Media

Media enquiries

Welcome to the media section of the Ballandean Estate Wines website. We welcome your ongoing support, and are always happy to arrange famil visits for travel writers and journalists.

You'll find our most recent media releases on our News page. Like to join our media distribution list? Please email your contact details to info@ballandeanestate.com.

We have an abundance of stories, video footage and imagery to share. If you have a media enquiry, please contact Brooke Billett, Marketing & Publicity Manager. She can arrange your interview, a famil visit, and support you with content.

Email media enquiry Call Brooke 0422 332 985

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Brooke Billett (L) and Robyn Puglisi-Henderson (R) like to work in the Barrelroom Wine Lounge.

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Published media highlights

Ballandean Estate welcomes new winemaker to family business

Winetitles, published 24 January 2023

When planting, growers such as Leeanne Puglisi-Gangemi from Ballandean Estate Wines in the Granite Belt in Queensland, anticipated the needs of future generations. She said with a changing climate, choosing varieties was difficult when the vines could be in the ground for decades.

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Australian wine industry future-proofed with plans to store varieties in high security labs

ABC Rural, Megan Hughes, published 24 Nov 2022

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Ballandean Estate farewells winemaker Dylan Rhymer

Winetitles, published 24 Aug 2022

“Dylan has underpinned Ballandean Estate’s industry accolades for almost a quarter of a century. He’s our longest-serving winemaker. We’ve survived drought, bushfires, hailstorms and floods – he’s family,” fourth generation vigneron Leeanne Puglisi-Gangemi said.

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Ballandean Estate open the Granite Belt’s first wine lounge

Winetitles, published 18 July 2022

Fourth-generation Ballandean estate vigneron Leeanne Puglisi-Gangemi said she has been wanting to open a wine lounge for years. The opening of ‘The Barrel Room’ marks the region’s first wine lounge and hopes to be a step forward for the region as a whole.

“We hope to provide a first-class, relaxed, extended tasting experience here. Visitors can sit back and indulge in fine wine and local produce from 9am to 5pm each day,” she said.

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Prestigious trophy honours Queensland's father of wine

Courier-Mail, published 25 Feb 2019

THE father of Queensland wine has a new feather to add to his cap. The Royal Queensland Wine Show (RQWS) has named its most prestigious award after Ballandean Estate Wines' Angelo Puglisi. Australia's first capital city wine show of the season will now award the Angelo Puglisi Grand Champion Wine of Show trophy. Mr Puglisi has worked in the Queensland wine industry for more than 50 years and he said it was an honour to have the Grand Champion trophy named after him.

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Ballandean Estate Winery releases 50th anniversary Shiraz

The Chronicle, published 23 March 2021

Ballandean Estate has proudly released its 50th Anniversary Opera Block Shiraz, a milestone for the Granite Belt, the Puglisi family and Queensland wine. Angelo and Mary Puglisi, pioneers of the wine industry in Queensland, celebrated their lifetime achievement at a degustation dinner earlier this month joined by family, friends, dignitaries, and business partners

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The godfather of the Queensland wine industry celebrates 50 years

Courier-Mail, published 3 November 2018 , extracts

Puglisi, 75, and I walk to the low paddock behind the house where it all began. The godfather of the Queensland wine industry places a gnarled hand over a gnarled vine and tells me how he and Mary, now 69, were featured on the front page of The Courier-Mail (July 20, 1974) when their second commercial vintage snared two gold medals at the Royal Queensland Wine Show. The front-page picture shows a suave young man with long sideburns in a mauve safari suit close to the woman who has never left his side since they married in 1968.

Angelo Puglisi says the taunts began the same day he planted his first vines and announced he was going to start a wine industry in Queensland. “When we planted the shiraz we were laughed at, scoffed at, Mary [my wife] and I,” Puglisi says. “They told us: ‘You’ve got to be joking. Who the hell drinks wine? Only wogs drink wine, we drink beer’. We got told that all the time.”

Puglisi was 25 when he and his brother Sam planted the shiraz, unaware of the triumphs and pitfalls that lay ahead. Before then, Angelo Puglisi and his Italian forebears had been orchardists, railway fettlers and land clearers who occasionally made wine from leftover table grapes such as muscatel, the sweet black grape, or waltham cross, the golden green fruit with the odd, elongated shape.

Today, Ballandean Estate produces 12 different grape varieties and the large cellar door on Sundown Road has become a major tourist attraction. (There are now 54 vineyards on the Granite Belt and nearly half have cellar doors.)

“It took a lot of hard work, but you don’t have to tell Italians how to work,” Puglisi says.

He swirls the shiraz from the 50-year-old vines in his glass and takes a sniff. The perfume of black fruits and white pepper billow from the glass.

“Wine hasn’t made me rich but it has made me happy,” he says.

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Media

Media enquiries

Friends of Ballandean

Published media highlights

Ballandean Estate welcomes new winemaker to family business

Australian wine industry future-proofed with plans to store varieties in high security labs

Ballandean Estate farewells winemaker Dylan Rhymer

Ballandean Estate open the Granite Belt’s first wine lounge

Prestigious trophy honours Queensland's father of wine

Ballandean Estate Winery releases 50th anniversary Shiraz

The godfather of the Queensland wine industry celebrates 50 years

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