SA Weekend cover story: Chateau Tanunda owner John Geber on his plan to re-start the Barossa wine train
Chateau Tanunda owner John Geber wants to re-start the Barossa wine train. Local MP Stephan Knoll put a stop to that and the battle has become very personal.
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John Geber is almost lost for words. This is the first time I’ve met him, but it strikes me this must be an unusual occurrence. Geber, who owns the remarkable Chateau Tanunda in the Barossa Valley, has more than a touch of flamboyance about him. Today, with his woollen scarf wrapped around his neck and his trimmed white moustache, he carries something of the air of a RAF World War II fighter pilot. Possibly the fact that we are in Geber’s brown 1980 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow II adds to this impression.
We have just rumbled over Chateau Tanunda’s cobblestoned driveway and have taken a right turn onto Murray St. Within a couple of hundred metres we are passing the electorate office of local MP Stephan Knoll. The 66-year-old Geber has no loss of vocabulary when it comes to Knoll. He makes it pretty clear he is no fan of the former transport minister. Two days earlier, Geber had planted an electronic sign outside Knoll’s office which read: “MP Stephan ‘Knoddy’ Knoll must go’’.
“That sign looked good for a while,” Geber laughs. “He nearly had a heart attack old Knoddy. Couldn’t happen to a better guy.”
Geber says Barossa Mayor Bim Lange rang him. Unhappy. He agreed to take it down. He knew he had made his point. It was a feeling reinforced when a member of the Liberal government contacted him to volunteer to act as an emissary to help sort out Geber’s problems.
The reason behind the crack at Knoll was Geber’s long, expensive and so far fruitless attempts to restart the Barossa wine train.
Another few hundred metres down the road from Knoll’s electorate office is when Geber loses the power of speech. We pass signs warning of roadworks. Speed limit signs are in place. There are workers everywhere. The sound of chainsaws and heavy machinery at work fills the air. And a cut-up slice of railway line is being lifted onto the back of a truck.
Geber’s silence is pockmarked with four or five strangulated attempts to start a sentence and comes to an end with a plaintive plea. “If you could just get it in your brain to say why,” he says.
The reason for his distress is that a 120m section of the railway track is being removed to allow a giant roundabout to be built at Kroemer’s Crossing, just outside of Tanunda. The destruction of the line has put, at the least, a temporary crimp on Geber’s plans to restart the Barossa wine train, which last ran in 2003. His grand idea was to run the train from Gawler, through Lyndoch and Tanunda, all the way up to the Penfolds cellar door just outside Nurioopta, a trip of around 33km.
Geber’s power of speech makes a comeback as the Rolls-Royce picks up pace as we move beyond the roundabout. On the other side of the roundabout, the line resumes its course to Angaston, even though it’s never likely to again feel the weight of a train.
“There was no reason at all for them to pull the line up,” Geber says in a tone of voice that suggests the world has gone completely bonkers. “Absolutely no reason.” He believes with a bit more imagination it wouldn’t have been too hard to design a roundabout that would have left the track, and his dreams, intact. He is right about that but it would have added another three quarters of a million dollars to its $6 million budget.
Not that he has given up. He still has plans to run a train from Gawler to Tanunda. He owns the Tanunda railway station that sits by the Chateau, as well as the train he needs. But that again will be a fight. A fight that has already cost him $200,000 in legal fees as he fought the government over its decision to pull up the railway track. He finally lost that argument in the Supreme Court in July.
But what’s annoyed him more than the decision is the way it happened. He feels excluded by the Liberal Party, and in particular his local MP Knoll.
“In six years he (Knoll) has never visited me once to discuss anything. I was quite a strong supporter of the Liberal Party. I’m not any more,” Geber says, even though he joined recently so he could attend a branch meeting just to eyeball his nemesis. That effort also ended badly when he was asked to leave the meeting.
Geber says he doesn’t go looking for fights but, then again, he also gives the impression he quite enjoys a barney.
“A bit of a scrap outside the grandstand at the Sydney Cricket Ground,” is how he describes it with a laugh.
Part of Geber’s frustration is that he feels he has been treated with disdain, and that he deserved more respect as someone who has spent almost $20 million refurbishing Chateau Tanunda over more than 20 years.
Meeting requests, he says, have been turned down or ignored. Not just by Knoll but by Premier, and Tourism Minister, Steven Marshall. A spokeswoman for the Premier says Mr Geber met with the “relevant minister”.
