THE AUSTRALIAN ARK – Federation to the Modern Era | 1900–1982
After the death of John Riddoch, the fortunes of the Coonawarra Fruit Colony dwindled. The lack of a benefactor and visionary leader meant that momentum was lost. In 1906, the trustees of Yallum carved up the land into lots of 25 to 865 acres and put a vast area of the estate (17,000 acres) up for sale. The uptake was sluggish rather than enthusiastic, with several parcels of land taking some years to sell. In 1909, John Redman and sons Robert and Bill acquired an unsold 40-acre block of land from the Yallum Estate for £900. A further 13,736 acres were sold off by auction in 1912 in 44 lots of varying sizes from 10 to 1,000 acres. Although this encouraged closer settlement in the area, the Coonawarra dream had lost its reverie. The blockers were now alone. When John Riddoch died in 1901, Coonawarra Cellars had 60 thousand- gallon casks, 200 fifty-gallon casks, and 600 hogsheads in its cellars. The alarming stagnation of sales resulted in the need for increased storage of wine. Casks were moved over to the Katnook Shearing Shed. The executors, shortly afterwards, on the advice of Ewen McBain, installed a pot still and brick chimney at Coonawarra Cellars to process the wine into brandy. This would result in a significant increase in brandy production in Coonawarra to deal with the oversupply of wine grapes. Pioneering winemaker Bill Redman (1887–1979), who first worked with John Riddoch as a labourer, as mentioned earlier, is quoted in James Halliday’s Coonawarra: The History, the Vignerons and the Wines as saying that ‘from 1890 to 1945 you can write failure across the face of Coonawarra’. The region stubbornly remained an outpost of South Australia’s wine industry because of its relative isolation and low production. A small amount of bulk table wine was produced annually, with Redman’s selling their wine to Douglas Tolley of Hope Valley until 1920. But ultimately, it was unprofitable, and as a consequence, there was no investment in the region until after World War II. But John Riddoch’s name is memorialised by Wynn’s John Riddoch Cabernet Sauvignon, a style that trailblazed Coonawarra during the early 1980s and continues to set the benchmark for the region. The importation of oak for barrel making had grown with the vibrant export trade of Australian wine during the previous decades. Much of the material was American oak. But even in 1907, ‘white oak’ was being imported into South Australia from Jarnac, in France. Douglas Tolley of Tolley Scott & Tolley had learned the craft of brandy-making in Cognac, at Hennessey and Martel. In the cellars, among the scores of oaken casks, were 480 barrels of white oak from Jarnac. Because of its highly prized reputation, it was reported in Adelaide’s ‘Among the Vineyards’ column in The Advertiser (22nd of June 1907) that every ‘stick or stave’ from the forest was authenticated from despatch and ‘countersigned [by] the local mayor and finally by the French Consul in Adelaide’ before shipment to the distillery, which had been established to rectify spirit for surplus wine and for fortifying purposes. In 1906, Tolley Scott & Tolley
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