
The entrance to a buried treasure.Credit:Ben Groundwater
Visitors? They try not to have too many. And that's mostly because there's no wine to sell. Giaconda's famed chardonnay,described by reviewer James Halliday as"one of Australia's greatest"might go for about $120 a bottle,but it's pretty much all sold before it even makes it out of the barrel. This is the stuff of myth and legend – you have to know someone who knows someone to even have the opportunity to purchase. So no,there's none available at the cellar door.
There's another reason,too,for Rick's reticence to fling open the Giaconda doors:he's a wine-maker,not a tour guide,and he's pretty much the only person here. This is one of Australia's finest vineyards,maker of some of the country's best wine,and it's owned,managed and staffed almost entirely by Rick and his small family.
To score a visit Giaconda you need an appointment,and to have an appointment you need connections. You have to be a serious wine-buyer,or someone with some well-placed contacts. Today,I'm lucky,because I have the latter:the good people at the local tourism office.
He's a wine-maker,not a tour guide,and he's pretty much the only person here.
And so here I find myself in one of Australia's best and most difficult-to-access wineries,a hidden lair in some ways,a house atop a hill with treasure buried beneath. After our little chat in the house on a cold,wintry day,Rick leads me down to that buried treasure,ushering my little family into an ATV and driving us down the hill to where a small pathway leads to those double doors set into the hill.