State Library of South Australia Jd Somerville Oral History Collection

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

OH 692/53

Full transcript of an interview with

JAMES HALLIDAY

on 29 November 2001

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 692/53 JAMES HALLIDAY

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 692/53 TAPE 1 - SIDE A

NATIONAL WINE CENTRE ORAL HISTORY. Interview with James Halliday on 29th November, 2001. Interviewer: Rob Linn.

James—I know you were born in 1938. Tell me about your parents, please. Who were they?

JH: My father was a doctor. He was actually one of thirteen children so I had a very large number of first cousins. And he graduated from Sydney University, and then went to London in the mid 1920’s to do his FRCP, and while he was in London on that trip he was introduced to fine table wine. It was not, of course, a major part (and that’s putting it mildly) of Australian life at that time—fortified wine was, but table wine was not. And when he came back from that trip and bought the house in which he lived, and in which I was born and lived in for a considerable period of time thereafter, he established a formal cellar. It was underneath the house but reached internally. It was sandstone and had individual racks. It was a proper cellar, in other words. And that’s where it started [for me].

What was your father’s Christian name?

JH: John—John Halliday. My mother, Muriel was from another interesting family with a lot of artistic streaks in them. After my father came back [from the UK], he became a customer of Lindemans. At the end of the 1920’s it was in receivership, where it lay until 1947. Lindemans was located in the basement of the Queen Victoria building and that was where he went to buy wine to stock the cellar. So when he came and bought as he did, three, four, five or six dozen bottles of table wine on one visit, he was greeted as a very valued customer because table wine was but a tiny fraction of the business. Of course the

people close to the company, the winemakers and the managers, had obvious pride in table wine. So that was really the start [for me].

James, in those years would beer and fortified wines have been the major drinks of Australia—alcoholic drinks?

JH: Something like 97%. I mean, table wine was probably about three or four percent of the total market at that time.

You were born in 1938, so do you have early memories of that cellar at your home?

JH: Well, yes. My father went off to the War. He was a fairly distinguished physician, and after he went off to the War my elder sister, brother, mother and I moved up to Moss Vale, and the former house was in fact rented during the War. So when he came back and we returned to the house in 1945, it was from that time on, when I was seven, that my memories of it come. I was often taught to be the butler when they had dinner parties. So after a while it was I who would go around and pour the wine. There was some dispute between us as to whether I drank half wine/half water. I believe that that’s how I was given the wine. He said, ‘No, there was no water’. Either way, I gradually became interested in it, not as I might had I been born thirty years later, by which time wine was obviously far more socially important. Throughout my school days, when we had wine, I just drank it without any particular insights or curiosity about exactly what it was and how it had been made. And indeed my parents had the same attitude. After I had gone to St Paul’s College at Sydney University I suddenly became aware that Lindemans Riesling, Hock, White Burgundy and Chablis, were in fact all made from the one grape. There were just very minor differences in picking dates. The grape was commonly known in the Hunter Valley at that time as Riesling, which was derived from Shepherd’s Riesling, who had been the original nurseryman who provided cuttings and vines to people in the Hunter Valley. Later, Shepherd’s Riesling became Hunter Valley Riesling.

And of course that usage continued until very recently with McWilliams, Elizabeth and Murray Tyrrell with his first Chardonnay Semillon blend calling it Pinot Riesling, which must be one of the most confusing labels ever designed by man. Likewise, the Clarets and Burgundies that my father drank were made, again, from the one grape—Shiraz. And it was I who told him of these things. He was unaware of it, which was very much part and parcel of the attitude to wine at the time. He obviously had a reasonably good palate. The discussion on the wine would be brief but it would be pretty much along the lines of, ‘This is damn good’ or ‘We’ve opened this one too early’ or ‘It’s disappointing’, or whatever. A non specific discussion like that. So dinner party conversation was not then as it is often now, completely dominated by yacking on about the wine.

Were you educated locally, James?

JH: I had the rare distinction of being born in, lived in and went to boarding school in the same street. Our road was Victoria Road, Bellevue Hill. I went to Cranbrook and was a boarder there for the last four years, before I went to Sydney University and St Paul’s College.

And you did arts/law?

JH: I did arts/law, so that took six years. And it was there that I really became more interested in wine.

Why did you choose arts/law?

JH: I actually chose arts/architecture, and I very nearly didn’t get a Commonwealth scholarship, which were available in those days, because arts/architecture was an eight year course. And it was very unusual for anyone to do it. I just wanted to do arts because I loved history and hadn’t had much of an opportunity at school because I was bulldozed into doing all the subjects that I didn’t want to do, like Latin, chemistry, physics

and maths, on the thought that I might become a doctor. Once my mother sliced the ball of her thumb off with a kitchen knife while sharpening a stubby pencil, I knew—I was eleven or twelve at the time—that being a doctor was not for me. But nonetheless the options were kept open. Why I chose arts/law? Well, it was temporising. Really having got the scholarship for arts/architecture, I did two years of arts and then a first year of law as combined effectively with the third year of arts. And when I got the degree I was then confronted with the choice of another five years at the University via architecture, or another three via law, and I just couldn’t come at the idea of being there forever so I continued with my law.

You would’ve been in your early twenties by this time?

JH: Yes, I was pretty young when I went to university in 1955/56—’56. As I say, it was there that my interest in wine became rather greater because of the St Paul’s College wine club and cellar. It was via the club that I made my first trips to the Hunter Valley with Johnnie Walker and Harry Brown of Rhinecastle, who were the distributors for Tulloch wines in Sydney. I’m actually uncertain whether it was in 1956 or 1957 that I made my first trip to the Hunter. We were taken there under the aegis of Rhinecastle.

So you hadn’t been there prior to this?

JH: No. No.

What was the character of the Hunter in those days?

JH: Really a very, very sleepy place. Tulloch was the only place, and then very informally, that you could actually go and do a tasting and buy bottled wine from the winery. Lindemans and McWilliams were, of course, there but they hadn’t even contemplated cellar door sales. It just wasn’t part of the deal that you could do tastings there. Elliotts had a store in town where you could buy Elliott’s wines, labelled. But Tyrrell wasn’t doing it. That is, selling bottled wine with labels.

So this was all in bulk at that time, was it?

JH: Yes. All in bulk. And Draytons was also all in bulk. So that the early trips up there were basically, in fact, one stop shops to Tulloch. And Hector died in the late 1950’s, or thereabouts, but I remember him.

Was that Jay’s father, is it?

JH: Jay’s uncle or grandfather? Maybe uncle.

I’m not sure.

JH: Keith took over from Hector. I guess that’s probably right. Hector was quite a lot older than Keith. And we used to go out to this galvanised iron winery with its earth floor. There would be no formal tasting facilities whatsoever. And they’d bustle around and rinse a glass out under a cold water tap, which was just like a garden tap which went into a drain in the floor, and then there’d be rustling around while they hunted up bottles, and then we’d do the tastings. There was nothing remotely approaching a restaurant. There was nothing remotely approaching bed and breakfast or motel. If you did stay up there you had to stay in one of the old hotels in town, which were hardly luxurious. So we tended to do one day trips. But at that stage there was about 600 acres under vine. One or the other. And it remained constant for a very long period of time. There was just literally no new activity other than the incipient move from selling in bulk to selling in bottle. And it wasn’t until Max Lake planted in 1963 that you started to see the origins of the boom that then manifested itself in the latter part of the 60’s/early 70’s.

Did it have a certain charm to it though?

