CHAPTER 16 | 1920s – Bountiful Years
‘The multiplication of small wineries that occurred in this (post World War One) period was largely the work of Dalmatian immigrants. They were industrious and as patient as anyone could be. Their aim was to supply a local city and country market, mainly their countrymen and Italian migrants, with cheap table wine. In Australia, and WA, until the 1960s three-quarters of bulk wine was fortified due to demand by English settlers and their descendants.’ – Tom Cullity, memoir, Vasse Felix, 1987
. . . Among the new settlers to arrive in South Australia was Giovanni Patritti, one of the state’s first Italian immigrants. In 1925, with ambitions to meet his sister, he boarded a ship in Genoa, which he mistakenly believed was going to the United States. After arriving in Adelaide, he changed his name to John and worked as an ice cream seller in front of Adelaide Botanic Gardens. Blessed with green fingers, he soon leased a small vineyard and began making wine with his business partner, Christiano ‘Jimmy’ Bissacca, in the Brighton Beach area, now Marion. The allotments and vineyard areas in the garden of Adelaide have gradually succumbed to urbanisation. A 2.5-acre patch of 1907-planted grenache is the last remaining vineyard in Adelaide’s southern suburbs. Although owned by Marion Council, the fruit is processed by Patritti, which is now the last remaining winery in the district.
‘During the Depression, members of the British Empire were given a duty break on product for the rest of the world, due to the Empire preference. It was a protectionist tariff which gave Australia preferential treatment when we shipped wine to colonial outposts such as India, Kenya, Hong Kong or Malaysia – anywhere the Brits had a colonial seat.’ – Robert Hill-Smith
. . . A number of Australia’s leading winemakers, many of whom studied at Roseworthy Agricultural College, elected to further their oenology studies at Montpellier Agricultural College (L’Ecole d’Agriculture de Montpellier) in the South of France, where there has been a long connection. Sir Samuel Davenport, who established Château Tanunda, attended the college during the 1840s. Ron Haselgrove, who went there during the 1920s, was instrumental in establishing a
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