THE AUSTRALIAN ARK – Federation to the Modern Era | 1900–1982
While attending King’s School near Parramatta, New South Wales, Bob James gravitated towards literature rather than sports. While on holidays with his family in Perth, Western Australia, he said he also ‘learned to smoke his father’s cigars and to drink his best wines’. In 1923, he joined the West Australian newspaper as a cadet, along with (Sir) Paul Hasluck, later governor-general of Australia, who became a lifelong friend. When living and working in London as a journalist around 1930, James said he enjoyed all of ‘the cultural entertainments, lectures, bookstores, and galleries’ the city had to offer. This included the experience of ‘Château Margaux at 7/6d a bottle’. After returning to Perth in 1932, he became a features editor, occasionally writing wine stories. In 1940, Paul Hasluck’s Freshwater Bay Press published his Venite Apotemus (Come, Let Us Drink) under the pseudonym Tom Turnspit, which promoted the consumption of Australian wine and a European- style cafe culture. During World War II (after having been rejected for military service on account of poor health), he was a Western Australian government censor – which he hated – before joining the ABC bureau in Canberra in 1942. After the war, he returned to Western Australia and purchased (against the advice of Jack Mann) the Glen Hardey Vineyard in the Perth Hills, where he made sweet white wines and claret styles. After his vineyard was destroyed by a bushfire in 1949, he wrote Barrel and Book: A Winemaker’s Diary , which ran into a second edition. During the 1950s, he moved to Melbourne and wrote Nuts on Wine (1950), the influential primer Wine in Australia (1952), The Gadding Vine (1955), Antipasto (1957), and A Word-Book of Wine (1959). He also worked on other projects, particularly for Wynns Wine Growers. Typically, his books combined his love for literature and the culture of wine. While seemingly old-fashioned in style today, his writing was greatly appreciated by readers wishing to gain ‘greater worldly sophistication and knowledge of wine and food’. He was very much a renaissance man who railed against the extremes of wowserism and drunkenness yet encouraged the consumption of Australian wine. Other wineries, including Orlando, Yalumba, Hardy’s, Houghton’s, and Lindeman’s, were also competing in the same space, with the importation of pressure fermenters, refrigeration equipment, and new presses. Colin Gramp, who flew on Sutherland flying boats as an air gunner on 49 operational flights over the Atlantic during the war, returned to his family’s Orlando winery and became its technical director. He is generally credited as being the first person to use cold and pressure fermentation to produce beautiful aromatic wine. The 1953 Orlando Special Vintage Rhine Riesling was a standout wine. Gramp also introduced Barossa Pearl, a sparkling wine based on pressure fermenters and the tank transfer method, which was released in time for the Melbourne Olympics in 1956. According to wine writer James Halliday in his A
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