JH: Oh, it was great. We used to go up to a picnic point on Mount View. At the very top of Mount View there’s a spur road that leads out over the valley, and unless the wind was howling, which it did on occasions, we’d have a picnic there. We used to go up to the Hunter via the old Wollombi

road and stop as a matter of course at the convict drinking trough, which had been cut out of a sandstone side of the road, and that was where the convicts who built the road got their water. And Len Evans, I think, was one of those who started the custom of stopping there for a glass of champagne—that’s real champagne—so there’s quite a collection of champagne corks that you could see lying at the bottom of the drinking trough. Others—in fact Tony Albert, who became in due course one of the Brokenwood partners, used to measure the trip up according to the number of cans of beer he drank. He was a forerunner of David Boone, I think, going to London.

So, James, obviously your college experience just broadened your knowledge tremendously, and your love of wine.

JH: Yes, it did. I was still blissfully unaware, like most other people, of the big world of wine outside. There was very little imported wine. There was some but it was in very small volume that it came into Australia, and Doug Crittenden was one of those who was bringing it in, of course. And Hermann Schneider in his days at Seabrooks. And when I went overseas for a year in 1962 at the end of my university career—and I spent a lot of time travelling through Europe, and France as part of that—I really didn’t have the faintest idea that I might be driving through Burgundy or Bordeaux. And we were camping, my mate and I, and we went to almost no restaurants that I can remember. We just cooked for ourselves the whole time. So it wasn’t until I came back from overseas in 1963 that the bug really began to bite, and I started my wine cellar under my bed, and then in the clothes cupboard and so on and so forth.

And eventually that started to overwhelm the house, did it?

JH: Yes. I got married at the end of the 1960’s and built my first house, which was meant to have a cellar extending half of its length. (It really is true, not everyone believes this, but it’s true that they accidentally excavated the entire length.) So I got a much larger cellar than I had asked for. By that stage I think I had wine at six or seven different places.

I now forget the precise number—stretching all the way from quite locally to my sister’s house, to my parents’ house that they had kept up at Moss Vale, as well as the one in Sydney. They eventually sold the one in Sydney. So it was here, there and everywhere. And then I was able to consolidate it finally in 1969 in Turramurra.

Was it true that your mother mistook on occasion some of your best bottles?

JH: Yes, indeed. Anything that wasn’t Lindemans was, in her view, basically there for cooking. So I came home to find some of my best bottles had disappeared and found out that she’d used them for cooking. So I then whipped up a sheet and tied enormous white bows around the end of the bottle so they couldn’t possibly be mistaken. It reminds me. I bought a bottle of 1955 Grange for my father as a Christmas present. And he was like many others in Australia, he just couldn’t understand this wine that he thought was very jammy and soupy and, of course, utterly unlike anything that he’d ever seen from the Hunter. So, he wasn’t a wine critic but he probably would’ve joined in the chorus of criticism that those early vintages of Grange were greeted with.

James, I think it was the year before your marriage in ‘69, you made a journey to South Australia and Victoria.

JH: Yes, that’s right.

Would you tell me a bit about that because that seems—when I was reading about it—an extraordinary journey for the time.

JH: Yes, well, three of us—one of whom turned out to be my best man, Michael Hornibrook and then a barrister called Tom Gleeson—we three decided we were going to do this grand tour of the wine regions of Australia. [This effectively meant at that stage South Australia and Victoria] The Swan Valley really didn’t come into it. I mean, it was there. Of course it was important. But Tasmania was barely extant. So by going down to South Australia, and then back up through Victoria, we really were going to cover most of the Australian wine regions.

We got to Adelaide, and then hired an Avis trailer and stuck that on the back of this big V8 Valiant, and in no time at all we had, in fact, filled it to overflowing. So we had to send quite a lot of the wine we bought thereafter back to Sydney by rail, including a purchase of a lot—and again my recollection is slightly hazy—of 1953 and 1958 Bailey’s reds. And we used the red, 1958, copiously at barbecues and bring-a-bottle sort of parties. We collected it from Darling Harbour, as I remember.

Were there any significant differences between the areas you visited that stuck in your mind at the time in terms of the wine—not just the place, but in terms of the wine—that attracted you to certain wines?

JH: By 1968 I’d met Len Evans and I’d started to significantly broaden my drinking horizons. So I knew pretty well what to expect from South Australia in terms of the style of the wines. But we also went with certain targets firmly in our sights. One was Seaview—which was then still owned by the Chaffeys—Cabernet Sauvignon which we’d tasted and enjoyed in Sydney. I guess the places that made the biggest impression on me were certainly the Clare Valley. I thought those were marvellous. We tried to beat down the door of Basedow in the Barossa Valley. And it was very difficult to extract any wine from some of these places. Quite strange really.

They were offering them in barrel flagons, if I remember.

JH: (Laughs) Oh, yes. Yes, we came back with, of all things, some half bottles of Henschke Rosé.

JH: Cyril had found them somewhere or other. (Laughs) So we came back with a very mixed bag. We’d had one marvellous experience when old Ken Hardy had driven us around McLaren Vale and up into the foothills of the Adelaide Hills, spending most of the time in his Rover 90 looking back over his shoulder to talk to us in the back seat and paying absolutely no attention to what was going on on the road ahead. Quite amazing that we got out of that alive.

How did you come to meet people like Ken? Did you write before you went?

JH: Yes, we did. Again, I was able to use my Lindemans connection and was able to get into Rouge Homme—really Lindeman/Rouge Homme— where Phil Laffer was in charge.

He would’ve been a pretty young man then.

JH: Yes, he was. I did write and got introductions via the Sydney offices of these places. So, yes, we were known before we came, in most instances, and others like Basedow we weren’t, and that’s possibly why we didn’t get very far in our endeavours.

Were you encouraged by these people?

JH: I suppose so. I mean, we were then in many instances a rare beast, looking for table wine. It was a time when the industry was taking off, certainly.

You said earlier that you’d met Len Evans by this time, James.

JH: Yes.

How did that come about?

JH: I went to some wine valuation/appreciation courses that he was running under the aegis of the national wine promotion body—the Australian Wine Board. He’d been appointed their liaison or publicity officer. And it was at the very end of that period of time—in fact I think he may’ve just been doing the courses as a sideline because he was certainly opening up Bulletin Place and starting to get the people together, who became Rothbury. All at the one time.

Were you working by this time?

JH: Oh, yes. I’d graduated in 1962. I came back at the end of 1961, but the graduation ceremony, which I didn’t go to, was in early ’62, and I’d already buzzed off overseas. When I set out on that trip I’d been told by my law firm, Clayton Utz, that if I went overseas for a year there would not be a job when I came back. I regarded that as the best news that I’d ever heard—that I wouldn’t have to get a job back there. It’s funny how things change. When I came back I wandered in to say hullo to my mates there, and I was offered a job. So I was working there from the end of 1962. I had every intention of going to the Bar. I didn’t want to stay a solicitor; it wasn’t really part of my plans. And then in 1966, really so far as I was concerned, out of the blue, they offered partnership to three of us—myself, Michael Hornibrook and another guy who finally went off to the Bar thereafter. And it had been a very long time since they’d taken in any new partners. I was really taken by surprise, but I thought that it’s five or six times the salary that I was on as an employed solicitor. Really by that stage I was wondering whether I wanted to commit myself to the extraordinary hours that you needed to work at the Bar if you were to make a success. One way or another, I tossed it up, and all three of us accepted. So from 1966 I was a partner at Clayton Utz. And, of course, that gave me income, even though they were pretty mingy in those days and earnings were nothing like they are now, that I would’ve probably not had had I been at the Bar and it enabled me to purchase wine.

Did you actually have a specialty in law?

