THE AUSTRALIAN ARK – Federation to the Modern Era | 1900–1982
the relative comfort of ladies’ lounges whilst men propped themselves up against the bar, or each other, in noisy and sometimes nauseatingly foul conditions. The damaging social engineering by the government altered drinking habits in Australia profoundly and set in motion a standard that promoted binge drinking, widespread intoxication, and appalling family violence. The great Australian winemaker Leo Buring was particularly critical of early closing and believed that many of the great vineyards and producers of the 19th century had been adversely affected by the early closing hours. He believed the premise in a 1938 article in Smith’s Weekly, entitled ‘ Wine – Magic of Sunlight Served with Meals’ that ‘no heed was given to the fact that natural Australian wines were being consumed and used as part of a meal’. . . . The war years in Australia were difficult, especially with the loss of manpower. Many young men volunteered to join the AIF, draining the country of its youth. Whilst families were proud of their children doing their duty for Australia and furthering the cause of the British Empire, the mounting losses and grief were generating a national melancholy. After Gallipoli ended in late 1915, most Australian soldiers were transferred to the European theatre of war, where they distinguished themselves on the Western Front in France and Belgium. After 15 weeks of fighting at the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917, Australian casualties alone numbered 38,000. At home, some late 19th-century dreams were also shattered. In 1916, the troubled Château Tanunda sold all of its Barossa assets – winery building and vineyards – to B Seppelt & Sons Limited, making that company the largest wine and brandy producer in the Southern Hemisphere at the time. In the same year, it also sold its 1914-built distillery at Renmark to a group of around 130 grapegrowers desperate to find a market for their crop. The Renmark Growers Distillery, later Renmano, became Australia’s first cooperative winery, initially producing brandy and fortifying spirit. (A similar cooperative project was established in the same year by grapegrowers around the township of Berri.) Although Château Tanunda’s Coonawarra Cellars and Distillery continued to operate, it finally succumbed to commercial pressures in 1923 when it was acquired by Messrs Milne and Co, an Adelaide-based spirits company that produced brandy, whisky, gin, and rum. Meanwhile, phylloxera gradually spread throughout northeast Victoria, causing vineyards to be pulled out and replanted. By the 1900s, viticulturalists already knew that grafting European grapevine material with American rootstocks was a means of combating this dreaded pest. In 1908, Australian scientist François de Castella, the Victorian state government’s viticulturalist, had visited Marqués de Riscal and other wineries in Rioja, Spain, to observe the management practices
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