The Culture of Wine: Australia
Australia is a vast, isolated, contradictory country. The north of Australia is close to Pacific Asia, but there isn’t really very much in the north of Australia apart from the one-street town of Darwin. There are a lot of one-street towns in Australia located in the middle of nowhere. The street usually has a “hotel,” which in the nineteenth century meant it was a brothel, now it’s a bar, an off-licence, and a bookies.
The most bizarre—and busiest—of these towns is Hahndorf near Adelaide, which is essentially a German theme park. Australia is defined by immigration, much of it forced. In Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, the convict Magwitch was sent to Australia, but rather than being an outcast he made money. In another of his novels, David Copperfield, the character Micawber, modelled on Dickens’ father, has a catchphrase, “Something will turn up.” Nothing ever does until he moves to Australia.
In Britain, Australia was seen as a distant land of both punishment and opportunity, rather like the US but a country that remained a colony—the head of state is still the British monarch. But immigrants from other European countries went to Australia too. There are large Italian, Greek, and Croatian communities. The great 1990s Italian footballer Christian Viera speaks English with a strong Australian accent and played cricket growing up. The current Tottenham manager Ange Postecoglou is Greek-Cypriot Australian and embodies every stereotype that description conjures: watch The Slap.
In terms of wine, German immigration was significant. Charles Henschke left Silesia in the 1840s for religious reasons. A trained mason, he found himself in the town of Gnadensburg in Eden Valley where he won a contract to build a new church. His family then earned the rights to make wine for the church from the vineyard planted next to it. The German population was otracised during both World Wars, and German names were Anglicised: Gnadensburg became Hill of Grace, now the most iconic vineyard in Australia. The Henschke family still supply the church with wine—fortified wine made in the 1940s.
Another important wine immigrant is Dr. Penfold, who arrived in Adelaide in the late 1840s. His medicine was fortified wine. His daughter and son-in-law took over his business and turned it into the biggest winery in Australia: by the First World War, they made a third of all Australian wine. Fortified wine is no longer an integral part of wine culture, but it remains a part of Australia’s wine identity.
Immigration from Europe meant the displacement of the original population, either through widespread murder or by forcibly removing Aboriginal children into European families. This history is recognised, but whether it has been fully addressed is another question. The remaining Aborigine population are still on the edge of society with alcohol a huge problem—alcohol was only introduced by the Europeans in the 1800s.
Convict jails are now museums, where you can see the cells in which convicts were jailed, the spaces in which women were whipped, the stocks in which convicts had vegetables and worse thrown at them. It’s a brutal history, and not one that’s in the distant past.
Australia is a strange, fascinating country to visit. The cities are modern, with skyscrapers looking over the water: Australia’s main cities are all by the coast because it’s so hot inland. They’re vibrant, with an Asian influence. But there’s also a clear British identity, with Victorian architecture and statues of Queen Victoria. The cities are far apart, with little in between them. It’s a country that’s vast and open, huge stretches of nothingness, a country to get lost in yet which always wants to take you somewhere.
Perth is perhaps the most isolated city in the world: the only thing that lies between it and Adelaide, nearly 2,700km away, is a gold mine. But it’s a modern, vibrant, successful city. After the Second World War, the Western Australian government initiated research into which industries would re-energise the economy. One of those industries was agriculture: farming is a big part of Australian culture (think Babe). That research led to Margaret River being pinpointed as ideal for viticulture, particularly for Bordeaux varieties, the first plantings in 1967.
The success of Margaret River since then gives a sense of the innovation in Australian culture. And also the irreverence towards accepted traditions. Australian winemakers embraced stainless steel tanks for “clean” winemaking; the concept of multi-regional blending; and the knowledge that image matters. Critter labels were all the fashion in the 1990s; now, there are producers all around the world that have an animal on the label, because animals help sell wine. It may seem kitsch, but wine needs to be sold.
[yellow tail] (yes, that’s how it’s labelled) has a kangaroo on the label. Owned by a family of Italian immigrants who spotted a gap in the US market for off-dry, inexpensive red wine, it’s been an astonishing success. And who wouldn’t buy a slightly sweet red wine with a kangaroo on the label? In Perth, there is an island in the bay that’s devoted to orphaned kangaroos who jump around freely. I got to feed an intimidating but adorable kangaroo from the palm of my hand. That’s Australia: open, friendly, wild, combative, proud, prickly, complicated, full of surprising history but alive and always hopping into the future.
