CHAPTER 19 | 1946–1949 – Return to Normality
cellars were built in 1949 by Paul Alfred Henschke to cope with the increasing intake at vintage. By the early 1950s, his sons were ready to take responsibility. While Cyril Henschke concentrated on winemaking, his brother Louis (Lou) looked after the farm and vineyards. . . . A fire destroyed the chemistry laboratory at Roseworthy Agricultural College in 1949. But by 1952, new facilities with the latest technology, at a cost of £36,000, were inaugurated. The era of chemistry in agriculture was accelerating with the introduction of weedkillers, insecticides, and fungicides to combat pests and diseases. These new advances were celebrated as a modern miracle for Australian agriculture. Viticulture embraced many of these products to improve efficiencies and yields. (The dark side of agrichemicals would only become apparent many years later, as the wine industry began to take sustainable, organic, and biodynamic practices more seriously.) In the Hunter Valley, new plantings took place as well. In 1946, Maurice O’Shea replanted the Lovedale Vineyard and established the Rosehill Vineyard, both of which would add to the rich history and importance of the region. But progress was still quite slow. At Tyrrell’s, the vineyards were worked entirely by horses, typically taking seven weeks to complete ploughing. Despite that, the development of semillon as one of Australia’s singularly idiosyncratic but evocative wines would gradually take hold, with McWilliam’s Lovedale Semillon and Tyrrell’s Vat 1 dominating the genre during the 1980s onwards. The influx of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe and returned soldiers from various theatres of war would profoundly change the face of Australian society. The one-meat-and-two-veg meal would become all but obsolete in capital cities in the coming decades, and in its place would arrive one of the most diverse and interesting food cultures in the world. Although fortified wine production would remain important for another 20 years, dry table wine would become increasingly featured in the daily lives of multicultural Australia. Among the emerging identities of Australian wine, as noted in Chapter 17, was Colin Preece, a gifted and imaginative winemaker. Intending to join his family’s flour mill at Tumby Bay after graduating as Dux from Roseworthy Agricultural College, he instead fell into wine after taking a side course in oenology, where he proved to have a natural aptitude and empathy for winemaking. After a stint at B Seppelt & Sons at Seppeltsfield, in the Barossa Valley (where he married Dorothea Rhoda Tümmel in 1928), he was transferred to Seppelt’s Great Western winery as its manager in 1932, where, under his direction, they carried on the tradition of naming wines after well-known Australian identities. The Great Western winery, originally established by Joseph Best and previously owned by Hans Irvine, was the most
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