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STATE LIBRARY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA J. D. SOMERVILLE ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION

OH 692/81

Full transcript of an interview with

JOHN KIRK

on 13 March 2002

by Rob Linn

Recording available on CD

Access for research: Unrestricted

Right to photocopy: Copies may be made for research and study

Right to quote or publish: Publication only with written permission from the State Library

OH 692/81 JOHN KIRK

NOTES TO THE TRANSCRIPT

This transcript was donated to the State Library. It was not created by the J.D. Somerville Oral History Collection and does not necessarily conform to the Somerville Collection's policies for transcription.

Readers of this oral history transcript should bear in mind that it is a record of the spoken word and reflects the informal, conversational style that is inherent in such historical sources. The State Library is not responsible for the factual accuracy of the interview, nor for the views expressed therein. As with any historical source, these are for the reader to judge.

This transcript had not been proofread prior to donation to the State Library and has not yet been proofread since. Researchers are cautioned not to accept the spelling of proper names and unusual words and can expect to find typographical errors as well.

OH 692/81 TAPE 1 - SIDE A

NATIONAL WINE CENTRE ORAL HISTORY PROJECT. Interview with John Kirk at Clonakilla at Murrumbateman, New South Wales, on 13th March, 2002. Interviewer: Rob Linn.

John, just to begin with yourself—your own background—where and when were you born?

JK: I was born in England in 1935, not exactly in the north of England, but in Cheshire, just to the south of the major Manchester area. My father at that time was working for Thomas Cook & Son. My family were of Irish origin. My mother was born in Ireland and my father was born in England, but again [was] of Irish [extraction]—there’s a lot of Irish up in the north of England. And so we retained strong contacts with Ireland. And my mother went into business. She just started a dress shop, and then another dress shop, but she always hankered just to go back to Ireland. And so shortly after the World War 2 she went back to Ireland to buy a hotel, which had come on the market in a place called Listoonvarna, which is in County Clare on the west coast. Very well known. It’s a spa town, with the sulphur waters, and iron waters, and (sounds like, make easy) waters, and people used to come for their rheumatism and so on. But there were lots of hotels there, and an old one came on the market called The Atlantic Hotel, which she duly bought. But while she was there, the biggest and poshest hotel in the town also came on the market, called The Hydro Hotel, which was one of a series of hotels set up by the Irish Tourist Board as exemplars. Very well run, to provide first class hotels. And like a lot of government enterprises, all these hotels were losing money. So the government decided to sell them. The Hydro came on the market just while she was there. So she came back to England to tell my

father that she had bought not one, but two, hotels, the second one being much more expensive than the first. Anyway, from that moment on, every summer we went back to Ireland to live in and work in the hotel. This is really where I got involved with wine. Because, as in many family businesses, every member of the family has to do their bit. So at the age of fourteen I was not only serving behind the bar, but I was put in charge of the wine cellar. Being a ‘grey day’ hotel, as they were classed then, naturally customers expected a wine list. So someone had to order the wine. I simply had this task given to me. I didn’t at that time drink wine. Not many fourteen old boys find wine very nice. But I had to learn about it. And I got hold of a book by a man called Andre L Simone. And he was a very well regarded expert at that time. A Frenchman.

Still is regarded.

JK: Yes, indeed. He wrote one of the first popular books on wine appreciation.

Exactly.

JK: [He wanted] to educate the wine drinking public about wine. And I got his book. I can still remember it. Unfortunately, it’s mislaid somewhere. In our many moves I’ve lost it, but I can still remember its red cover. And I read it from A to B and learned, in essence, how to order wine. I read from his charts, which were the good vintages. And I learned about the whites and the reds and so on. All this without ever drinking it. So I became very knowledgeable about wine. Of course, I read about fermentation process, how wine was made and so on. So I was getting interested. There was obviously lots of interesting technology there so I got very interested in wine and carried on the wine ordering. Then later on, as I got older, my father would get out bottles of wine in the hotel—at dinner in the evening. And, of course, we had some very good wines. I was introduced then to very good European—entirely European— wines. Mainly French. I think nearly all French. Particularly Burgundy’s. I

remember we drank a lot of Burgundian wines that I couldn’t afford to drink now. I just acquired a taste for wine, having already acquired a lot of knowledge about it.

John, did your mother manage these hotels from afar?

JK: No. Well, they were seasonal hotels. This was one of the advantages. They weren’t opened in the winter. So they’d open at the beginning of the summer and go through to well into the autumn, and then they’d close down. There’d be a caretaker there to look after them. So somebody would have to go over. All this time she still had the dress shop in the north of England in a town called Stockport.

I know Stockport.

JK: Remarkable town. That’s where I spent a lot of my life. And so she was still running the dress business, while in the summer mainly concentrating on the hotels. So we would spend the whole summer there. At the time we’d gone back to Ireland, in effect, because increasingly the hotels became the main part of our total business. I was already at boarding school in England. Actually it’s a school run by the De La Salle brothers in the north of England. It’s mainly a day school but had a small boarding section.

What was that called, John?

JK: It was just called De La Salle College. It was a De La Salle Order. Paul Keating was educated by the De La Salles.

Yes, he was.

So it was simply De La Salle College, Pendleton, Salford. And there was De La Salle College, Cardiff. And there was a set of them throughout England. It was a very good school, I may say, a very good school. To this day I’m grateful for the education they gave me.

So this was in the immediate post-war period?

JK: This was in the immediate post-war period, yes. When the war ended in 1945 I suppose I was about ten. I can’t remember the exact year when my mother bought the hotels but it could’ve been sort of ‘47/48, something like that. As I say, when I was about fourteen I was given the job of running the bar and so on. Not totally running the bar but I was one of the people who served behind the bar. We would come over to Ireland for the summer and I’d spend the whole of the summer vacation there in the hotel, and then I’d come back to boarding school in England. Now, after school, when I finished school, I then went on to university. I went to Cambridge to do science. I had already decided to be a scientist by this stage. And maintained my interest in wine but, of course, on an undergraduate’s stipend you can’t drink much good wine. But nevertheless I can still remember buying Yugoslavian Sylvaner, for example, which is one of the cheapest and still drinkable white wines around. So within my limited means I kept an interest in wine. And sherry, too. You can get good sherry in England. I mean, Gonzales, Byass Tio Pepe—things like that.

The true flor fino.

JK: The true flor finos, yes. I acquired quite a taste for those. Myself and my coterie would have sherry together in the evening before dinner, in one or other of our rooms. Very civilised practice I still think, sherry and conversation.

John, at the time were premium table wines well known in England or was it still mainly a fortified market?

JK: Australian, you mean?

No, I mean in England -

JK: In England generally. Oh, yes, England was then, as it is now, mainly a table wine drinking country. England was Bordeaux’s main market. I suppose until America eventually took over. With England’s increasing poverty and American’s increasing affluence, the more expensive Bordeauxs tended to drift across the Atlantic. But it was England that created Bordeaux essentially. And, yes, there was always a very good choice. I can still remember in Cambridge there was one wine shop to which I and my friends used to go to because the man there was very knowledgeable. He was, himself, a Cambridge graduate. I wish I could remember the name of the firm. It was one of these old established firms. You know, been there some generations. And he was always very good. He would advise us and we could discuss the wines with him. And if you were going to go to a party and likely to drink too much, he’d say, ‘Well, don’t get a good wine. Take some of this instead’. (Laughter) But the knowledge and expertise was there in the wine retail trade if you sought it out. And, yes, there was a very good choice. And on the whole prices weren’t that bad.

So, John, you were studying science. At which college?

