CHAPTER 18 | 1939–1945 – The Second World War
1940 SEPPELT GREAT WESTERN CHAMPAGNE Great Western, Victoria
This 10-year-old wine was entered into the champagne section of the International Wine Show at California’s State Fair in 1950. Competing against other champagnes from California and from the Champagne region of France, it won a gold medal, in those days a winning first prize. The principal variety was probably ondenc, previously known as Irvine’s white, and, before that, pineau. There was probably a mix-up or miscataloguing of grapevine material in the first place. Ondenc was only identified by the French ampelographer Professor Trouet in 1976. This variety, whilst relatively obscure elsewhere, was available through Camden Nurseries and John Pascoe Fawkner in the 1840s as Mauzac Blanc.
During the war, Penfolds further invested in vineyards in New South Wales and South Australia. Perc McGuigan, ‘the first to ever to drive a tractor in the Hunter Valley’, was employed as vineyard manager at Penfolds Dalwood vineyards in 1941. The following year, the old Hunter Valley Distillery (HDV) and vineyards were acquired by Penfolds. The pinot rieslings from the HVD Vineyard were based on chardonnay and semillon, reflecting the nomenclature of Australian grapes at the time. Although it had a chequered history under Penfolds ownership, the HVD Vineyard inadvertently entered wine history. The story goes that in 1967, on a moonlit Pokolbin night, Murray Tyrrell jumped the fence to purloin discarded Penfolds chardonnay vine cuttings. This would result in the release of 1970 Tyrrell’s Vat 47 Pinot Chardonnay. Winemaker Murray Tyrrell’s claim that it was Australia’s first commercial chardonnay was accepted by all at the time but, in actual fact, chardonnay had been grown, vinified, and bottled by a few other producers for decades before, just not under the name chardonnay. Although Penfolds’ purchase of the Dalwood vineyards was a positive step, the vineyard area in the Hunter Valley had diminished considerably. Many vignerons believed that it was liquor licensing laws, which still legislated a six o’clock evening closing, rather than the wartime economy that was the major stumbling block for prosperity in this sector. In his somewhat pretentious 1943 Australia Limited: Think – Or Be Damned series, AJ Marshal wrote: ‘It will also interest former Hunter Valley wine growers who are now on the dole, and the crowd who shuffle like horses in every city pub in that precious hour between five and six. Australian wines can be very bad – but some of them are really fine. Some of the lightest and most delicate of these come from the Hunter. I curse gloomily when I recall that Valley vineyards have decreased by fifty per cent in recent years.’ . . .
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