Smoke alarms growers

As a young bloke growing up on the family farm in southern Tasmania, Gerald Ellis learned early on in life that working on the land presents all manner of personal and community challenges. Fire, frost, flood and drought, he's experienced them all in his neck of the woods.

Ordinarily, there's little that gets under the skin of this affable bloke that's owned and operated Meadowbank Wines for the past 40-odd years. But Ellis has been spitting chips this past week.

Eleven days ago, he watched in disbelief as the skies above his 50ha vineyard at Glenora filled with thick, grey smoke. According to Sustainable Timber Tasmania, the fire was an unplanned and unintended consequence of a regeneration burn the company conducted in the nearby Styx Valley on 6th March.

Four days later, gusty winds caused the burn's smouldering embers to break containment lines and ignite adjoining vegetation. By week's end, the blaze was being described by the Tasmanian Fire Service as 'providing no immediate threat,' but under the prevailing conditions 'could be difficult to control.'

"I'm just about at the end of my tether with Sustainable Timber Tasmania," Ellis says (pictured below on left).

"They should be shut down and the whole operation turned over to private enterprise."

Ellis is one of many landowners and business operators in the Derwent Valley that have expressed anger and alarm over the incident. What should have been a brief, high-intensity burn became a smoky, week-long incident in a region of the state where interstate visitors are being actively encouraged by Tourism Tasmania 'to come down for air.'

Meadowbank Vineyard is renowned as one of the jewels in the crown of the state's cool climate wine industry.

"We sell approximately 85 per cent of production to other winemakers and we work very closely with them to deliver the best quality we can," Ellis says.

His vineyard's client reads like a who's who of the Tasmanian wine industry. It includes House of Arras and Bay of Fires, both premium wine brands owned by Accolade Wines, based in South Australia.

"With our picking crew just about to begin hand-harvesting, this is a critical time of the year for us," he adds.

"We've got something like $2.5m-$3m worth of fruit on the vine. Whenever there's fire, there's always the potential risk of having smoke-affected fruit that can render the resulting wines smoke-tainted and unsaleable.

"We were very lucky this time. We only had a slight smoke haze for about three hours on the Thursday morning and then it just cleared away. We're lucky the geography of the region means that the winds that move past us are often funnelled down through Bushy Park. 

"That's the reason they get a lot more rain there than we do here at Glenora. In this instance, the gusty winds that helped cause the fire also took away the smoke."

"It looks like we've dodged a bullet," says Meadowbank winemaker Peter Dredge.

"Based on EPA Tasmania air monitoring and our previous experiences, we're confident we won't have a problem with smoke taint. However, we've already initiated a set of protocols that will see samples of our wine grapes being sent to the Australian Wine Research Institute in South Australia for testing and analysis.

"Sustainable Timber Tasmania need to be much more aware of the damage these burns can cause to our industry – not just to the wine industry, but to all those industries involved in growing horticultural produce, like cherries and hops. The lack of consultation is shocking. Whenever these controlled burns are conducted, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of communication going on here in the south of the State."

The former Bay of Fires winemaker says that when he was employed at the company's Pipers River production facility a decade ago, key stakeholders like Gunns Ltd, the Tasmanian Fire Service as well as Forestry Tasmania maintained effective lines of communication throughout the critical summer and autumn months.

"We'd give them a buzz or they'd give us a buzz and we'd be able to negotiate the timing of various regeneration and hazard reduction burns based on mutually agreed terms," he explains.

"Sustainable Timber Tasmania need to do much more to notify stakeholders of their intentions. If they're not skilled enough to be able to control their burns at such a critical time, they should push them back to a less critical part of the year."

The State Government-owned forestry enterprise says it plans to undertake an operational review of the Styx fire to understand and learn from its burn.

First published 21 March 2021: Sunday Examiner

Last update: 26 May 2026