JK: I was at Jesus College in Cambridge. I went up to Cambridge thinking I was going to be an organic chemist because that’s what I was most interested in. I had never done biochemistry because you don’t do biochemistry at school, at least you didn’t then. But as soon as I was exposed to biochemistry I knew this was for me. So I did what we call part two, and that’s equivalent to an honours degree in biochemistry, and then went on to do a PhD in biochemistry in Cambridge. After that went on to Oxford on a post doctoral fellowship in the botany department. And after that I went on to be a university teacher in the University of Wales in Aberystwyth in the biochemistry department. Now the sort of work I was doing, the area I was involved in and reasonably well known for, was an area in which CSIRO in its division of

plant industry right here in Canberra was also very strong. They knew about me, I knew about them. And one of the senior scientists at CSIRO plant industry—it was actually John Phillips—was on a visit to Europe and he called in to see me in Aberystwyth. It was on the Welsh coast. And he sounded me out as to if I would be interested in going out. As it happens, what he said fell on fertile ground, because I’d always been very interested in Australia, and the reason is that I have a long term family connection here. Well, I may or may not have one now, but my great, great grandfather came out in the gold rush. I don’t know what year he came out, but counting twenty-five years per generation, it would’ve been roundabout 1850, which was the time of the Victorian gold rush. So we know he came out. We know he found some gold because—I’ve been told, although I’ve never seen it—he sent back a bit of quartz with a bit of gold in it. But then he never got back. Well, the last letter they had from him said that he and some other man were going out after gold thieves. So either the gold thieves saw them coming or, like a lot of other migrants, he just decided not to go back, I don’t know. But, anyway, because of this long term family interest, I was always intrigued by Australia. By this time we were raising a family in Wales, which is a lovely place but has a dismal climate. Now, when you’re cooped up with four small children for rainy day after rainy day—every weekend sometimes—it could be an ordeal. Because what can you do with the kids? Just looking for something to do and they’re cooped up inside. ‘What shall we do now, Daddy?’ ‘What shall we do now, Daddy?’ And so the thought of sunny Australia seemed increasingly attractive, for this very reason. I’m not joking, you know. Simply being cooped up with small children.

Well understood, John.

JK: This was a real factor. As well as my family interest. Also, of course, the fact there was a centre of excellence, as we now say, in my very own

field right here in Canberra. So when John Phillips suggested—asked me in effect—was I interested, I said, ‘Well, yes, I am’. So as it happened, the division of plant industry had a post becoming available then, and they sent me the papers, in effect with an invitation to apply for it. So I applied for it and got it because they wouldn’t have invited me to apply if they hadn’t wanted me. So in 1968 we got aboard the P & O Oronsay. I mention it because, shortly thereafter all migration, not just the ten quid migrants but all migration, changed over to airlines. But I was fortunate—or we were fortunate—we caught the tail end of going all the way from Britain to Australia, first class, P & O. Very interesting experience. Five weeks at sea. And it was one of the most interesting periods of my life.

So your children would’ve been quite young at this point?

JK: Yes. The youngest one was Tim, who was one year old, and the other three were each two years. So there’d be one, three, five and seven. They were all boys and we had two more boys when we got here. So with four children and my wife, to her great credit, even though she has no family connections with Australia at all and does not, like I am, come from a family of migrants, she nevertheless buckled down and without a word just organised the move and came out. Even though she felt she was leaving [her] England. I’m not going to knock England, but I just didn’t have the same roots there that she did. So for her it was more of a wrench, but she came. And we both liked Australia almost straight away. We came to the right place, Canberra being cooler. If we’d gone perhaps to Adelaide, nice place though it is, to be hit by that climatic change from Aberystwyth might’ve been a bit much. But Canberra’s got a lovely climate. At least to appreciate it you have to come from northern Europe. Australians tend to think it’s cold, but it’s not cold at all. I mean, if you want to go cold, go to the mid west of America. Or to the north of England even. But, no, Canberra has a lovely climate. Especially if you’ve come from a worse climate. So we liked it. We settled down here.

But the climate then is what led me into wine, because within the first year or two as we experienced the seasons, and the summers, and experienced this hot weather, I began to ask myself, ‘Why aren’t there vineyards here?’ I’d been to Europe, and I thought that, well, surely this can’t be dissimilar to some of the wine growing areas of Europe. And so I decided to do a bit of climatic research. I looked up climatic data—there’s a book produced by the Smithsonian Institution in America that has all the climatic data for towns and cities around the world. So I got a data for Bordeaux and Dijon and various German places and various Spanish places. And worked out a parameter, that you’d know about, called the day degrees, or the temperature summation, which, as you know, you simply take the (median?) month of the growing season, you take the average temperature, you subtract ten degrees C because vines don’t do much below ten degrees C, and you multiply what’s left by the number of days in the month. So if the average temperature’s seventeen, you subtract ten, and you’re left with seven. Multiply it by thirty. Let’s say you get 210 day degrees. You add those up for the (median?) month of the growing season and you get a figure of merit for the amount of heat available to ripen grapes. And as soon as I did this it immediately became apparent that around Canberra—the southern tablelands is really where we’re talking about— there is almost exactly the same temperature summation, or day degrees, as Bordeaux. So immediately it was clear that anything they can grow in Bordeaux, surely we can grow here. And we were warmer than Burgundy. Substantially warmer. Much warmer than Germany. So again, why weren’t they growing grapes here? I didn’t at that time know that they had in the last century, and I think that no-one knew at that time. We only became aware of that some years later. I’d always wanted to have some involvement with the land. On my mother’s side, my family are farmers in the west of Ireland, and I’d visited my grandfather’s farm many times —the family farm—which goes back

generations. I’d always loved the farm life. And so here was an opportunity, I thought, to both indulge my great interest in wine and to get back on the land. So I decided to look for a block of land and plant a vineyard and just see what would happen. I am a scientist, and to me it was like an experiment. If we grow grapes here, of the great European varieties, what will the wine be like? It was a question that no-one then could answer because it seemingly hadn’t been done. A very interesting question. In a totally new environment, [where] there were no vineyards. If you take the Cabernets and the Semillons and Rieslings and grow them here, what will emerge?

And what were the soil types like, comparatively?

JK: Well, this was a very interesting question because as soon as I’d made this decision to look for a block of land and plant a vineyard, I started driving around. Now, at that time, and shortly before then, subdivision had started. I think when we got to Canberra its population was somewhere between sixty and ninety thousand. It now must be two hundred and fifty to three hundred thousand. But it was beginning to grow. And, of course, there were people looking for blocks of land to live the country life. Some of the local properties were being subdivided. There were a number, not a lot then, not as many as there have been subsequently, of blocks on the market, typically forty/fifty/sixty acres. And I thought that would be plenty because fifty acres of vineyard is a very big vineyard. If you just want to grow a small vineyard and have a small winery just to see what will emerge in the way of wine from this district, you only need a few acres of vines. I started looking at these properties as they were advertised in the Canberra Times, and I drove all around, and it became clear to me that there were essentially two types of land, you might say, around this part of the southern tablelands. Because although I keep talking about Canberra and the Canberra district, Canberra’s just the town. Really we’re talking about the southern tablelands of New South Wales.

And I can best exemplify this [by noting that] you’ve probably driven along the Federal Highway towards Sydney. Now, if you drive from Canberra towards Sydney on the Federal Highway, as you go the first ten/twenty/seventy kilometres out of Canberra—actually almost all the way to Sydney pretty well—if you look at the road cutting at the side of the road, what you see is sedimentary rocks. You see this, what they call, sandstone, silverstones(?), mudstones, and you generally see rock going almost all the way up to the surface and very little soil on top. If you drive along the Barton Highway—you see the Federal Highway sort of goes north east and the Barton Highway, heading towards Yass/Melbourne, goes north west—you look at the road cuttings at the side of the road, and you just see soil. It’s not topsoil the whole way. You’ll see a bit of topsoil on the top then it greys into yellow, red, whatever. So clearly these are quite different land forms. And why are they different? Well, as I said, on the Federal Highway side is the sedimentary rocks, and over this side, on the Barton Highway side, it’s volcanic rocks of various kinds. Now the difference was very clear. And I learned from a CSIRO colleague called Bob Galloway—he’s a geomorphologist in what is now CSIRO land and water, it was CSIRO land research then—that in Australia over the millennia the volcanic rocks have weathered down much more deeply than the sedimentary rocks. And this is what I was seeing so clearly. If you want a reasonable depth of soil, and in this climate we now know that you’ve got to have reasonable depth of soil, or you’re well advised to, then you’re much more likely to find it on the volcanic rocks where they’ve just naturally weathered down deeply. While I didn’t actually know about the weathering down then, it had already become clear to me that the soils were very thin and shallow on one side, on one access—the north eastern access—whereas they were deep on the north western access. I didn’t fully understand the geological basis then. So I concentrated my attention then on the north western access.

And it’s not just the soil. You can just see looking at the trees, the remnant vegetation, that it’s so much better on this side. Much bigger trees. Scrubby, thin—you just say that that’s poor country on the right- hand side. In fact, there’s damn little good country between here and Sydney. The Federal Highway’s pretty poor the whole way along. So I concentrated on this north western access, and the Barton Highway goes through Murrumbateman and to Yass. And properties became available one weekend—well, actually it was just one I saw advertised near Murrumbateman. I went and had a look at it. Just looked over the gate. And then I got in touch with the owner. It looked interesting to me. I just liked the way the grass was growing. There were only two or three trees on the place then but they were big trees. I just felt that this looked good. You know how you can get a feeling for the land?

