South Australian wine story

It’s almost impossible for an Australian to think of wine and not think of South Australia. It wasn’t our first wine growing state, it wasn’t even our major wine state until the turn of the century, but South Australia has long been the engine room of Australia’s wine industry. Even with the dramatic recent plantings in New South Wales and Victoria, South Australia was still responsible for 48.8 of Australia’s entire wine grape crush in 1997.

The state’s first vines were planted only a year after the colony’s founding in 1836. The most likely of the three claimants to have made its first wine was a Walter Duffield, who had recorded in 1845 that he had made six hogsheads. His reward for sending a case of 1844 white wine to Queen Victoria was to be immediately prosecuted for having made it without a licence!

South Australia owes its pre-eminence in Australian wine to a sequence of otherwise unrelated historical accidents. From 1884 new plantings in the state exceeded the removal of poor and uneconomic vineyards, creating a supply of wine far in excess of what Australians could themselves consume. The London market, which had been courted since 1862 by Australian wine companies, then began to place very significant orders. The vine disease phylloxera, having wiped out the European wine industry, had begun to do the same thing to another colonial competitor in Victoria. Federation then removed the barriers to free trade between the new States, providing South Australia with several tailor-made domestic wine markets, while the change in fashion from table to fortified wines played right into the hands of its warm climate and varietal selection.

In no other Australian state today does wine play such an essential role in the economy and day-to-day lives of its people. Wine is as much a feature of the South Australian lifestyle and landscape as it is in many European countries, so it’s no accident that Adelaide has set so many trends in Australian food and wine. Not only is wine a major industry and employer in its own right, but over time it has evolved its own specialised infrastructure of support industries. Coopers, winery refrigeration and insulation specialists, vine trellising suppliers and countless related businesses today trade nationally, but remain firmly based in Adelaide, riding the fortunes of a rural economy that swings with the historic boom-bust cycle of wine grape prices.

Adelaide, itself fighting hard to retain its purpose as a major city, stands to benefit more than any other if the Australian wine industry can successfully maintain its present rate of growth. Recognising the city’s central role, it is in Adelaide that the wine industry has chosen to construct its National Wine Centre, due to open in the year 2000.

Most of its historic vineyards no longer exist, but Adelaide remains a true wine city. Although the vast bulk of Penfolds’ Magill Estate had succumbed to the bulldozer and the housing estates by 1984, the historic winemaking and distillation facilities have been painstakingly restored as a working museum. Enough vineyard remains intact to produce Penfolds’ Magill Estate dry red, a robust and stony shiraz, which is still made in the original open fermenters and matured in the winery’s deep underground cellars. The real home of Penfolds Grange, the estate also includes a spectacular modern restaurant and the original home and surgery of Penfolds’ founder, Dr Christopher Rawson Penfold, who in 1844 established his wine company to provide for the health of his patients. A century and a half later and we are still learning what a unique medicine wine really is!

To examine a map is to gain the impression that Adelaide’s flat coastal plain is guarded by a crescent of wine regions. What the map fails to reveal is how entirely different each is from the other. To the city’s south lies the McLaren Vale, a dusty, dry, brown location whose rolling hills are again alive with the sounds of planting crews responding to the renewed appeal of its most treasured output: shiraz. Wedged between the spread of Adelaide’s southern suburbs, Gulf St Vincent and the steeply rising Adelaide Hills, McLaren Vale is the domain of rustic small family wineries and honest country food. BRL Hardy’s headquarters at the superbly restored Chateau Reynella complex makes a highlight of the Old Cave Cellar dug out of the local earth and stone by John Reynell, who established the first vineyards at Reynella in 1838 or 1839.

Passing up through Clarendon and into the Adelaide Hills proper, the landscape undergoes such a complete metamorphosis that you could at times be forgiven for thinking that you had switched hemispheres, not just wine regions. So English and intensely cultivated is its pristine, green, civilized landscape, frequently cloaked with vineyards and apple orchards and interconnected by a seemingly random network of narrow, meandering roads that it’s the Australian wattles and gums which occasionally seem out of place.

