John Gebran with horses Buddy (roan coat) and Dasher, with Sooley Dam in the distance. The property has Angus cattle, alpacas, pigs, six horses including a two-year-old Clydesdale stallion and ponies, a donkey, chickens, geese, peacocks, turkeys and sheep. Photos: John Thistleton.
When father-and-son restaurateurs from Sydney bought the Kingsdale Winery just north of Goulburn in 2000, many of their interests came with them.
A couple of years later, John Gebran, who established the famous Gebran Lebanese Cuisine in Sydney, changed his plans and considered selling Kingsdale.
But by this stage, his son John had other ideas. He had established a substantial garden, surrounded himself with farm animals and built elaborate enclosures for his extraordinary collection of exotic birds. He wasn’t going anywhere and bought the winery from his father.
“I brought my exotic parrots from Sydney and grew my collection and I cannot take that set-up back with me to Sydney,” he said. “I didn’t want to sell my birds, I have had them for years. It’s a large collection and it takes years to collect those birds.”
They include two pairs of striking macaws, African greys and yellow-crowned and double-yellow Amazons. They all talk and sing superbly. Winery visitors love them, sometimes showing more interest in their behaviour and appearance than the wine and vineyard.
Widely considered the smartest parrot species, the African greys make excellent pets. Among all his birds, African grey Nina is John’s best friend.
Protecting them with extra layers of Colorbond and insulated nesting boxes from Goulburn’s cold weather, John is looking forward to when they’re old enough to begin breeding.
By Christmas time, he plans to open a new restaurant at Kingsdale, and will offer food unlike any other served in Goulburn today.
“I’m a cook, just as good as a chef but I’m not a chef,” he said. “Cooking is in our blood, my whole family loves to cook. It is a good business to be in if you love food.”
John ran his father’s Italian restaurant in Sydney’s Padstow, Bongusto, which they sold to buy the winery.
For his new restaurant, he is planning Australian “homey food”, including lamb shoulders and beef cheeks. It will be warm, comfort food with lots of his home-grown produce. He is growing pumpkin, eggplants, tomatoes and cauliflower, and has figs, apricots and pear trees.
John Gebran with bottles of vintage shiraz and merlot from Kingsdale Wines.
“We will expand the garden tenfold, and the chefs will be in the garden as well as the kitchen so they can know their produce off by heart,” he said. “They’ll know what’s in season and the menu will change, depending on the season.”
John learned to grow vegetables thanks to his grandparents on either side of the family in Sydney.
“Every time we went there they were in the garden, so we helped them out and became attached to the garden, pretty much,” he said. “Nothing like fresh produce from the garden.”
These days he is testing sugar levels in the vineyard’s grapes, waiting for them to reach a certain percentage to signal the start of harvest, which will begin any day now and take two weeks to complete.
About 40 per cent of the vineyard is given over to shiraz grapes, which are thriving in the limestone soil. The vineyard also has merlot, Malbec, semillon, chardonnay and sauvignon blanc grapes.
“We have had a lot of sunny weather and warm temperatures that ripen the grapes really well,” he said. “We haven’t had much rain, which is really good.”
It’s not just the customers who like to unwind at Kingsdale Wines. Photo: Kingsdale Wines/Facebook.
Self-taught in the vineyard, his lessons came quickly and emphatically. In 2020, one of the wettest years in Australia for vignerons, the grapes suffered. In the years before John and his father arrived, previous owners had harvested between 20 and 30 tonnes; the Gebrans picked three tonnes in their first, rain-soaked year.
This year is much better, and his techniques are more refined.
“We stopped netting after our first season, realising how time-consuming and damaging this was to the vines,” John said. “The vines grow through the nets and when you take the nets off, they pull the vines out. And birds get stuck in there.”
They now rely on bird-scaring devices, including speakers emitting bird of prey calls, a green laser that fires random beams, and a gas cannon that noisily blasts out bursts of air.
The harvested grapes will be delivered to Greg Gallagher of Gallagher Wines at Jeir, near Murrumbateman. Greg was the Kingsdale winemaker before the property changed hands and continues today.
The Kingsdale cellar door is the best place to buy their wine. It can be found online; at information centres in Mittagong, Goulburn and Crookwell; IGA Crookwell; Goulburn Workers Club; and their restaurant in Sydney.
Kingsdale Wines is located at 745 Crookwell Road, Goulburn. They’re open on Saturdays and Sundays from 11 am until 5 pm. Check out their website and Facebook page for more information.
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