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

OH 692/13

Full transcript of an interview with

LITA BRADY

on 28 August 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 692/13 LITA BRADY

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 692/13 TAPE 1 - SIDE A

NATIONAL WINE CENTRE ORAL HISTORY PROJECT.

Interview with Lita Brady at Wendouree Cellars on 28th August, 2002.

Interviewer: Rob Linn.

Lita, where and when were you born?

LB: I was born in Adelaide in 1949.

And who were your parents, Lita?

LB: Max and Alegra Liberman

So, Lita, your father was a developer.

LB: Yes.

And did some very interesting things that I know about.

LB: Yes, in South Australia.

So when you were young growing up, was there wine on the table in your house?

LB: No.

Did your parents drink any alcohol at all at that time?

LB: They would have drunk socially for the custom of the day. The odd spirit that people were drinking. Very moderate. Conventional.

For the time.

LB: For the time, yes.

How did you come to be mixed up with the wine industry?

LB: Well, Tony and I had been travelling and we’d returned and settled in Adelaide and we wanted to live in the country. And Dad heard about this property for sale and mentioned it to Tony, who had a friend who’d moved here not long before that. So he knew of the property and what it was like. They came up to have a look at it together. Dad bought the property and we moved here and ran it for him.

What year would that be?

LB: ‘74.

Was Roly still around then?

LB: Roly worked with us for about eight years. So he directed the first two vintages.

This is Roly Birks. Can you tell me a bit about Roly, Lita?

LB: Well, he was seventy-five when I first met him, and he was sort of a traditional person in terms of values. He’d been born in South Australia—born here actually in the house. He hadn’t actually done any tractor work, he’d done a lot of the various tasks but he was basically the winemaker. And he and I used to do jobs together in those days. You know, a girl and a seventy-five year old man did about the same thing. (Laughter) He taught me quite a bit. He taught me to prune, and a balanced view of life I guess. And we learnt his method of handling wine and making wine. I later went to study winemaking.

Was that at Roseworthy?

LB: No, at Charles Sturt.

Wagga?

LB: Yes.

So when would you have gone over there, Lita?

LB: I started in ‘83.

Was Tony Jordan still there then? No, he’d gone.

LB: Yes, just left.

Can you tell me a bit about Roly’s view of winemaking?

LB: Well, he was very traditional. I’d say non experimental. His sort of creativity showed up whenever there was something to be done, in the way he would design a method to do something out of the ordinary. For instance, when we first got here the wood was all empty—the barrels were all empty—and had been for a year I think, or six months. Just the method that he proposed to get the wood up. He said that we should get a boiler built and—they had ways of doing absolutely everything. Old fashioned thing basically.

Can you describe to me how Wendouree was when you first saw it?

LB: Yes. There was a dirt floor here.

This is in the winery section?

LB: Yes. On both sides. On the other side in the fermenting cellar, where we’ve got the stainless steel now, were a row of large oak barrels—old oak barrels. They used to use old oak. We talk in gallons, so there were 300’s, 500’s. We just used the equipment that was here. There were several methods that we discontinued

because they were no longer worth it. They used to process skins to get more alcohol out of it and these sort of things.

Actually crush the skins?

LB: They’d soak them in water and then re-ferment them to get extra sugar out of them. The white skins, because the white skins don’t go into a ferment. So they would make alcohol out of the sugar in the skins.

So was he looking at natural ferments at that time?

LB: No. We used to go to what was called the Stanley Wine Company and they would give us a drum of fermenting wine and we would use that to start the first ferments, and then we would seed from ferments that were going. That to my understanding is not a natural yeast. I don’t know where theirs would have come from but it wouldn’t have been just started up by leaving grapes to the air.

But you were bringing in, in effect, an external yeast to trigger the ferment.

LB: Yes.

Now were all the grapes sourced off the property here at that time?

LB: There was a grower that Roly had an agreement with, and we used to make wine for him. That vineyard was later sold to Petaluma. That’s up on the back

range. That continued for a few years. Lots of wineries used to do that sort of thing just as extra income.

What were the varieties of grapes on the place when you came?

LB: Very much the same as today, except for Riesling, which we’ve pulled out. So there was Shiraz, Cabernet, Malbec, Mataro. That’s it I think.

And the Riesling.

LB: And the Riesling. Oh, actually there was Grenache.

