THE AUSTRALIAN ARK – Federation to the Modern Era | 1900–1982
legendary Seppelt winemaker Colin Preece instructed viticulturalist Murray Clayton to bring back vine cuttings from Rutherglen with the aim of planting pinot noir for sparkling wine production. Shortly afterwards, a propagation nursery was established at Stawell, and vines were planted at Great Western and Drumborg. In 1956, John Middleton, of Mount Mary fame, planted pinot noir at Mooroobark (now Chirnside Park) using cuttings sourced from the defunct Yeringberg Vineyard and Great Western, but this vineyard would be later grubbed up for housing development. As a consequence, a diverse yet largely unidentified collection of 19th-century pinot noir clones was destroyed. It would take many more years before pinot noir would return to vogue in Australia.
In 1952 [Roseworthy Agricultural College] was an old-fashioned farm that still used draft horses to pull carts. Lessons included learning to milk cows, which meant getting up at four-thirty in the morning in the pitch dark and wandering around with a torch looking for the brutes out in a paddock, while freezing to death. The college had a winemaking course, but I never tasted the product. When the grapes were harvested, they were dumped in a big concrete holding trough and left overnight. In the morning, before pressing them, they had to chase the possums off the grapes! – From the Beginning Onwards, autobiography, John Robinson, British sculptor, Roseworthy student, and co-founder of Australia’s Bradshaw Foundation
Max Schubert’s early Grange vintages had a reputation for volatility. ‘One logical explanation of why Schubert even left the bungs out of barrels to encourage volatility’, said winemaker Ian Hickinbotham, ‘concerns the management of malo-lactic fermentation’. Apparently, few scientists of the day recognised that a secondary fermentation could take place in Australian conditions, despite the occurrence of secondary fermentation having been observed in 1858 by William Macarthur in Letter XV in his ‘Letters from Maro’ series. By this time, he had been making wine for over 30 years, his first Camden vintage being 1824. After the purchase of Château Comaum from Woodley’s and the vineyard property’s renaming to Wynn’s Coonawarra Estate, a new winemaking approach was instigated by Ian Hickinbotham, in which malolactic fermentation was encouraged after primary fermentation in its red wines. This was achieved by simply decreasing the amount of added sulphur dioxide. Astonishingly, the leading scientists of the day believed that warm-climate-grown grapes contained no malic acid. Emboldened by the advice of his father, Roseworthy’s Alan Hickinbotham, the experiments were carried out at Wynn’s Coonawarra Estate during the 1952 vintage. The results were spectacularly good.
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