De Bortoli Wines
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De Bortoli Wines is one of the larger privately owned companies in Australia. De Bortoli makes a wide range of wines including world acclaimed sweet white Noble One.
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[edit] Wineries and cellar doors
De Bortoli Wines owns three wineries in three diverse wine growing regions:
- Bilbul near Griffith in the Riverina region of New South Wales
- Near Cessnock in the Hunter Valley region of New South Wales
- Dixons Creek near Yarra Glen in the Yarra Valley in Victoria
The company has vineyards in the same regions as its wineries, along with the King Valley in Victoria.
The Yarra Valley Winery also boasts a very popular and highly awarded restaurant featuring Northern Italian inspired cuisine. There is now also a cheesemaker & cheese shop onsite at the Yarra Winery.
[edit] Winemaking
The winemaking team is overseen by third generation winemaker Darren De Bortoli and his brother-in-law Steve Webber. In the early 1980s Darren De Bortoli created the world acclaimed Noble One Botrytis Semillon. Steve Webber established the company's premium Yarra Valley winery in the early 1990s and is also responsible for overseeing the company's King Valley vineyards and Hunter Valley winery and vineyards.
The winemaking philosophy is that good wine begins in the vineyard, that the winemaker should use minimal handling and interference in the winemaking process and that wine should have a sense of regionality and be an expression of the soil in which it is grown.
[edit] History
De Bortoli Wines was established in 1928 by Vittorio & Giuseppina De Bortoli and rapidly expanded under the direction of their son, the late Deen De Bortoli. Today the company is in the hands of the third generation. The family history is documented in a book called Celebrazione! launched in 2003 to celebrate De Bortoli Wines' 75th Anniversary.
[edit] Environment and technology
As a family owned company, De Bortoli Wines has often taken a longer term view of the world than a traditional corporate equivalent.
Examples include the consideration of concepts such as "data sovereignty" and commitment to "open standards" based computing, leading to the organisation standardising on the "Open Document Format" for office productivity files though the use of OpenOffice.org 2.0. Other notable technology rollouts include TYPO3 [1] for both the Internet site & corporate intranet, dotProject for collaborative project management, Fedora Directory Server with SAMBA 3 for authentication & fileserving, and the rollout of Linux clients on the desktop.
Examples of De Bortoli Wines' long term view of environmental sustainability include:
- Participating in the Greenhouse Challenge and Packaging Covenant and the Australian Wine Industry Environmental Stewardship program.
- Adopting an integrated Pest Management System in the vineyard minimising the use of chemical sprays.
- Purchasing easy to clean winery equipment to minimise water usage, for example dry cake discharge filters and centrifuges.
- Adopting recycling practices at all sites eg. composting of winery skins and stalks, restaurant compostables, separation of bottles, cardboard, cork and plastic.
- Removing all Sodium based products from the Griffith site because of concerns relating to salinity in the environment.
