Peter and Lizette Kenny of Bellarine Estate are not the first people to become excited about the agricultural potential of the black basalt hills of Bellarine.
As far back as 1802, the English navigator Matthew Flinders noted the good grass and well-wooded slopes of the peninsula during an examination of Port Phillip and Corio Bays on his epic voyage around Australia. But it was John Batman, pioneering member of the pastoral partnership, the Port Phillip Association, who began European settlement in the region. In 1835 he was so impressed with the district that he broadened his purchase of land from the Aborigines to include 100,000 acres on the Bellarine to add to the 500,000 acres he had secured around what is now the city of Melbourne.
Batman enthused over the black volcanic soil covered with kangaroo grass and named Wedge’s Range (now known as the Bellarine Hills) after his surveyor partner John Wedge.
“I found the Hills of a most superior description (sic) beyond my most sanguine expectation,” he wrote at the time.
His reports back to Van Diemen’s Land encouraged the development of the peninsula, first with sheep grazing and then with the planting of crops like wheat and barley. The Bellarine region quickly became one of Victoria’s most important agricultural districts and by the 1850s it was described as the “granary of the colony”.
When this mantle was taken over by new wheat farms in the Wimmera District further west, the rich productive Bellarine soil was turned to grow potatoes, peas and onions. Intriguingly, historians note that onion growing had a marked effect on the truancy rate at schools in the area as children were kept home to weed the furrowed rows. Their nimble fingers were much more adept at this vital job than those of adults.
Historians also point to the contradictory spellings of Bellarine as symptomatic of the confusion that surrounded much of this early development. The small hamlet of Bellarine, where this winery now stands, was known in early settlement days as East Bellerine while the name ‘Bellarine’ was given to what is now the township of Drysdale a few kilometers to the west.
East Bellerine became Bellarine about 1860, by which time it was the centre of a thriving community with churches, shops, a post office and a population of several hundred. Ironically much of this growth came at the expense of nearby Portarlington on the coast, whose residents were obliged to travel to Bellarine for most of their shopping. This trend reversed during the 1900s and Bellarine returned to its modest beginnings. During the 1980s the land now occupied by Bellarine Estate was used as sheep and cattle pasture.
Today however, Bellarine is undergoing a renaissance sparked by the discovery that the rich black soil and temperate climate provide ideal growing conditions for a wide variety of cool-climate wines. An additional asset, hidden from John Batman and his successors, came to light recently when geologists surveying the peninsula identified a patch of Curlewis Limestone directly underneath Bellarine Estate. The combination of volcanic soil on a limestone base gives the wines a wonderfully unique depth of character.
While Peter and Lizette Kenny cannot claim to have discovered the agricultural riches of Bellarine, they quickly realized its potential when establishing the vineyard in 1996. Their goal was, and is, to ‘handcraft exceptional estate-grown wines.’ A measure of their success is that Bellarine Estate has rapidly been catapulted into the limelight of wineries within the region.
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