Tony Smith awarded Life Membership at Mount Barker Wine Producers

Tony Smith will be awarded life membership of Mount Barker Wine Producers Association on 25th May on ‘national wine day’, celebrating his career pioneering a new wine region and the local industry.

Tony Smith, formally of Plantagenet Wines, in 1973 was a founding member and first president of the Lower Great Southern Wine Growers Assoc which became the Mount Barker Wine Producers Assoc. Tony helped develop the wine industry to what it is today. Tony helped to form the Mount Barker Wine Show, now known as the Wine Show of Western Australia.

Tony holds an OBE for his work in the wine industry and developing the Great Southern wine industry, and was part of the group that officially recognised the Great Southern regionally for Wine Australia and the five sub regions Mount Barker, Porongurup, Frankland, Albany, and Denmark.
Tony as general manager of Plantagenet Wines was the first to bring a technically trained winemaker to the region and brought new innovation to the winery as the industry involved.

“One of my favourite stories about Tony is when he brought the old stainless-steel tanks from the whaling station when it shut down in 1978”, says Galafrey Wines vice president Kim Tyrer. “Hosing out all the oil and fat making it clean and ready for wine. Stainless steel was very innovative in the winery those days and to come from another local industry that closed down shows the ingenuity and hard work of those pioneering days.”

Other Mount Barker Wine Producers Assoc. Life Members include Betty Quick, formally of Forrest Hill, and Ian Tyrer of Galafrey Wines.

 

James Halliday (left) and Tony Smith (right)