Yes.

JK: This looked good. So I talked to the owner, and said, ‘Look, I might be interested. Can I go and dig a hole? He said, ‘Yes’. So I took my spade and I came to somewhere up on the west end of the property. Somewhere about 150 metres short of the western end and just dug a hole. A couple of spade depths. And it was soil. I didn’t hit rock, and it was nice reddish looking soil. So I thought that, yes, this I think might do it. So I made him an offer a bit below what he was looking for, and he accepted. In 1971 then we actually bought this property. It’s about forty-four and a third acres, which is more than enough for my purposes. We immediately set out to plant a vineyard because I knew it would take a long time for the vines to grow and make wine so I thought that I’d better get this ball rolling.

John, just before you go on with that, could I ask you a question more about the cultural impact of coming to Australia of you and your wife?

JK: Sure.

How did the drinking of wine compare in Australia to England?

JK: Well, it was just beginning to take off in Australia, but it was mainly amongst what you might call the educated middle class. Now I found when I got here, for example in the university and CSIRO circles in which I naturally tended to move, yes, there were some people who were already experts and who knew a lot about wine, and there were others who were just beginning to become expert. But really the range of wines available in Australia at that time was much less than in England. Much less. You didn’t have the range. And some of it was very poor. Mind you, there was very poor wine available in England, too. There’s a lot of very poor Continental wines. I think it is even true now that our wines are technically, on average, better than theirs. There are still some poor wines made in Europe. There is almost no poor wine made in Australia. But nevertheless there was a wealth of good wine available in Britain but it was much harder to find in Australia. You almost had to go and ask one of these people who’d made it their subject and say, ‘What would you recommend?’ Because if you walked into a wine shop, it wasn’t at all clear.

Was it comparatively expensive?

JK: No, not that expensive. Those were the days—it was before bag-in- box, but there were flagon wines. You could always get cheap wines— cheap half gallon flagons. Some of these were competently made, although of course if it was a white it was probably made mainly from Sultana with a little bit of Gordo chucked in and they’d call it Riesling. (Laughs)

Doradillo.

JK: Yes, Doradillo. Oh, yes, that’s right, all those neutral varieties. In the case of the reds it might be—mainly Grenache.

Mataro -

JK: That’s right. I have actually learned a great respect for Grenache certainly. Nevertheless if you over-crop it and over-water it, it’s very inferior. So, the range available was not good and it was very hard to know what to buy. I don’t know exactly when Len Evans and James Halliday first got going, but they were only beginning to get going then I think.

The early 60’s is when Len starts going, but Max Lake’s book comes out in ‘65.

JK: Yes, well, the thing was just beginning to break then. If you sort these out, you might get some information. But compared to the wealth of quality wines we’ve got available now, no, it really wasn’t very good. It really wasn’t.

And this is about the time that Andre Simone actually comes to Australia.

JK: Oh, did he?

And met with people like the Hill Smiths at Yalumba, and Colin Gramp at Orlando, and learnt to have an enormous respect for the potential here.

JK: Yes.

And it’s more or less when you arrived. (Laughs)

JK: Just at the right time. There’s a tide in the affairs of men.

So you come here, anyway.

JK: I came here, and in ‘71 then we bought the property and I cast around to find out where you get grape vines from. If you just go to your local nurseryman they say, ‘Oh, yes, we’ve got grape vines. You can have a Sultana or a Waltham Cross or a Black Hamburg’. You know, basically they were just selling grape vines for home fruit production. But I soon got on to the fact that if you go to any of the major vineyard areas there are always nurserymen there. So I, in fact, went to Griffith.

And our first vines we purchased from Premier Nurseries. They’re still going to this day, in Griffith. I think they were established in the 1940’s because I had a word on the phone recently with the current owner, who’s a lady, and I think it was her father who started it in the 1940’s. So they were able to sell us proper wine grapes. I’ve actually, in connection with something else, looked out and managed to find, quite amazingly, that we still have the first invoice. And our first purchase was of 600 Rhine Riesling, 600 Cabernet Sauvignon, and small amounts—sort of forty-ish—of various other things, although I’ve no idea what happened to them. We got some Traminer. I think a few Pinot, and one or two other varieties, but the main thing was Riesling and Cabernet Sauvignon. So in the first year then we planted—I think it was about two and one-fifth acres, it worked out at, which is down near the bottom of the hill. And the first year everything went perfectly. Because we must’ve had one of those—not all that rare but fairly infrequent summers, untypical summers— where the rain just kept coming. So the vines just kept growing. At the end of the season there we had two and one-fifth acres of established vines. No water or anything.

No irrigation?

JK: No irrigation. I didn’t at that stage appreciate how essential irrigation was. Because, as I say, we had this unusual summer. So at the end of that growing season I thought, ‘Well, that was fairly easy, I’ll plant some more’. So in the next winter, which is 1972—the first vines we planted in ‘71—I planted about another one and a fifth acres, I see from my diary, that brought us up to—what?—three and two fifths. Say, about three and a half acres. And I think that next one was mainly Pinot. At this stage we had really no idea what would do well here. So my strategy then was to plant a range of varieties corresponding to different European areas and just see what did well. I think that was a sensible thing to do. Because there was no-one you could ask. And if you asked

around in the wine industry, ‘Now, what grapes should we be planting near Canberra?’—I mean, the standard message then was—‘Oh, you can’t grow grapes there. It’s much too cold’. That was the view in the wine industry. They thought that it was too cold. Because they clearly hadn’t done their homework.

And John, were you buying rootlings or was it -

JK: These are rootlings, yes. These are rooted cuttings.

TAPE 1 - SIDE B

So John, this is your second planting.

JK: Yes. This was in the winter of 1972. And we put in, as I say, an acre and a fifth. Brings us up to nearly three and a half acres. Now the second summer—this is the ‘72/73 season—was a typical southern tableland summer. And, of course, it was hot and dry, and it was one of those years when there was actually very little rain from sometime in December right through, as it turned out, until well into February. And the new vines I planted started up alright but then, with no water, and these hot dry winds from the interior, they just began to curl up and die. At the end of that season we’d lost about two thirds of the vines. The older vines had survived better, of course, because they’d had their roots deeper. And more to the point, what we observed was that the ones near the bottom of the hill did best of all. Most of the ones at the bottom of the hill survived. And the reason, of course, is that’s the part that went dry last because water tends to drain down the hill. And so they’d survived despite the complete lack of rain. So this was a real shock to me. I thought that we’d obviously got to have water, but that’s easier said than done. We have a dam, just an old farm

dam. It doesn’t have much capacity. And the property’s too small really to capture enough water for a big dam. So clearly what we had to have was a bore, but our problem was that, again, there weren’t as many bore drillers around then as there are now. You can whistle up a bore driller like that nowadays, but then there was only one who ever came anywhere near us. I think it was (sounds like, water min), and the times when they were in the district it was too boggy so they couldn’t get on the place. They had to traverse what in the winter might be half a kilometre of boggy ground, and they thought, quite rightly, that if we get on we’ll never get off. So for some years this went on. But we nevertheless hung in there at the bottom with no more than about an acre of grape vines, but they survived despite the lack of water. Because, it’s moister down there. And every year the vines got a bit more deeply rooted.

Were you living here at this time?

JK: No, no. We still lived in Canberra (we still have a house in Canberra) and were working with the CSIRO. In fact, I only left CSIRO in 1997. So all my work in the vineyard was done in weekends, public holidays and, of course, some of my annual leave. So we hung in there with our surviving vines at the bottom, and of course they grew and, in time, produced. We did actually try and expand because fairly soon it became apparent to us that although the vines survived at the bottom of the hill—because it’s moister—that’s a frost bucket. So it was much more susceptible to frost. I thought that, obviously, we must plant at the top of the hill. So two years running—it might’ve been ‘74, and I think again in ‘75, or it could be ‘75 and ‘76—I planted a small vineyard right up at the top of the hill. And each year, because we had no water still, virtually all the vines died. But nevertheless the vines at the bottom of the hill—our surviving vineyard—produced, and we made a little bit of wine in ‘75. That’s four years after we planted. Nowadays because we now know what we’re doing,

we would expect to take a useful amount of fruit in the third year, a good quantity in the fourth year and to be at full strength from the fifth year onwards. But in those days we didn’t know what we were doing. We were struggling, learning viticulture. There were no local extension officers around here. So we had to learn on the job. It was only in the fourth year that we got a little bit of fruit, after these catastrophes with the drought and so on. And then in the fifth year, which is 1976, we got a useful amount of fruit, and so we made the first wine— the first commercial quantity of wine. We made a little bit in ‘75, just for our own benefit, and we liked it.