JH: In fact, quite quickly. I’d started off doing a lot of litigation because I was intending to go to the Bar. But by the end of the 1960’s the first mining boom was on in Australia and I gravitated to doing a lot of mining prospectus work, acting both for underwriters and for companies that sought to go public. And [I acted for] other companies. There was Peter Kurts’ Properties, I remember. And it was an interesting one because it

coincided with an economic downturn and I was acting for both the underwriter and the company. But it was all sorted out. It was all happily sorted out in the end. I also built up quite a substantial practice in public company takeovers. So it was the big commercial end of town. And it was really that that led me in 1974 to, once again, leave Clayton Utz. A great personal friend was head of a merchant bank and he head-hunted me. I went off to do mergers, acquisitions and takeovers in 1974.

TAPE 1 - SIDE B

So, James, you made this move.

JH: Yes, to merchant banking to do, as I say, mergers, acquisitions and takeovers, and that was when the sky fell down on the earth, or whatever it was termed. We moved into a period of acute recession, and a lot of companies were going belly-up all over the place. I suddenly was no longer doing mergers and acquisitions but presiding over the death throes of borrowers from the merchant bank. That was quite an interesting period of time. It taught me quite a few lessons. But at the end of 1976, I was head-hunted to head up a merchant bank in Melbourne, and I had to decide whether I was prepared to go to Melbourne, and I couldn’t really make up my mind. But anyway, the head- hunting process meant that the only people they could talk to—because my employer didn’t know that I was being approached, and I’d only ever really had one other job—was my former partners at Clayton Utz. And when they heard that I was thinking of moving, they came to me and said, ‘Look, you know us, please come back’. So I ended up, in fact, deciding to go back to Clayton Utz. As a consequence of that I said that I’d come back as long as I never had to attend another partnership meeting in my life. And they said, ‘Well, why on earth don’t you want to attend partnership meetings?’ I replied, ‘They are an incredibly inefficient way of running the firm, interminably boring’. It was like having thirteen wives—there were thirteen of us as partners by

that stage—but not having the connubial rights of any of them, they all being male partners. And as a consequence of that the firm was restructured and I became the first managing partner of the firm. But I continued my legal work, which then took another turn into what was called leverage leasing of aircraft. But there were other things, too; big ticket stuff.

James, on the other side of your life, in 1970, there’s quite a story behind how Brokenwood began in the Hunter. But that involves some lawyers as well.

JH: Lawyers, yes. In the late 1960’s, about ‘68, I, Tony Albert and John Beeston, plus a number of other lawyers from Sydney, started looking for an investment in the wine business in the Hunter. They ended up buying, first, the Barrie Drayton winery, known as Happy Valley, but thereafter some of them moved into what is now the Audrey Wilkinson vineyard. But Tony Albert, John and I decided we’d go our own separate way and find a block of land and do it ourselves. It was at the end of the 1960’s that we were offered a 96 acre block of land for $100 an acre, which ultimately became part of Rothbury. We got an Ag Department report because we could see that it had been planted around the turn of the century. You could see the remnants of rows and end posts. There were no vines, but you could see how it had been planted. The Ag Department gave us a ho-hum, not really terribly suited to viticulture, type of response. We didn’t realise that if we had gone to the Ag Department for about 90% of the Hunter Valley, they would’ve given the same response. So we backed off that. About twelve months later, got wind that there was to be an auction of four hectares—ten acres—of land in McDonalds Road, next to what is now—well, it’s where Brokenwood is now. But it was a Crown land auction. The land had been given to the Council with the idea that it would become a playing field. And at the time, prior to the end of the nineteenth century and the 1893 bank crash [it was destined to become] a playing field. The vision was that Cessnock would extend all the way out to Pokolbin.

The land came up mid week without any publicity. One of our lawyer mates had noticed it in the Government Gazette, and it turned out to be a more or less put up job between the Lands Department and Hungerford Hill. There were complicated reasons why it had reverted to Crown grant and that meant that it could only be sold by public auction, and we were unexpected visitors, as it were, to the auction. (Laughs) And we paid the then unheard of price, which is much more than we intended to pay, of $1,000 per acre. So we bought ten acres, in other words, for the same price as we could’ve bought ninety-six acres only a few years earlier.

Who was acting for Hungerford at the time?

JH: It was John Parker. He was behind it. They were very narked that we had taken this block. So that was the block that became [Brokenwood]— we bought that in 1970. We planted it in 1971. We’d contracted out the basic tree clearing but we had endless weekends up there at, what we called, stick picking. It was like Jason’s dragon teeth. The more sticks we picked, the more sticks there were remaining to be picked. But it was quite good fun. And in 1971, we planted it and that was a horrendous experience for all of us, going behind a tractor with a water cart. We really hadn’t worked the soil up as much as we should’ve. It was very, very rough, with great lumps of red clay up on the surface. It was very irregular, very hard still. You had these two primitive water guns coming off the back of the water cart with a metal tube and a cross T-piece at the top with a primitive [lever], like a hand-brake on a motor bike or a bicycle, and that released the water. It also had a primitive three-toothed cutaway at the bottom to help penetrate the earth. And you started off on the water gun and the side piece down at the bottom where you jammed the ground with your foot and where the tube would go into the ground. You quickly learnt that this was excruciatingly

hard work. So then you’d try and swap the job and instead take the job of thrusting the vine into the hole as the gun was coming back out of it. That gave rise to a lot of unintended blood and bone fertilisation for the vines because the back of your hands got ripped by the gun when it was coming out. You then decided that this was just equally as bad as the job of running the gun. You would next attempt to go back with the stampers who were coming afterwards and would stamp the earth and firm it up around the rootling. Well, that was just like having to run on the spot, before then running to catch up with the tractor, which was remorselessly going ahead. Shortly put, all three jobs were physically very demanding. (Laughs) But we got it done.

What grapes did you plant?

JH: We planted one acre of Shiraz and half an acre of Cabernet.

That was the first planting?

JH: Yes. And then we followed up with more Shiraz, and the ridiculous bit of Pinot. We made our first wine in 1973. The Pinot planting came later, and we crushed one ton of Shiraz and half a ton of Cabernet.

Where did you do the crushing, James?

JH: We were meant to do it on site. We were building what the Council was told was a tractor shed but, in fact, we had every intention of putting our one ton fermenter and tiny little Zambelli crusher and minute hand- operated basket press in there. But, unfortunately, the roof wasn’t on in time, despite assurances from our mate, who was an architect, that it was on. I had to ring him up, Monday morning, just to say, ‘Dennis, I’ve got bad news for you. Some bastard’s pinched the roof’. In fact, it hadn’t ever gone on. So we parked it all over at Rothbury, which at that stage was not terribly busy. There were a lot of unused spots. Subsequently, of course, as its production grew, it became a different matter. And Gerry Sissingh, who I’d

met in my days going out to Lindemans—he’d been senior winemaker in Sydney for Lindemans. I knew him from those trips after I came back from overseas when I was buying Lindemans wines on my own account. And, of course, we knew Len. And it was Gerry who walked by and said, ‘Do this, don’t do that’. We had an unpaid consultant winemaker at hand. And it was he who said to us, ‘Look, you’ve got this open fermenter. You say you’ve got to go back to Sydney, you can’t wait for the fermentation to completely finish. You can’t leave the wine in the tank, therefore you’d better press it and put it in barrel where it’ll be safe’. And that led to us doing, unwittingly, the barrel fermentation, which was part of Grange making, and which I think Wolf Blass had got on to but it was certainly not known generally, and was certainly not the general practice for red wine making. It was much more waiting until fermentation was well and truly finished, and then actually leaving the wine in contact with skins.

Wolf had done it by then.

JH: Yes. But no-one was talking about it much. And we didn’t do it because we knew that this was the secret of Grange or anything dramatic like that. It was just purely a practical, pragmatic solution.

To keep it.

JH: Yes. And then we liked the results so much that we continued to make wine that way.

So even with the youthful vintage, it was still worthwhile?

