About Aussie Wine Tours

Aussie Wine tours was founded in July 2001 by Peter Kane. At that time we traded as Golf’N’Grape Tours and Charters. We mainly conducted both wine and golf tours, being the preferred carrier for The Jack Newton Junior Golf Foundation.

In 2002 we changed our trading name to *AUSSIE WINE TOURS *as most people believed we only did golf tours. This fallacy was soon rectified by the change in trading name.

We started with a 22 seat coaster bus and soon found the need to purchase a second vehicle, Peter believed even in these early days that there were small groups that wanted a private exclusive type of wine tour and purchased a 10 seat Kia Pregio . This soon proved a vital corner stone to what AWT is today. In 2003 we purchased a second 22 seat coaster and were growing at a rate of knots.

In 2007 we sold the Kia as money and staff started to dictate proceedings but we soon realised that our small private wine tour groups [our niche market] was starting to re-emerge. We soon realised our mistakes and purchased 2 more small vehicles a Toyota Tarago [9 seats] and a Toyota Commuter [14 seats] to cater for our loyal supporters.

We then found out, much to our surprise that we had been featured in a book titled* “Australia’s Best Wine Tours”* this came as a shock as the author had never contacted us, let us know he was going to include us in the publication or had even been on our tour.

“A true tribute to our ability”

We promoted ourselves as the VIP wine tour specialist and again enlarged our fleet by purchasing 2 Holden Statesman’s and starting WINE COUNTRY HIRE CARS offering exclusive upmarket private wine tours for a maximum of 4 passengers. In late 2008 because of staff shortages we down sized our fleet and sold off our two smaller buses and kept the two 22 seat Coasters and the 2 Hire Cars. Between Peter, Gail, Garry and Ken we continued to operate a thriving tour operation that was blowing the opposition away but needed to grow, but we wanted quality not quantity.

In 2009 we were rocked that Garry had to retire and as Ken was also working as an assistant Wine maker we found ourselves short of suitable qualified staff. I then had to make a decision on the future of the business and also needed some time off to recuperate from a minor operation so I decided to sell off the buses and concentrate on the small private exclusive and boutique side of the business that we had spent so much time nurturing.

We combined AUSSIE WINE TOURS and WINE COUNTRY HIRE CARS into the one operation and now operate as *AUSSIE WINE TOURS *using our luxury hire car fleet doing *private wine tours *and airport transfers for a maximum of 4 guests. So if you are interested in a private or romantic, knowledgeable wine tour with the total flexibility of whatever you want but still with the same AUSSIE flair and expertise you can give us a call.