Mr Geber disputes any such meeting happened. He says he met Knoll in 2018 and had a very brief chat with him at the Tanunda Show in March. “Knoddy refused to meet with us or discuss the roundabout at all – and certainly not the train.” Geber says he made “five formal requests” for meetings, which were all declined.
In a statement to SAWeekend, Knoll said: “I have met with Mr Geber a number of times when we were in Opposition, as well as a number of times since becoming Minister to help progress this issue.” He says he offered support to move the train to the Barossa in 2018 from Port Adelaide but the offer was refused.
The demise of the train, has meant two potential investors he was courting to build a $30 million five-star hotel on the grounds of the Chateau have walked away. That plan is now dead.
“It’s more than a lack of respect, it’s arrogance,” Geber says. “I don’t think we are exactly small here, we are in the top 20 wine companies in the country.”
One potential investor, he says, was the Canadian billionaire David Gilmour. Gilmour founded Fiji Water, helped start the Southern Pacific Hotel group and made a fortune at Barrick Gold, the world’s biggest gold miner. “He wanted to come in and build a hotel on this piece of property.
“Why? Because a hotel has to have a special angle. He had the wine, and the train he thought was amazing,” Geber says.
Gilmour wrote to the Premier, asking to look again at the decision to tear up the rail line.
“Well, he didn’t get a letter back from Marshall, he got a letter back from Knoddy Knoll. The most insulting letter I have ever read,” Geber says. Gilmour walked away, telling Geber he didn’t “fight Town Hall”.
Geber, though, still has his grand dream. He has plans to build a smaller hotel and an education centre in the winery’s bond store.
He wants to produce a “100-point wine”, he believes Chateau Tanunda can become the Australian equivalent of France’s “first growth” wineries. In France, “first growth” wineries are the five Bordeaux wineries with the finest reputations – Lafite Rothschild, Mouton Rothschild, Haut-Brion, Latour and Margaux.
“There are five wine regions that are really important in the world,” Geber says. “Three from the old world, Burgundy, Tuscany and Bordeaux. Two from the new world sit right at the top. One is Napa, the other is Barossa.”
Geber has owned the 130-year-old Chateau for 22 years after stumbling across the abandoned and dilapidated building on a morning bike ride. Geber had already started his own successful wine labels in NSW before finding Chateau Tanunda, but his background was in marketing and sales.
He grew up in South Africa in the apartheid era. He says he “could not ask for a better upbringing” but knows that wasn’t the case for everyone. “It was a beautiful place if you were a white guy. If you were a black guy I think it was a whole other story.”
Geber studied business and law at Pietermaritzburg before heading to Switzerland for a year. In Switzerland he met his wife Evelyne and broke his knee while skiing. While recuperating from his injury, he applied for a job as an international trainee with tobacco conglomerate RJ Reynolds and moved to Germany. In the late 1970s, at the age of 27, he was running Camel cigarettes in New York.
“That was big time. Big business. The funny thing is I don’t smoke, but the training on marketing, on the ad agencies in New York, flying corporate jets, it was such an eye opener,” he says.
Next was Sydney and Australia, where he became the company’s marketing director. But after RJ Reynolds disbanded its Australian operations, on Geber’s suggestion, he declined their offer to return to Europe. The South African was living in Manly, liked the sun on his back and was even playing cricket again.
He found a job at Stimorol chewing gum, but it wasn’t a big enough job and decided to grow the company. He investigated other options and came up with tea. He took over the Tetley brand and developed the round tea bag. Tetley went from 2 per cent of the Australian tea market to 32 per cent. It’s an innovation he still ranks as his finest.
When the company was sold he looked at wine. He came up with two brands. Kangaroo Ridge and Naturally Australian. He says Kangaroo Ridge was a battle of perseverance. He travelled to Europe with it for 18 months and “started to doubt myself” before making a sale.
At its height it would sell around 800,000 cases a year, mostly into continental Europe. Geber sold a majority stake in Kangaroo Ridge in 2002 to Foster’s, for a price reported to be around $10 million. It helped him to pay off the debt incurred buying the Chateau.
Geber was still based in NSW but was in Tanunda meeting a Belgian buyer when his morning bike ride took him past the Chateau. He had never heard of the place, it was missing parts of its roof and its windows were either smashed or boarded up. Back then it was owned by the now-extinct Southcorp group, which counted Penfolds among its brands. But something about it appealed. There was a for sale sign with a phone number, so Geber rang it. He bought it the next day, without stepping inside to have a look.
He then rang Evelyne to tell her he had just bought a chateau.
