CHAPTER 16 | 1920s – Bountiful Years
The post-war years saw South Australia become Australia’s dominant wine state. Although Britain’s preferential trade with Australia began in 1919, Britain’s Export Bounty Act of 1924, in which the Australian federal government subsidised and assisted wineries to compete with fortified wines from Portugal and Spain, saw a massive change in wine industry production. It was enacted partially because the post-war soldier settlement schemes designed to help build farming communities had created a wine glut. The combination of Britain’s preferential trade tariffs, initiated to reward Australia for its support of the war effort, and the Export Bounty Act made Australian wine more competitive in the potentially lucrative UK market. A differential excise on doradillo was also introduced to encourage distillation of this over-planted grape variety and included a provision to ensure grapegrowers were paid a fair price. But the reality was that the British public lost its respect for Australian wine and soon forgot the popular, extraordinary, ferruginous dry red wines of South Australia and northeast Victoria. The Export Bounty Act changed the structure of the industry by creating artificial demand based on price. It encouraged wineries to chase the flow of easy money rather than building on the reputation and successes of the pre-war trade to the UK. In February 1934, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph reported that Australian wines were now seen as cheap and ‘of indifferent quality’.
‘This, of course, was about the start of the ‘Bounty’ when we commenced shipping styles of wine other than ‘ferruginous red’, a trade which grew to 3,000,000 gallons and then collapsed because it was not built on a firm foundation’. – HR Haselgrove, Recollections, 1973
. . . From 1924, fortified wine dominated the winemaking scene and set back Australia’s fine wine potential by decades. While many large wineries prospered because of preferential empire trade with England and successful distribution of their wines within the Australian states, others began to fail, particularly smaller table wine producers. The last vines in the Yarra Valley were pulled out in the early 1920s. Yeringberg pulled out its last vines in 1921 but kept its remarkable 19th- century architectural winery buildings. It would take over half a century before this region kickstarted back into prominence. Soldier settlement schemes also extended into Western Australia, where large pastoral estates were subdivided to promote closer settlement and market gardening. Some of the older estates on the Swan River near Perth were subdivided around 1913, causing a great fillip to grape growing. By 1939, the
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