JH: Yes. The vines were only eighteen months old. I’ve still got a few bottles of the ‘73 vintage and they’re drinking wonderfully well. They’re pretty well indistinguishable at this point from Lindemans Hunter of the same age. Regionality has taken over well and truly, on top of the Shiraz. Our wines, when they were young, looked very different to most others in the Hunter because they were bottled a lot earlier. We bottled them before

the next vintage. In fact, at the end of the year, over the Christmas/New Year period. Why? Because that’s when we could get people up there for the six or seven days that it took to do the bottling. And the first time we entered wines in shows, which were the ’74s, at the Hunter Valley Show, we walked away with gold medals, and that continued on thereafter. But there was a lot of discussion about the wines because we’d moved finally to some slightly newer oak. The first barrels we got were hand-me-downs from Lakes Folly, but we got oak from Montrose where Carlo Corino had become the winemaker and didn’t like the new oak. He was Italian, and new oak was then not part of the Italian way of doing things. So we got barrels pretty cheaply. They were American oak. But it was some time thereafter before we moved to French oak. But nonetheless, the wine, as a consequence of being bottled early and perhaps looked after a little better than some up there, seemed to have a very different style. There were suggestions that we were blending in grapes from elsewhere, which we in fact weren’t until 1978 when we decided to recreate a famous Hunter Coonawarra wine that had been made by Mildara in 1958. And we bought Cabernet from Brands and did a Hunter–Coonawarra blend, and well and truly advertised and labelled it as such. I mean, there was no secret to all of this. Far from it. And it was very difficult at that stage to buy grapes in the Hunter, or if we were able to, we just didn’t think that way. And it was also in 1978 that we bought a large block—quite large block—next door, from Hungerford Hill, which is now known as the Graveyard Vineyard.

James, I’ve been trying to come to grips with that fact that in ’77 you started judging, and ’78 your writing began formally. You were still practicing law and you were running Brokenwood. So what else did you do?

JH: (Laughs) Went to bed occasionally. (Laughs)

How did the judging and writing come about? Let’s start with the judging first.

JH: That was Len Evans’ doing. By this stage the Bulletin Place front row, as it was known, was going well (we used to meet every lunch time and play options games with some fairly extraordinary wines.) At that stage, ’74/5 for example, the Australian dollar was very strong against the French franc, and against the pound sterling was even stronger. I actually paid for some imports at $1.29 to the English pound. And it also coincided with this period of time where there was a recession in Australia. That’s when I got away from merchant banking. But this was a worldwide slump. And we were able to buy wines at extraordinarily low prices. I acted as the bidder, and the importer, and did all the book work, and worked out the cost of landing them. By chance, only a couple of days ago (last Saturday night) in the Hunter Valley we had the 1865 Chateau Lafite Double Magnum Dinner, which featured a double magnum of Lafite that I’d bought earlier. We had twenty- six people finally get together. Earlier in the year we bought it for £25,000 which, once you added on Christies sale commission, equated to AU$78,000. I happened to look it up, because I was interested in writing an article about it, what that same wine first sold for at Christies in 1967, as we had participated in some of those auctions at the end of the 1960’s. But I knew that the market had fallen into pieces in ’74/5. And I looked up the Christies’ sale prices, to find that a double magnum—the same wine in other words from the same cellar—had been in fact resold at Sothebys in 1974 for £500. So the price of this has gone from £500 to £25,000 over that twenty-five year period. Happily, the wine was magnificent.

I was going to say that hopefully it was worth keeping.

JH: It was just magnificent. It was extraordinary. So [in the 1970s] we were able to buy wines at very cheap prices. We bought 1874 Lafite from the famous Glamis Castle auction, and so on and so forth.

And I remember one lunch time we had a pre phylloxera wine, as the theme for the day was pre phylloxera Claret. This is just at lunch time. We’d have first growth days, and ’45 vintage days, and all sorts of extraordinary wines were drunk. So out of that process our palates developed, and Len thought that I had the better palate and so I was invited to judge at the Sydney Show. That’s how I came to be judging in 1977. Neville Baker, on the writing side, was the editor of—I’m not sure whether it was Epicurean or Australian Gourmet. I really have lost the thread of that. But that was, in fact, prior to 1977. ’77 was about the time when I was getting close to writing my first books. I was writing for Epicurean and Gourmet well before that. But it was he who just asked me would I mind doing some articles. It was published monthly so I did twelve articles a year for him. That then, in turn, led to newspaper writing.

Had you ever thought about writing prior to this?

JH: No. My interest in wine was independent of the fact that I might end up writing about it.

Your first book came out in ‘79.

JH: Yes.

Now, what was that one, James?

JH: That was Wines and History of the Hunter Valley. I’d done quite a lot of research on that, but then I sat down one Easter and wrote it over [that break]. For five or six days I just simply sat down and wrote the book with the benefit of (a) the research and (b) of course, my first-hand knowledge of the Hunter.

One thing that came to me was that at that time in Australia Len had written his book, Max Lake had written his, Benwell had written some—Sam Benwell—Walter James had written quite a few -

JH: Little monograph type books.

Yes, that’s right.

JH: Wonderful books.

And quite a bit for Wynns he did, too.

JH: Yes, his annuals.

But that, indeed, yours was probably the first to come to grips with where the industry had come from as well as the wines. Would that be correct?

JH: Yes, I think that’s right. That’s true. And that was followed pretty quickly by the books on Coonawarra and Clare, which I self published, but they were very much modelled on the approach that I’d worked with the Hunter Valley book, and had the same photographer for the photographic work.

Without being too rude, were they successful?

JH: Well, yes, they were. They weren’t wildly successful. Hunter Valley was followed by Mead & Beckett—Rod Mead and Barbara Beckett—who had commissioned me to write the Hunter book. That’s the other thing I suppose is worth saying, that I didn’t sit down with the idea of writing a book and then going to try and find a publisher. All the books that I’ve ever written have been commissioned. So that in between the Clare and the Coonawarra books, which are hard backed and colour and black and white photography, came a little series on each of the States. And they were done by the University of Queensland Press, because McGraw Hill, who’d done the Hunter Valley book, made a decision to go out of general book publishing at that stage—or, anyway, out of wine publishing.

Yes. They retreated back to their geographic roots, if I remember. You’re quite correct.

JH: So the University of Queensland Press [took up the mantle].

Then I did the Hunter and Coonawarra books, with the four regional books. That then led to one that’s been out of print now for a considerable period of time—576 pages, Australian Wine Compendium, which really used all of the research that I’d done for the Hunter, Coonawarra, Clare, and then the State-based books, which I started writing in long-hand. At that stage (this was 1984) I’d moved to Melbourne for my law firm. And we’d started at the firm a midnight to dawn, 24 hour typing pool. And it was a win/win situation because the text for this was typed only when the girls had nothing else to do. So it kept them from being bored and I got the book typed. But I started running out of time about halfway through so I simply dictated the second half of it. It, too, looks back at the history as well as a winery by winery, and region by region format.

I’m still amazed, James, how you actually came to do all you did. I don’t see how you could practice law and keep writing that much.

JH: (Laughs) When I went around the office at Rialto building I think I was known for running between the typing pool and my office. I used to gallop around the place. I love wine, so the real challenge, some would say, was on the legal side of being both managing partner and carrying on an active client-based law practice. All of the managing partners who’ve come after me have given up their normal practice and just concentrated on running the firm. Mind you, it’s a hell of a lot bigger now than it was then. Obviously I worked at nights and weekends. If you counted wine as work, it was a seven-day week. And I also learnt—because of the leverage lease work that I was particularly doing for international carriers and for whom I did a lot of overseas travel over long distances—that I should write, always, in the planes because no-one could get to me. I wasn’t expected to be working. And that even extended to Melbourne/Sydney travel. So I’ve become sort of like Pavlov’s dog. If I get in a plane now and I don’t have something to write, or to keep myself occupied, I get very twitchy. I

tend, still, not to watch films on planes, which most people do, but to write until such time as I need to go to sleep, and then I go to sleep.

