More than anything else about wine, it’s the story behind the bottle I love. Structured tastings and large line-ups for review tend to take the romance out of wine, but every so often a story comes along that makes me fall in love with wine all over again.
The latest involves a Swiss captain of the Hussars and the rebirth of a vineyard he planted on the banks of the Moorabool River in Geelong in 1848.
In 1842, James Henry Dardel, a Swiss Huguenot arrived in Port Phillip on board the ship Himalaya. He established himself as one of Victoria’s early wine pioneers.
He set up vineyards in Heidelberg, then helped the Ryrie brothers establish Yering Station – he was their first winemaker. He bought land at Batesford in Geelong, where there was a Swiss community and a busy port that serviced the booming wool export industry.
Here Dardel set to work on his property, Chaumont, planting an orchard and four vineyards: Paradise I, II, III and IV. “The dates are all a bit vague, but the Pettavel family planted the first vines in Geelong in 1842 and Dardel planted Paradise IV in 1848, but had already started setting up his vineyards and orchards,” explains current Paradise IV winemaker Doug Neal.
Gold was found in Ballarat in the 1850s and Dardel’s Chaumont became a major supplier of wine and fruit.
“By the 1860s it was known as one of the leading wineries of Victoria, winning considerable awards in Geelong, and going well in Paris and London. Dardel’s orchard was known as one of the leading orchards in the state,” Neal says. “Through family connections he also had become friends with Baron [Ferdinand] von Müller, who developed Melbourne’s [Royal] Botanic Gardens, so Paradise was turned into a paradise. They dug out a lake and diverted the Moorabool River, and planted with various species of trees.
“Phylloxera hit in the mid-1870s and a government proclamation in October 1881 declared the Geelong region had to pull up all their vines and destroy them, then the vine area had to lie fallow for a set period of time. No other wine region where phylloxera spread was forced to do this.”
Paradise IV’s modern story begins in the 1980s, when it was bought by Ruth and Graham Bonney. After investigating the site’s history, they planted vines in 1988 as a test. The Bonneys named the vineyard Moorabool Estate and in the mid-’90s they teamed up with winemaker Neal and renamed it Paradise IV.
Neal says no other vineyard in Geelong is planted on any of the pre-phylloxera sites of the 19th century. “The site is the best location in Geelong,” he says.
“Paradise IV is a more protected site than nearly any other in Geelong. We get coastal breezes that blow up the Barwon, then the Moorabool until where Paradise I, II and III were and the valley flattens out and they dissipate.”
