Rowella vineyard making a racket about 100 years of tennis history

Rowella's Holm Oak vineyard will catapult Novak Djokovic and Iga Swiatek onto its lawns this summer when it shows the Australian Open on the big screen for the first time.

From the deck, visitors will also be able to spot the namesake trees that etched Holm Oak into Launceston's sporting history.

Dating back to 1913, Holm Oak was part of the Holm Lea property first owned by architect Alexander North.

Famous for designing the Ritchie's Mill silos and many Launceston churches including St Ailban's in Newstead, Mr North later became tied up in Launceston's tennis racquet industry.

The Alexander Racket Patent Company began in 1925 and was housed at Newstead's PCYC building, which still bears the 'Alexander' name to this day.

The factory produced as many as 750 racquets a week, as well as cricket bats and hockey sticks, and starred on the world stage in the 1930s.

"Jack Crawford won Wimbledon in 1933 using the 'wizard' tennis racquet, which was named after Norman Brookes," Holm Oak owner Bec Duffy said.

"They have this flat-top design so they could tension the strings tighter - that's what made them such good tennis racquets."

Securing enough English ash wood to meet demand became a problem.

Mr North was a director of Ash Plantations Ltd, which was set up to supply wood to the Alexander Racket Patent Company.

As well as planting 21,600 ash trees at Hollybank, which is now home to a nature reserve and adventure complex, Mr North and his son planted many trees at the Rowella property.

No tennis racquets were ever made from the trees, and the Alexander company wound up in 1961, but the history lives on through a series of Holm Oak wines with tennis-themed names.

"One of our pinot noirs is called the wizard, we called another pinot noir the hotshot ... which is also named after a racquet," Mrs Duffy said.

"The protege is a play on the tennis theme as well.

"We have quite a collection of the tennis racquets here including one of the Cressy wizards."

Vines were first planted on the property in 1983.

Mrs Duffy's family has owned the vineyard since 2006, and she and husband Tim took over in 2013.

In 2022, they launched what is believed to be Tasmania's first sensory garden for wine lovers, matching up wines with different selections of plants.

The pinot noir garden, which is currently in flower, include cherry trees, blueberries, raspberries and rhubarb.

"They represent the different aromas you get in pinot noir," Mrs Duffy said.

"While you don't add those fruits to the wine, the same sort of chemical compounds that give strawberries their specific smell are also found in wine as a result of fermentation.

"On our sensory garden tours we go around and collect bits and prices from the garden and come back and do a tasting and talk about how the different esters or terpenes or aroma compounds exist in the wines and what sort of flavours they impart."

Holm Oak hosts regular sensory garden and tennis history tasting tours and is open weekdays from 10am to 4pm.