No Crouchen at all?

LB: Yes, Crouchen as well. There were other little patches of things that used to be used for fortifieds. There was a patch of Chenin Blanc that we called Albillo.

Did you call it Albillo, did you?

LB: Yes, we did. We only found out that it was Chenin Blanc in the late 70’s when a French viticulturist came to visit.

That’s interesting. Albillo was a Spanish sherry grape I think from memory.

LB: Yes, and that was used in sherry here. But in the wine industry there have been a lot of names that sort of confused along the way, and if you look up an ampelography book you’ll find that most grape varieties have got several names.

Yes.

LB: And so confusion comes from that.

What type of wine was Roly mainly making when you first came?

LB: Dry reds and fortifieds. He had been making a lot of dry white base. Oh, there was Pedro as well—Pedro Ximenez. He’d been making white wine base for sparkling wine production, but the market disappeared in that and so we pulled the vines out.

So he wasn’t doing his own sparkling here?

LB: No.

He’d send that off.

LB: Yes. He’d sell that to someone else just as a wine.

Yes, to Romalo or somewhere.

LB: Yes, it was Romalo.

Thought it was. I remember Norm Walker telling me that.

So can you tell me a bit about the characteristics of the fortifieds? My memory of them is that they were very big wines.

LB: Yes, they were. I think you’d probably call them sweet red really because they were too red for a tawny style. There were tawnys made, and we made the first Vintage Port in 1975, so there hadn’t been a vintage before then. But to get a tawny out of that big dark red material takes a long time so Roly used to achieve more a dark red Port that wasn’t a Vintage Port.

Did you have much Port stored down?

LB: No.

What was the market for the dry reds like?

LB: It was quite small really. People didn’t really appreciate them on the whole in South Australia. We used to sell a bit in Victoria. But before we came Roly used to sell the red in bulk to other wineries on the whole, and he used to just bottle a few dozen cases.

Lita, did you actually like the wine when you first tasted it?

LB: I didn’t personally like the wine, no. I remember it was good because of the reaction of the other winemakers. When we had difficulties and it was hard to

keep going, I just used to remember their reaction to tasting the wine and I could see that it was something special.

Two things I’d like to talk about from that. One would be the difficulties. Would you mind talking a little bit about that?

LB: Well, the difficulties mainly was the slow pace of sales. You know, we only used to be able just to keep up with paying bills for a long time, but Roly had a much harder time, so I always remembered that and it was never quite that bad. He used to have to load up barrels and drive around the north of South Australia and go to pubs and sell the barrels, and he actually delivered the wine.

Did he treat you as good mates?

LB: He actually was very kind. He really respected Tony because Tony’s quite a hard worker and he does things well. He was a very nice man to work with, yes. Just like a grandfather really. But, you know, with reserve.

What about in the district—the broader district? Did the other winemakers take you to heart?

LB: Oh, everybody helped, yes. You could ring up anyone and ask them how to do things. In fact, when I first started to do the winemaking course I used to come home and tell him what I’d learnt, and when he had a problem he’d ask me what to do and he’d still ring someone like Tim Knappstein. When the answers started to become the same he stopped ringing. (Laughter)

There’s trust for you.

LB: well, you have to be careful. You only get one chance a year.

Yes, you do.

So who were some of the characters in the wine industry up here whom you met apart from Roly?

LB: Brother John.

Was he helpful to you?

LB: Well, he was more like a contemporary colleague. I think he was more sort of support and friendship. Tim Knappstein was probably the major source, and he was so generous.

This is when he’d set up Enterprise, was it?

LB: No, he was at Stanley Wine Company.

Still at Stanley?

LB: Yes.

Met Jim Barry just on a social—and the Barrys. Oh, what was his name? The viticulturist who worked at—the name escapes me. George Finn. He was the viticulturist at the big winery at Auburn.

Quelltaler.

LB: No. At Auburn.

Grossets?

LB: No. Big, big -

I’ve had a blank.

LB: Yes, I’ve got a blank, too.

Taylors.

LB: Taylors, yes. He was there for many years. If we had questions about the vineyard we used to often just check with him.