Bit by bit Geber rebuilt the Chateau. The first thing he did was to spend $250,000 fixing the roof. He says he has done it slowly because he never had enough money to do it all at once. But his dreams just keep getting bigger.
He says he has knocked back offers of more than $50 million to sell the place because he and his family are so invested in it.
“That is why I get the title drongo of the decade,” he says.
Geber now plans to spend $4 million on a smaller 50-room hotel and tourism centre. He will spend another $2 million renovating the Bluebird train cars he currently has in storage at the Port Adelaide National Railway Museum.
What he doesn’t want to do is spend money on fixing up the rail line between Tanunda and Gawler.
“I said I am not going to fix the line, I didn’t screw it up,” he says.
The line is under a long-term lease until 2047 to a company called OneRail, but the track hasn’t been used since 2014. In August last year, when he was still transport minister, Stephan Knoll called for expressions of interest on future use of the line and OneRail said it was willing to give up its lease if an alternative could be found. Five submissions were made, but all were deemed unworthy.
In a press release in January, announcing the decision, Knoll said all proposals would impose “significant costs on South Australian taxpayers”.
“The last time passenger train services operated in the Barossa was 1969 – the same year as the first moon landing. The reason this passenger service was discontinued and has not been reinstated since is because it just doesn’t stack up and the cost to run it is too prohibitive.”
This week, Knoll maintained that while he supported the idea of a “private commercial tourism venture” on the track, Geber was asking for “substantial support from the State Government”.
Geber denies that is the case and maintains his project doesn’t need any taxpayer funds to run the train. He believes the track can be fixed up to an adequate standard for a tourist train for around $1.2 million – which OneRail would be obliged to pay – and beyond that he is offering to pay rent and meet upkeep costs.
“If we get that line working, it can be shovel ready within the next year. I have said that to the government,” he says. But the State Government has never asked OneRail to repair the line.
Geber’s highly public stance – the signs, joining the party then being thrown out of a meeting – has finally attracted some government attention. Perhaps, the timing suits him as well. Knoll is now out of Cabinet, having resigned after paying back almost $30,000 in travel expenses and being subject to an ICAC inquiry.
In addition, a redrawing of the state’s electoral map has meant his once safe seat of Schubert is now almost marginal and he could lose it to Labor MP Tony Piccolo who is moving from the neighbouring seat of Light. There are also rumours a strong independent, with a long family history in Barossa, is gearing up to run.
So there is some irony in the fact that Piccolo also spoke out against the wine train all the way back in 2012. Another indication of how long Geber has been trying to get it up and rolling.
In speaking to a motion in parliament condemning the then Labor government for not backing the idea Piccolo, sounding very much like Knoll, said that “the ball is in the court of Mr Geber to submit a feasibility study that would incorporate a proven and compelling business case for a Barossa Wine Train service”.
That motion was moved by Knoll’s predecessor, long- serving Ivan Venning, who has long campaigned for the Barossa wine train to restart. He unsuccessfully lobbied the Labor government and says he understands Geber’s frustrations.
He believes there is no downside for the government in giving its approval, asking OneRail to repair the track and says with Australians now looking more than ever to holiday within the country because of COVID, it would be a great attraction.
“They should say ‘go for it’ but we will not bail you out,” Venning says.
Barossa Valley mayor Bim Lange is also keen, even though he advised Geber to take down his ‘Knoddy’ Knoll sign. “In my view it was inappropriate,” he says.
Former tourism minister David Ridgway contacted Geber on the weekend his signs were on display in Tanunda and offered to act as a go-between for the two parties. Ridgway says he has told Premier Marshall, Knoll and new Transport Minister Corey Wingard of his intent. Ridgway is also a believer that there is a case to restart the train.
“I think it would add to the beautiful Barossa Valley,” says Ridgway, who is taking a senior public servant to meet Geber so he can again deliver his case.
Back in the Rolls, we slide by Knoll’s office and make our way back to the Chateau. But just before we reach the cobblestones again, Geber takes a sharp right turn and bumps onto a dirt road that leads up to the Tanunda train station.
He wants to have one last go at delivering his vision. He points to the site where the council has its own plans to build something new, then to the Tanunda Club which is just on our right.
As we inch towards the station, the Chateau comes into view.
“I can see it,” he says, with a hint of what might be desperation in his voice.
He takes a hand off the wheel and with a sweep of the arm points it all out.
“There’s the cultural centre, the hub, the creative centre. This will be the main hotel. Imagine that working and hotel guests get on the train here, major tourism activity. A company could hire the train. Weddings. I can see it in my mind’s eye.”