Early in 2021, we celebrated the first vintage at our new Jansz Pontos Hills Winery in the picturesque Coal River Valley in Southern Tasmania. The winery had been a work in progress for some time after the Hill-Smith Family purchased the Jansz Tasmania brand in 1998.
Before Pontos Hills Winery, Jansz Tasmania’s home has been in northern Tasmania in Pipers River. It’s where we source our estate fruit for our wines, and it’s where you’ll find our Wine Room, where we get to share our passion, our stories and our wines with you.
Now, we prepare to share the next generation of premium sparkling wine made at Pontos Hills, led by our winemaker and vigneron Jennifer Doyle.
This beautiful piece of the Tasmanian landscape has excellent diversity and aspect, and reliable temperate climate - a stunning combination for quality Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. In total, we have 50 hectares of clonally selected Pinot Noir and Chardonnay vines at Pontos Hills, which have provided grapes for Jansz Tasmania wines for many years.
As people around the world fell in love with Jansz Tasmania, we knew the time would come for us to build our own processing facility, and due to the quantity of grapes we sourced from our Southern Tasmania vineyards, it was more sustainable to build the winery in the south, too.
While the architecture of the building is most impressive, the winemaking team called for simplicity of processing, minimal handling of grapes and juice to make wines that are the best expression of the vineyard. The design had to enable us to make wine with the least intervention.
While the state-of-the-art winery was designed and engineered specifically to craft world-class sparkling wine, sustainability and innovation drove our decision making. It was important for us to create a space that would sustain the next generation of our family who will one day take the reins. And the next generation, and the next...
As of November 2020, Tasmania runs on 100% renewable energy. Regardless, it’s part of our ethos to do what we can to generate our own resources, so the winery has been designed to support a 250kw solar system. In our day-to-day we optimise our renewable energy consumption with demand response planning, meaning we optimise energy use according to when energy is most available, often linked to sun and wind availability. We also treat the wastewater from the winery on site, and then reuse the water for irrigation in our vineyards.
At the moment, the winery is not open to the public. We have no doubt Pontos Hills Winery will continue to evolve, just as it has over the past two years. We are passionate about wine and tourism and we will always have a desire to share our piece of Tasmania with the world, in one form or another.
For now, our Jansz Tasmania Wine Room in Pipers River is open and we’d love you to stop by, say hello and enjoy a wine with us. Why not visit us soon?
