The sun hit the Geelong hilltops, its first shine of early spring. Jeff Darring, with grey in his beard and a smile, is welcoming as the open gates to the vineyard.
Jeff speaks softly, often through a wry smile.
Jeff and his wife Kirsten run the small Geelong vineyard together.
“We raised our kid here, this is our home,” Jeff says.
Jeff is now 63, and planning to retire soon, but says he can’t afford to.
Drought has starved the vinyard’s and many other winemaker’s grapes of the water they need to grow and prosper.
A 2024 report by Wine Australia says hat total Australian wine production in 2023–24 was 1.04 billion litres (116 million 9-litre case equivalents) – an 8 percent increase compared with 2022–23, but still the second-smallest reported production since 2006–7 and 16 per cent (nearly 200 million litres) below the 10-year average of 1.24 billion litres.
Kate Sims, an employee at Wine Victoria for the last decade, says the droughts hit vineyards right across Victoria. “If grapes can’t grow, wine can’t be bottled, and heaps of winemakers are suffering,” she says.
“This impacts the price of wine for consumers as well, while lower quality wines are actually getting cheaper higher quality wines are rapidly increasing in price,” Kate says.
Natural disasters like flooding or in this case drought, can be really damaging to not just the vineyards and farms, but the winemakers and farmers themselves.
But Jeff, as stubborn and strong willed as his burley figure would suggest, is insistent there is a solution to this drought.
“It’s all about holding out until the rain comes,” he says. “So, if we banned together as a community, whether its in Geelong, South Australia, Tasmania, I don’t care, if we prop each other’s farms up, we can hold on until the rain comes.”
When asked what a community effort might look like, Jeff looks up slowly, pushing his glasses further up the stem of his nose. After pausing for a moment he says, “caring, it just looks like caring. It means giving what you can, and keeping what you need.”
This story is part of a project exploring regional Victoria and the issues farmers are facing. See the whole collection here.