This is Riesling?

JK: Riesling, and we actually made a Cabernet Shiraz, because it’s still an Australian style I’m very fond of. So we had some Cabernet and we had some Shiraz so we made a Cabernet Shiraz. In 1975 we made very small amounts of each. But it wasn’t enough to release commercially. But I do remember I donated six bottles to our local Church fete for sale. So I suppose that was the first actual sale. But we don’t regard that as serious. But in ‘76 we did make wine enough to sell, and we had labels printed and so on. And that was our first vintage and as far as I’m aware, I think it’s true to say, that was the Canberra district’s first commercial vintage.

Were there any other people experimenting at the time?

JK: Oh, indeed there were. Now that we’ve got up to ‘76, I’ll backtrack a bit and tell you. In the same year as I planted—‘71—over here in Murrumbateman, even though I knew nothing of his activities, Edgar Riek was planting at Lake George, the northern end of Lake George as you drive along the Federal Highway. When you get to the top end of the lake, and look to the left, you see on the slopes of the escarpment—now you see various vineyards, of which his was the first in 1971. So Edgar and I, independently, planted the first vineyard. As I say, without knowing anything of each others

existence even though we both worked for CSIRO. But he was in the division of entomology and I was in plant industry. CSIRO is a big organisation. Each division is virtually an autonomous institution. But we fairly soon became to know of each other’s activity. So he and I were in ‘71. In ‘73, there was another vineyard planted in Murrumbateman. No, two planted in Murrumbateman. One by Wing Commander Harvey Smith, who planted Doonkuna, which is just over there, and the other one is what is now called the Murrumbateman Winery, planted by Jeff Middleton and his wife, just on the side of the Barton Highway. It’s the one you go past on the highway, just south of Murrumbateman. So they were planted in ‘73. Then Ken Helm‘s vineyard, again Murrumbateman, although now getting north of Murrumbateman and down the Yass River road. His, I believe, dates from ‘74. And then a neighbour of mine over here, what is now Yass Valley Wines, Michael Peter Griffith, planted his just over that way in ‘78. And Max Blake planted his—if you go north along the Federal Highway, and if you turn right towards Bungendore, down that road is his winery—well, his vineyard was off to the left, down there. Shingle house—I think his was called. And there may be one more planted in the 70’s. So these were the 70’s crop, you might say.

Were they mainly experimental, John?

JK: I think all of us were experimental to the extent that you couldn’t be certain it was ever going to work. But I think most of us had the idea that if it was going to work that we plant a commercial size vineyard and had a winery. But because of this total lack of knowledge about the area, you just couldn’t say whether the whole thing was going to fizzle. And after the ‘72/73 season, it was a toss up: shall I give it away now. Very tempting just to let the cattle in. But, no, we persevered.

Other people had the same sort of troubles as we had, but we learned that you have to have water, for example. Because this is where the climatic comparison can start to be very misleading.

Yes.

JK: Whereas we are very similar to Bordeaux in our temperatures (in fact, we’re not just similar, we’re essentially identical. If you plot out the seasonal temperatures for, say, Canberra airport and Bordeaux, they are point for point almost the same), but if you start looking at other climatic parameters, they’re very different. And the big difference, of course, is evaporation. In Bordeaux they’re virtually coastal. They have mild, moist breezes coming in from the Atlantic. Here we have hot, dry winds coming in from the interior of the continent. Totally different. And it shows up in the actual evaporation rate. The standard evaporation rate in the growing season in Canberra is something like two and a half times what it is for Bordeaux. So that means the evaporative stress on grape vines, or any other plant, is two and a half times what it is in Bordeaux. So that’s why they can plant and sustain vineyards without irrigation. And this is why we can’t successfully establish vineyards without irrigation. Once they’re established they actually do quite well here if your soil is deep. There are many seasons when you really don’t need any irrigation at all on a mature vine, but those first two years for the young vines you’ve got to have it. So this is something that we just had to learn on the job. So eventually, and I think it was 1978, we managed to get the bore drillers who were in the district. It was a time when the ground was dry. (Laughs) So we managed to get a bore put in at the bottom of the hill. Not a super bore. Not a great capacity. About 2,000 litres an hour. But that’s enough. You don’t need a lot of water. And we could then start establishing vineyards at the top of the hill. And, of course, once we put in the trickle irrigation the vines just grew perfectly. And so we then started increasing the size of the vineyard year by year. We’re now up to about four hectares, and we’ve just, this last winter,

started what will be our fifth and last hectare. We aim to have about five hectares in total on Clonakilla. If we want more, my son Tim and his wife have an adjoining property, and they’ve already planted two hectares. So we’ve got as much fruit as we really need. But anyway to go back. We had our first vintage in ‘76, which was the first vintage for the Canberra district. And of course, I had to go out and sell it. The person who bought it, was actually an interesting component of the industry, a lady called Anne Boland, and she was very interested in wine. And she had a very small wine shop in what must’ve been a very inexpensive retail area down in Fyshwick, which is our industrial suburb. In a place called—I think it was the Molongolo Mall. A very small shop, but she was very sympathetic to the idea of a local wine industry. So she agreed to take on my wine. She was the first person to retail our wine and, therefore, to retail Canberra district wine. Now shortly thereafter she moved up to a much better location in the suburb of Dickson. She traded under the name of The Private Cellar, and she set up her private cellar under the same name, in a nice shop, well fitted out, in Dickson. And while she was there she continued to take our wine. I have warm feelings for Anne Boland because if she hadn’t agreed to take our wine, and nobody had agreed to take our wine, then again it would’ve been a very serious obstacle in our path. But she did and she sold our wine for us.

And John, you said earlier that as a youth reading Andre Simone you learnt about the basics of winemaking.

JK: Yes.

How did you actually make your first vintage here?

JK: When I was still in England I used to do a lot of home winemaking. Mainly fruit wines because it’s very hard to buy grapes in England. So I’d learned a lot. You can learn a lot that way about just handling yeast and fermentation and bottling and so on at the small scale level, and by assiduous reading of books, particularly on home winemaking. There are

quite good home winemaking books, which have lots of details about baume and acids. So you can learn a lot from some of the home winemaking books. I, being a scientist, particularly being a biochemist, I knew a fair bit about fermentation anyway. I knew about chemistry. I knew about pH. I knew about acid. I knew about yeast nutrients. And so I had a lot of the necessary knowledge. But I will freely admit that some of those early wines weren’t as good as we would’ve liked them to be. Well, actually the Wagga courses did start I think in ‘74. The Wagga wine degree. Tony Jordan and Brian Croser. I think they started in ‘74. I wasn’t actually aware of their existence but it became clear to me that there was close at hand a proper winemaking course available. I decided that I’d better go on it. Particularly as our production began to increase. Because when you’re only making small amounts of wine it probably doesn’t matter that much, but once it became clear to me that, yes, we have potential here, we’ve got potential for a substantial industry, once you’re crushing many tons, you’ve really got to get that right. You don’t like the idea of a ten ton batch of red going bad on you because you’ve made some foolish error. So I thought that I’d better do the course, despite the fact that I had a lot of scientific knowledge anyway. When I first tried to get on they were actually being quite restrictive. They only allowed so many students per year. But I eventually managed to get on, starting in 1984. And I finished in ‘89. This is doing it externally. We had to go up every semester for the practical courses and analytical techniques and so on. And I really enjoyed that course and learned a lot from it.

The no compromise. Did he tell you that? Did Croser tell you about the no compromise?

JK: No.

Well, if you make one compromise in the process of winemaking, you’ll make another and then another and another and another. So you don’t make any.

JK: Yes. I think he’s right, particularly if you want to position yourself at the top of the market. Yes, you’ve just got to be ruthless, and focused. So I did the winemaking course and learned a lot from it. I also, very early on, joined the American Society for Oenology and Viticulture to get their journal, and I’ve actually got their journal going back to 1969.

