NATIONAL WINE CENTRE - Located in Adelaide, South Australia
Winemakers might describe the project as a “difficult vintage”, but at last it’s time for the public to savour it. Let me offer some tasting notes, then, to help you sample the new National Wine Centre in the city. After some uncertainty about its exact location, it has been built on the south-east corner of the Botanic Garden in the parklands to the east of the “square mile”. There is no doubt some of the best views of it emerge as you approach it through the trees from the long established gardens, although the majority of people will arrive from the car parks along Hackney road.
What is it exactly? In one structure, it is home to eight national wine industry bodies. Its curved and projecting vertical ribs along its rear have caused a wag to call it an uncompleted ark. More importantly, in a skyward sweeping building next door, it is the home of all wine made in Australia and a showcase for us to visit in a single exciting venue.
Over time, fifty regions from the tip of WA to southern Queensland will be represented, involving a boggling 10,000 different wines. It will do that through a high tech experience from vineyard to a roll round the palate, opportunities to educate the taste buds and letting them loose on a fine combo of food and wine. The new edifice itself is a potential trophy winning blend in its own right.
With the official - and very public - opening of the National Wine Centre due on Saturday 6 October, we went inside what the back label suggests will attract an average of 3000 plus people per week to the Botanic Garden end of North Terrace. As you come into a vast and vaulted curving concourse it’s obvious that chateau cardboard this definitely ain’t! It’s a bold and brave structure with massive loop pine laminated columns arching and tapering upwards to a cathedral - like peak. Looking back from the first level platform at the other end, those exposed ribs on the administrative building make sense, continuing the steady curve of the main centre. A giant slot in the concourse will house its wine stocks from the Adelaide Hills to the Yarra Valley. The cellar will take 32000 bottles. You could drink one a day and still be going in eight seven years time.
“Busby’s” is the big general purpose meeting area with doors all along the northern side opening to a big paved quadrangle. It has a striking suspended ceiling made up of hoop pine triangles bound by steel cabling to handg like a net tethered high on the concourse side and lower above the doors. James Busby, by the way was an early NSW prophet of the wine industry, planting a variety of grapes for every day of the year.
Pioneers Dr John Ferguson in WA and Bartholomew Broughton in Tasmania scored naming rights for the sparkling white and clinical wine education areas of other side of the concourse. Upstairs in a wing projecting into the garden, early McLaren Vale identity Dr Alexander Kelly cracks the tasting room with a view over First Creek as it gurgles into the parklands. Downstairs and under it is the café that is open to all. De Castella’s (yes “Deek “ is a descendant of the pioneering Victorian vigneron) is here for coffee anytime during the day, and there is an a la carte menu for lunch.
I was delighted and relieved to find that it will cost visitors nothing to wander the vineyard across the creek on what was the ugly bus depot or look through the spectacular building which includes a wine tourism information centre and specialist wine retail shop. There is a fee, however, for the twenty first century wine experience upstairs. It is a Journey of Discovery that starts in the vineyard chamber with a massive illuminated wine regions of Australia map. The Postcards crew were all taken by a century-and-a-half old shiraz vine with a thick and gnarled trunk and a myriad of crinkly roots. It was painstakingly removed in its entirety above and below ground from an old Barossa vineyard. There’s a wide screen video of a year in the life of a grape block on one side and a beautiful wall panel of ampelography on the other . . . that’s the scientific illustration of grape varieties, thirty two of our most popular in this case.
Through a central winemaking chamber where you can dabble with your own blend surrounded by winery machinery, there is a strikingly lit display of antique Australian wineglasses and decanters. It signals that your three-quarter hour journey is coming to the flavours. You’ll get a chance to identify basic flavours or characteristics and then sample four representative wines, accompanied on multiple screens by international imbibers of our export drops.
Outside again, the National Wine Centre deliberately turns its back on North Terrace so that it can gently sweep around an ancient African Acacia tree in a rising corner of the Botanic Garden. To the west, a sheer wall is broken by windows with a close-up view of a magnificent grove of jacaranda trees. The centre is a Federation project, with about half the funding from the Commonwealth government and the rest from the State coffers. It was a commitment happily made, given that it drives home the image of South Australia as the wine state.
The designers, Philip Cox (think Yulara resort and the National Tennis Centre) and Steve Grieve have given Adelaide a striking contemporary landmark which at the same time sits well in the corner of the garden. Behind it, hard on North Terrace and Hackney Road, the handsome old two storey dwelling, “Yarrabee” is now home to the centre’s administration staff. It was built in the 1860’s to house the resident surgeon of the lunatic asylum that rambled down the slope beyond. A redressed high stone wall that bisects the two new buildings was part of a quadrangle that kept the unfortunates in. The great spinal red wall that curves at the back of the first building and through the middle of the wine centre itself is all about the good earth that nurtures the grape. It is probably the largest rammed earth wall in Australia. The concave and soaring roof of the main structure is “Reinzinc”, a silvery metallic sheet that symbolises the stainless tanks that are synonymous with white wine making.
Speaking of wine again, it all begins in the vineyard and eight popular varieties are now growing on trellises that pick up the great circular motion set up by the centre across First Creek. It is here that our Australian wine flavour and success begins. After all, as Galileo so elegantly put it, “Wine is sunshine held together by water”. They’ve finally built the monument to our own new world wines, and so it’s our turn to come and sample the National Wine Centre.
National Wine Centre of Australia
Botanic Road
Adelaide, South Australia, 5000Telephone: (08) 8222 9222
Opening Weekend
Saturday 6th October 2001
From 11.00am to 5.00pm
Public Opening including food and wine stalls, family activities and entertainmentSunday 7th October, 2001
10.00am to 5.00pmGeneral Opening Times
Open 7 days (Business Hours)
Check for details, Telephone: (08) 8222 9222
