CHAPTER 16 | 1920s – Bountiful Years
‘In terms of absolute alcohol consumption per capita, by the 1920s Australian consumption had settled at a level not much more than two-thirds of the level in the 1890s – and less than one third of the level in New South Wales in the 1830s’. – Robin Room, ‘The Dialectic of Drinking in Australian life: from the Rum Corps to the wine column’, October 1988
. . . Vittorio De Bortoli, from Italy’s Castelcucco municipality, immigrated to Australia and arrived in Griffith in 1925 when the town was known as Bagtown. He lived under a rainwater tank until his fiancée, Giuseppina, reunited with him in 1926. By 1928, he had enough money to purchase a 55-acre mixed farm, previously a solder settlement block. With a glut of shiraz grapes in the area, he was able to acquire 15 tons of fruit and made his first De Bortoli wine. By 1931, he was shipping ‘train loads’ of hogsheads to markets in Sydney and Queensland, where Italian immigrants had settled. De Bortoli’s initial success, making low-grade plonk, was based on the support of fellow Italian immigrants, mostly labourers who travelled between the cane fields of Queensland and the orchards of the Riverina each season. But Vittorio’s descendants and extended family, recognising the ideal autumnal conditions, would establish Griffith as the unlikely centre of one of Australia’s most innovative and imaginative wines of the 1980s: De Bortoli Noble One. In Western Australia, Giacomo ‘Jimmy’ Meleri, from Lombardy in Italy, planted a small vineyard at Yallingup (present-day Margaret River region) soon after purchasing the 560-acre property in 1917 and made wine from fragola, doradillo, and other varieties. During the 1920s, his vineyard expanded to four hectares, and he was selling his Red Dynamite for a shilling a bottle at local dance
Vittorio De Bortoli lived under this water tank at Jones winery in the Riverina, New South Wales during the 1920s. [De Bertoli Collection]
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