CHAPTER 16 | 1920s – Bountiful Years
1929 MOUNT PLEASANT GRANDMOTHER DRY RED Hunter Valley, New South Wales
The 1929 Grandmother is regarded as one of Maurice O’Shea’s greatest achievements. Campbell Mattinson, Maurice O’Shea’s biographer, mentions the 1929 vintage as being pivotal to O’Shea’s reputation, and Max Lake wrote, in 1966, ‘I am dwelling on Grandmother in my own cellar and I hope she is up to it’. By all accounts, 1929 was not a great Hunter year, but apparently, the wine turned a few heads at the Melbourne Wine Show. Clearly, Grandmother is one of a handful of wines that, as Max Lake wrote in Wines of Australia , have ‘claims for the top Mount Pleasant reds’.
The arrival of Austrian winemaker Rudi Kronberger at Yalumba in 1929 was an enlightened move and signalled new positive directions for the Barossa. He began making early-bottled German-style rieslings. These modern styles initiated momentum for this variety in the Barossa region. Much later, with the development of new technologies, especially refrigeration, Kronberger encouraged the Hill- Smith family to invest in new vineyards in the Eden Valley. The purchase of the Pewsey Vale property in the early 1960s began a new chapter in the region’s history and the development of one of Australia’s most important vineyards. Kronberger also used cultured yeast to improve the quality of white wines. The Phylloxera Act would prevent any new material from coming in for a very long time, but by 1963, new riesling clones would be imported under strict conditions from Neustadt via Davis in California. . . . As if to signal the turn of a new decade, Alan Robb Hickinbotham, who would become the most influential wine scientist of the 1930s and 1940s and would develop the college’s first oenology course, joined the teaching staff of Roseworthy Agricultural College, beginning as a lecturer in physical and chemical sciences and later becoming deputy principal. His son Ian would subsequently state that he believed the course was established as a result of ‘the statistic that 25% of Australian wines were “diseased” prior to 1930’. This was an unfortunate choice of word because it was not as if the wines were going to kill anyone; they were just faulty through spoilage. Table wines, for instance, could be vinegary or slightly effervescent. Alan Hickinbotham’s studies at Melbourne University had been interrupted by World War I. He served as a captain with the 108th Howitzer Battery of
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