That’s out of Davis, wasn’t it?

JK: Out of Davis, yes. I’ve probably got one of the longest runs of that in Australia.

Could be worth a fortune, John.

JK: Probably could be. We read avidly here. We look at all the journals. So I learned a lot from that. So our winemaking certainly improved, especially once I started doing the course. I think this has shown in the quality. As soon as we got the bore put on in the late 70’s, then we could start increasing the area of our vineyard and start increasing production. But all of it’s always slowly and cautiously because I was still working for CSIRO. The work had to be in the weekends and my holidays. So there was no way we could suddenly slap into any acres of grapes and expect to be able to run it. Also I didn’t want to leave CSIRO. I’m a dedicated scientist and I enjoy doing my work. But the vineyard was nevertheless a very nice change from it. Increasingly we got better known, and the district got better known. Because a lot of good wines started to come out of the district. Some, for example, from the higher up vineyards like Lark Hill. They’re much higher. They’re probably the highest commercial vineyard in Australia. I think they’re 860 metres. And that brings their temperatures down, not to Bordeaux but to Burgundy.

Yes.

JK: So it means they can’t ripen things like Shiraz. They have great difficulty with things like Cabernet, but they can do a great job on Pinot and Chardonnay. Probably Sauvignon Blanc, too. Whereas here—we can, of course, ripen Pinot but I’ve never been very satisfied with our Pinots. Makes a nice drinkable red, but it seemed to me that the quality wasn’t there. So now basically we don’t release a Pinot. We turn it into wine and then we actually use it as topping up wine. You know, for topping up the casks you’ve got to have something so we just use the Pinot for that. We always bottle a few dozen just out of interest for ourselves. So the district then began to crystallise out. It became clear what would grow where. Down here in Murrumbateman, this sort of area, we’re about 600 metres, we can ripen the Bordeaux reds—Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Merlot, Semillon. And we can, of course, ripen Riesling but we can also ripen Shiraz. And thereby hangs a tale because this was one of the defining moments for us. As I told you, our first red was a Cabernet Shiraz. Still a style that I’m fond of. Uniquely Australian style. And we just made this year after year. And then in 1990, almost on a whim, I thought that, well, I’m doing this out of interest, why don’t I indulge myself? I thought how about we make a straight Shiraz? Because we’d never made a straight Shiraz. Just to see what it’s like. I didn’t know what a straight Shiraz from Murrumbateman fruit tasted like. I thought that, well, it’s time that I did. So made a separate Cabernet and a separate Shiraz. And we made it and we couldn’t at that stage go into any capital city show. We didn’t have the quantity. You’ve got to have a minimum quantity, as you know, in Sydney and Melbourne.

Yes, that’s correct.

JK: But we were already big enough to go into the significant regional shows such as, for example, Griffith. Griffith’s a good show. Very important wine area, of course, but their quantity requirements were not as high as, say, Sydney. So we put our Shiraz—our very first Shiraz, 1990

Shiraz—into the Griffith show. Could’ve been in ‘91. And we had no great expectations of it at all. But to our amazement—first of all, it got a gold medal. It got the trophy for being the best Shiraz. Then it got the trophy for being the best table wine in the whole Griffith show. And we suddenly realised for years we’d been sitting on, potentially, a very important wine. Huan Hooke was one of the judges for that wine. He was here the other day, in this winery, and we were showing him some of the wines, and he remembers it well—tasting this wine from this place he’d never heard of. From then on we made no more Cabernet Shiraz. It was Shiraz—we used all the Shiraz for Shiraz. Now the first two or three years we just made a straight Shiraz. And that’s where Viognier comes into the picture. And here, again, another interesting story. Back in the early 80’s, my two main family helpers then were two of my sons, Tim, who is now the winemaker here, and the other one, Jeremy. He was two years younger than Tim. He’s now a lawyer in Sydney. They were my two main helpers. And Jeremy, who must’ve been perhaps fourteen or so at the time, suggested to me one day that maybe for a small enterprise like ours a good strategy would be to pick out, to identify, some rather unusual, rare, but good, variety. Get hold of it, plant it and make an unusual wine which other people perhaps didn’t readily have. So we establish a niche market. Well, I thought that that was a very good idea. So I started reading around, looking for a suitable candidate for this unusual but good variety. And the one that commended itself to me most was Viognier. Now, I knew about Viognier already because I read avidly. But as I read about it, it sounded really interesting. Because all the wine writers seemed to rave about it, but they said that it’s hard to grow, hard to find, there’s not much of it. And I thought that, well, those are exactly the criteria we’re after.

It’s a Rhone grape?

JK: It’s a Rhone. Now, Viognier comes from the northern end of the Rhone Valley. As you come south from Lyon—the vines start somewhere between Lyon and Valence and the Côtes Rôtie. There’s two important appellations of the Côtes Rôtie, which is red, and there’s Condrieu(?), and they are cheek by jowl. I’ve been there. I was there in ‘98. They’re just side by side. You know, these are European distances. Only a few kilometres apart. That’s the natural home of Viognier, as it is of Shiraz, of course. They call it Syrah up there. It’s in the wine books about the northern Rhone that you read about Viognier, and all the wine writers said how it had this haunting, musky apricot, violets whatever. You know, the words of the wine writers. (Laughs) Tend to use flavours they can find in Viognier. So it sounded interesting. But the question then was how do you get hold of Viognier in Australia. Certainly wasn’t in anybody’s catalogue then. But I was at that time doing the Wagga course, and Wagga then had a cultivar collection. There were two vines and a whole series of varieties. I’m not sure this collection still exists but it did then. And they had two Viognier vines. I went to have a look at them and they certainly were visibly less vigorous than other vines, but they had fruit on at the time and they were growing. So I thought that, okay, we’ll give it a go. So I asked the college nursery to send me as many Viognier rooted cuttings as they could produce from these two solitary vines. Well, unfortunately they—you know, just trying to satisfy me, what they did was that they basically gave me one node cuttings.

Oh, gosh!

JK: So these were tiny, tiny cuttings. So I got a reasonable number, but they were so small and feeble—and given that it’s already a feeble vine—if a vine gets off to a bad start, it takes it a long time to really get going. So if you start from one node cuttings, unless you have a greenhouse or something, you’re really struggling.

So we planted those—the first lot—in 1986, and I think a couple of years later we managed to get a few more from them, and then I managed to source some Viognier cuttings from the CSIRO collection. Because there was still no commercially available Viognier.

Yes, I think Peter Wall had brought it back from Europe in ‘79, with CSIRO blessing, but it was all under controlled breeding with the CSIRO.

JK: They’d be under quarantine, yes. So probably what we got from CSIRO was descended from some of the stuff that he brought in.

Well, could be.

JK: So even though we planted in ‘86, it took us a long time to get it going. Very small vines we started off with. It’s natural feebleness. It’s rotten with viruses. It has at least six known viruses. And you can see in the vineyard that it has pale (sounds like, un-thrifty) looking leaves. It also has a very unfortunate growth habit in that it sends out a forest of side shoots.

Yes, I’ve heard that.

JK: It’s a shocker. Whereas something like Shiraz or Cabernet Sauvignon, they all have a tendency to throw out side shoots, but once one shoot gets ahead, this tends to repress the other shoots. So typically with Shiraz, let us say, very soon you can get one really good shoot going, and then the other side shoots really slow down and that shoot will zoom ahead. Viognier just doesn’t seem to have this characteristic. You have to continually go back to it, pulling off side shoots and you never stop. And you really have to work much harder to get Viognier up onto the wire than, say, Shiraz or Cabernet Sauvignon. This, again, was something we didn’t know from the books. We just had to learn from experience. It took us a lot time before we had Viognier.

Now the original aim was to make a straight Viognier, because that’s what all the wine writers raved about. But my son, Tim, went to the northern Rhone before I did, some years before.

He learnt about the blending.

JK: Yes, he learnt about blending. He visited Guigal(?) and he learned about putting in some few percent—anything up to 20%, but typically more like 5—into the red wines, the Shiraz-based wines—or Syrah-based, as they would say—of the Côtes Rôtie, and he thought that this was an interesting idea. Then it might add something extra. So I’ve always encouraged Tim to participate. He was the most interested of all my sons in the winemaking. He was a school teacher by this time. Teaching at Xavier College in Melbourne. But whenever possible he’d come up and help with the vintage. He suggested that we start putting some Viognier into the Shiraz. And we actually had enough Viognier to put into the Shiraz before we ever had enough to make a straight Viognier. So we started putting Viognier into the Shiraz. It could’ve been ‘93 or ‘94. We made these wines and started showing them to the wine writers. They were very interested. They could detect all kinds of things on the nose that the Viognier seemingly is putting in. And, of course, they were just intrigued by the fact that we were doing it at all.

