De Bortoli Boosts Its Holdings

Newcastle Herald

Wednesday July 28, 2004

John Lewis

THE Griffith-based De Bortoli family wine company is providing a $5 million antidote to the gloom caused in the Hunter by Southcorp Wines' cutback at the Rosemount winery at Denman.

Last month Southcorp managing director John Ballard announced that the group would transfer bottling and distribution activities at Denman to Nuriootpa in South Australia and Karadoc in Victoria's Mildura area at the cost of 100 Upper Hunter jobs. The De Bortolis, by contrast, have expansion plans in the Hunter. Over the next two years the company will boost its Hunter vineyard holdings to 60.7 hectares and build a smart new cellar door sales centre and function facility at Pokolbin.

These plans come two years after De Bortoli's $2.685 million purchase of Joe Lesnik's Wilderness Estate winery and 16-hectare vineyard in March 2002. The 26-hectare Wilderness Estate property is at the intersection of Broke Road and the Cessnock-Branxton road, right at the gateway to the Lower Hunter wine country.

De Bortoli Hunter manager-winemaker Scott Stephens told me last week that the company had already spent large sums on new winery equipment, upgrading the existing cellar door, providing a new barrel storage hall and general landscaping.

The vineyard around the winery was being rationalised to concentrate on semillon, shiraz, chardonnay and verdelho, with small plantings of viognier and roussanne.

As part of its further $5 million expansion it had bought two additional Pokolbin properties to boost its grape-growing resources.

One property was the Murphy vineyard in Wilderness Road, which already had eight hectares of old semillon vines and would have a further 12 hectares of semillon, chardonnay, verdelho and viognier planted over the next year.

The second property acquisition was 40 hectares of grazing land behind the winery property. The land was bought from Jock McDonald and would be used for 24 hectares of shiraz and merlot vines.

Scott said the building of a new cellar door-function centre would probably go ahead in the 2005-06 financial year.

Other plans include the building of a wood-fired pizza oven for visitors' use and accommodation units for the use of clients visiting the Hunter.

The Pokolbin winery is expected to process increasing volumes of fruit for the $18 to $20 De Bortoli Hunter and $13 Black Creek ranges. The Hunter label encompasses semillon, shiraz, chardonnay, verdelho and merlot wines and the Black Creek wines are based on Hunter fruit and grapes bought in from such other NSW regional areas as Tumbarumba and Orange.

Scott Stephens said last week he was excited at the expansion plans, which recognised the Hunter's place as the most popular wine tourism region in Australia, with over two million visitors each year.

Born in Wagga, 37-year-old Scott was a scientific officer in pathology between 1988 and 1993, working in blood banks in Australia as well as in London and Manchester. While in Britain, he was bitten by the wine bug and returned to Australia to get a job as a winery cellar hand and to begin a winemaking course at the Wagga campus of Charles Sturt University.

After graduating from the Wagga wine school in 1997, Scott worked on vintages in France, at the Mondavi winery in California and at the Brand's of Coonawarra. Following that he began his current 10-year stay in the Hunter as a winemaker at McWilliam's Mount Pleasant winery and was then recruited by De Bortoli in 2002.

The growing Hunter presence of Griffith-based De Bortoli Wines is the realisation of a long-held dream harboured by members of the De Bortoli family.

Chief among them was Deen De Bortoli, the company chairman and grand planner, who died at the age of 67 last October. He and his family were great fans of Hunter semillon and shiraz and this encouraged them pay $2.685 million for Joe Lesnik's Wilderness Estate winery and 16-hectare vineyard in March 2002.

The purchase of the 26-hectare Wilderness Estate property at the intersection of Broke Road and the Cessnock-Branxton road was seen as an opportunity to repeat the success of De Bortoli's 1987 purchase of Chateau Yarrinya in the Yarra Valley.

Under the joint management of husband and wife team Steve Webber and Leanne De Bortoli, the daughter of the Deen and Emeri De Bortoli, the De Bortoli Yarra arm has gone from strength to strength.

The property now boasts a fine Italian restaurant, and its original 10 hectares of vineyard has been expanded to 130 hectares and its winery can process up to 5000 tonnes of grapes. At the 1997 Melbourne Wine Show its 1996 cabernet sauvignon won the Jimmy Watson Trophy for the champion one-year-old red.

Before he and Leanne moved to the Yarra Valley in 1989, Steve had spent seven years working for Lindemans alongside such great Hunter wine exponents as Karl Stockhausen and Gerry Sissingh.