The Austins planted their first vines in the Barrabool Hills, southwest of Geelong, in the early 1980s. The soil they turned was the same worked by the pioneering Swiss more than a century before. During it's nineteenth century heyday, the Geelong region was recognised as producing some of the finest red wines made in Australia's first one hundred years. This was at a time when the Victorian wine industry out-produced the sum of the South Australian and New South wales industries by a factor of two. The area suffered badly in the second half of the nineteenth century when phylloxera (a grapevine pest) and bureaucracy combined to destroy the region. The Moorabool Valley re-emerged in the first days of the Victorian wine industry's renaissance, in the 1960s. Recognition of that link has played a major part in the Austin family's affair with wine and the move to Sutherlands Creek. Austins»