De Bortoli: A Family Story Born from a Grape Glut
Not every great winery starts with a grand vision. De Bortoli started with a pile of grapes nobody else wanted — and a young Italian immigrant who saw an opportunity where his neighbors saw a wasted harvest.
From Treviso to the Riverina
Vittorio De Bortoli left Castelcucco, in Italy’s Treviso region, for New South Wales in 1924, arriving in Griffith — then still known as Bagtown — the following year. The flat plains and red earth of the Riverina were a world away from the hills he’d grown up in. He worked hard and lived humbly, at one point sheltering under a rainwater tank, before his fiancée Giuseppina arrived from Italy in 1926 and the two were reunited.
In 1928, Vittorio bought a 55-acre mixed fruit farm. That same year, a glut of Shiraz grapes left many local farmers deciding it was cheaper to let the fruit rot than pick it. Vittorio took the grapes for free and crushed 15 tonnes of Shiraz — and when local Italian and other European workers in the area offered to buy wine off him, De Bortoli Wines was born, almost by accident. Vittorio and Giuseppina married on the farm the following year.
Four Generations, One Winery
What started as a side project quickly became a family business passed down through generations. By 1931, demand had grown enough that De Bortoli wine was being shipped by the trainload, in 270-litre barrels, to Sydney and Queensland. The second generation — Deen, Florrie and Eola — grew up around the winery, and Deen left school at just 15, against his parents’ wishes, to start working there. By the time he was 21, he was pushing to modernize production, and through the 1970s he kept expanding the winery, often while his father was out of town.
The turning point that put De Bortoli on the world stage came in 1982, when newly qualified winemaker Darren De Bortoli created what was first released as “De Bortoli Australian Sauternes Botrytis Semillon” — the wine that would become Noble One. It won the Trophy for Best Botrytis Wine at the International Wine & Spirit Competition in 1985, and again in 1992 and 2004, becoming one of Australia’s most celebrated dessert wines.
From there, the family’s footprint expanded well beyond the Riverina. In 1987, De Bortoli purchased a winery and vineyard in the Yarra Valley, Victoria, where Leanne De Bortoli and her husband, winemaker Stephen Webber, went on to establish the De Bortoli Yarra Valley Estate in the 1990s. The family later added vineyards in the King Valley and a winery in the Hunter Valley, and in 2018 acquired Rutherglen Estates, adding another winery and a tourism destination in Victoria’s North East. Along the way, De Bortoli picked up some of Australian wine’s biggest honors, including the prestigious Jimmy Watson Trophy in 1997 and a Best Chardonnay trophy at the IWSC for its 1998 Yarra Valley Chardonnay.
A Modern Winery Still Rooted in Its Origins
Today, more than 95 years after Vittorio crushed that first batch of unwanted Shiraz, De Bortoli operates across four regions — the Riverina, Yarra Valley, Hunter Valley and Rutherglen — while staying a genuinely family-run business into its fourth generation. Sustainability has become a defining part of that modern identity: De Bortoli is a certified member of Sustainable Winegrowing Australia, and its 17 Trees initiative — born from a 2008 project to offset the carbon footprint of the company’s vehicle fleet — has grown into a standalone brand that has helped plant more than 69,000 trees and counting.
It’s a fitting throughline for a winery that began with turning what others saw as waste into something worth sharing.