The O'Reilly Family
The vineyard is owned and operated by the O'Reilly family, famous for providing legendary hospitality in the area for over 80 years. O'Reilly's Story
The Vineyard
O'Reilly's Canungra Valley Vineyards is one of the premium boutique cellar doors in South East Queensland. Located in the peaceful Canungra Valley, in the Gold Coast Hinterland, we are a scenic 60 minute drive south of Brisbane and 35 minutes drive west of the Gold Coast. This area is one of Queensland's newly emerging wine growing regions. Canungra Valley soil is well suited to grapes, as the rich river loam has built up over centuries by the flooding creek and a naturally occuring layer of gravel a metre under the surface allows for excellent drainage.
Eight of the fifteen acres of land belonging to the Vineyard are 'under vine', consisting of 4,000 vines of primarily Chambourcin and Semillon grape.
Chambourcin is a subtropical grape variety that is ideally suited to our climate here in South East Queensland. Chambourcin produces good-quality, ruby-colored wines that have a reasonably full, slightly herbaceous flavour and aroma. This grape is used to produce our lush sparkling red, still red wine and port.
Semillon is a white wine variety often grown in the Hunter Valley. This grape variety makes a dry, grassy style of white wine. The crop is harvested in February, before the tradtional wet season. The semillon grapes turn from a pale green colour to a golden yellow before ripening.
Local Canungra residents planted these vines in November 1998.
With a lot of smiles and many friends, we harvested our first crop in February 2000 with our first wines becoming available in August later that year.
Since then our wines have been recognised with a number of awards both nationally and internationally.
When the vineyards were first established, we spent a number of weeks trying to define our mission for the vineyards. After much laughter and a few bottles of wine later, we noticed that we had talked a lot about the simple pleasures of life. Good wine, good food, good friends and generous hospitality in beautiful surroundings.
So our mission became 'Celebrating the Simple Pleasures of Life'... the feeling you get when driving down the white gravel Vineyard drive and lazing on the cool homestead verahdah, you certainly get the feeling that life is indeed great!
Download the O'Reilly's Canungra Valley Vineyards brochure (2084KB).
The Homestead
The heart of O'Reilly's Canungra Valley Vineyards is a grand Queensland homestead, 'Killowen', filled with people passionate about fine wine and food.
This fine example of early Queensland architecture was built in 1858 by the Devine family in Warwick. It was moved to its present position in 1989. Many hours of restoration and care went into bringing the house back to its former glory. Many of the antiques you see in the house today were originally in the house, and have also been restored.
The house also has a resident ghost, a member of the Devine family who owned the house for over sixty five years. There is a picture of her above the bar, standing on the verandah. The story goes that when the picture was taken she was standing next to the photographer with her daughter. She died a couple of months later and her image appeared in the photo when it was later developed. Many of the present staff are convinced she made the move with the house from Warwick. Sugar bowls have mysteriously moved, pictures leapt from walls and coffee pots smashed.
O'Reilly's Canungra Valley Vineyards is open seven days from 10:00am - 4:30pm daily.