And also a fellow called Bernie Hanlin who was just a fantastic inspiration to us. He was jovial and strong and had been in the industry a long time. He was the vineyard man for the grapes that we used to process for this other group. And we could ring him and tell him about the symptoms on a grapevine and he’d come straight around. Just the time it took him to get here from wherever he was. And basically he knew that if we had it in our vineyard he’d very likely have it in his. But nevertheless he was always incredibly generous.

That’s amazing really. So there was a camaraderie?

LB: Oh, absolutely. It was superb. I’d never really seen anything like it, having come from the city.

Was that a bit of a culture shock in a way?

LB: I thought it was going to be but it wasn’t really because we’d been travelling for a couple of years and so a lot of our friends had been displaced by the time we came back. I’d worked at Flinders in the book room and I thought I was going to miss the intellectual company that I had, but I like solitude and I just always enjoyed the country things.

Well, Wendouree’s still got almost a nineteenth century feel about the layout of the property, hasn’t it?

LB: Yes. That was the intention, to keep it very much as it was, and I always felt that we’d changed it unbelievably because things just weren’t practical. You couldn’t have a dirt floor, you couldn’t ask men to fork grapes into crushers after a certain period, and all this sort of thing. So we’ve changed it quite a lot.

They are some of the very obvious changes I guess, aren’t they?

LB: Yes.

What about technology-wise? Have you brought in new technology bit by bit?

LB: Yes, we have. Every time there’s new technology proposed, or written about, we evaluate it and we choose where we can improve wine quality, and not necessarily decrease labour. That’s never been a goal. So we’ve got a stainless steel crusher, and it’s a very gentle crusher. That was the first thing we changed. You’d tip into it with hydraulic tippers rather than fork. We kept the same press because really to do a press load with the basket press is about the same time as to do a press load with almost any other press. By the time you clean these new pieces of equipment you’ve got a four hour press, and so we’ve kept to that.

So the basket press is still the one you had originally?

LB: Yes.

Which is more than functional.

LB: Oh, yes. And Tony’s repaired it, and replaced the wood, and relined the base of it with stainless steel.

Has the growth in technology been very much a step by step thing as capital allowed?

LB: Oh, yes, very much so. See, we’ve got a spectroscope, which for years you would look at the cost of having the tests done, and for a long time the purchase of the spectroscope would be five years analysis by the Wine Research, so why would you worry? And then the price of those came down, and the price of the analysis went up. And by that time I was very familiar with those sort of techniques, having finished Wagga. And we always liked to have those sort of things available because if Sunday night you want to know something for Monday morning, we can just come down here and analyse it and then make the decision and pick.

Would it be true to say that in Roly’s time he wasn’t analytical in a laboratory sense? He tended to do it a lot more by taste?

LB: I suppose that’s true, but there’s always been a laboratory here. And he would have had to do distillation, and he would have had to find out how much alcohol he had in the wines because we had to keep those sort of records for the— oh, what do you call it?

The bond. Customs.

LB: Yes, all that. Still as complicated as any of the tests we do today. In fact, more so.

Actually I was just thinking, you came in right on the end of that era, didn’t you?

LB: Oh, I wouldn’t say that. They used to be the bane of our lives for many years, and they’ve just now virtually disappeared from the face of the earth, although I think we still do the records but we just post them in. But they used to turn up.

But you wouldn’t have them living on site like some wineries did, would you?

LB: No, we didn’t have them but they would come, I think unannounced, and there was this very Police-like—we always got friendly with them in the end.

‘Show me your spirit’.

LB: Yes, that’s right. It wasn’t even that, it was much more sort of quiet fury. (Laughter)

And I suppose that could be quite off-putting.

LB: Well, it was to me but Tony never worried about those things. He used to enjoy it all. I would quake if we didn’t have the right balance of spirit used and spirit retained but, no, Tony said that you’ve got to have errors to show that it’s been done honestly.

I guess that was all part of it.

Have you concentrated since that time—since Roly’s departure and all that—more on the table wine side?

LB: The bottom fell out of the market of the fortifieds when people started to worry about drink driving. And we made a beautiful Vintage Port for many years, but you used your best material for it, and that wasn’t selling. You’d open it for cellar door and you could only have it open for one day and you’d have to empty the bottle into the tawny barrel and open the next one the next day. So we could see that wasn’t the best use of our best material, so ‘86 I think was the last Vintage Port we made.

So by ‘86 the move to table wine was obvious, too, was it?

LB: Oh, yes. Long before, but we persevered because it was such a delicious wine.

