Second time lucky as Indigenous winemaker swaps vines for savvy tie-up.

Craig Cromelin almost missed out on his dream of running a wine business – but a chance encounter changed all that.

 Max Allen, Australian Financial Review

July 3, 2025.

When Craig Cromelin’s business partners asked him to suggest a name for the wine label they were about to launch together late last year, there was only one choice.

“Bidja,” says Cromelin. “It means ‘friend’ in Ngiyampaa language. We say ‘yamma karra bidja’ – welcome, friend.”

Cromelin is Ngiyampaa on his grandmother’s side, and Wiradjuri on his grandfather’s. For much of the past two decades he served as an elected representative on the NSW Aboriginal Land Council, a role that took him to the UN in New York, where he discovered that Ngiyampaa was on the UNESCO list of endangered languages.

“I thought, my goodness!” he says. “My grandmother’s language on that list! I thought, how can I help revive it? Bidja is one way of me playing a role in that, using language as a conversation starter.”

Bidja also marks the 61-year-old’s second foray into the wine industry.

Back in 1998, Cromelin was part of a group of 16 Aboriginal men who planted Australia’s first Indigenous-owned and operated vineyard and wine label in Murrin Bridge, a small community 150 kilometres north of Griffith in central NSW. The group established the groundbreaking small vineyard as part of a Community Development Employment Project, with the encouragement and support of one of their TAFE tutors, Pat Calabria, whose family had ties to the Riverina wine industry.

“None of us had set foot in a vineyard before, let alone a winery,” Cromelin told a reporter a few years later. “We had no idea, and we couldn’t visualise it. We said: ‘Blackfellas don’t do that sort of thing.’ ”

Turns out, they do. After the first successful harvest in 2001, the project took off and started making headlines. The wines were well received by critics, and the orders started coming in: Qantas was keen to stock the wines onboard. But, says Cromelin, Murrin Bridge didn’t have the resources or experience to build the business quickly enough to meet demand, and it eventually folded.

Cromelin moved on to his work with the Land Council, and indulging his passion for music as a drummer in bands. Then, last November, the wine spark was reignited after conversations with a couple of mates: fellow muso James Stephens, who runs a company called Aboriginal Beata Terra, specialising in Indigenous procurement management; and Bevan Mailman, managing director of Jaramer Legal, Australia’s first national Indigenous law firm.

“They asked me to tell ’em the story of Murrin Bridge Wines,” says Cromelin. “And when I told ’em, they said ‘Wow, what a fantastic story. Why don’t you do it again?’ I said no, it’ll take too many resources, which I wasn’t flush with. And they said, ‘Look, if you want to get into it again, we can help and guide you.’ ”

Cromelin knew from past experience that starting a wine business from scratch – planting the vines, waiting for the first harvest – was not only capital-intensive but also a slow process. So, the three men decided to look for a partner to supply wines that could be branded and sold under their name. And that, says Cromelin, is where serendipity stepped in.

“Bevan was driving back [from that meeting in Murrin Bridge] to his office in Melbourne and he drove through the outskirts of Rutherglen. He pulls into this winery, walks into the cellar door, asks to speak to the general manager and says, ‘Would you be interested in working with an Aboriginal-owned company?’ Then calls me and says, ‘I think I might have found our wine partner’. I’ve always believed in fate: it takes you in a certain direction; all that matters is whether you accept that or not.”

 The cellar door Mailman chose happened to be Buller Wines, a century-old business with substantial vineyard interests in the King Valley and Heathcote alongside its original plantings in Rutherglen and Swan Hill, and well-established domestic and export distribution networks. A winery, in other words, with the resources to meet Bidja’s needs.

“When I first started with Murrin Bridge I had no idea about different climates for growing grapes,” says Cromelin. “Now I know a lot more about it. I’ve been to Buller’s vineyards in the different regions, had a look at them, done the tastings to select the wines. I know that what we’ve got is quality. And that’s important: at the end of the day, you can have a good story but that doesn’t matter if the wine doesn’t stack up.”