CHAPTER 16 | 1920s – Bountiful Years
The vineyard harvest often coincided with school holidays, and it was not uncommon for children to help with the picking, particularly in the Hunter Valley and Minchinbury. Although many of the kids would eat the fruit during the first day, they became sick of it by the second.
1928 PENFOLDS MINCHINBURY TRAMEAH Sydney environs, New South Wales
The 1920s saw an expansion of the vineyards, winery, and cellars at Minchinbury, now buried by housing estate developments, in Western Sydney. Champagne and sparkling burgundy output was greatly increased, and in 1920, the first Trameah was marketed: ‘This dry, light wine, produced at Minchinbury from traminer grapes, is a white type of high quality, with a delightful bouquet that invites the highest praise of wine connoisseurs’.
The 1928 Trameah is regarded as one of the greatest wines of the 1920s. The grape variety traminer is a synonym for savagnin blanc (not to be confused with sauvignon blanc). Trameah is an amalgam of traminer and savannah, the latter being an Australian corruption of savagnin. Trameah was simply easier to pronounce.
. . . The development of the electricity grid in Australia began to take shape after World War I. Tasmania, in 1916, was the first state to establish a hydro-electric authority based on its vast water catchment. Victoria initiated its own state- owned power authority in 1921 and built a power station in the coal-rich Latrobe Valley. It was able to deliver mains power to Melbourne, 160 kilometres away, via 132-kilovolt transmission lines. This would be further upgraded in 1956 (220 kV) and 1970 (500 kV), enabling the development of manufacturing and other industries. But the introduction of electricity was uneven because the states’ approaches to its control and implementation vastly differed. In New South Wales, Queensland, and Western Australia, local governments oversaw electricity supply, and most country areas were quite backward.
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