Do you generally write by dictation?

JH: A mix still, unbelievably, of long-hand and dictation. It’s a mix of the two. But I still write most of my newspaper articles and magazine articles. I was a touch typist. I taught myself to type while I was at university on an ancient 1910 Remington, I think it was. The lock shift for capitals was so stubborn that I couldn’t do them with little fingers, as you’re meant to do, so I had to do those with my index fingers. But other than that, I was a touch typist. Once I went into law, quite quickly thereafter word processing started to be part of the scene. Because of my extensive travel—and the odd hours at which I tended to do this stuff—I’d write the articles, but the annual companion that I do, that is all dictated from notes and typed by my faithful secretary Paula Grey. People ask me why don’t I have a lap-top. Well, the answer is that I’ve played with them and I thoroughly intend to embark, even at my ancient fossilised age, on lap-tops because of the information that you can see as much as putting the data entry in. But it’s one of those sort of things where everyone says to just wait another six months and it will be voice recognition, or be this, that or the other thing. And seriously, when voice recognition becomes a little bit more advanced, it may well be that I’ll use that. But I’ve been blessed with long-serving and highly efficient secretaries and so it’s just been, for me, more efficient, although it sounds strange, not to use lap-tops.

OH 692/53 TAPE 2 - SIDE A

NATIONAL WINE CENTRE ORAL HISTORY. Interview with James Halliday on 29th November, 2001 . Interviewer: Rob Linn.

James, we’ve talked about your own writing and your judging, but during those formative years when you leant to love wine, you must’ve met some intensely interesting people. You’ve mentioned Len Evans already. Who were some of the others you met in the industry who were special characters?

JH: I suppose the two really outstanding ones were Max Schubert and Jack Mann. Max, I met at Magill. He’d been pulled back out of retirement by Penfolds, when they realised belatedly that in him they had a wonderful asset. And we seemed to hit it off pretty well. He, in fact, came over here to Coldstream Hills. He was going to come with Thelma, but Thelma suddenly had to go off because her mother was sick so he came alone. He stayed with us and had a wonderful dinner here. That was pretty late in his life. But I mainly met him at Magill where he told me a lot of the information behind Grange, and we did some interesting tastings together.

Did you meet him in that extraordinary office?

JH: Yes.

All the oak.

JH: Yes. Indeed. One of the tastings was a little off-skew because out at Brokenwood—I suppose we didn’t mention this—I’d actually become an expert pruner. We did all the pruning. We did all the making, and I did all the marketing, such as it was. But it was very much the hands-on winemaker. And when I went to see him at Magill he took me to the barrels of Grange, and the issue came up of the barrels being put in loosely so that the wine would deliberately get a degree of volatile acidity. He really saw that as part and parcel of the style.

And I said to him in advance, ‘I can’t understand, Max’—this was the days pre-silicone bungs. And so with wooden bungs you had to put them back in exactly the same spot. You had to put a little notch in the bung that corresponded with a point on the barrel. Otherwise it never fitted properly. And we used to use ugly bung wax and stuff like that, which was not good for disease, prevention of bacteria and so on and so forth. And I said to him, ‘Max, I can’t understand why you don’t get mycodermo’. This is a white film that will form on the top of the wine. It’s not actually nearly as bad as one might think, but it’s very unsightly and you certainly don’t want it. ‘Oh, no, we never get mycodermo’, said Max. So we go to the first barrel, and lift the bung out, and there’s mycodermo all over the top of the wine. So we go to the next one and ‘Oh, that must be exceptional’. And go to the next one and there’s more mycodermo. And so ultimately, this particular tasting ended in confusion with Max stomping back to his office saying that he’d have to get the boys to look at this immediately. He couldn’t understand how it was there. So, yes, he was certainly a wonderful person and I greatly enjoyed talking to him, but I have to be honest and say that the greatest character of all was Jack Mann. This was because of the great Jack Mann’s sayings which are legion and innumerable. I think the one that Peter Dawson told me about was when he would go through the winery with Peter at Houghton and tap the stainless steel tanks—holding tanks—and whenever he found one that was empty, he’d say, ‘Ha, no bad wine in there’, (Laughs) insinuating that all of the wines that Peter was making were, in fact, bad wines. But his three C’s—his cricket, Christianity and Chablis! Were his war cry.

That’s right.

JH: No wine was worthy of being called the name unless it could be broken down with 50% water. And his beloved butcher’s mincer. He was just a fascinating old man, who remained as sharp as a tack until shortly before his death.

He was making wine for Corin long after he left Houghton.

JH: Yes, correct. That’s where the butcher’s mincer [came in]—I saw the butcher’s mincer.

She’s told me all about that. I remember Tom Cullity telling me, too, James, about Jack coming down at the start of the planting of Vasse Felix and peeing on the first one that went in, and saying, ‘Well, this is going to make a great vineyard’. (Laughter) And Tom saying, ‘I think that’s what he meant, that it was going to work’. But he said, ‘Anyway, it happened’.

JH: I suppose the other family that I have got to know very well over the years was the Cullens in Margaret River. They almost adopted me. And I dearly love Di Cullen. I still get long letters from her. And then, of course, I suppose I played my part in getting Vanya Cullen into the show system.

Well, that’s been well rewarded, hasn’t it?

JH: Yes, it has. I’ve got a huge regard for Vanya. We get on well, of course. That was important, in fact, for judging because I think there was a perception that women couldn’t and were being discriminated against. Glass ceilings and all of that sort of thing. I think I have obviously been able to influence that because I’ve been chairman of so many of the shows. We’ve seen people like Wendy Stuckey and Caroline Dunn come along, for whom I’ve got, again, enormous regard for. And Caroline has been hitting winners all over the place since she arrived on the scene, somewhat belatedly. I think it’s accepted now that women are very much part of the scene and equally as competent judges and winemakers as men are.

Just coming back again to your move to Victoria, James, that you mentioned briefly. That must’ve been a fairly significant move given that you’d established Brokenwood and you were partner in Clayton Utz.

JH: Yes. After I stopped being managing partner I headed up the committee that was looking at ways that the firm might grow, expand and, indeed, fulfil its long-held ambition to become a national firm.

In 1982, I came across a firm called Arthur Pritchard in Sydney that had about eight partners, if my memory serves me right, in Sydney and one partner in Melbourne. I laid down the law to my partners to the extent that I said, ‘Look, before I go any further with this idea of finding firms to takeover/merge with, I want to hear from each and every one of you that you will not block such a merger merely on the philosophical grounds that you think that we’re better off growing organically. I’m not going to waste my time doing a whole lot of work and only to find that you’re going to dispute it’. At that stage, incredibly, the firm had a requirement of unanimity. I faced them down on this issue. So then when the Arthur Pritchard merger came up in ’82/’83, it was approved and did go through, and part of the reason was that it had a one man practice in Melbourne. We’d had quite detailed discussions with some of the other big Melbourne firms, one in particular that I don’t think I should name. We’d always been a very efficient firm and our net profit, ie the percentage of each billing dollar that went into our pockets as partners, or went to pay the firm of course, too, was as a percentage much higher than most other firms. This, while very good, gave us problems when we came to look at mergers with big firms. It would’ve meant a significant dilution of our earnings to give them the share and the business that they would’ve expected. Anyway, it had this one man practice in Melbourne, and that was a guy called Louis Bialkower. So the next thing was that we needed a partner, now we’d got our foot finally in Melbourne, to go down to help build the practice up. I’d long since negotiated with the firm that I would get an extra four weeks holiday a year on top of the normal four weeks, that gave me eight weeks a year, by giving up part of my partnership interest—it was a unit arrangement—in return for that. So that enabled me to do as much as I did, but I was still restricted in how much wine work I could do contemporaneously with my legal career.

