THE AUSTRALIAN ARK – Federation to the Modern Era | 1900–1982
Penfolds’ Minchinbury Vineyards as a sparkling winemaker before the war. Once installed as Auldana Cellar’s new manager, all of the table wines from Magill were bottled at Auldana, and as Beckwith recalled ‘John carried on with building up the sparkling wine’ and developing St Henri Claret. Among Davoren’s colleagues was Clem Adams, who helped set up the sparkling wine cellars. Three generations of his family had worked for Penfolds, and his father-in-law, Jack Lange, was a legendary Penfolds cellarman. The cellars at Auldana were still quite basic, with candle and lantern lights. Auldana Cellars was producing table wines, fortified wines, sparkling hock, and champagne, with Penfolds importing yeast directly from the Champagne region of France. In the State Library of South Australia’s Somerville Oral History Collection , 2001, Clem Adams recalled in an interview with Rob Linn that the remuage racks ‘had something like 178,000 bottles on table. And two of us used to do the hand shaking right through.’ During the 1950s and ’60s, about half of Magill’s table wine production, with the exception of Grange later on, would be shipped in bulk to Tempe Cellars in New South Wales for bottling and distribution on Australia’s eastern seaboard. . . . The wine stocks at Auldana were in a terrible state, having been left unattended for several months. Over three years, Ray Beckwith and John Davoren saved 50,000 gallons of flor sherry and sorted out the whites, as Beckwith said, ‘by blending it with some good wine and going through the sparkling process’. The red table wines, riddled with acetic bacteria, were blended away gradually into commercial blends, mostly sparkling burgundy. Ray Beckwith said, ‘We had a mammoth task to straighten out the wines that were bequeathed to us, and we did so without loss’. After that, he said, ‘John was able to work with sound wines and put his own stamp on the resulting blends – and how well he did it!’ After experiencing wartime trading difficulties, war-related family tragedy, and an uncertain future, D & J Fowler sold its valuable 1888-planted Kalimna Vineyard to Penfolds in 1945. The vineyard had been a major success story during the export boom of Australian burgundy to the United Kingdom, but since 1924 had gradually become an important source of fruit for fortified wine. The acquisition coincided with plans to abolish the export bounty, the post-war immigration of displaced Europeans, and the return of Australian soldiers from various war theatres. Planted with cabernet sauvignon, shiraz, mataro, and cinsaut, Kalimna would become the centrepiece of Penfolds’ post-war vineyard portfolio and the source block for early Bin 28 and Bin 389 Dry Reds. Prior to the experimental 1952 and 1953 Penfolds Grange Cabernets, there was at least one bottling of 1948 Penfolds Kalimna Cabernet Sauvignon, as
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