By Casey Neill
Leanne De Bortoli has been involved in the family wine business “ever since I was knee-high to a grasshopper”.
“When my husband and I first moved to the Yarra Valley, 1989 was a wet year and there were floods everywhere,” she said.
“We had cool weather, it was wet in summer, every now and then you’d get a hot day.
“You always knew there was a cool change coming.
“We never would have thought back then that the Yarra Valley would be susceptible to drought conditions.”
The day Black Saturday threatened De Bortoli’s Dixons Creek vineyard is still fresh in Leanne’s mind, 10 years down the track.
The Yarra Valley Wines committee member said they had a fire plan back then, but “how ignorant we were at the time”.
“We’d had hot weather before and the warning signs were there,” she said.
“I remember the premier being on the radio and telling everyone to enact their plans.
“No one ever thought that the valley would burn.
“Yet when you look back to 1939 when the conditions apparently were exactly the same, leading up how it was very hot and dry and the weather came from the north-east and Kinglake way…
“It was like a mirror image.”
Leanne said the communication between emergency services and the public at the time wasn’t as good as it was today.
“I can remember…the CFA wasn’t answering their phones because everyone was calling them,” she said.
“On the website it had that the fires were still up Kilmore way.
“Looking up at the horizon you could see the smoke, and it had a bit of an orange glow to it.
“I thought ‘no, that’s a lot closer’
“Being able to access that information back then, we just didn’t have it.
“By the time we realised when was happening, the fire had already come through in part and the roads were closed off.
“We had a wedding here that night.”
They finally got through to the CFA and explained their situation, and were advised to keep the guests on-site.
“I can still remember him saying ‘honestly, that’s probably the safest place for them to be at the moment’,” Leanne said.
“We do have this buffer of the vineyards around us, and the water.
“There are gardens and concrete leading up to the restaurant.
“People who ended up down at the Dixons Creek CFA, they had to vacate there and they ended up driving up to Yea.”
Neighbours from Steels Creek sought shelter at the winery.
“It was just a couple and their dog. Everything else they left behind,” Leanne said.
“They stayed with us for a couple of days.”
Their house burnt down.
“It was a very trying time, a very trying time for our staff as well,” she said.
“None of them could leave the property to check on their own families at home.
“What we had here was probably replicated at other vineyards around the valley.”
De Bortoli staff loaded trucks and tractors with pumps and put out the fires on the vineyard, but still lost a couple of hectares of vines in the fire – a minor dent in the 180 hectare site.
“Vines don’t normally burn, but the grass underneath the vines was very dry, very brittle,” Leanne said.
“There were quite a few wineries who had similar problems.
“A couple of wineries, like Brownstone, burnt down.
“But then we were all faced with the problem of smoke taint.
“We continued to pick a lot of our fruit.
“As we went through the fermentation process, it was just so obvious.
“Except for a little bit of pinot and chardonnay that we picked just before the fires, we lost that vintage.
“It was heartbreaking when you consider you’ve spent all this time – pretty much 12 months – growing the vine, pruning it, training it, grapes are ripening, maintaining the vineyard, and just when you’re supposed to be reaping the rewards and turning it into wine, all the hard work went up in flames.”
She said De Bortoli was lucky to have other vineyards in Victoria and interstate, and other grape suppliers.
“We probably weren’t as affected as some of the smaller producers who had to make the hard call of whether they would write off the vintage or still produce wines, and sell it at a reduced price,” she said.
“I would think for them it had enormous impact.
“They would have had very little income for the year.”
Leanne said De Bortoli’s Yarra Valley wines really saw a return to form in 2012, and bringing tourists back was also a slow process.
“It was still raw in people’s minds,” she said.
“People elected not to come back to the Yarra Valley. Some people didn’t want to come to an area that was burnt up.”
Leanne was in the Napa Valley wine region in California, USA, last year shortly after bushfires tore through and it took her right back to the aftermath of Black Saturday.
“They were just trying to get people to come back,” she said.
“It was like groundhog day.”
She said that Wine Yarra Valley was collecting information from all wineries in the area about their fire season plans.
“In our plan, if there is a code red day, restaurant and cellar door will be closed and all non-essential staff will be told not to come in,” she said.
“I believe that the feeling from a few venues is similar, that they would do that.
“We don’t want people on the road if we have a day like that again.”