No-one else could imagine going to Melbourne. So I said that I’d go. And part of the arrangement was that I would get my units back, but still keep my eight weeks for wine related purposes. When I got down to Melbourne (I think I’d known about it) but, lo and behold, Louis was right there in the middle of planting what became Yarra Ridge. Well, when I say the middle of it, Suzanne and I helped him plant the first vines at Yarra Ridge. So I moved on that basis, remembering that I’d already left the firm twice, never to return. The fact was it was a a partnership at will and that I could leave at any time, and so could anyone else, but that it really wasn’t fair, as I intended, to start another winery without disclosing my intentions. Because Brokenwood had got to the stage where it had eight partners, by the time I left, and clearly I was not going to be able to retire up there and run it. It was just not on. I’d been responsible getting in Riggs as winemaker. I’d hired him in 1982. So in ’83, which was the year all of these things happened, I sold my interest in Brokenwood. That was hard. I’d also got divorced in ’79. At the time the value of one’s legal practice was regarded as a matrimonial asset. And this is a scary thing because it wasn’t anything that you could actually realise, and Clayton Utz, what’s more, had got rid of goodwill, so I was going to be lumbered with this huge notional asset, which had to be brought to account. The upshot of all of this was that I, for a while, had a net negative worth. And Brokenwood was part of that. So a lot of things happened at the one time. The interest in Brokenwood was needed, anyway, for the divorce settlement. I might say that I’m on very good terms with my former wife— so there’s no sort of heat in all of this—and also with my children. I went to Melbourne, gave up Brokenwood, and said to my partners, ‘Look, I will guarantee you five years when I’ll do my best to build up the firm, but if at the end of five years I want to retire to go into full time wine business, don’t look at me with beady eyes’. And they thought that I, quite rightly, wouldn’t be able to afford to do that—take that plunge at the end of five years. On the other hand, in that period of time, the Melbourne firm had grown from nine people to ninety, and had by the time that I finally

left it, become more profitable than the Sydney branch. So I reckon I’d done my bit. And I left, in 1988, to come out here full time.

To Coldstream Hills.

JH: Yes, to Coldstream Hills. I jump a piece. I’d done two vintages in ’83, because I’d done the Brokenwood vintage, and then later in that year I did the vintage at Burgundy—Domaine Dujac. I’d done one before in Bordeaux, in 1979, with Len Evans and Brian Croser at Chateaus Rahoul and Padouen, which were respectively red Bordeaux and Sauternes. I came down here in 1983. I did not do a vintage anywhere in 1984—I had a holiday. But in 1985—I’d set myself up to buy grapes in the Yarra Valley and to make them using someone else’s winery. In the first year it was at the Baillieu Myer winery at Elgee Park. So the grapes went down there and I went down to make the wine. And unexpectedly, in 1985, bearing in mind that I was still pretty broke, this property and the house, in which we’re sitting as we do this interview, came on the market.

So this house was here?

JH: Yes, this house was here. Very different to how you see it now. This was just—where we are, down on the lower ground office area—an underground parking area for cars. And the big cellar, which you haven’t seen, which is in there, was more of the parking areas for cars. It was incredible. (Laughs) And so it came on to the market, and I had no money to buy anything. My intention was to make wine ’85, ’86, ’87 and ’88 vintages, and thereby have four vintages to tied me over while I then set around buying a property for a vineyard and a house and a winery. But then this came on the market in 1985, and it’s a long story. I went to the property in front, which I now also own, never dreaming that it was this house. It was on the market for sale and as you’ve seen it’s spectacularly situated.

A year earlier with my kids and Suzanne we had gone up what we called then, and call now, the Big Dipper, trying to work out a way to see whether we could get near to the house to see what we knew would be the spectacular views and had to give the game away. I’d said to Bailey Carrodus that if something came up in this particular part of the Yarra Valley I’d be very interested in at least knowing what it was going for. And I’d said the same to the Churchs at Warramate. It was Jack Church who rang me up at the office and said that “there’s an auction sign just gone up on the property behind us”. And I thought that he meant the house which is now the Coldstream cellar door. So Tony Jordan and I had been down at Mornington Peninsula mucking around with the wine on that day. We drove up here in the middle of the winter of 1985 and waited down at the house down the front. It was pissing down rain. Terrible weather. And the agent didn’t turn up. And we were about to leave—I’d rung the agent up and found that the expected value was $250,000. And this had got me interested because I couldn’t believe how cheap it was. But no-one was there. So we were about to go and Tony said, ‘Well, why don’t we just check that it’s not the one up the hill’. And I said, ‘It can’t possibly be. Not at that sort of price’. Anyway, we took the fifty yard drive to see, indeed, that the auction sign was for this place. We came up there and the agent was just about to go. He’d given us for dead. And it was actually a weekend, a Sunday. And on the spot I said, ‘I’m going to buy it’. And contracts were exchanged on the Tuesday. I rang up the Bank manager and said, ‘Look, I’m signing a $25,000 deposit cheque. Don’t bounce it whatever you do. I know I don’t have an overdraft but I’ll sort something out’. And those were in the glory days of merchant banking when everything was possible. And I, in fact, borrowed 130% of the purchase price, which then gave me the money to enable me to start planting the vineyard. It was entirely unplanned, a spur of the moment thing. But I was still then a

partner of Clayton Utz and thus had the cash flow to look after the mortgage. The fact that I didn’t have any assets other than the one I had bought—the house that I bought—was not of any vast consequence. So that all happened, and by the end of 1987 with my retirement coming up in the middle of the following year—well, in April, I actually fudged it a bit—we started building the winery further down the hill. It was three- quarters up and I was, by this stage, hocked to the hilt, when the property in front, which we’d originally inspected [was also put on the market]. We’d always said that if it ever came up, we would have to buy it, but there was no sign that the owners had any intention of leaving it. In fact, every sign to the contrary. So history repeated itself. Up went the auction sign. I went into a blue fit of despair, and I said, ‘Well, this is absolutely impossible. There’s no way we can even contemplate buying it’. The next day I was in the office and Suzanne rang up in a state of high excitement. She said, ‘I’ve had the field glasses out. Bailey Carrodus is walking all over the block in front. We’ve got to do something’. (Laughs) So, as I say, once again history repeated itself. What I decided to do to get the money for that was, in fact, to take Coldstream Hills into a small public float. I had three choices. Either stay on at Clayton Utz and postpone my retirement, or buy the property with four or five partners or go public. Peat Marwick, who were my accountants, said, ‘We’ve got people who’d love to come in’. Or I could go public. I’d done a lot of prospectus work, and I’d made other friends in the merchant banking field, so we did a small underwritten issue. But October 1987, you might remember, was when the sky really fell in with that massive decline in share prices. It was the start of the stock market decline and start of the big depression. But initially, it was only just the stock market. I kept on saying to my merchant bank friend, ‘Look, is this thing going ahead or not?’ He said, ‘Look, don’t worry. It’s only a million and a half dollars. It’s nothing. Forget it. Stop bothering me. We’ll do it’.