Northwards and along the same range of hills and into the High Eden Valley, where bony ribs of weathered rocky outcrop, mean soils and treeless slopes shelter gnarled, low-trellised vineyards of riesling and shiraz. Small townships display their mandatory school, pub and general store, proudly and lastingly fashioned from locally hewn sandstone. Bigger landscapes beckon, whose longer, straighter roads ultimately tumble down a rollercoaster of undulating hills through sleepy Angaston and into the Barossa Valley proper.

The man singly responsible for much of the Barossa’s unique character was George Fife Angas. Something of a feudal lord, he established a vast settlement in the Barossa area, so large that Angaston, originally know as Angas Town, was surveyed in 1841 and named after him. Needing a hard-working source of labour for his estates, Angas sponsored the immigration to the Barossa of three ship-loads of German Lutheran farmers from Silesia who, since 1822 had been oppressed by King Frederick III of Prussia for refusing to annex their church to his.

Amongst the early arrivals was Johann Christian Henschke, who landed in South Australia in 1842 and twenty years later who purchased land in the ‘Northern Rhine’ section of the Barossa. Today Henschke wines are an Australian icon. In 1847 Johann Gramp established a small vineyard at Jacob’s Creek. That company has become Orlando Wyndham and its flagship brand, Jacob’s Creek, is synonymous with Australian wine in dozens of export markets. Joseph Seppelt arrived in the Barossa in 1851, with the original intention to cultivate tobacco. Forty years later Seppelt was Australia’s largest wine producer. Many other German settlers followed, giving the region its distinctive German flavour. Step into a quiet cafe today and you may still hear a conversation in ‘Barossa Deutsche’.

The revival around the wine world of ripe, fleshy, flavoursome Australian shiraz has revitalised this, Australia’s best-known wine region. Barossa wines have never been more in demand. The sins of the early 1980s, when the South Australian government actually funded the removal of what were then considered to be useless old low-yielding vineyards, should never be repeated. For a decade or two, the serious Barossa wine industry took second place behind the tourist facades presented by its German street frontages, beer gardens, gift shops and oompah-pah bands, but today wine is firmly again entrenched as its principal raison d’etre.

From the western perimeter of the Barossa Valley one emerges at the equestrian shrine of Gawler, as much English as the Barossa is German. From there it’s only a short distance south and east to the Italian-dominated horticultural area of the Adelaide Plains, a flat, sandy and featureless landscape planted to olives, almonds and vineyards. Without irrigation it would virtually be desert, yet it’s only an easy hour’s drive from here into the comparative lush fertility of the Adelaide Hills, where it’s almost necessary to prune the telegraph poles every year.

So many antipodean wine icons are South Australian: the scarce Woodley’s Treasure Chest reds of the early 1950s from Coonawarra survive today as some of the greatest red wines ever made in this country. The impossibly ancient, yet keenly alert Reserve Liqueur Para Ports from Seppelt, only released to the market when their age chimes over exactly one hundred years. Max Schubert’s eternal legacy and Australia’s most famous wine: Penfolds Grange. Their special bin number counterparts, including the incredible Bin 60A Cabernet Shiraz from 1962, quite possibly the best red wine ever made on this continent. The remarkable heritage of stellar red wine from Henschke, whose Hill of Grace and Mount Edelstone shirazes define what the rest of the world presently finds so appealing in Australian wine.

John Vickery’s two decades of Leo Buring rieslings is recognised to have raised the standard and the level of expectation in the market for Australian riesling. The contemporary classics from Petaluma, the Wynns Coonawarra labels of John Riddoch and Michael Shiraz are have spawned a legion of imitators. Clare Valley classics like Jim Barry’s Armagh Shiraz and the timeless red wines of Birk’s Wendouree are sought after by winemakers, while the freshness and sheer class of Adelaide Hills chardonnay from Lenswood Vineyards and Shaw & Smith combine Burgundian traditions with a contemporary technological edge.

For sure, the next bottle of South Australian wine you enjoy will only pay tribute to a single vintage. But rest assured that its breeding, cultivation and making took considerably longer than that. Please login to post comment