CHAPTER 15 | 1914–1918 – World War 1
PLONK The word ‘plonk’ was in use well before World War I, although not associated with wine. According to some observers, plonk was first recorded in 1919 by Walter Hubert Downing in Digger Dialect s. In this book it refers to an artillery ammunition column rather than wine. Downing suggests that Australian soldiers used expressions like ‘point black’, ‘vin blank’, and ‘vin roush’. ‘Von blink’ and ‘von blinked’ (inebriated) were humorous variations. Vino also gets an entry for diggers stationed in Italy. But plonk was also a word used by Australian soldiers fighting on the Western Front and was probably a corruption of the French vin blanc, pronounced as ‘van blonk’. Similar names were given to cheap wine by soldiers, including ‘pinky’, ‘plink’, ‘plink-plonk’, and ‘plinkety plonk’. The word ‘pinkie’ predated World War I and was already a name given to adulterated Australian wine. It was described in a December 1907 article in Wagga’s Worker as ‘a practically poisonous compound, which in its effect is more demoralising than the vilest rum ever made in an outback shanty’. The origins are not entirely known, but there is some suggestion that it comes from the phrase ‘pink horror’. By the 1920s, ‘pinkie’ and ‘plonk’ were in usage extensively within Australia. Bottle shops and wine bars became known as plonk shops or plonk bars. To be plonked up meant to be intoxicated or drunk. According to some observers, there was a difference between plonk and pinkie, the latter being a cheap wine strengthened by methylated or bootleg spirits. Depending on the sources, plonk or pinkie could also be a fortified red wine or sparkling red wine, both types being able to ‘inebriate at speed and with economy’. In the 1950 book A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute, plonk is referred to in the lines, ‘He asked me if I would drink tea or beer or plonk. “Plonk?” I asked. “Red Wine”, he said.’ This may have popularised the word in the UK. Even today, plonk is used as a nickname for wine of all types, but not necessarily cheap wines.
CORIOLE 1919 PLANTINGS LLOYD BLOCK McLaren Vale, South Australia
According to Mark Lloyd, there is some suggestion that these vines could have been planted as early as 1875. But for a long time, it was believed that Geoffrey Kay established the vineyard block in 1919 in the Seaview subregion. East-facing, unirrigated, and organically grown, the shiraz plantings lie on deep clay soils over a hard limestone cap and contribute to Coriole’s single-vineyard Lloyd Reserve Shiraz.
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