THE AUSTRALIAN ARK – Federation to the Modern Era | 1900–1982
Bourke of Sons & Brothers Vineyard in Orange, Benno Seppelt had made wine for the Gilbert family in the 1870s. Also, there are distinct similarities in the appearance of both the Reynella and Dorrien clones, with similar clusters and small berries. The Dorrien Vineyard was owned by Seppelt for decades but was dug up soon after the vine-pull scheme of the mid-1980s. These venerable but very low-yielding vines, planted with colonial vinestock material around 1945, were deemed uneconomic, despite contributing to Seppelt Dorrien Cabernet Sauvignon, one of the region’s successful ultra-fine wines during this period. The Dorrien clone was exported to Molong in New South Wales during the 1950s and distributed around Mudgee, including to Alfred Kurtz’s vineyard in 1961. Molong’s Dorrien material was also planted at Sons & Brothers Vineyard, among others, during the early 1980s. The selections SA125 and SA126, by far the most successful and widely planted commercial selections in Australia, also derive from the Dorrien Vineyard, but were registered in 1970. . . .
1948 PENFOLDS KALIMNA CABERNET SAUVIGNON Barossa Valley, South Australia
Max Schubert made this one-off single-vineyard cabernet sauvignon from the 1888-planted Block 42 vineyard, located at Kalimna, in the Moppa subregion of the Barossa Valley. Max Lake wrote that it could ‘only be compared to the big Cabernet wines of Europe’. This wine was assembled around 1950 and could have been an inspiration for Max Schubert’s Grange. He initially hoped that Grange would be cabernet-based and even made experimental Grange cabernet and Grange cabernet hermitage before he settled on hermitage (shiraz) as the principal variety. These bottles may have been labelled especially for Max Lake, the source of two bottles sold at auction in Sydney in 1987. The wine was never released commercially, but it inspired winemaker John Duval to release a single- vineyard 1990 Block 42 Cabernet Sauvignon to great acclaim.
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