Can I ask you another question with that, John? Did it make a difference to the depth of colour of the Shiraz?

JK: Not that we’ve noticed, although we’ve heard these stories.

I’ve heard the stories, too.

JK: I’m certainly not saying that it’s impossible, but really someone would have to do the spectrometry to safely measure it—it could be done. It’s a very straightforward experiment to do. But what we attach great importance to is that they be vintaged together. When we make a Shiraz Viognier, we’re not taking some completed Shiraz

and some completed Viognier and making a blend. No. The Viognier goes into the vat with the Shiraz. We think this is important because we think that this way you’ll get much more extraction of flavour from the skins. Whereas if you only mix the finished wines, well, the Viognier skins contribute nothing to that wine. But we’re actually fermenting not only on Shiraz skins, we’re fermenting on Viognier skins as well.

So it’s grape on grape.

JK: Grape on grape indeed. And in fact, you can see this layered structure to begin with in the crush. So that’s the way we do it. And we also do—and, again, this is Tim’s notion, Tim’s innovation—we include a substantial proportion, typically 25%, of whole bunches. These are our red fermenters up here—

Stainless steel ones.

JK: Stainless steel, yes. These are each two ton fermenters, and about 25%—say, half a ton for each—will go up in boxes—in polystyrene boxes. And typically it’s me up there while we pump in—we crush the remaining one and a half ton, let’s say for each vat, with a crusher and must pump down there. That’s pumping through a hose. And then I’m chucking in the boxes of whole bunches, which go in. And, again, Tim believes that this adds some of that European character, which the wine writers all seemingly find in our Shiraz Viognier. And I’m sure they’re right. So we go to a lot of trouble to achieve it. So we are looking—again this is on Tim’s initiative—we are looking mainly for a Côtes Rôtie style and the reason is that our climate is much more similar to them than it is, let us say, to the Barossa. I mean, I love Barossa Shiraz but it’s a much warmer climate than here. And we could not make that style of Shiraz. So let’s aim for a different style. The style from the cooler end of the region where Shiraz comes from, which is the Côtes Rôtie, and seemingly we are having some success at doing this. So the Shiraz and the Shiraz Viognier was a very important departure for us.

And then eventually, we grew enough Viognier so we could actually start making Viognier. We made small amounts for our own interest quite early on, but the first one we released was in 1998 as a straight Viognier. And by this time Viognier was beginning to get known. Mainly because of Yalumba’s pioneering work. They deserve a lot of credit. They first grew it—planted—I think in 1980. We planted in ‘86. So we didn’t know about them.

That’s what I was saying—Peter Wall bringing it in in ‘79.

JK: Yes. So they were definitely ahead and with their recent Viogniers, particularly things like Virgiliius.

Oh, it’s just fabulous.

JK: I love it. So that’s a style I very much like. I like that ripe style.

OH 692/81 TAPE 2 - SIDE A

NATIONAL WINE CENTRE, WOLF BLASS ORAL HISTORY. Interview with John Kirk on 13th March, 2002. Interviewer: Rob Linn.

JK: From ‘98 onwards, we’ve been making straight Viognier, and it varies from year to year. We have a cool-ish climate. We’ve been very pleased with it and it’s received very good acceptance. And, again, warming praise from the wine writers. We’ve actually just bottled one fairly recently—the 2001—which is, in my view, very much along the Virgilius style. It was a lovely warm year. It’s actually better than the millennium year of 2001. That, I think, is very nice. But we’re very happy that we went for Viognier. And, of course, we could’ve made a wrong decision. We were looking for a new, rare variety. Say we’d made the wrong choice. It was, in fact, that Viognier turns out to have been the right choice. There’s this element of luck, which is always involved. I can’t claim that was a wisdom of mine. I didn’t know how Viognier would do here. In fact, it’s done very well. That’s just good fortune.

But in one sense you did use scientific principles for thinking through the ideas -

JK: Oh, yes.

- and more often than not that helps.

JK: Oh, yes. We try to give good fortune every bit of help we can. Now the Shiraz Viognier has always received very good reviews from the wine writers, and they began to speak of it in terms—and I’m quoting now—the Canberra districts first great wine. Typically they nearly always say the Canberra districts best wine, which of course naturally is very pleasing for us.

I suppose in terms of awards: after the initial shock at the Griffith show we put the ‘98 Shiraz Viognier into the New South Wales wine awards, and it was the top wine in New South Wales—of all the whites and reds and everything. That was just confirmation that we were on the right track. So we were very pleased with that. We’re just sticking with it. The curious thing is that when I started I was thinking almost entirely in terms of Bordeaux. I didn’t actually know much about the Rhone Valley. Even when I was buying wine for the family hotel in Ireland, I don’t think I bought any Rhone wines. They were not well known. They just didn’t have the reputation of Bordeaux wine. It was Bordeaux and Burgundy. If you asked people in Britain, where do the great French wines come from? ‘Bordeaux and Burgundy’. Practically no-one knew about the Rhone region. Except for Châteauneuf-du-Pape, of course, which is right at the bottom. Very hot and a totally different scene—viticulturally, climatically—from the northern or the middle Rhone. It’s only in the last ten or fifteen years that the northern Rhone has really received the acclaim that it is due. Of course, in the last century it was not unknown for Bordeaux winemakers in bad years to buy some of that wine from the northern Rhone and stick it in. They used to use the term (couldn’t decipher word)—hermitage, you know. Wine had been (couldn’t decipher word)—Hermitage put in—to give it a bit of a boost. So some of the winemakers must’ve known it was good stuff, but it took decades for it to acquire a good reputation. But now it does, of course.

There seemed to be a lot of Australian winemakers who began travelling in the 70’s who became very keen on that area.

JK: Yes.

That does seemed to have happened. John, with all the successes you’ve had, which have been justly due of course, what were some of the obstacles you faced along the way?

JK: Mainly climatic, I think. And with the things that go with climate. I told you about the drought. The thing that happens in a very bad drought

year here is that you get plagues of the small wingless grasshopper. It’s a native insect—Phaulacridium Vittatum. And certain years, for reasons I don’t fully understand, not every dry year but certain really dry years, this will come in plague proportions. Not only are your vines suffering from the drought, [but also] the bit of foliage that they’ve got is getting eaten. And, again, this was not something that was in any viticulture book. In fact, most areas—viticultural areas of Australia—perhaps don’t suffer from this. But the southern tablelands is a hot bed of Phaulacridium Vittatum in the bad years. So that was [one of] the natural hazards of the environment that we had to learn to cope with. Drought, of those particular insects, and frost. Frost is actually, on the whole, now our most serious problem. You see, we can handle the drought. We’ve got trickle irrigation. Once your vines are deep rooted they don’t need a lot of water. I’ll just give you an example. Typically in the Riverland, per hectare of grapes—they are entirely irrigated there—perhaps, I think it is, eight megalitres per hectare. Something like that. That’s a typical usage. Here for the whole four hectares in a bad year—drought year—we wouldn’t use more than, say, two megalitres. That’s for the whole area of four hectares. So you can see that because we’re higher and cooler that the vines don’t need that much supplementary water. So you don’t need a lot of water, but you do need some. If anyone wants to plant a vineyard now in this area they must have water. And that’s something we learned early on. Water was one of the things we found that we needed. Fortunately, trickle irrigation had just become readily available at the time we were getting into the business. And that’s makes an enormous difference, being able to just buy this stuff off the shelf. Because when we first started you actually had to make your own drippers, and people used to get long lengths of very thin tubing, and you wrapped them around something. And this just slowed down the water enough so that it would drip out at the end. But very soon after that you could just go into a shop and say, ‘Give me five

hundred key-clip drippers’, or whatever. And that made the difference. So I think it was the natural hazards of climate that were the biggest. And frost remains our biggest problem, about which we can’t do very much. The thing you do about frost is that you take great care about where you plant your vineyard. And you must have a good slope below. You don’t have to be on top of the hill but you mustn’t be at the bottom of the hill. As long as there’s a slope below you for the cold air to drain away, then this makes a big difference. But we’ve also found another way to ameliorate the consequences of frost, and this is something we devised here. We had a fairly bad frost in 1994. Greatly reduced the yield. Didn’t wipe us out altogether but greatly reduced the yield. And so I then thought that we can’t stand this, we’ve got to do something about it. Now most of our vines were then, as they are now, spur pruned—you know, standard (couldn’t decipher word) trained with spurs. Now something every viticulturist observes is that if you leave, for whatever reason, any long cane—maybe just (sounds like, a cane) from a vine, or maybe it’s just a cane that has been left by accident—when bud burst comes, you will observe that not every bud along that cane will burst. You might have fifteen to twenty buds on a really long cane, and there’s always maybe a quarter of them will not burst. So it occurred to me—say you have long canes, some of the buds will burst. If a frost then comes, those shoots that’ve grown will get wiped out. But then you might have 25 to 30% of the buds that are still dormant and they can come back. So I thought that we would give this a go. And there’s some precedent for this. You read the books—there’s one procedure that’s recommended is that you leave your pruning very, very, very late—to the last minute. Basically until after bud burst. And you have your bud burst, and then you have your frost, and then you can prune and see what’s left. But that’s not practical. It takes us the whole winter to prune. So basically we couldn’t do that.

