Our Story : Peter Brueckner

Peter Brueckner originally arrived from Vienna, Austria during the early 1970s to learn English and to gain overseas experiences. On returning to Austria, it only took a couple of years to realise that his future and destiny lay in Australia.

Peter’s career has been “global logistics” for all his working life and in 1989, he eventually established his own business, POWERHOUSE LOGISTICS PTY. LTD. Establishing offices in Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth, Sydney, Hong Kong and China, they offer many services including import/export, air freight/sea freight, customs brokerage and consultancy, cartage and warehousing, animal transport, project cargo, 3PL and the list goes on.

During 2005 Peter literally stumbled across an opportunity to purchase a beautiful 40 acre property in Howes Valley (upper Hunter area NSW) which already happened to have 17 acres under vines (Semillon, Chardonnay, Verdelho, Shiraz and Merlot). Peter maintained the “Splitrock” name because of the very large split-rock which overlooks the entire property from the North and his newly found passion became wine growing, not just wine consuming.

Vine pruning and grape picking is all done by hand instead of the more economical machine harvesting. “This helps to ensure that wine production is maintained at the highest quality on an ongoing and reliable basis, essential to a boutique winery,” says Peter. This also helps winemakers ensure that only the minimum amount of sulphur is used in production instead of the allowed 250ppm. It is believed that sulphur is the culprit for many bad hangovers, headaches, migraines.

With the loss of his entire 2008 harvest, Peter very quickly realised that the success of the vineyard very much depended on the co-operation of nature and the “give and take” associated with living off the land. This loss strongly reinforced one of his core principles which is “give in order to receive”.