The billionaire Vestey family is selling its Australian wine interests

The aristocratic Vestey family, once the second richest in the UK after the royal family, is selling its Australian wine interests including a leading Adelaide Hills winery.

The Lane Vineyard at Hahndorf is up for sale.

The aristocratic Vestey family, once the second richest in the UK after the royal family, is selling Adelaide Hills winery The Lane for bids in the vicinity of $20m.

The family was at one point the largest retailer of meat in the world and their poor treatment of Indigenous workers in the Northern Territory sparked the Gurindji Strike, led by Vincent Lingiari, later immortalised in the Paul Kelly song From Little Things Big Things Grow.

The family’s Guernsey-based investment vehicle, Tombette Ltd, is the sole shareholder of The Lane, which the family bought into in 2011 intending to grow the group’s business in Australia.

Executive vice-chair George Vestey said at the time that the group was reinvesting in Australia and planned to put together a group of four or five family-run wineries with strong brands, quality products and clear paths for growth.

The Lane, in the Adelaide Hills, is a premium white-focused winery, selling its heritage chardonnay and shiraz viognier at $120 a bottle, along with a range starting at $25 a bottle.

The Lane Vineyard’s chief executive, Jared Stringer.

The Vestey family is also selling its Delatite winery at Mansfield in Victoria.

The family’s fortune, estimated at more than $1bn, had its genesis in a cold storage firm founded by brothers William and Edmund Vestey in Liverpool in the 1890s.

As pioneers in the field of refrigeration they expanded throughout the UK, Russia, the Baltic States and Western Europe, and also expanded into China in the early 20th century.

The family established the Blue Star Line shipping company which it sold in 1998.

Vestey Holdings is headed up by George Vestey who is also a director of The Lane, and the family is close friends of the royal family,

The Lane has plans for a $10m luxury lodge and wellness centre which would include 20 villas and spa facilities adjacent to the cellar door. Those plans are expected to be submitted for council approval later this year.

The winery sells more than 50,000 cases of wine a year – well up on the less than 30,000 it was producing when the Vesteys bought it – and it has 42ha of vineyards and a 600 tonne “super premium” winery. It also has a highly awarded restaurant.

Originally published as The billionaire Vestey family is selling its Australian wine interests