off, and a new long drawn-out battlefront with European Governments on Australian wine names would become a feature of debate for many decades to come. After the First World War, soldier settlement schemes, including at McLaren Vale, were established around the country to develop productivity and build new lives for returning soldiers. In 1920 Frank Osborn, with the help of his brother-in-law Sam Tolley, built a winery with “a row of nine five-ton open fermenting tanks, a block of 19 concrete storage tanks totalling some 40,000 gallons and hand- operated basket presses.” The following year he made his first wines, mostly heavy dry red table wine, for the Australian Burgundy market in the United Kingdom and a small amount of port. This venture was established to “cash in on the Commonwealth export bounty of four shillings per gallon.” At Kay Brothers, over 70% of production in 1930 was sweet, fortified red. Yet just ten years earlier, most of its wines were made for the bulk dry red market and destined for “Burgoyne’s Dry Red or Emu Dry Red” in the UK market. Such was the effect of the Export Bounty Act of 1924, which encouraged and subsidised fortified wine production. In the peaceable days of 1938 and early 1939, Lyndsay Booth began trucking grapes for Penfolds. During the war he gradually expanded his operations by carting wine between Clarendon, McLaren Vale, Magill, Marion and Nuriootpa. Marion, at that time, before urban development, was a big grape growing area. But petrol rationing became heavily controlled by the Government. Lyndsay Booth got around these war regulations by painting the Penfolds-branded livery on his trucks. The work was relentless, but it enabled Booth to acquire the turn-of-the- century Honey Pot Vineyard in the mid-1940s. A close relationship between Lyndsay Booth and Max Schubert would develop after the war. Max Schubert chose the Honeypot Vineyard as a source for his ground- breaking 1951 Penfolds Grange. In 1948 Emu Wine Company’s William Benjamin ‘Ben’ Chaffey, a scion of Mildura’s Chaffey family, and friend Alan Ferguson bought the historic old Hope Vineyards in McLaren Vale from Geoffrey Kay. Both had served with the Royal Australian Airforce during the war. The property was renamed Benalan and with the managing director Colin Haselgrove’s approval, the pair were able to sell their bulk wine to Emu Wine Company which kept the business solvent. Family connections with
McLaren Vale
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