Square Route: d’Arenberg’s Chester Osborn.

With architectural marvel The Cube, d’Arenberg winery in South Australia is taking the cellar door experience into the 21st century.

The colourful Chester Osborn, chief winemaker at d’Arenberg in McLaren Vale, South Australia.

Though he’s the fourth generation at the helm of one of Australia’s greatest winemaking dynasties, d’Arenberg, Chester Osborn still considers his craft to be a bit of a puzzle. As far back as the 1980s, he was struck by its similarities to a Rubik’s Cube — and an idea began to ferment in the eccentric winemaker’s mind.

Known for his love of contemporary art and flamboyant attire, Chester is a far more colourful character than his father d’Arry, a sensible salt-of-the-earth type who initially thought his son’s idea for a five-storey, space-age terabit plonked smack in the centre of the family’s McLaren Vale property was utter folly.

When Chester first presented a model to his dad and fellow boardmembers in 2003, “My father was very nervous about spending a heap of money on a giant glass cube in the vineyard,” he says. “He didn’t think it was a very attractive building at all… he was quite anti, and my uncle didn’t like it either. It took a lot of years to get them convinced that it was a good idea.”

The legendary d’Arry Osborn, who was born on the property in 1926.

Over a glass of d’Arenberg’s signature shiraz, The Dead Arm, Chester explains, “I’ve always respected my father a lot. We’ve always got on extremely well in business together and he just needed to see my thinking justified. He was brought up during the Second World War, he only went to school for seven or eight years and started working for the company when he was 15 because it was really hard times in the 1940s.”

In that era, Chester says, “You never spent money, and in my father’s view, the success of the company could be gauged by whether you had debt or not — if you have debt, business is going really badly. Whereas my mother, who was more of an entrepreneurial sort of person, she said that if you make money then you should invest as much as you can in the business, if you can turn that investment into more money, so long as you’re not putting the company at risk.”

Costing millions more to construct than originally budgeted, the Cube has become a major tourist attraction and been awarded for its innovative design.

Chester says during his time running d’Arenberg, he’s been guided by his mother’s philosophy. “Building the company up and making sure that I could justify any decisions through a cost-benefit analysis. That’s how I justified building The Cube,” he says. “And eventually, my father said, ‘Alright, if you believe in it, let’s do it,’ and luckily everything we’ve done has worked out the way that I’d planned. It seems to be successful.”

Indeed, though the imposing glass and steel structure ended up far exceeding initial budget estimates, with a final cost of AU$15 million, up to 1,000 people visit The Cube each day. Containing numerous tasting rooms and bars, a highly regarded fine-dining restaurant, an art gallery and audiovisual / sensory experiential spaces, it has fast become one of South Australia’s top tourist attractions.  

The winery boasts two outstanding restaurants: Asian-influenced Singapore Circus (pictured here) and d'Arry's Verandah, in the property’s 19th century homestead.

Traversing The Cube’s various remarkable spaces, Chester believes, not only “says a lot about d’Arenberg’s history, telling a story that is artistic and fun and creative and memorable,” it also heightens the senses, “so that when you get into the tasting room, everything tastes better.”

Providing customers with a memorable experience pays dividends from a sales point of view, too. “Apparently when people visit your winery, over the following year, they’ll buy four times as much of your wine as they would’ve otherwise. When they go out, they buy your wine again because they have good memories and it’s a conversation starter: ‘Oh God, yeah, we visited d’Arenberg, it was really quirky, I liked that place.’”

A delicious dish of seared scallops (with damn fine matching wines, naturally) at d'Arry's Verandah.

Experiences are a vital part of the marketing mix today, not least in wine, says Chester. “People are demanding experiences that go beyond just a rolling up at a tasting room and having a glass of wine. They actually want to learn something.”

At The Cube, d’Arenberg offers an array of tasting and blending workshops that will leave you more vino-savvy, he explains. “Here, you can do a Dead Arm vertical tasting or you can blend your own version of the Dead Arm, or you can go right back to the basics and just to do a varietal tasting and we’ll just teach you what different varieties of grape taste like, where they come from in the world and what sort of wines they make here. Or a shiraz theme, you can just look at all our different shiraz if you want. We get up to 100 people a day doing these sorts of tastings.”

A tasting of the iconic Dead Arm shiraz in The Cube. (All images courtesy of d’Arenberg)

 The visual impact The Cube possesses means it is naturally a big hit on social media. It’s also a winner with arbiters of taste. Designed by Nick Salvati of ADS Architects, in 2018 The Cube won a Good Design Award — the most prestigious honour for design innovation in Australia — in the architecture category. Nevertheless, despite its critical, popular and commercial success, Chester’s dad d’Arry still gazes at the extraordinary structure with a look of disbelief.

Chester reckons he could be in for another generational clash when his own child enters the business. “My youngest daughter is deadly serious about being a winemaker, deadly keen. She’s quite a strong-minded girl and very quirky and creative. She’s probably a lot like what I was, when I was younger, strong willed,” he says. “It’ll be interesting to see what happens.”

Postscript: Francis d’Arenberg “d’Arry” Osborn passed away in December 2022, at the ripe old age of 95. Joining the family business as a 16-year-old in 1942, d’Arry oversaw more than 70 consecutive vintages at the vineyard, introduced the signature red stripe branding in 1959, and grew d’Arenberg into one of Australia’s most successful and internationally respected wineries.

This article was first published in Robb Report Singapore, October 2018.