Family-Owned Urban Winery in Melbourne
for Premium Quality Wines

Beckingham Wines is a family owned urban winery in Moorabbin, VIC.

Find out more about our range of high-quality wines by contacting our team today and see how our passionate winemakers use the unique landscape and climate to produce exceptional wines.

Winery Walkthrough

Discover Our

Family-Owned Winery

Beckingham Wines is a family-owned, urban winery.

We are passionate about our winemaking. We source grapes from trusted growers also passionate about wine, because great grapes are needed to make great wine.

At the winery, we crush, ferment, mature and finally bottle our range of sparkling, whites, reds and fortified wines. You are welcome to visit us most weekends.

Peter Beckingham – Chief Winemaker and passionate chemical engineer. Peter brings state of the art technology to winemaking such as reverse osmosis .

Ann Beckingham – Quality Assurance manager. Ann assists with the finishing steps of each wine.

Our Wines

Family-Owned Since Day One

Our family combines winemaking expertise, innovation and quality assurance to produce wines customers can enjoy with confidence.

Our History

It all started in 1992. My wife, Ann gave me a winemaking course at Boxhill TAFE for my 40th birthday. The lecturer was mates with the Bianchet family who had a winery in Lilydale so I ended up working (for free) in the 1992 vintage at Bianchet. I took some grapes home and had a shot.

By the age of 40 I was used to drinking some pretty nice wines so I wasn’t sure I could make something that I was prepared to drink. This thought had prevented me from trying to make wine. But the process seemed to be straightforward. (See video clip).

It didn’t turn out as well as expected but there was sufficient promise to have another go in 1993. 1993 was a brilliant year in the Yarra valley. The shiraz and cabernet and sparkling just made themselves in spite of interference from me. I made a barrel (225L) of each and they were just great. And 20 years later they were still wonderful.

Had this not been the case I would have found a different passion to throw
myself at.

First Vintage 1992

My mates thought the wine was pretty good not to mention cheap, so by 1997 I had 15 mates helping. The winemaking equipment filled the basement under the house, the garage and much of the driveway. (see video Pressing in the driveway).

1997 was a watershed year. Red grapes were scarce. (for amateurs like me at least). I had recently met Sam Plunkett (of Plunkett wines) and he said I could glean his vineyards. The mechanical harvester typically left 10% of the fruit behind. Sounded great. What he didn’t explain was that it was 10% of each bunch not 10% of the bunches. Anyway an enthusiastic troupe of pickers set off at 5am each day for a long hike up to the Strathbogie ranges where we picked all day and returned to Brighton only to crush grapes in the drive in the dark. In all we picked a couple of tonnes of grapes like this.

The results were stunning. Many of the berries had been split by the harvester and then dessicated while hanging in the breeze. The flavour concentration was amazing.

My cabernet won the trophy for best amateur red wine at the Victorian wine show narrowly beating my shiraz that came second. The shiraz won the trophy at the Eltham wine guild and the traminer was runner up for the trophy at the Lilydale wine show.

A New Home in Moorabbin

By this time Ann was fed up with the mess. She suggested I get a little factory and move all the “stuff” somewhere (anywhere) else. Hence factory 7/477 Warrigal Rd Moorabbin in January 1998. We crushed 7 tonnes of grapes through the little basket press (see video) in our last year in the driveway.

Now I had plenty of space but also overheads. I went and obtained a liquor licence and a food factory licence and a trade waste licence etc etc. I had always given a few bottles back to the people we bought grapes from but now they wanted me to make some wine for them. Long time friends had just planted a vineyard at Flinders so we were taking all their fruit. Another friend planted at Echuca. We were crushing somewhere around 20 tonnes by year 2000 and a colossal 84 tonnes in 2004 (as well as having a day job).

2004 was a bumper year for everyone. You could not buy a tank for love or money. We had several hundred litres of wine in plastic bladders (Flexitanks) because we had nowhere to put it. 30 tonnes of the crush was sparkling (25000 bottles) How was I ever going to disgorge all this???

I was employing part timers up to this point. Carrying out a full time engineering job and running a winery was beginning to stretch me. I employed Mark Burt late in 2004 as a full time cellar master. You can see him in the corking line video.

The yearly crush dropped down to 50 tonne per year for a few years and has drifted down since. It is now at a level I can handle in retirement.

Riddling the old way

Engineering a Different Approach to Wine

Around 2008 a UK journalist (Rob Crossley) was trawling the net looking for interesting chemical engineers and found me. I will admit to being atypical, eccentric and someone who is thinking outside the box most of the time.

Crossley describes the corking line I cobbled together. When I look at the video 20 years down the track I amaze myself. Bits and pieces cobbled together for less than $8000 doing the job of bottling line worth hundreds of thousands. It now resides in the warehouse. We have gone to screw capping.

Much of our crush at this point was for other people and some of them were very keen to get medals from wine shows to promote their sales, I made the trophy winning sparkling at the winewise wine show three years in a row (2008-2010). I am not a fan of wine shows but that is a topic for another day.

Cherry Liqueur 2017

Experiments, Awards and an Unexpected Cherry Liqueur

Corking and Labelling

One of our more interesting projects was cherry liqueur. New Years day 2017: we were having a lovely family lunch when I got a phone call from a local cherry grower. He wanted to make his last 4 tonnes of cherries for the year into a liqueur. So next day it arrived and we set to work but making a fortified needs brandy spirit and while I had a fortifiers licence I didn’t have enough spirit on hand. The spirit basically prevents the yeast from fermenting and using up all the sweetness. So there was a mad panic to order alcohol in but we had to keep the cherry juice from fermenting. We chilled the juice down to freezing, dosed what alcohol I had and hoped for the best. And best it was. I presented it on a TV program called Winesquad and totally confounded the judges.

Science, Wine and What Comes Next

The emphasis in recent times has been to develop reverse osmosis technology to fix winemaking faults and improving wine quality. We can concentrate wine flavour, reduce alcohol and extract vinegar from wine. Making low alcohol wine is on our horizon.

We have helped a lot of local wineries turn marginal wine back into pristine saleable wine (ie turned it back into what it started as). One recent example: a batch of chardonnay received 15cm of rain just before picking. The sugar level went from 21 brix down to 16. Ie the grapes sucked up all that rainwater. The resulting wine was thin and only 9% alcohol. We used reverse osmosis to remove the rainwater and create the wine it should have been in the first place. The grower said it was the best chardonnay I had made for him!!!

Recently (September 2026) Goodwill Wines came for a look. The family thought the report in their news letter summed me up to a tee.

We are moving into beer production- just for something different to do!!!

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Visit our Melbourne winery to purchase wines directly from the source and speak with our passionate family team. We recommend calling ahead before visiting to ensure we're available to welcome you. Whether you're looking for premium wines or commercial winemaking expertise, Beckingham Wines offers personalised service backed by experience, innovation and genuine passion for quality winemaking.