Endeavour Group will sell Chapel Hill's vineyards and heritage cellar door in McLaren Vale, along with vineyards and cellar doors at Riddoch Coonawarra and Krondorf Barossa, in a fresh retreat from wine production that will reshape three of South Australia's better-known labels. The Chapel Hill cellar door is due to shut in late June, and a McLaren Vale bottling facility will close later this year.

The move is part of a plan to slash grape production by more than 80 per cent and cut the company's winery operations from seven sites to three. Endeavour will keep the Chapel Hill, Riddoch Coonawarra and Krondorf Barossa brands, but not the vineyards and cellar doors attached to them.

For Chapel Hill, the sale reaches into a site with a long local history. The property includes an ironstone chapel built in 1865 that now serves as a tasting room, a nearby chalet-style guest house and 40 hectares of vineyards. The first wines were made from grapes grown in the surrounding paddocks in 1975, and Chapel Hill chief winemaker Michael Fragos was named world winemaker of the year at the London International Wine and Spirit Competition in 2007.

Endeavour bought Chapel Hill in 2019 from Swiss billionaire Thomas Schmidheiny, but the brand is now one of several being kept while the physical wine assets are sold off. The company also said it would retain Dorrien Estate in the Barossa Valley as a strategically important asset, along with Cape Mentelle in the Margaret River, Isabel Estate in the Malborough region of New Zealand and Vinpac Angaston in the Barossa Valley.

Erin Leggat called the decision a huge disappointment, saying Chapel Hill is one of those icon brands for the region and that the move was a glaringly obvious sign of the state of the industry when one of the most profitable companies in the Australian beverage market is not making money. She said it reiterated calls for a lot more support from both state and federal governments, and warned the closures would bring considerable job losses that would be felt across businesses and the wider regional community.

The sale fits a broader shift inside Endeavour, which owns Dan Murphy's and BWS and more than 2,000 retail stores and hotels nationwide, away from production and toward retail. The company has not just trimmed vineyards; it has moved to simplify a wine footprint that once stretched across seven sites, leaving three holdings it still considers worth keeping. What remains unresolved is how much of the region's wine economy can absorb another round of cuts while the brands stay in one hand and the land in another.