CHAPTER 20 | 1950s – Boom Times Again
By 1952, wine merchant Johnnie K Walker had bought out McWilliam’s shareholding of Rhine Castle Wines Pty Ltd. The cellars at the Royal Exchange in Sydney became a meeting place for local business people where a ‘glass of wine, a plate of spaghetti and back at work in an hour’ popularised a local wine culture. Throughout the next few decades, until his death in 1987, Johnnie Walker became a Sydney institution and renowned restaurateur, despite the decline of the Rhine Castle brand by the 1970s. David Dunstan wrote in the Australian Dictionary of Biography that Johnnie Walker had ‘advanced Australians’ appreciation of wine and food and helped to promote the wines of the Hunter Valley’. Against the advice of his management team, and after previously showing interest in its acquisition, David Wynn purchased Château Comaum and the surrounding vineyards in 1951 and renamed it Coonawarra Estate (later Wynns Coonawarra Estate). Prices for grazing land had increased markedly because of the strong demand for wool created by the Korean War, and there were rumours that the vineyards would be sold as grazing land and the cellars converted into a wool store. Ken Ward, a Roseworthy-trained winemaker who was working at Romalo Cellars, in Magill, at the time, had listened to the negotiation that took place on the phone. ‘The offer was £15,000’, he said, and ‘it went up in £2,500 steps until they got to £25,000, which Tony Nelson accepted’. This represented an enormous profit at the time but also showed great confidence in the potential of Coonawarra. Eric Brand believed that it was ‘the saving of Coonawarra’. In some respects, the jigsaw puzzle was now complete. After decades of uncertainty, and fully aware of John Riddoch’s grand visions, David Wynn took control of the region’s destiny. With strong distribution in Melbourne, wealth, and creative flair, he set a new standard for winemaking and marketing practices that quickly made Coonawarra Estate one of the biggest names in Australia’s rapidly expanding table wine market. Samuel Wynn & Co had become the most influential wholesale wine business in Melbourne. The family also had interests in restaurants, including Florentino’s, and large vineyard holdings and wineries in South Australia, including Wynvale, between Adelaide and the Barossa Valley, and Romalo Sparkling Wine Cellars at Magill, in South Australia. Samuel (Sammy) Wynn (1891–1982) came from Lodz, Russia-occupied Poland, and arrived in Australia in 1913. Although he came from a family of vintners, he built his substantial wine business through his own imagination and hard work. His eldest son, David, rejoined the family business after serving with the Australian Air Force in 1945 and further expanded it, including a large vineyard development at Modbury in 1947, now a suburb of Adelaide called Wynn Vale. During the early 1950s, the Redman family was the only other winery in Coonawarra with the capacity to sell bulk wine to other wine companies. By this time, Hardy’s, Yalumba, Château Reynella, Leo Buring, and Woodley’s were taking
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