By CASEY NEILL
Tucked away on Riverend Road in Bangholme is Greater Dandenong’s only winery.
The Craft and Co concept started when Lisa Baggio’s parents-in-law came to Australia from Italy.
Lou started out making vats and presses for friends and opened a shop in North Melbourne, stocking supplies for homemade food and beverages.
“My husband Paul took that concept further and decided he wanted to branch out into commercial winemaking equipment,” Ms Baggio said.
He diversified to breweries and packaging and water plants, and today he’s added coffee roasting and meat curing equipment to his product range.
The Baggios opened The Craft and Co in Collingwood in December last year “as a showroom for his customers”.
It features a brewery, a coffee roaster, cheese and meat-curing rooms, a restaurant and more.
The Craft and Co Farm opened in Bangholme in early June.
“The idea behind this place is that everything we grow and produce here will be split between here and Collingwood,” Ms Baggio said.
“We’ve got the winery out the back. We’re preparing the soil for a massive vegetable garden, a hop garden for the brewery…
“All their waste will come back here for our chook feed and compost.
“We’ll be this little sustainable ecosystem.
“We’ve got a licence for a couple of pigs that will eventually go to the meat room for salami.”
Ms Baggio plans to introduce workshops and “grand-scale events” down the track with ideas already on the table including salami-making classes, an Octoberfest celebration and a sausage festival.
“There’s already a cellar door and there’s wine and beer tasting,” she said.
“You can do a tour of the winery and the vines.”
The Nine Dragons Horse Club next door is going to start trail rides in spring.
“The trail ride will finish through our vineyard,” Ms Baggio said.
“They’ll tie up the horses here and included in the trail ride will be a lunch.
“We want this to become a destination.”
The Craft and Co crew currently brew a stout and a pilsner in Collingwood and hope to one day brew beer in Bangholme, too.
“We have to grow our own hops before we can even think about it,” Ms Baggio said.
But the wine is already on its way.
“Our 2016 vintage, all the grapes are from here. It’s in barrels and tanks at the moment,” she said.
“We didn’t have access to the vines until this year.
“We have a nero d’aovla we produced here with grapes from Heathcote.”
Craft and Co’s winemaker Rory Lane worked with the Baggios years earlier.
“The landlord here told him he didn’t want to keep looking after the vines,” Ms Baggio said.
“Rory contacted my husband Paul and said ‘would you be interested in taking over the lease for the vineyard?’.
“We were setting up the Collingwood site at the time.
“It just seemed like the most natural progression.
“It’s really paddock to plate and paddock to glass.”
Lisa said the winery was also open to contract wine makers.
“They bring their own grapes but they use our facilities,” she said.
There are 11 grape varieties growing across the 14-acre vineyard.
“This is all reclaimed swamp land originally, so there’s plenty of water, which is good for growing grapes,” Mr Lane said.
“The soil is quite heavy and clay-based but because we’re quite close to the beach there’s also quite a bit of sand in the soil too.
“The balance is quite good. There’s good drainage but there’s enough clay in there to hold a good amount of water.”
The ground water also produces big canopies with lots of foliage.
“The more foliage, the quicker things ripen,” he said.
“So we do have to manage the amount of foliage, make sure that things don’t ripen too quickly.
“All in all, for what you wouldn’t consider to be typical wine-growing country, it does quite well with a number of different varieties.”
