With Dowie Doole, we were founded in 1995 by two great gentlemen, Drew Dowie and Norm Doole. And the reason I raise that, is Drew Dowey was one of Australia's most recognised architects. He designed the Wolf Blass Cellar Door, and so, the design aesthetic here at Dowie Doole is very, very important to us. So choosing products that really were complementary to the building was very important. So things like the air conditioning, which you can't see a lot of, and the beautiful panels that stand out on arrival, was key parts of the design element. So yes, while efficiency and performance of the products was very important, it's also the aesthetic. With everything that we do here at Dowie Doole is very important, right from growing grapes, making wine, how we serve people at the Cellar Door, and the environment you sit in, it's all about the feel of the environment.

The panels look absolutely amazing, and part of the design I guess here at the Cellar Door, was also, we wanted the journey to start from when you enter the property. So when you come off California Road, there's a 24-meter-long Dowie Doole corten sign, and then you sort of come in through a journey. There's the first block of vines is a Bush Vine Grenache plot, planted in 1965. And we've actually cut those off at ground level, and we're retraining them as bush vines. So it's been a real generation. So there'll be a sign that you'll see, that that's the Bush Vine vineyard. Then you come through a Shiraz Cabernet vineyard, and then, as you're coming down the road, one of the first things you see is the top of the Cellar Door as you come over the hill, and you see all the solar panels. And that was important because we wanted people to get that sustainability feel as they're entering the property. So by the time they walk in, they've got a feeling for what Dowie Doole's about, the vineyard names, the solar on the roof, that real approach has been very important.

With Dowie Doole, we're very conscious of our input, I guess, on the environment. We're actually, at the moment, going through a carbon audit process with a carbon accountant. So we're trying to make sure that Dowie Doole is carbon-neutral across the entire business. Which to be fair, we own 69 hectares of our own vineyards, all up, so we get a lot of credits from the vines consuming carbon. But we also wanted to make sure that this Cellar Door had zero input. So trying to use energy-efficient products, and the high solar output was really important in making sure that this Cellar Door is essentially carbon-neutral.

So for me, it really started with, a lot of the wines that I'm passionate about happened to come from biodynamic vineyards, and it was just a coincidence that a lot of the wines that I really enjoyed drinking happened to be biodynamic, so I became interested in biodynamics and sustainability. And so, this vineyard is currently in conversion to biodynamic, we're in the final year of the three-stage conversion process. So, within the next 12 months, all wines produced from Dowie Doole will be organic and biodynamically certified.