Transmission The transmission of vine stock during the 19th century forms a pillar of Australia’s fine wine story. Although South Australia’s rich heritage is well known through its ancient surviving plantings, vine cuttings were frequently shipped around the Australian continent throughout the 1800s, before phylloxera arrived on Australia’s east coast, around 1875. Western Australia also initiated strong quarantine regulations and, through luck and good management, has never been exposed to phylloxera. Although it does not have South Australia’s glorious living heritage of ancient vinestock, there are still descendent vineyards which are related to importations of material from South Africa (chenin blanc) and Australia’s east coast. Although Margaret River’s wine industry did not get going until 1967, it should be remembered that vineyards were planted in Western Australia’s South West more than 100 years before. When we talk about modern pioneers, their achievements are built on the work of generations before them. Comparatively, however, wine growing has a short history compared to the existence of the region’s first inhabitants and the traditional owners of the land. The Bussells planted grape vines in the 1830s. Sam Moleri grew grapes, made wine and sold it door-to- door in Margaret River in the 1930s – he lived about five kilometres north of Vasse Felix. Ephraim Clarke, Kevin Cullen’s maternal grandfather, grew grapes and had a commercial winery near Bunbury earlier in the century. The Duces had a vineyard and winery near Boyanup, planted after the First World War, and sold wine in wine shops in Manjimup and Bunbury. I have tasted a beautiful Hermitage, by courtesy of Bill Jamieson, that was made at Houghton’s by Jack Mann in the fifties, from Duce’s Boyanup grapes. Indeed the obvious quality of this wine was a practical support to me in deciding that the effort to make quality wines in the cooler regions of the South West was worthwhile. Tom Cullity, vigneron, Vasse Felix, 1987.
Margaret River
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