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Tom and Charmaine Handyside stand amidst piles of ash and shattered glass, the remnants of six years of their dedicated effort.
In the quaint Victorian town of Harcourt, the couple is painstakingly sorting through the destruction of their wine collection, reduced to heaps of charred bottles and glass fragments.
“We’ve lost our entire wine vintage, which was valued at $1.8 million,” Charmaine Handyside shared with SBS News.
“It’s incredibly distressing, a very difficult reality to come to terms with,” she added.
“We lost approximately 70,000 bottles, which included sparkling wines, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Sangiovese, and Shiraz.”
Residents of Harcourt in the apple-growing region of central Victoria are still reeling from the devastation caused by fires that broke out in the afternoon of 9 January.
What started as a fast-moving blaze quickly escalated into a community-wide emergency. By evening the flames, fanned by fierce winds, were running down hills into the Harcourt Valley and the township, razing local businesses and more than 50 homes.
Local resident Gary Grant, who works at the cool store, was among those who fought to save properties.
“All of a sudden, there was a wind shift, and we knew Harcourt was in trouble. We wet everything down, and we stayed to defend our properties,” he recalls.
However, little could be done to save the cool stores and their contents.
The Handysides were among 90 small business producers blindsided by a disaster they never expected — one that is now raising broader questions about risk, insurance, and the growing cost of extreme weather.
“It never occurred to us that the cool store would be a genuine fire threat. It’s a monolithic concrete building; we were truly shocked when it burned down,” Handyside says.
For the couple, the loss is both financial and deeply personal: a business erased just as it was starting to gain momentum.
The Harcourt Co-operative Cool Stores held wine, beer, apples, beehives and other produce — a critical hub for the region’s agricultural economy. The couple had no insurance to cover their contents.
Each bottle of wine in that mound is a piece of us that’s sitting there destroyed.
Charmaine Handyside
“We obviously made a mistake that we didn’t have adequate insurance. A real challenge is that the insurance is not cheap, either,” Handyside says.
Their loss is not an isolated case.
A growing risk for small businesses
Across Australia, small businesses are increasingly exposed as natural disasters become more frequent and more intense.
According to the Insurance Council of Australia’s 2024–25 Insurance Catastrophe Resilience Report, extreme weather has driven a 67 per cent increase in household and business insurance claims compared to the previous five-year period.
Brad Miller, general manager of insurance comparison website BizCover, says small businesses are being significantly impacted by disruptions from natural disasters.
“These disasters are happening more frequently, whether fires, storms or heat waves,” he tells SBS News.
BizCover data shows that claims for severe weather events such as bushfires, power outages and storms, have almost doubled over the last three years.
Miller says rising premiums, cost of living pressures, and limited understanding of coverage are leaving many operators exposed at the worst possible time.
“In some cases, claims are being denied where insufficient cover or the right cover doesn’t exist for these small businesses. And that’s a really catastrophic result,” he says.
“Some covers like business interruption, which cover loss of revenue, can be absolute lifelines after a natural disaster. But we know these insurances are very rarely taken, especially at a time of higher living costs and premiums.”
BizCover data also shows that severe weather-related claims jumped from 9.6 per cent of all claims across Australia in the 2023 financial year to 16.8 per cent in the 2025 financial year — underscoring how quickly the risk landscape is shifting.
The biggest risk for these small businesses is underinsurance or having no insurance at all.
Damage to building and contents comprised 81.3 per cent of all claims due to severe weather events, with businesses typically claiming up to $53,000 during the 2023 to 2025 financial years.
“Our advice to small businesses is to take practical steps to prevent the impact of a disaster. Get quotes, shop around and don’t make underinsurance or non-insurance decisions blindly,” Miller says.
An industry already under pressure
Australia’s wine industry is already facing significant headwinds, compounding the impact for producers like the Handysides.
Lee McLean, CEO of the industry’s national representative body, Australian Grape & Wine, says producers are facing the most challenging set of commercial conditions on record.
“We have too many vines in the ground, too much wine in storage and not enough people around the world drinking wine at the moment,” he tells SBS News.
Australia has around 263 million litres of surplus red wine in storage.
“That equals around 350 million bottles of wine that needs to be sold,” McLean says.
According to the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences’ March quarter 2026 Agricultural Commodities Report, the Australian wine industry is facing a severe downturn, with the value of winegrape production forecast to fall by 31 per cent in 2025–26.
“That’s a significant decrease,” McLean says.
Beyond domestic challenges, war in the Middle East has added another layer of strain to an already fragile industry, with impacts on fuel, fertiliser and global supply chains.
These rising input costs are hitting growers at the same time as revenues are falling — squeezing margins and forcing difficult decisions.
Calls for support and structural change
Ahead of the federal budget, due on 12 May, McLean is calling on the government to back an industry-wide restructure.
The federal government’s existing funding commitments include a $4.6 million Long-term Viability Support Package and targeted market development initiatives.
“What we are looking for is a $60 million package to help [wine producers] transition into a more viable future,” McLean says.
“That could include things like concessional loans with deferred repayments, or grants to help people remove vines and diversify into other crops or to exit the industry.”
Some in the sector are also exploring alternative uses for excess supply as the glut worsens. An option under consideration is converting surplus wine into biofuel to help meet demand amid the global crisis.
Determined to rebuild
Despite the challenges, the Handysides are determined to fight on.
“Everyone is suffering, and we are not unique. We are just a mum-and-dad business. We don’t have a huge brand to launch campaigns to raise cash,” Charmaine Handyside says.
“And health-wise, it’s taken a huge toll on us. I’ve just had a bit of a flare of lupus and our mental health has really suffered through this crisis.”
But they’ve vowed to keep going — however cautiously.
“We made the decision despite the risk to go ahead and do a vintage this year, a smaller vintage.
“I hope when people drink a bottle of Still Moon wine, they see the genuine love and care that has been poured into that bottle.”
Readers seeking support with mental health can contact Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636. More information is available at beyondblue.org.au. Embrace Multicultural Mental Health supports people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.
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