THE AUSTRALIAN ARK – Federation to the Modern Era | 1900–1982
The uncertainty surrounding wine production in the early 1900s saw many growers convert, by grafting, their vineyards partially or totally over to Zante currants for the dried fruit market. By 1909, the Clare Valley, including Watervale and Auburn, had around 981 acres of Zante currant plantings compared with around 240 acres in 1900. The Barossa’s plantings had gone from 95 acres to 848 acres in the same period. Penfolds, on the other hand, was in an acquisitive mode, buying land and vineyards in McLaren Vale and later building a winery between 1904 and 1912. D & J Fowler’s Kalimna Vineyard, named for its beautiful view, which had been planted on Moppa scrubland 20 years earlier in 1888, was now planted out to around 326 acres, of which 200 acres comprised shiraz, cabernet, and malbec to make into burgundy wine for the export market. The winery, built in 1896 and set into the side of a hill, with a storage capacity of 250,000 gallons, also bought fruit from local growers and vinified the harvest in 32 water-cooled (with copper-coiled pipes) fermentation tanks. That same year, George Swan Fowler commissioned to have a riverboat steamer built for both work and private use, but he died that year and never enjoyed it. The MV Marion, recognised as one of the Murray River’s iconic steamships, ended up being owned by another irrigation and wine pioneer, Ben Chaffey, and would later be restored in the 1990s by Steam Age enthusiasts, including vigneron Robert O’Callaghan. But in 1904, the Barossa Valley’s Kalimna Vineyard, managed for six years by William Salter, had begun to struggle with slowing export orders, although it was still exporting wine to PB Burgoyne and Co. The story goes that, in 1907, a flock of starlings flew over a car belonging to vigneron R Russell of Katunga, who was driving Burgoyne and his son Alan to various wineries in McLaren Vale. Russell saw them overhead and remarked, ‘They get our profits’. The Wine King, as Peter Bond Burgoyne was called, could not resist the opening and observed, with a smile, ‘Oh, I thought Burgoyne got them’. By this time, the populations of starlings and foxes in McLaren Vale had become extremely problematic. Oak was used for both the maturation and transportation of wine. Although new-oak-aged wine is today seen as a symbol of quality, winemakers then saw the flavour of new oak in wine as an impairment. In 1904, the Melbourne Leader’s horticultural correspondent revealed the steps taken at Peter Burgoyne’s new Mount Ophir Winery in Rutherglen:
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