But I thought that here’s another version of the same underlying phenomenon, that if you leave a lot of wood, some of the buds won’t burst and they’ll be there waiting because of frost. So we started leaving on, from after 1994, what we call frost insurance canes. On every spur pruned vine we leave two long canes. The first thing you do in pruning a vine is to say which are my frost insurance canes. And you just leave them dangling. And if you don’t have a frost, then typically at the end of the first week in November, we just go through the vineyard taking those off. And the point is that this is a very quick job. It’s not like leaving all your pruning until after bud burst and then desperately trying to do it. You just walk into the vineyard with the secateurs in your hand—snip, snip! Snip, snip. Very quick job. It doesn’t wreck your whole viticultural schedule at all. And so the question is how well is it going to work. Well, it was put to the test in the ‘99 vintage, because in October ‘98 there was a horrendous frost. Not just in the Canberra district by any means. Right throughout the southern tablelands. I think it even affected Coonawarra.

Yes, it did.

JK: Lots of places. A really serious frost. I think it was on the night of the 27th or 28th October. Really late, too—the shoots were long. Very late frost. And our vineyard was as though someone had been through it with a flame thrower. Everything burnt off. Not a healthy green shoot in sight. All brown. But we had the frost insurance canes. As I’d anticipated, on every frost insurance cane there were some buds that had not burst. And so they weren’t affected by the frost. The dormant buds are actually quite resistant to frost or else the vine wouldn’t get through the winter. Those buds started growing. And in fact, in the case of Shiraz, we ended up with 50% of normal yield after a total frost wipe-out. Certain other varieties also did well, like Merlot. Cabernet did well. Riesling, for some reason, did poorly. It didn’t give us the yield we wanted.

But in Shiraz, our key variety, to get half your normal yield in a year like that was quite something. So we’ve stuck with the frost insurance canes ever since. I wrote up a paper for the Grapegrower and Winemaker giving all the figures of yields and describing the technique. And this has aroused a lot of interest. Someone was talking to Tim, he’d been down to one of the cooler places, and he said that wherever he went he saw vines with two long canes left. (Laughs) He thinks these were frost insurance canes because a lot of people have been interested in this. And that’s what I would recommend to everyone in a frost prone area like here—leave these canes. And then you’ve got buds in reserve. Actually they turned out to have an additional advantage. Because, again we’re a cool-ish area and can get variations in yield. You can get variations in fruit set, without anything to do with frost. Depends how cool it is at flowering, how much rain you get at flowering. This can have quite a big affect on how many of those flowers actually turn into fruit. And so the frost insurance canes at the end of the first week in November give you one last chance to adjust your yield. We did this in—I think it was in the ‘98 vintage. We didn’t have a frost in the previous October, but going through in November, for some reason the fruit set was not very good in Shiraz. In that year we left at least half a frost insurance cane, and that brought our yield up to normal levels and ‘98 was our best vintage ever. It turned out to be an additional advantage. You have this last minute chance to adjust your yield. You can’t adjust it down but you can adjust it up if it looks like you’re not going to get your yield. So it’s a good technique for people in this area. It won’t do if you use machine pruning. It’s not the thing for a thousand hectare vineyards all run by machines. It’s a thing for small vineyards aiming for the best possible quality in cooler areas. These are the vineyards that can use a technique like this. And there’s no way that we’re going to stop using it.

That’s something else you can do but nevertheless we are in a frosty area, and every year in October we’re going around with our fingers crossed. And every night we’re looking at the weather news very closely. There are, of course, wind machines, which have some effect, but in that bad ‘98 frost there were lots of wind machines in the Tumbarumba area and what we heard was that they didn’t do any good. The wind machine works by bringing down warmer air from above. And apparently there was such a cold air mass that moved in that there was no warm air to be had anywhere—above or below. So the wind machine can’t bring you down warm air if there’s no warm air. Apparently, it wouldn’t have done us any good in that frost. Nevertheless, if I could afford it, I’d quite like to have a wind machine because for the ordinary radiation frosts I’m prepared to believe the evidence, that they do good. But we’ll have to wait for that. You have to have your priorities if you’re a small vineyard. Putting up our red winery was quite an expensive [exercise], thoroughly insulated all around. So clearly you’ve got to be able to make good wine first.

But, John, you mentioned earlier that Anne Boland had been very helpful to you with marketing your wine.

JK: Yes.

How have you gone over the succeeding years?

JK: Tim is not only a good winemaker, he’s a marvellous marketer. He has flair. I’m a scientist. It’s not been my role in life to interact with the public or with wine buyers basically. I’ve just had to solve scientific problems. Just by temperament, I’m not a marketer. We managed to sell all the wine we make but it was hard slog, and I never enjoyed it. But in recent years our production’s gone up and up, and so we really had to have good sales, and Tim has done it. He’s been enormously helped, of course, by the good quality we’ve succeeded in producing. But Tim’s a good networker. He talks with people and actually enjoys chatting. He’ll chat away to others at restaurants and so on. He puts on tastings and

is very good at. And this has made an enormous difference to our sales. In fact, the demand for our wine exceeds the supply.

So it’s largely self marketing, John?

JK: Yes, entirely. We don’t use any agent. It is self marketing. But our situation is such that people are continually looking for our wine. They ring us up, and hardly a week goes by that some expensive restaurant in Sydney or Melbourne will say, ‘Oh, could you let us have some of that Shiraz Viognier’, or whatever. And we simply have to put them on allocation and say, ‘We can’t let you have any this year but we’ll put you on the list for next year as production increases’. So the reputation that we’ve made has helped enormously. But it’s taken us—what have we been going now?—thirty-one years to build that reputation. I’m greatly concerned about the number of new wineries now. I fear a lot of them are going to fall by the wayside, and it won’t be because they’re necessarily making bad wine. A lot of them will make good wine, particularly in areas like this. But it’s so hard now to carve your way into that market. I wouldn’t do it again. I retired from CSIRO in 1997. I took early retirement so I could concentrate on the business. Lots of people in their retirements take on some new activity, and some people plant vineyards or whatever. I ask myself would I plant a vineyard and build a winery? Well, the answer I come up with, knowing what I now know, is that, I might plant a vineyard if I thought I was physically capable of looking after it, and I’d aim to sell the fruit to people—BRL Hardy or other winemakers, but no way would I build a winery. Because it’s just so hard to create your brand. I wouldn’t climb that mountain again. What are we up to now? Fourteen hundred/fifteen hundred small wineries in Australia— going up every week. I saw a figure of three new wineries every week. I cannot believe it. They are not all going to survive. Pity, but that’s the way it is. Getting involved in the wine industry is not, alas, always driven

by clear-eyed commercial considerations. People have, and I sympathise with this, this ambition to have a vineyard and make lovely wine.

The mythology.

JK: Yes, the mythology. But if it’s your life savings that you’re throwing into that—people should stop and think. Very often it is their life savings.

John, you’d like to talk about the way your family have become more involved in the enterprise.

