CHAPTER 19 | 1946–1949 – Return to Normality
technical skills and continued to build Hamilton’s reputation through the wine show system and the market. After the war, the Redman family in Coonawarra had come to depend primarily on fruit and sheep for income. They owned 30 acres of orchard, 500 acres of grazing land, and 40 acres of vines. Bill Redman continued to enthusiastically make wine, despite being married to a strict presbyterian teetotaller. As a consequence, as recorded in the 1971 Redman Wine history , the Redman family never drank wine ‘except in the line of duty’. Late that same year, 1946, Tony Nelson, managing director and former cellarmaster of Woodley’s Wines, bought Milne’s Cellars, John Riddoch’s original gabled winery, plus 130 acres of vineyards. Among those who had been interested in buying Coonawarra Cellars at that time were wine merchants and producers Samuel (Sammy) and David Wynn. They, too, had seen the quality of table wines coming from Bill Redman and spotted an opportunity, but they would pounce at another time. Tony Nelson hired the Redman family to manage the Coonawarra vineyards and make the wine on behalf of Woodley’s. The new company created by Woodley’s was called Château Comaum. Bill Redman and his sons Leonard and Owen made the wines while their cousin Jock Redman managed the vineyards. According to wine writer Ralph Kyte-Powell, Samuel Wynn was also ambitious to invest in the Yarra Valley. Wynn, he says, was aware of the region’s previous reputation for fine wine, but ultimately the idea of starting from scratch was shelved after Château Comaum was put on the market once again in 1951. The following year, downy mildew swept through the vineyards for the first time in the region’s history. The Coonawarra Fruit Colony had previously been a grand, late 19th-century vision steeped in the ambition to build South Australia’s southeast into a major agricultural centre and community. In many respects, it was Coonawarra’s isolation from the major centres of population, combined with sluggish investment in roads and railways, scarcity of labour, economic depression, and war, that slowed down development. Bill Redman kept the vision going, and his efforts enabled the Coonawarra boom that would take place during the 1960s. He is credited for making every major wine out of Coonawarra for most of the 20th century. In England, post-war austerity and food shortages ensured that rationing continued. A headline, ‘Britain Asks Us for More Wine’, by Melbourne’s Herald in 1946 revealed a market clamouring for more Australian wine. But problems with shipments and increased duties since 1938 had hampered delivery, despite annual quotas of 7,000 tons of wine and 600 tons of brandy. To add to such problems, as Jack Babidge recalled in a Rob Linn interview, there was the loss of 4,000 barrels of wine on a shipment to England when the SS Reynella, a former Italian cruise liner, was wrecked off the coast of Papua New Guinea in 1947. There were also
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