THE AUSTRALIAN ARK – Federation to the Modern Era | 1900–1982
There are many pre-World War I plantings, particularly in phylloxera-free South Australia, that have reached their centurion years. The richly concentrated d’Arenberg The Dead Arm Shiraz, for instance, derives from ‘truncated, gap- toothed’ old vines dating back to 1912. Henschke’s Mount Edelstone Vineyard, planted by Ronald Angas, and St Hallett’s original Old Block Vineyard were also planted in the same year. Alongside the buoyant red table wine market, the market for fortified and sparkling wines in Australia was growing rapidly. Penfolds was particularly acquisitive during the early 1900s, buying the Dalwood vineyards in 1904 and Minchinbury Vineyards in 1912, the latter with Leo Buring as its chief winemaker. Seppelt bought properties at Rutherglen in 1914 and Hans Irvine’s Great Western in 1918. In Western Australia, the Slavonian Vineyard, established in 1902 at Armadale, was producing 36,000 litres of wine in 1912 and selling to the Croatian community and beyond. Slavonian’s chief cellarman, Zdravko Vranjican, said of the times that ‘barrels of wine were delivered by horse and cart to the Armadale railway station and sent to various parts of the State mainly for consumption by fellow countrymen such as timber workers cutting sleepers in the southwest forests and those working in the Kalgoorlie Goldfields’, according to Michael Zekulich in his book The Vine, Grapes and Wine Croatians in Western Australia. Wine, usually watered down to suit the taste of their crew, was also sold to visiting French ships. The vineyard became a hub for the Dalmatian community and was renowned for its generous hospitality. Its founder, Josip Marian, who had previously worked on the construction of the Suez Canal, had found some success as a fisherman working out of Perth and owned a number of fishing boats. According to wine writer Michael Zekulich, the nearby Derrynasura Vineyard, owned by English Baronet Sir Arthur Stepney, was producing 15% of Western Australia’s production in 1913. Around this time in the Barossa, with exports to England booming, ‘over 1,500,000 cuttings of various varieties had been put down by a few nurserymen who made a regular trade with rooted vines’, according to the Weekly Times on the 16th of November 1912. And at Orlando Wines, in Rowland Flat, considerable extensions to the fermentation and storage cellars were made in 1911. The spectre of a great war with Germany was still an abstract concept to many winemaking families. They just got on with their lives and took advantage of the booming export markets to the UK. . . . Auldana winery continued to prosper during the early 1910s and featured heavily in newspaper editorials and advertising. Many of Auldana’s wines entered into wine shows yielded impressive results. The Mercury newspaper reported on the 17th of October 1912 that ‘[g]old and silver medals and championship cups have
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