Production Details

Director and Writer: Stephen Oliver
DOP: Ian Batt
Editor: Lawrie Silvestrin
Executive Producers Electric Pictures: Andrew Ogilvie & Andrea Quesnelle
Executive Producers Brook Lapping: Phil Craig

Documentary 1 x 57 minutes
An Electric Pictures and Brook Lapping Co-Production 2012

PLAY TRAILER

How a small group of enterprising Australian wine makers challenged the traditions of the world of wine, and won!

It’s the 1970s and Australian wine is a joke – not for drinking, as Monty Python put it, but for ‘laying down and avoiding’.  The idea that a wine made ‘Down Under’ could ever challenge the august products of Burgundy or Tuscany has wine buffs and snobby sommeliers sniggering into their tasting spoons. But little more than 40 years later, Australian winemaking is leading the world. London merchants sell more wine from Australia than any other country, while the chastened French wine industry reluctantly take note of how modern winemaking – and wine marketing – is really done.

Chateau Chunder is both a social history of wine and wine drinking and an in-depth examination of how a small group of enterprising Australian wine makers took on the world…and won, changing the way that wine is made and marketed.

With humour and insight, this documentary features winemakers, marketers, merchants, critics and drinkers including Bruce Tyrrell (Tyrell’s Wines), Robert Hill Smith (Yalumba), James Halliday and Max Allen (Australian wine critics), Oz Clarke and Jancis Robinson (UK wine critics), and Sir Les Patterson (Cultural Attaché to Australia, a comic creation of Barry Humphries).

Awards & Festivals

  • Selected for Food & Wine Screening at Napa Valley Film Festival 2012
  • Selected for Premiere Screening at Cinefest Oz Film Festival  2012

Production Details

Director and Writer: Stephen Oliver
DOP: Ian Batt
Editor: Lawrie Silvestrin
Executive Producers Electric Pictures: Andrew Ogilvie & Andrea Quesnelle
Executive Producers Brook Lapping: Phil Craig

Documentary 1 x 57 minutes
An Electric Pictures and Brook Lapping Co-Production 2012

PLAY TRAILER

How a small group of enterprising Australian wine makers challenged the traditions of the world of wine, and won!

It’s the 1970s and Australian wine is a joke – not for drinking, as Monty Python put it, but for ‘laying down and avoiding’.  The idea that a wine made ‘Down Under’ could ever challenge the august products of Burgundy or Tuscany has wine buffs and snobby sommeliers sniggering into their tasting spoons. But little more than 40 years later, Australian winemaking is leading the world. London merchants sell more wine from Australia than any other country, while the chastened French wine industry reluctantly take note of how modern winemaking – and wine marketing – is really done.

Chateau Chunder is both a social history of wine and wine drinking and an in-depth examination of how a small group of enterprising Australian wine makers took on the world…and won, changing the way that wine is made and marketed.

With humour and insight, this documentary features winemakers, marketers, merchants, critics and drinkers including Bruce Tyrrell (Tyrell’s Wines), Robert Hill Smith (Yalumba), James Halliday and Max Allen (Australian wine critics), Oz Clarke and Jancis Robinson (UK wine critics), and Sir Les Patterson (Cultural Attaché to Australia, a comic creation of Barry Humphries).

Awards & Festivals

  • Selected for Food & Wine Screening at Napa Valley Film Festival 2012
  • Selected for Premiere Screening at Cinefest Oz Film Festival  2012