Borry Gartrell

Situated high on a hill overlooking the prosperous Towac Valley, just ten minutes from the Orange CBD in central NSW is Borrodell on the Mounthttp://www.borrodell.com.au/, a 32-hectare property. Here Borry  Gartrell and his wife Gaye Stuart-Nairn grow vines (pinot noir, chardonnay, gewurtztraminer, sauvignon blanc), heritage apples, cherries, plums and truffles. As if that’s not enough to keep them busy, they also run an Italian-style restaurant called Sisters Rock, a cellar door for their wines, a wedding reception area and cottage-style accommodation.
A steep winding road threads its way through vineyards and roses up to the restaurant and reception area and the views from here over the prosperous valley and hills beyond are as good as any you’ll get in Tuscany. It’s also at the top of the hill where Borry proudly grows two hectares of heritage apples. The rich, red basalt soils and 1000-metre elevation ensure fabulous cool-climate wines and produce. Borry’s green thumb and aesthetic sense have also helped to transform the landscape.
“When I bought the property 40 years ago, it had been used for growing vegetables, which was inappropriate on these slopes, because every time they ploughed the soil, it moved a metre down the hill,” he says. “I spent two years shifting the soil back up and establishing a major dam on the southern slope which holds four to five years’ supply of water.”
He then planted the whole property with red delicious apples, a move he now says was a big mistake. “We were all given bad advice back then,” he says.  “It was about 30 years ago when the supermarkets were moving in and making significant marketing changes. They told us that people would buy only good-looking apples and that the red delicious held their colour well. Greengrocers just disappeared, which meant there was no one encouraging them to try different varieties of fruit.”
At that time Orange was known as the apple city but when the industry sank, many of the orchards were bulldozed and replaced with grapevines and cherries. “Luckily I’d grown up eating old varieties of apples from my father’s orchard and had taken cuttings from them, which I’d grafted onto some of the red delicious trees,” Borry says. “I did it purely for my own pleasure because I remembered the taste of those apples from my childhood.”
As friends and visitors to Borrodell tasted the grafted fruit, the pleasure spread and Borry began collecting heritage apples more seriously. He now boasts over 170 different varieties, including a good selection of cider apples, and every year acquires a few more.
One of his favourites is the Lady of the Snows, a pure white-fleshed apple with a very short shelf life, best eaten as soon as it’s picked. “Another really good eating apple is the Cox’s Orange Pippin,” Borry says. “It’s not a great looker because it’s orange in colour but the flavour is superb. And I like the Winesap, which tastes like wine and the Rome Beauty, which was once widely grown because it kept well. It’s no longer popular because it’s not a bright red.”
He also grows a number of cooking apples such as the English Bramley, the Scottish Dr Hogg and the massive Peasgood Nonsuch. “It’s a monstrous piece of fruit which grows as big as your head,” he says. “There’s a similar one called ‘Twenty Ounce’ because of its size.”
One of Borry’s missions – apart from making a great pinot noir and growing more truffles – is to educate people about the different tastes and textures of heritage apples.  “The seasonal nature of fruit has been lost and people are only interested in the colour, not the taste or texture,” he says.
At the monthly farmers’ market in Orange, you’ll often find him during apple season encouraging people to taste a slice of this or that apple. “I remember him turning up at our first markets five or six years ago in his old tractor with a trailer full of apples,” says Kim Currie, convenor of the Orange Farmers’ Market and executive officer of Brand Orange. “He’d be wearing his leather apron and turn up at the last minute with a great flourish.”
He’s still flourishing.
If you can’t locate him at the monthly farmers’ market, you’ll always find him out at Borrodell on the Mount where he encourages visitors to take a paper bag and walk around the property tasting and picking apples.