Assmanshausen Winery is a heritage-listed former winery at Serisier Road, Toolburra, Southern Downs Region, Queensland, Australia. It was built from to . It is also known as Toolburra Vineyards. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 6 January 1999.
History
Assmanshausen Vineyard at Sandy Creek, near Warwick was established in the 1860s by German immigrants Jacob and Elisabetha Kircher, who were also among the first in the district to establish commercial wine production on a substantial scale. In the late 19th century, Assmanshausen's award-winning wines were known throughout southern Queensland, and the winery was a popular attraction for visitors to the Warwick district.
Jacob and Elisabetha Kircher were early settlers on the southern Darling Downs, arriving at Moreton Bay in March 1855. Jacob gained employment as a gardener at Canning Downs Homestead near Warwick, when the principal stations on the southern Downs had extensive orchards and gardens. About 1857 the Kirchers left Canning Downs, Jacob working as a bushman on Rosenthal station and at various other activities, before taking up farming in the early 1860s. In December 1861 Kircher purchased adjoining portions 238 () and 239 (), near Sandy Creek, about northwest of Warwick, for . The Kirchers were among the earliest farmers in the district. They fenced and cleared their land and experimented firstly with wheat, but after successive failures turned to vine growing, the first 1,000 vines being planted . By 1870 they had established Assmanshausen Winery - named after a celebrated Assmannshausen wine-producing district on the Rhine.
Viticulture and wine production in the Warwick district was pioneered in the mid-19th century by principally German immigrants. By 1861, Germans formed 9.75% (217 persons) of the population of the towns of Warwick, Allora, Leyburn and the rural portion of the Warwick police district. Like the Kirchers, most were farmers sponsored in the 1850s by southern Darling Downs squatters. Most of those who pioneered the wine industry on the southern Downs took up selections on the Warwick Reserve or Warwick Agricultural Reserve in the 1860s. By the mid- 1870s a number of vineyards had been established along Sandy Creek, at Swan and Deuchar's Creek, and at the Jew's Retreat on Glengallan land. Only one vigneron relied solely on the vineyard as a source of income; most also grew wheat, maize and lucerne or had established orchards, and none of the vineyards exceeded . All made wine on the premises, and all had constructed cellars (some in stone, often two- storeyed and partly underground) in which the wine was both made and stored.
By 1876 Assmanshausen was the principal vineyard and winery in the Warwick district, with under vines. Older plantings included both white (verdelho, muscadine and salvina) and red (black Spanish and Mataro) grapes, but more recent plantings were reds only: Mataro and Hermitage. Most of the vines were trellised, the newer ones planted about apart, and Kircher had invented a horse-drawn cultivator which could weed and turn the soil close to the vines while the horse walked at a sufficient distance to prevent vine damage from the traces. Kircher was producing unfortified wines [dry wines made without the addition of cane sugar or spirits], and had already won prizes at the Warwick and Brisbane exhibitions. At this period the Assmanshausen winery comprised a dressed stone building of 3 flats: an underground cellar; a ground-level workroom; and a steeply-pitched shingled roof containing an attic space. The attic was ventilated by 12 air shafts fitted with shutters on the inside, ensuring that the temperature in the attic was cooler than that of the ground floor. There were also 6 air shafts in the cellar. These shafts sloped through the stone walls to the surface of the ground. Kircher had devised his own system of wine production: the press was located in the ground floor workroom; from here the must (unfermented grape juice) was suction-pumped through pipes up to the attic, where it was fermented in 500 and vats before being fed through more pipes to the underground cellar, where it matured in wooden butts.