THE AUSTRALIAN ARK – Federation to the Modern Era | 1900–1982
The technocrats and style merchants, by this time, were convinced the future lay in cool-climate viticulture, and soon a completely different style of shiraz took root in New South Wales, Victoria, and Western Australia. The higher elevations of New South Wales in Tumbarumba and the Orange districts were also planted with cool-climate grape varieties with the hope of redefining and broadening Australia’s fine wine aesthetic. Although a nascent modern winemaking scene had appeared decades earlier, new momentum was gathering speed with plantings in Heathcote, the Grampians, and the Pyrenees taking place. The Melbourne Dress Circle, the ring of wine regions around the city of Melbourne (and a term coined by James Halliday), showed great promise with new vineyard developments in the Yarra Valley and Geelong. The release of Central Victoria’s 1980 Knight’s Granite Hills Shiraz and 1980 Balgownie Cabernet Sauvignon epitomised the excitement and potential of cool-climate wine. These styles were a counterpoint to the voluminous reds of South Australia and appealed to Australia’s rapidly developing food and lifestyle culture. The excitement for cool-climate wines created a new unsettling paradigm for post-colonial wine families situated in warmer climate districts. Dr Richard Smart, the controversial viticulturalist, predicted the end of the Barossa by the turn of the approaching millennium. At the time, there was widespread uprooting of old vines, funded by the government, to reduce the number of bearing vineyards and grape surpluses. The Vine-Pull Scheme could have been disastrous because many old vineyards were grubbed up, but the very best were left alone, according to winemaker Robert Callaghan. Many observers believed that the scheme allowed vineyards planted in the wrong areas to disappear.
First vintage Jeffrey Grosset, Clare Valley, South Australia. [Grosset Collection]
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