Brothers in wine

Now enjoying their twilight years together, Hobart's Claudio Alcorso and Dr Don Martin enjoy an enduring relationship. Born barely two years apart on different continents, these venerable octogenarians will tell you they are brothers nonetheless. Brothers in wine. 

The bonds between them reach back more than 30 years, to a period of entirely different social mores. To an Australia in the 1960s, when immigrants were often labelled by mischief makers as 'wogs' or 'dagoes.' When wine was 'plonk' and the 'six o'clock swill' held sway.

The sprightly pair still meet weekly for coffee and a chat.  

A favourite subject remains the wine industry they helped create. They talk of its future with optimism.

"Within 20 years, you'll find we are making great Pinot Noirs here," Alcorso asserts.

More than half a century has passed since this patron of the arts and former industrialist first set eyes on the small, sandy outcrop of land at Berriedale – north of the Hobart CBD – that became home to Alcorso and his wife, Lesley, until 1995.

The nine-hectare property above the banks of the River Derwent is Moorilla.

Their beloved Moorilla.

The place left such an impression on Alcorso that it is deeply embedded in his psyche.

Benefitting from a cool, maritime climate, the property had been an apple and pear orchard in earlier years. But looking at it for the first time in that summer of 1947, Alcorso ignored every aspect of its then derelict appearance.

"It was love at first sight," he recalls.

"There's no way you can explain it."

After buying the land and naming it Moorilla – a word in a Tasmanian Aboriginal dialect meaning 'a stone by the water' – Alcorso later set about planting a small vineyard.

In all, the site comprised some 200 vines of different grape varieties.

With a degree from his native University of Rome and academic qualifications from Harvard and the London School of Economics, Alcorso was not the least bit deterred by his lack of expertise in this new field of endeavour.

Established without regard for any form of scientific analysis, the vineyard became a project guided more by the heart than the head.

"It was pure luck that the place turned out to be a good area in which to make quality wine," he readily admits.

"I didn't start with that idea at all."

Indeed, Alcorso was drawn by a much simpler desire.

"All Italians – no matter where they are – the moment they have a little bit of land, they plant a few vines to make wine for the family. And that's what I did. I didn't stop to think about how good the soil was. Anybody coming from Europe knows without having to be an expert that vineyards are not planted in the good soils.

"All of the analysis – of temperature and sunshine and wind – all that came later."

Those plantings 40 years ago – and his first modest vintage in 1962 – did not mark Alcorso as the founder of the modern Tasmanian wine industry, however.

In the spring of 1956, a French immigrant and Hydro worker named Jean Miguet established a small vineyard near Lilydale he called La Provence.

Moorilla's experiments in cool-climate viticulture almost certainly gave credibility to the two ventures at opposite ends of the State.

While Miguet was seen by a few Tasmanians – and particularly by some bureaucrats – as little more than 'a crackpot foreigner', Alcorso was considered to be an astute and successful businessman.

Prior to becoming an internee during World War Two, Alcorso founded a profitable Hobart textile business. After the war, he then enjoyed sufficient personal wealth to fund his entire development of Moorilla.

That noted, Alcorso's pet project had its share of detractors, he says, even from within Tasmania's own Department of Agriculture.

Yet for every well-intentioned friend and acquaintance who advised him to abandon his efforts and simply fill his cellar with the world's best wines, there were others, like David Wynn, who supported him.

Wynn – of the renowned Wynns Coonawarra Estate – assisted by providing some of Moorilla's earliest vines. Riesling and Cabernet Sauvignon.

By virtue of his business acumen and expertise, Alcorso became a member of the State Committee of the CSIRO during the mid-1960s.

CSIRO was Australia's premier scientific research organisation.

It was there that he met Dr Don Martin, who was officer-in-charge of CSIRO in Tasmania. A botanist by training, Martin believed in the State's potential for premium-quality, cool-climate wine production. He soon came to appreciate what Alcorso was trying to achieve at Moorilla.

"There was a member of the State's Department of Agriculture that was also on the CSIRO Committee, so we had to mind our P's and Q's a bit," Martin recalls.

A bright young graduate of Sydney University – and later on, a leading researcher with a University of Tasmania doctorate in science – Martin had links with the CSIRO's vine research station at Merbein, in Victoria. Fellow scientists there expressed interest in evaluating the viticultural potential of Alcorso's Moorilla developments.

Martin arranged for a CSIRO team to begin installing instruments to monitor the site. The data obtained over a five-year period confirmed Alcorso's assertions that Moorilla's climate was indeed similar to that of many of the premium wine-growing regions of northern Europe.

The team also became interested in assessing the performance of a wide variety of wine-grape clonal selections that could be grown at Moorilla. Conditions that were considerably cooler than those at Merbein's research establishment on the hot and sunny Murray River.

"My superiors were prepared to let me have my head and help Claudio if I wanted to," Martin recalls, "as long as I did it as a sideline to my main work on the cold storage of apples."

Between 1965 and 1983, Martin gradually assumed the role of Moorilla's winemaker. It came with the added benefits of CSIRO's Merbein assistance, as well as that from leading Australian wine industry professionals, like Dr Bryce Rankine.

A CSIRO office in London helped facilitate occasional opportunities for Alcorso to tour and study several European sites engaged in premium cool-climate wine production.

The Berriedale property's own minuscule wine production soon began to gain national recognition. Its quality was helped in no small way by Martin's own brief periods of study overseas that included visiting key wine research institutes in Canada, the US and Germany.

Additional information was also gained from local research Martin carried out on his own small-scale vineyard, planted at Koonya on the Tasman Peninsula in 1970.

"We were both very interested in grapes, especially Pinot Noir," Martin says of the longstanding nature of his close friendship with the now retired Moorilla founder.

"In the beginning, for me it meant doing something practical – taking up a kind of professional challenge – having an opportunity to make some important scientific observations without having to pay for them.

"Claudio, meanwhile, was more interested in making wine as a hobby. For him, it was a kind of romantic gesture. And while he was happy to indulge in it, I was happy to just tag along with him."

As brothers in wine, they now see themselves travelling the same path as the emerging Tasmanian industry itself, sharing its optimism.

"What we have done here will not be lost," Alcorso observes.

"We are not on the road of the people who first tried a century and a half ago and failed. The industry and the public's taste for quality wines are now firmly established.

"We are on a road from which there will be no return."

First published 40 SOUTH Magazine, July 1998

Last page update: 24 August 2026