"I feel the 75th should be the story of my father and all the people who came out from Italy in those days. You must go back to where all started, to the ones who did it hard. All the respect goes back to them. I just continued on what he started - if he didn't start it, then what would I have to continue?" - Deen De Bortoli.
Vittorio De Bortoli left a war-ravaged Italy in the 1920s looking for better life. In the dusty back blocks of New South Wales, he lived a make shift lean-to under a water tank surrounded by a flourishing vegie patch. It was a primitive existence but there was work and food and a future filled with possibility. He had found the right place. In 1928, he bought his first farm, made his first wine and married his childhood sweetheart Giuseppina.
Seventy-five years on, Vittorio's son Deen and four of his grandchildren are running the seventh largest wine company in Australia. "Good food, good wine and good friends" is the unofficial family motto, and the traditions of Italian food are an essential part of the De Bortoli story.
Recipes include those from Vittorio's early days when food was scarce - the simple Pan Bogio (bread soup) and Osei Polenta (sparrow skewers on polenta) - to the recipes from the world famous chefs, such as Antonio Carluccio, Lorenza De Medici and Rick Stein, who visit the De Bortolis' Yarra Valley winery to talk and cook food.
'Celebrazione!' is the De Bortoli story. A family that continues to do business around the dining table with a vegie patch that still flourishes. Theirs is the story of Italian immigrants made good - it is story worth celebrating.
