CHAPTER 20 | 1950s – Boom Times Again
Despite all of the developments in Australia, the export market was still largely based on bulk wine. In England, H & G Simonds Ltd sold mainly Australian red burgundy under the Emu, Big Tree, Harvest, Tintara, and Keystone brands. PB Burgoyne was still particularly active in distributing its Tintara brand, but by 1956, the firm was taken over by the Emu Wine Company, which then marketed the famous Tintara brand under its own moniker. The track record of the Emu Wine Company was varied. Under the winemaking supervision of John Guinand, the wines were generally extremely sound. Much of the wine during the 1940s and 1950s came from Tolley’s Stonycroft, d’Arenberg, and a few others. The bestselling Emu burgundy style required the winemakers to make heavily coloured, thick, concentrated, and extracted wine so that when it was shipped to London, it could be blended with cheap, light-coloured Cypriot wine, or at least that is what d’Arry Osborn said in an interview with Rob Linn in 2001. The wines were open-fermented with headed-down boards. After vinification, they were stored in massive vats, often made of jarrah that had been sourced second-hand from the nearby Tatachilla winery or purchased new from either Babidge or Schahinger, in Adelaide.
When I started making wine at our own winery, Cud Kay, of the second generation [Kay Brothers], often helped me with advice on winemaking. Kay started vintage a week or two before us, and I would take two buckets of our freshly crushed grape juice and take out buckets of his fermenting juice to start our fermenters. This was typical behaviour of the day, where business neighbours, whilst competitors in the strictest sense of the word, did not see it that way, and lived their intertwined lives cooperating and helping each other. – d’Arry Osborn, d’Arenberg Winery, 2015
. . . The early 1950s saw the beginning of the Hunter Valley’s golden period, which would last for about 20 years. It was a well-established wine region close enough to Sydney to draw interest and visits from interested wine people such as wine merchants Henry Renault and Johnnie K Walker. They encouraged Maurice O’Shea, Dan Tyrrell, Keith and Hector Tulloch, Len Drayton, Doug Elliott, and other winemakers. The flourishing wine and food scene in Sydney and growing interest in Hunter Valley wine gave the region a leading advantage, but it was off a small base. The decade had started off with only eight operational wineries in the Hunter Valley. Lindeman’s and McWilliam’s were dominant forces because of their successful fortified winemaking ventures in Corowa, Griffith, Yenda,
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