I remember it. I mean, the tawnys too were just super.

LB: Yes, the tawnys are lovely. We realised that we had to specialise.

So what was the feeling towards Wendouree from the wider wine press? People like Halliday and that sort of -

LB: Well, Halliday came and I remember he reviewed the ‘75 wines very highly, and that always gave us a boost. And then I actually can’t remember seeing him until about 1984, and he gave us a completely rave review on the ‘84’s and I think that really set us on the right track. People then used to come.

So had you overseen that ‘84 vintage yourself?

LB: No. I was very junior in those days.

Roly wouldn’t have been here then.

LB: No. Tony and a friend, Stephen George. Stephen didn’t actually ever come at vintage but Tony used to be in contact on the phone.

Did Tony have a winemaking degree or anything?

LB: No, he didn’t, but he’s a very careful methodical, very logical—he’s a great handler of wine. Everything he does he does incredibly well. We had a winemaker who was a Roseworthy graduate until 1980, and then he left to go into business with his family. So it was at that point—and Stephen was at a loose end and he said, ‘I’ll help you. You can do it’. So Tony went on with it.

I started to have an input, I guess, about ‘85 when—it mainly came in when problems would arise because, you know, the method was set and I would basically run the picking gangs, and I still do, and Tony does the vintage in here with our off-sider. So I would only put my mind to problems that we had and try and sort those out. And I’d go to Wagga with questions for all my colleagues and come back and try things that they’d tried when they’d had similar problems. And usually we found that we’d have to devise our own solutions because most things didn’t work for us on our wine. You know, a lot of the analysis and the scientific sort of work is done on what they call a model solution—I think they call it—which is water, wine and acid. And you get these big dry reds and they just won’t do what the other model solutions do. They resist oxidation and they resist all sorts of things. You can’t deal with sulphide quite as easily as other wines.

I guess it’s a question of whether that’s the best solution for here, isn’t it?

LB: Well, having the basic principles we could go back to that, and we knew how to handle wine and we just tried this and that. We ended up building a couple of bits of equipment that people are now really coming around—but we realised that we had to get air into our reds, and we used a little pump that puts air into a fish tank. We set that up with a—because our off-sider here in the vineyards is an electronic genius really. We had a switch would vary the amount of air going into a ferment. We played around with little—I’ve forgotten what you call them. Something that gas passes through and it makes it into bubbles.

(Sounds like, Sphincter).

LB: Yes. Tony built a sphincter that worked quite well for us, so we’ve been doing that for quite a while. We tried aeration and found where the extreme was. We could see that we couldn’t do quite that much to the wines and then we moved back from there.

Now when you came here it would have been open fermenters, pretty much?

LB: Yes. Still is.

So concrete?

LB: They were. Double brick lined with concrete. And then we used to wax them every year. Take the wax off and put new wax.

Do you still do that?

LB: We’ve lined them with stainless steel for about three vintages now.

What a wonderful thing.

LB: Yes, it certainly is.

So the open fermentation though you find suits the grapes from here?

LB: Oh, yes, superb. Because, you see, through the ferment, depending on the vintage, you get off odours for various reasons. One that I was talking to someone about the other day is like tomato vine, and you get that from—we’re not sure what it’s from but it’s possibly not completely ripe seed tannins. You see, that sort of thing comes off in a ferment. It just comes up into the air and you can smell it. Those volatiles come off, whereas if you have a closed ferment it just stays in there. It’ll form a liquid and get back in the wine. So I think it’s the best way to ferment a red.

Do you go from the open fermentation into stainless?

LB: Yes.

And from there into small barrels?

LB: Yes. And we conduct a malolactic in the stainless after by keeping the wines at twenty. Got little heaters that are designed to heat 44 gallon drums for glue I think—we have one for eack tank—they hold the wine at around 21ºC.

Is that for more of a softer edge you’re after?

LB: Oh, well, no, that’s really for stability because if you bottle a wine with residual malic acid—it may undergo a malo-lactic, and the production of gas causes corks to pop out and leave the wines cloudy and gassy.

Without it, you’ll get it.

LB: Yes. (Laughter)

There are some famous examples of that I think.

LB: Are there? I don’t want to know about them. (Laughs)

Down at Coonawarra there were.

LB: Were there?

And you learnt a lot about this from Wagga I guess.

