CHAPTER 17 | 1930–1938 – The Dead Dog Bounce
1930 MATTHEW LANG AND CO HUNTER RIVER CABERNET Hunter Valley, New South Wales
Max Lake, in his book Cabernet: Notes of a Wineman, described this wine as ‘of extraordinary complex flavour, it was a supple and elegant wine consisting of equal parts cabernet sauvignon and petit verdot, grown at Dalwood. Only three hogsheads were made and the vines were pulled out.’ Max Allen dramatised Max Lake’s epiphany at Doug and Judith Crittenden’s house in Melbourne around 1960 in his prize-winning book Intoxicating. He numbered the 1930 Dalwood Cabernet as ‘one of Australia’s ten drinks that shaped Australia’. It was the wine that inspired Max Lake to establish a cabernet vineyard in the Hunter Valley, despite the general belief that the variety was unsuited to the region. As a result of tasting this wine, Max Lake founded Lake’s Folly, one of Australia’s early boutique wineries, in 1963. According to Max Allen, this property was established on a site previously planted with grapevines by George Kime. The vineyard was then known as Martindale, and it supplied grapes to Dalwood. John Davoren Snr was known to have purchased ‘good clean wine’ from Kime in 1929. Max Allen mused: ‘[I]t’s possible that the cabernet wine Davoren Snr blended with Dalwood petit verdot to make the 1930 Hunter River red that inspired Lake to plant his own vineyard may have come from the very spot where Lake ended up establishing the Folly thirty-three years later’.
Matthew Lang and Co Hunter River Cabernet, 1930.
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