Chateau Tanunda releases designs for $6m 48-room cultural education centre and accommodation in Barossa Valley
A new $6m cultural education centre with 48 rooms is planned at one of SA’s most well-known wineries – but a $31m five-star hotel development is on hold for a few years.
SA Business
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Chateau Tanunda is pushing ahead with plans for a 48-bedroom cultural and education centre in the Barossa Valley – but has placed plans for a larger, five-star hotel, on hold.
Owner John Geber says he will soon lodge heritage and building applications for a $6m centre, which would be incorporated into existing buildings on his Tanunda property.
His plans include building accommodation inside an existing Bond Stores building, and classrooms inside the main chateau.
“The times have changed dramatically,” Mr Geber said, referring to moves to put his wider, $31m hotel development plans to the side for a few years.
“But a quaint little project like this would work really well. The position of this place in the Barossa is so central in Tanunda.”
Under the project, guests could learn about viticulture and take part in cooking and taste appreciation classes.
Mr Geber is also not giving up on his plans to bring a wine train to the Barossa Valley.
He owns the three-carriage former Barossa Wine Train, a Bluebird, and is keen to use it to carry passengers around the region on a now-defunct railway line, resurrecting a service that finished in 2003.
Mr Geber wanted to use the train to service the area between Tanunda to Nuriootpa, but the plan was blocked by a Government decision to upgrade Kroemer’s Crossing in Tanunda with a roundabout.
He said he was now hoping to use the train to service the southern part of the valley – between Lyndoch and Tanunda – and would keep lobbying the Government and Opposition for access to the line.
“There’s a lot of work behind the scenes on it – it will be a fabulous thing for SA,” he said.
“If you have a hotel and a cultural education centre there, you are brining in a different audience. It doubles up that you can have a family in there – kids in one room and mum and dad in the other and then they go on the train.
Mr Geber said his plan for the accommodation stood with or without the train’s revival, but “I’d prefer to have the train with it”.
The State Government has maintained that an expression of interest process for projects to revive the rail corridor found none of the proposals warranted further development.
The Government has said a “prohibitive” amount of taxpayer money would be needed to revive the corridor.
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