And indeed the prospectus was issued in December, and it was the first company to list after the stock market crash in Australia. It was issued over the December period into the New Year, when you never issue a prospectus, but we did and gained what turned out to be inadequate capital. The ultimate end point of all of that was that, through a fortuitous series of events, Hugh Johnson came in as a director for a while and provided us with some much needed capita. Because ’91 was just a shocking, awful period of time. It was the height of the recession. We had to reduce all our prices to get cash flow going. When we reduced the prices from the winery we had to then follow all of the wine out into market place and refund money to our distributors and the retailers for holding the stock so that we didn’t, in effect, discriminate against those who had been loyal to us. So that was all a pretty grim time. And then, and in ’93, we raised capital, but that meant finally, while I’d put all of the money that I could scratch up into Coldstream Hills, our interest was diluted from 57% to about 25%. And then it was diluted a bit further with another rights issue. But by the time that Southcorp came along with its takeover offer in 1996, Coldstream Hills had no need of money. We were doing well by that stage. And we didn’t really need Southcorp to make a takeover offer but, again, it is a long and involved story. After much soul searching we decided that we would accept. If we hadn’t accepted they couldn’t have got their 90% and compulsory acquired—there would’ve been a substantial minority. We still would’ve been listed with Southcorp as a dominant shareholder and, with my sort of legal knowledge, I decided that was not a healthy situation so it became wholly owned in 1996.

What had first attracted you to the Yarra Valley?

JH: When I was coming down and doing research for Wines and Wineries of Victoria—that was at the end of the 1970’s, in 1977 or ‘78, it was after we’d made these deplorable Pinot Noirs at Brokenwood. Every other Pinot Noir that I’d tasted from Australia was dreadful. John Beeston actually had

visited Mount Mary and come back with several Estate and Mount Mary Pinot Noirs, and they were just like a bolt of lightning. I couldn’t imagine that there were such wines capable of being made in Australia. At that stage I knew a lot about (French) Burgundy. I drank a lot of it and I owned quite a bit of it. So I was really taken. And I was also taken by Bailey Carrodus’ wines from the late 70’s. Not his first wines, which were pretty volatile, but from ’77 onwards. So one of the first places that I wanted to come down to when I started the research for Wines and Wineries of Victoria was the Yarra Valley. And we came in from the Christmas Hills way early one morning with Gary Steel, who now runs Domaine Wine Shippers, as my navigator and pilot, and there was the Yarra Valley spread out below me, looking incredibly beautiful. There was quite a bit of fog around but you could see the valley, and I thought that this was just so beautiful. And in short order I became familiar with Yeringberg, Seville Estate and Mount Mary, and of course Yarra Yering, and their wines. And right there and then I knew that this was where I wanted to end up. Hence, it was that in ’83 when I put up my hand to come down, and my partners all looked at me as if I was mad, I had to tell them that there one didn’t need a passport to get to Victoria. They did speak the same language, it wasn’t Siberia, and I wouldn’t have a frontal lobotomy and forget my forty-five years in Sydney. But it was still considered very strange behaviour. But, of course, right from that instant, I had the certain knowledge that somehow, some time, and I thought it would be much later in the 1990s,, we would move there. It was with serendipity. But it was predominantly, the capacity of the Yarra Valley to produce world class Pinot Noir [that attracted me]. And very damn good Chardonnay. And Bailey Carrodus, of course, and Yeringberg and Mount Mary for that matter, made wonderful Cabernet based wines as well. But it was particularly Pinot Noir and Chardonnay that interested me. So that was why I was so happy to come down from my law firm and be able to advance my plans by five or ten years.

Just as an aside, James, you were undaunted by Pinot? It can be a very difficult grape.

JH: Yes, I was undaunted. And what’s more, I perceived that if I was able to make top class Pinot, that the competition would be much less than it would be with Chardonnay because any fool can make Chardonnay, and basically, particularly with these hot vintages we’ve been having, any fool can make Cabernet. That’s putting it a bit strong, I suppose, but Pinot to this day actually remains a very difficult grape to deal with, to grow, to do what you want it to. You can’t make any mistakes in the winery. So, yes, it was a challenge but it was also an opportunity. And it was, indeed, Pinot that made the big breakthrough for Coldstream Hills. Lightning struck twice actually. I didn’t enter the 1985’s in the 1986 Yarra Valley wine show, I think it was then called the Lilydale wine show, because I think I was unaware of it. I didn’t think about it. But we did enter in 1987, and I remember coming out in the train from work late in the afternoon for the presentation of prizes, to find that we’d won every single trophy that was on at the show. Except, mysteriously, other than for the Chardonnay trophy, despite the fact that we’d got the highest points for the Chardonnay. Tony Jordan, who was one of the judges, told me afterwards that when they realised that one winery was going to win absolutely every single trophy, it was simply not on and they had—he hoped we wouldn’t mind—awarded the Chardonnay trophy went to Yeringberg. We hit it there. And then the 1987 Pinot, which came from what was then called the Miller vineyard but De Bortoli were buying it (De Bortoli bought the vineyard in between the time that I had agreed verbally with Graeme Miller to buy the grapes.) De Bortoli then came along, and then there was vintage. They honoured the agreement. They said, ‘You’ve got an agreement. We would like the grapes. If you don’t want them, we will be delighted to have them’. And I said, ‘I do want them, if you’re prepared to stand by the agreement’. They were, and I’ve always had the highest regard for Leanne de Bortoli and Steven Webber because of the way they did that.

So in 1987 Miller vineyard won an awful lot of gold medals and trophies, and Huon Hook, in particular, wrote about that in the Sydney press. So that was the first major success. And then the 1988—no, it is the same wine. I’m wrong. 1987 Miller vineyard Pinot came fourth in the Wine Olympics against a whole lot of very high ranked Burgundies from 1985. And then the 1988 Rising Shantell Chardonnay, a couple of years later, in the next, in fact, wine Olympics at Vinexpo came second out of two hundred after a 1996 Le Montrachet of Ramonet , and it won a lot of trophies in Australia. So those early wines really were very successful and put us well and truly on the map.

TAPE 2 - SIDE B

James, we’ve talked quite a bit about Coldstream Hills and this most beautiful place here. And we’ve talked about, in one sense, a conclusion of it with Southcorp taking over. Not that you don’t still live here, you do. But could we turn to a couple of things now on a much broader sphere? Firstly, would you spend some time talking about the change in public sentiment towards wine, particularly Australian wine.

JH: At the time that I started drinking wine there was a tiny column in the Sunday Telegraph by Frank Margan, which was his choice of the week, and it was about six lines. Postage stamp size. And I used to buy the Sunday Telegraph for that reason, and that reason alone, and then rush off and buy the wine a few days later. In other words, there really was almost nothing written. When Len Evans became part of the Wine Bureau—Australian Wine Bureau—he sat down and his first job was to find out who was writing about wine, and he found thirty-odd columns, and he’d written them all himself. So he got the late Frank Doherty as his Melbourne wine writer. So in that mid 60s period there was very little public writing about wine. The interest in table wine had definitely started because it went back to the mid 1950s with the end of beer rationing and the tied hotels ceasing to be the wine outlets; basically for fortified wine. So there were a lot of things

happening, plus European immigration—the change from a tea society to a coffee society, which really went back to the mid 1950s to the introduction of cold pressure fermentation by Orlando, and very critically, particularly in retrospect, Max Schubert with Grange. The mid 1950s was actually the starting point, if you like, of modern winemaking in Australia. But it was still to a very tiny audience. And, of course, it was Colin Preece and O’Shea who were also enormously important, but they were making table wines in tiny quantities—500 case lots were a big make of any particular wine. The seeds were already sown. And there was the European immigration wave, and on the other hand, people following my pattern and going to Europe for a year and coming back. These were people who had disposable income, or were to have disposable income. By the 1960’s, the second half of the 1960’s, you started to see wine coming out more into the general scene in the way that it is today. Today, the young—the nineteen/twenty/twenty-one year olds—who are in the wine industry, be they in the trade, be they winemakers going through Roseworthy or Charles Sturt University, are infinitely more knowledgeable about wine than I was at their age. There’s just no comparison. I guess the really big change started at the end of the 60s with the red wine boom, which then promptly changed in the 1970s to the white wine boom with the introduction of casks. I suppose it was the perfection of the cask technology that brought wine into the scene as a normal social beverage, rather than a very restricted specialty choice by very few people. Obviously that, too, was a watershed as those two successive wine booms came, when in the early 1970s they were carbon fining Shiraz to turn it into white wine, not unlike blush. There was a big change in attitude. It was definitely the cask that had a huge role in that.

