Impossible to write a wine blog today and not mention Australia. Of course there are far worse things that vines being destroyed, but the Yarra Valley has been badly affected. This is painful reading.
This is from The Age newspaper in Melbourne.
http://www.theage.com.au/national/wine-region-feels-blast-of-raging-inferno-20090208-8119.html?page=-1
THE Yarra Valley wine region was all police roadblocks and smouldering land yesterday.
Locals told of a fierce, unpredictable fire that raced down hills and up gullies destroying homes, schools, farm sheds and vineyards.
For Karen Mitchell, of Steels Creek, returning to her burnt-out home at 3 o'clock on Sunday morning was "like a scene from Armageddon".
"There were different-sized flames, red and orange, dancing around the sky," she said.
Hours earlier Mrs Mitchell's life had perhaps been saved when police turned her around at a fork in the road just before the fire swept over a ridge and set about razing properties.
Despite losing her home and all the sentimental things such as her children's baby clothes and wedding pictures, she realised others had been dealt worse hands.
"There are still families unaccounted for," she said.
The true extent of the damage to small Yarra Valley communities such as Steels Creek, Dixons Creek and Chum Creek was impossible to tell yesterday, with many of the roads leading to the towns — and to some of Victoria's best-known wineries — now declared "crime scenes" by local police.
"It's so ravaged up there. There's still people missing," said one officer pointing to the upper Yarra Valley.
Dozens of houses are believed to have been destroyed at Steels Creek, Dixons Creek, Chums Creek and elsewhere through the Yarra Valley.
The Yarra Glen CFA confirmed the Roundstone winery and bistro at Yarra Glen had been gutted. Nearby, the Sticks winery had rows of blackened vines.
Greg Wallace, of Chums Creek, told how he and his brothers used 19,000 litres of tank water to keep 30-metre-high flames from enveloping his house.
At 7 o'clock on Saturday night, after getting his wife, children and dogs to safety, Mr Wallace had his first encounter with the fire lighting up the massive gum trees across the road from his house.
It returned at 4am on Sunday far fiercer and nearer to his home. "It was a pretty scary sight at night," he said.
Mid-afternoon yesterday flames still crackled in the trees around Mr Wallace's house, the danger evident in the regular sound of gum trees crashing to earth nearby.
Also in Chum Creek, neighbours Tom Neesham and Mark Poole had managed to fit seven children and an elderly woman in one car to take them to safety as the fire seemed to roar from nowhere on Saturday evening.
"I'd promised a friend who was at a wedding that I'd look out for his sister and the kids," Mr Neesham said.
"I've never seen kids projectile vomit from fear before but that's what they were doing. They were saying, 'We don't want to die'."
His fellow rescuer, Mr Poole, told of being bitten by one of the children's ferrets. "The boy was not going to leave without his cage of ferrets so they had to squeeze in too," he said.
Amid the ruined houses, dead livestock and fallen power lines across the Yarra Valley, there were isolated tales of good fortune.
None more than at the Yering Station winery, which resembled an oasis in the middle of a charred landscape, something saved only by an act of God.
As flames scorched the roads at its side on Saturday night, the winery played host to a wedding party of 112 guests.
By the time a bus arrived to evacuate them, the roads had been blocked. It was decided that it was safer to proceed with the wedding, with the barrel cellar a final point of refuge if things got desperate.
"They had a burning love for one another," the manager of internal operations Trevor Stewart dryly remarked of the bride and groom yesterday.
Sheridan Morris, the assistant hospitality manager, told of watching smoke billow from the Gruyere area and then the Christmas Hills. "It was very scary, I couldn't see the Yarra Ranges because of the smoke," she recalled. Eventually the reception was cut short at 11.30, because nearby pines were under severe ember attack.
Nearby Chateau Yering had run out of tank water, so the chefs worked a second shift, pouring buckets of water over the embers. "We just ran on adrenalin," Ms Morris said. "I knew that when the sun came up the whole Yarra Valley was going to be black."
At Domaine Chandon winery, estate director Bernie Wood was relieved to see the vines had suffered only minor damage while nearby plantations were destroyed. He praised staff for putting out spot fires.
"We lost a couple of rows of vines. A little bit of chardonnay and shiraz," Mr Wood said. "For what it could have been we are pleasantly surprised."
