CHAPTER 20 | 1950s – Boom Times Again
into heavier wines, with sherries and ports soon becoming a speciality. At the inaugural Pokolbin and District Vine Growers Wine Show, Tulloch was the most successful exhibitor and the championship prize winner. Much of the wine was sold in bulk to local wineries or wine merchants in Sydney. Among its clients was a roll call of great names, including Caldwell’s, Douglas Lamb (under his St Patrice label), Rhine Castle, and Leo Buring. By the 1940s, it was generally agreed that JY Tulloch had been instrumental in making Pokolbin famous for its wines. Highly respected by the local community, he had been the longstanding president of the Cessnock District Agricultural and Horticultural Association. By the early 1950s, after Tulloch’s death in 1940, a young assistant, Harry Brown, later a famous face on the Sydney wine trade scene, persuaded JY’s son Hector to bottle and market wine under the Tulloch label. But after a disastrous 1958 vintage, Tulloch began to supplement some of its dry red blends with McLaren Vale wine. The Private Bin Dry Red, however, was a 100% Hunter Valley wine and enjoyed a great show record. At a remarkable tasting that would be held in 1982 at Glen Elgin, wine writer James Halliday tasted Tulloch dry red wines dating back to the 1930s, including a 1933 burgundy bottled by Thomas Hardy. While disappointing as a wine, it would reveal the extent of relationships in the Australian wine industry. A 1947 Tulloch dry red tasted ‘magnificent, with astonishing sweet/ripe fruit and rich ripe velvety berry flavours’. The 1954 Tulloch Pokolbin Private Bin Dry Red enjoyed an astounding show career and is the stuff of legends. . . . Vigneron John Charles Brown, of Brown Brothers at Milawa, envisioned new directions for the family company with the 1950 purchase of an elevated 117-acre orcharding property Everton Hills from Mr V Capriotti, near the township of Everton. The existing vineyard was a fruit salad of plantings and included shiraz, black hambro, flame tokay, isabella, merlot, and several unidentified varieties. It was first envisaged that the stony hill soils would be suited to riesling, white hermitage (trebbiano), palamino, and white grenache. At the time, John Charles Brown was experimenting with flor sherry production, but a few years later, a new 30-acre vineyard was planted with shiraz, cabernet sauvignon, and some ‘rogue’ cabernet franc. John Graham Brown recalled, ‘A key driver of the Everton Hills purchase was to escape the frequent frost damage at Milawa – not too far away, so that it could be easily accessed and developed on Sundays, when wine sales were forbidden. As kids, we were expected to help.’ The first Everton Hills Dry Red was produced in the early 1950s, but there was very little bottled, as most wine was sold in hogsheads. This would change in 1961 when it was deemed there was ‘sufficient Cabernet to use the Everton Hills Shiraz
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