THE AUSTRALIAN ARK – Federation to the Modern Era | 1900–1982
Orlando Cellars, Château Tanunda, Vine Vale winery, Seppelt at Dorrien, Seppeltsfield, and Yalumba, all family-owned businesses that represented the power behind South Australia’s wine industry. Springbett’s Hillside Vineyard in the Barossa was a model post-war wine business with connections to scientific research. In 1924, Professor Arthur Perkins had laid out two experimental mataro blocks at Springbett’s Hillside Vineyard at Lyndoch and at D & J Fowler’s Kalimna Vineyard at Nuriootpa. The thinking at the time was that these sandy soils were of little value, except to vine growing. There was an expectation that these ‘notably poor, deep whitish sands’, as described by the 30th of March 1929 article ‘Effects of Green Manuring on Grape Vines’ in Melbourne’s Weekly Time s, would be exhausted after 20 years of viticulture. A ‘green manuring’ experiment was designed to see how the vines would respond to the nitrogen and organic matter introduced through planting and turning over inter-row crops of peas. Australian wine exports during the 1920s were plagued by ‘sickness’ or sweet wine disease, which often ruined whole shipments. The problem was exacerbated by the little publicised legal requirements and duties surrounding fortified wine for export to Britain. If the wine did not ‘exceed 27 degrees on the old scale, then it came in under the Empire Preference’. Sweet wine disease reflected a relatively stagnant wine industry largely unable – or unwilling – to invest in science and research. When the Australian federal government announced a reduction in the export bounty in the late 1920s, wineries rushed to export as much as possible under the old rate, which led to large stocks lying in storage and succumbing to sweet wine disease, thereby damaging the reputation of Australian fortified wine. When Ron Haselgrove returned to Australia after his sojourn at Montpellier and elsewhere in Europe, he was aware of the challenge: ‘Once more I was back in the hurly burly of primitive winemaking akin with unsound wines two a penny all over Australia’. No one really knew why red wines particularly would ‘turn’. As the name sweet wine disease suggests, microbial spoilage occurred when the wine was still undergoing fermentation. The causes would only be identified in the 1930s after extensive research by scientist John Fornachon in Adelaide. Some wineries were throwing out or distilling up to 25% of their production because of sweet wine disease. Others, intuitive to the problem, were paying special attention to hygiene, appropriate use of sulphur dioxide, and storing must and wine at relatively cool temperatures. At Angove’s, they kept largely on top of the problem with the disciplined hard taskmaster John Guinand, who joined the company around 1926. It wouldn’t be until 1936 that Ray Beckwith, a scientist working for Penfolds, would ultimately crack the problem. . . .
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