JK: Well, two of my sons, Tim and Jeremy—as I said before—were the ones who were mainly interested; although my oldest son, Kieren, who’s now a professor of biochemistry at the ANU, he helped me greatly in the very beginning, but his studies then took him increasingly away. Jeremy then went on to become a lawyer, but Tim, although he was a school teacher, and a good school teacher, was always very interested in becoming a winemaker. So he intimated to me that at first he was just going to take a year off school from Xaviers in Melbourne and perhaps work half time for me in my first year of retirement. Although I decided to leave CSIRO, I was then assistant chief of the division of plant industry. I was still doing research. I wasn’t enjoying administration. I was doing it competently but I didn’t enjoy it very much. I thought that I might as well be administering my own business. So I left CSIRO at the beginning of ‘97, and Tim knew I was going to do this so he decided he’d come up for a year and work part time for me. Well, of course, as soon as he started working half time as a winemaker he realised that he never wanted to go back. So fairly soon in that year the decision was made that he would leave school teaching for good and work for us full time. From the beginning of ‘98 onwards he was working full time as the winemaker. But with the increase in the business—the size of the business—I’m still very heavily involved and it has allowed me to now concentrate more on the vineyard, because we believe passionately in the adage that great wines are made in the vineyard. Tim believes this, too. We’re forever discussing how to handle the vines to achieve the best

quality. How we prune them. How we train them. How many buds to leave. Should we leaf pluck to expose the branches etc etc. Shall we bunch thin. So this has taken more and more of my time. I also have to look after the purely business end—the accounts and the financial management. I’m sixty-six/sixty-seven in July—in the coming July and I keep reading and hearing, with a wry smile, this business of how we’ve all got to go on working longer now. Not allowed to retire at sixty- five any more. Yes, tell me about it. I know. I had thought, before I left CSIRO that, if Tim cames on board I’d have much more time. I haven’t any more time. I thought of all the nice things I was going to be able to do in my retirement. I was going to spend most of the morning playing the various musical instruments, which I play so badly. I thought I might learn to play them properly at last. Not a word of it. Basically I’m full time in the vineyard. So I have become now a full time vigneron. Tim is, of course, full time in the winery and the sales side. We have a full time vineyard manager, Michael Lahiff, who has been working for me, it must be ten or eleven years now. He was a former public servant but for various reasons he left the public service. And he just started doing some casual work, picking grapes. We could see he was a sensible chap— intelligent—and so increasingly we got him into the business and for quite a few years now he’s been full time. He has main responsibility for the standard vineyard jobs—spraying and so on. And also assists greatly in the vintage. So he’s more an operations manager now. We’re now into the second generation with Tim. We built a house on the property that was finished in 1996. Tim and his family, when they came up from Melbourne, were able to move into that. They’re still there, although they’re thinking now of building a house on their own property. I, myself, when I’m out here, live in one end of the house. My wife and I still have a house in Canberra. My wife has now just recently—early this year—left the public service. She was in the Bureau of Statistics. She, herself, was a scientist years ago.

She and I were PhD students together in Cambridge. She did a PhD, but had no desire to go on with science. And we got married in the middle year of our PhD and we’ve had six kids, four in Britain and two over here. So that was really was a full time job. She always has helped with the business but now she’s helping a lot more. She’s very happy to do vineyard jobs, and to help with the accounts. It’s very much a family concern, with, as I say, Michael Lahiff. We have someone who works part time for us doing sales on Sundays. We hire lots of casual labour for picking. Finding the pickers is always a big job. I’ll probably be looking for help with pruning, too.

Has that made a difference to the local economy here, John?

JK: Oh, yes. I should perhaps say something about the industry.

Yes, please.

JK: We don’t know all the vineyards in the Canberra district because not everyone that plants a vineyard lets it be known, or doesn’t necessarily tell the Bureau of Statistics about it. But we now think it’s about five hundred hectares of vines. Some of these are very recent but a lot are now coming on stream. There are two local associations in the Canberra district—the Vignerons’ Association, which Edgar Riek, to his great credit, was instrumental in getting going as long ago as 1974. In the third year after the first vineyards were planted he got a few of us all together. We formed what was then called the Canberra District Wine Growers’ Association. Then we decided to call it Vignerons’ Association a few years later. So that still exists. That mainly represents the winemakers. Then, it might’ve been ten years ago, there was a ACT and Southern Tablelands Viticulture Society, I think it was called, which caters for the grape people who just grow grapes to sell. So there are at least a hundred vineyards now in the Canberra district. Most of them, of course, growing grapes to sell. It’s become a substantial local industry. We get yields

typically of about ten tons to the hectare so you’re talking about, when all that is on stream, 5,000 tons. The quality of the fruit has attracted BRL Hardy, one of the three big companies, into the district. Years ago as soon as they became aware of the quality of the fruit, they were buying up every bunch that they could lay their hands on, and then decided that the only way to really get hold of this fruit was to establish themselves in the district. So they’ve built a winery within the ACT itself. Eventually it will be about 4,000 ton capacity. They’ve signed contracts with lots of the growers. Most of the bigger growers that I’ve referred to would have contracts with BRL Hardy. They’ve also got a joint vineyard project within the ACT. I think it might be of the order of 100 hectares when it’s eventually established. They, too, are planting a lot of Viognier. All these things feed into the local economy. And it’s been of particular importance to the local tourist industry, even though virtually all the vineyards, apart from the new BRL Hardy one, and I think one other than I’m aware of, are actually in New South Wales. That’s something people forget. But even though we’re mainly a New South Wales industry, the Canberra Tourist Commission has always been very much on side because they realise that this is one more attraction to bring in tourists. Something to keep them here, to tour the wineries. They’ve always been very helpful and the industry interacts a lot with the Canberra Tourist Commission. They realise very well that this is, because of its tourist potential, an important part of the local industry. And the previous chief minister, Kate Carnell, is extremely supportive. I’m not saying the new Labor administration isn’t going to be supportive, too, but it’s just early days yet. They haven’t been in very long. But certainly the previous administration with Kate Carnell could not have been more supportive of the local industry. And given that we’re in New South Wales and they’re ACT, I thought that was very statesmanlike of them. I think they deserve a lot of credit for that. Now there’s a substantial local industry. It’s producing fruit and wine, which is at the top end of the market. I mean, BRL Hardy is putting this

fruit into their best wines. Not going into any bag-in-box. (Laughs) You may be sure of that. So this is the niche that the Canberra district occupies. There’s a handful of wineries now that have a good reputation. There’s ourselves, of course. I think I can say that. Lark Hill. Brindabella. There are others, too. I’m just not going to go through the list because there’s just some that come to mind. Helms. Jeir Creek. I mean, I’d have to have a list of wineries in front of me. But there’s a handful that already now are well known and, you know, that get the accolades from the wine writers. Jancis Robinson, the famous wine writer from Britain, she was over here. She came to see ourselves and Lark Hill. She’s taken over from Hugh Johnson. And you’ll find in New South Wales two of the small number of wineries listed are Clonakilla and Lake Hill. So we’re on the map now because of the quality. Because of the Shiraz Viognier from Clonakilla. Increasingly the Rieslings are highly regarded. Riesling is—even though Viognier is our, you might say, most out of the way and most interesting white variety—is always good here. Lots of good Rieslings produced locally. It’s a natural for this district. So, in fact, apart from Viognier, which is something of a special case, we tend to regard Riesling as our flagship wine. And there’s lots of other good Rieslings. Helms, Jeir Creek, and a number of the other makers all make good Rieslings. So in the future Canberra district’s is going to be specially well known for Shiraz, simply because of the impact our Shiraz has made. Lots of other people are planting Shiraz, and planting Viognier as well. Because the thing with Shiraz or Shiraz Viognier is not just that it’s good, but it’s different. It’s something characteristic of the area. And a new small wine area should have something characteristic. It’s not enough to make, let’s say, Cabernets that are comparable to Coonawarra. We’ve already got Coonawarra. But if you can say we make a Shiraz Viognier, which is distinctive from anything else made anywhere else in Australia, then that really is something you can say.

The district’s going to be known for that. I’m not sure to what extent Pinots are going to become important. It will require, in my view, more plantings in the high areas, like Lark Hill. At the moment Lark Hill is carrying the banner. There are more vineyards up there but the trouble is a lot of that is on fairly poor country, so I don’t know what the yields will be like. But in terms of quality, yes, they’ve got the altitude, they’ve got the low temperatures, which in principle should produce good Pinot. Pinot could become important. We’ll wait and see. But Riesling, yes, the district will increasingly become known for Riesling, because Riesling’s a winner in just about any of the vineyards.

Well, John, thank you very much for talking to me.

JK: It’s a pleasure.