So in that sense public sentiment’s been moved by the industry itself, and those writing about it. Would that be correct?

JH: Oh, yes, I think so. And to a degree—I don’t think you can altogether ignore this—by the European influence, which led to the opening of

French/Italian restaurants. There had been Italian ones here from way back, and certainly Chinese restaurants, but there was only one French restaurant in Sydney for a long period of time. And there was one Austrian restaurant called the Stuttgarter Hof in Darlinghurst. At the height of my ambition at the end of the 1950’s I was also interested in food and I wanted to get a job as a dishwasher out at the Stuttgarter Hof because this would get me back in to see what was going on. And so the change in food and the development of restaurants, also had a symbiotic effect.

That’s caught up with the post-War immigration and the changing nature of Australia.

JH: Yes, indeed.

You talked briefly about the pressure cold fermentation that was brought in in the early 50’s, James. What were some of the changes in the styles of wine that developed in those preceding fifty years?

JH: Okay. What you realised was a far greater protection of fruit flavour. It was really the start of the Australian ‘sunshine-in-a-bottle’ wine style, which has been such an important part of the industry. From a wine flavour-structure viewpoint, it’s been this that has been responsible for our export success. Prior to that time the means weren’t there to retain these very high toned fresh fruit flavours in both white and red wine.

So dealing with white, you got the idea of, initially, pressure but quite quickly moving to temperature controlled stainless steel fermentation of whites. Early bottling, in fact, came very much at the same time. So instead of the wines going into big, old, inert wood oval 50,000 gallon casks and remaining there for a year, or even two years, not really to pick up any oak flavour but just simply because that was the way they were made, you got Riesling and Semillon taken to bottle six months/five months/four months after bottling. And this certainly was how you could find it done in Germany, but it wasn’t being done in many other parts of the world.

Chardonnay, of course, the wood matured whites, started with Tyrrell in 1970/71, and we had to go through another learning curve from that point, which was all about the use of new French oak, and barrel fermentation of white wines. So that was another phase, if you like. And these two white wine approaches came to maturity by the start of the 1980s: although remember that there was no Chardonnay in South Australia because of the phylloxera quarantine rules that delayed the rootstocks coming in until 1980/81. So in other parts of Australia this was slower to arrive. We also had driving many of the style issues, the development throughout the 1980’s of the cool climate areas. Again, this put more focus on—and dealing here just with white wines for the moment—natural acidity, lower pH, fresher fruit and brighter fruit. These regions continued to gather pace through the 90s as you got greater volume coming through, but their start was really at the end of the 1970s. I suppose you can say that during the mid to second half of the 1970s there was a development of the cool climate areas, such as the Yarra Valley. On the red wine side, I mentioned before the absolutely fundamental importance of Max Schubert. But it was also in the same time in the 1950s that you saw Wynns take over and create Wynns Coonawarra Estate at Coonawarra. You had the premium red wine areas being rediscovered because many of these had been previously discovered. The Adelaide Hills, Eden Valley, Yalumba going back up there to Pewsey Vale, which had been famous in the 1860’s. You had Keppoch, now known as Padthaway, being pioneered in the early 1960’s. So once again, you had different types of fruit. You had Cabernet—only 100 tons were crushed according to the statistics in 1960. Merlot didn’t exist. Sauvignon Blanc didn’t exist. I mean, many of the stock varieties of today have come along as part and parcel of winemaking techniques that were directed to retaining fruit freshness, cool climate areas and this new spread of varietals. And then on the rebound side, you had the use and the selection of new oak. This was fascinating because the early selection was very deliberately

of American oak. At the time, it appears in the Australian Wine Board Report, in one of the years in the 1950s, and I’ve quoted it in my little History of Australian wine, that American oak was considered far superior, and French oak was considered unsuited to the production of fine table wine. I can’t imagine what French oak they’d got or what had happened to it, but nonetheless that pushed red winemaking to American oak, and it really wasn’t until the 1980s that you started to see French oak make significant inroads into red wine production. So there’s just been paradigm shifts starting in the 50s, running through the 60s, 70s, 80s, and no coincidence that by the time the export boom starts in 1985 virtually all of the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle have fallen into place. The other thing, of course, that Australia’s been so blessed with is the sheer size of the country, and out of the size of the country the diversity of climate and terroir. I think it’s something that Australians tend to take a bit for granted, and people from other parts of the world don’t understand, and can’t believe, that we really do have combinations of terroir and climate, which are suited to the making of everything from the finest sparkling wines—Tasmania—to the richest fortified dessert Muscats, Tokays—north east Victoria—and every wine style in between. I think that the pace of development of Australian winemaking, and the development of these styles, likewise could really only have happened in Australia. It hasn’t happened, for example, in California, simply because of the insatiable curiosity and the refusal of Australians generically, right across the board, to accept commonly accepted wisdom nor to be unduly subjected to or confined by peer group pressure. You’ve had the development of techniques and wine styles which have, in turn, meant the emergence of the Australian flying winemaker phenomenon, and the gnashing of teeth on the part of some that we are freely transferring our very precious know-how and technology at no cost to our competitors around the world.

I see it very differently. First of all, you’re never going to be able to stop Australians from travelling. They’ll just thumb their noses at you if you try to stop them or suggest that this is not a good idea. But secondly, I’m yet to meet, or hear of, a flying winemaker who has come back to Australia other than enriched by the experiences that he or she or they have gained overseas. They come back with a knowledge of the world, a knowledge of our competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, a knowledge of the societies into which Australian wines will find their way, and I think we gain on the swings on that exchange far more than we lose on the roundabouts. And long may it continue.

James, lastly, a more personal question. This might be just a bit too banal but I hope not. Do you have great satisfaction having spent the years you have in wine?

JH: Oh, yes. Absolutely. The wonderful thing about wine is—again, this is sort of motherhood banal stuff but it’s the best way of putting it even if it’s not the least bit original— that the more you learn, the less you know. That’s one thing. And I think the other thing is that wine is different from cheese. Let’s look at cheese, for example. There is a fine art in making really good cheese. But the object of the exercise there is to make the same cheese year after year. Beer is too obvious to even bother mentioning, and spirits, largely, ditto. Wine is always going to be different from one vintage to the next. Each vintage throws up particular issues. Again, there are the cliche opportunities, problems of threats, or whatever you want to call them, which you can look at both positively and negatively. So that keeps the challenge and the interest burning fiercely and brightly. Increasing competition from around the world is another constantly changing thing that is something that we’ve got to meet. And I, personally, am forever fascinated and attracted to the annual miracle of the budding of the vines, and the growth of the vines through the season, and then the picking at harvest season. Then the leaf fall and the quiet of

winter. Then there is the annual rebirth. There are lots of French romantic ideas about all of this, that the wines in the cellar stir with the budding of the vines, which is of course just the start of malolactic fermentation. It’s an observation that is correct, but nowhere near as romantic. But there really is something quite special in making wine and then, as we discussed off the tape, the ability to come and drink a wine as a group of us did the other night, the grapes of which were picked in the year that Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. I’ve just been looking through a Christies catalogue and there’s Lafites, in fact, going back to 1811, the year of the comet, considered to be the greatest vintage probably ever. Although these things are hard to assess, a lot of people certainly thought so at the end of the nineteenth century. And again, it’s just wonderful to have something that you can link to the past in that way, but also know that there is a future, that people will be looking back in fifty years time on the events and wines of today.

Thank you very much, James.