Wine maker mines cellar into hill

The wine and mining industries seem like strange bedfellows but they came together to give one wine maker an edge.

Rick Kinzbrunner from Beechworth in north east Victoria has gone to extreme lengths to create a better product.

He engaged a mining company to drill into the granite rock of a hill on his property to create an enormous underground cellar.

It cost hundreds of thousands of dollars but he says the expertise was harder to find than the money.

"It is a project that I lusted after for years until I actually found the people who could do it."

"With a hundred days of hard work , drilling rock and two and half tonnes of explosive later, we've got our underground cave."

The cave gives Rick Kinzbrunner the ability to control the climate he produces his wine in.

The high humidity helps to keep alcohol levels lower in the wine as it matures.
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"The wine matures way, way better in a constant low temperature and high humidity."

"You don't get much evaporation through the wood barrels."

With less evaporation the result is a wine with a slightly lower alcohol content.

"A lot longer than my life time I'd imagine."

"One would hope in a thousand years it will still be here because it is essentially, it is a hole in a block of solid granite."

Source: ABC Rural News, 19 July 2013