LB: It was a fantastic course. I basically did applied science, so learnt physics and chemistry.

Had you done that before?

LB: No. In fact, my chemistry teacher came to cellar door one day and I said to him, ‘Guess what? I’m doing tertiary chemistry’. And he looked at me and he said, ‘My God, you did it to spite me’. Because he and I were enemies. (Laughter) He couldn’t believe it. I said something about potassium metabisulphite and he turned to his wife and he said, ‘Look how it rolls off her tongue’. (Laughter) I can’t imagine what I’d been like in class.

So did Tony have a natural affinity with the chemistry of wines?

LB: Yes. And with antiseptic handling. He’s just a natural when it comes to that. And I used to learn the current methods, and I would come back and he would propose that we did it another way. And I’d say, ‘Why do it like that?’ Then I would be able to see that it was actually better. But he’d come from another direction. And I knew the sort of care that was being taken in the industry, and I could see that he was prepared to take much more care.

TAPE 1 - SIDE B

Lita, I think the last thing we talked about on the other side was the open fermenters. Can you describe some of the other technological changes that we haven’t touched on yet?

LB: Well, going from the fermenters, we threw out all the old barrels in something like 1980. It was a different style of barrel storage, and we used to think we’d done a marvellous thing by instituting small new wood, but when you look at the wines that we made in those old barrels in the 70’s, they were superb, with much more complex flavours, and we now get a very pristine red with just fruit and wood flavours. I don’t know that they’re better. In fact, they’re certainly not better yet.

So those early vintages in effect it was the grapes talking rather than anything else.

LB: Oh, the whole winemaking recipe if you like—the old wood. It was probably the blocks talking because Tony would be able to say to Roly, ‘Where does your best Shiraz come from?’ Roly would say, ‘That block’. And that would be repeated year after year.

Really?

LB: Yes.

Now tell me a bit about the vineyard, Lita, because I’m fascinated with the fact that it’s not irrigated. Is that right?

LB: No. But, you see, in 1980 no-one irrigated here. They only started irrigating then. We get twenty-six inch rainfall. Grapevines need twenty inches. And if you’re prepared to accept four or five tons to the acre on a young vigorous planting, then you don’t need irrigation. I don’t really know anything about white grapes because we don’t really grow them. I suspect you probably need the irrigation for white grapes. But when the growers started to put in irrigation we were suspicious and we thought that we’ll track the wines from our neighbours and just see how things go. At the time we wouldn’t have had the money to invest. It was very expensive to -

Do the irrigation?

LB: Yes. And we didn’t really have white winemaking equipment, so we weren’t going in that direction at the time.

When did things begin to take off a bit for you, in a good sense?

LB: Probably at the Centenary. We had another journalist, a fellow called Tim White, who wrote an article in the Financial Review. After that we could probably sell every bottle that we made. The article came out and the phone started to ring straight away. He, himself—Tim White—was surprised. He said to me, ‘Oh, they do listen’.

Was this 1990, was it?

LB: No, it was in the 80’s.

I’m just trying to remember when the Centenary was.

LB: ‘85/86. Sorry. The Centenary was ‘95. Yes, Tim White would have been in the 90’s. That’s right.

And that in itself must have been such a change to have that.

LB: It was a relief in many ways because you were sort of trying to balance cheque books and this sort of thing. But then that was our only problem at the time really. Then you were so busy just keeping up with demand and obligations that people put on you.

Did that mean travel?

LB: Oh, no, never. We always avoided that. Just weren’t interested.

Been there.

LB: Yes. I suppose as kids we’d travelled interstate. I could see a lot of people who wanted to expand so that they could slowly sort of retire and get enough so that they could pay other people to do the various tasks, and that’s never been our interest. I was always envious even of someone doing the pruning. I had to do other things and you have to chose, and I always wanted to be involved in absolutely everything.

So was there that sense of the garden for you?

LB: They used to call it the garden. And that always surprised me really. I mean, a garden for me is a very different thing but I just saw it as an industry really—agricultural industry.

The old German families always called it the garden.

LB: That’s right. And we had pruners here who used to call it the garden. I used to think that was delightful.

Well, it is in effect though.

LB: Yes, it is. That’s right.

Agriculture is an extension of horticulture, which is an extension of -

LB: Yes, that’s right.

It’s the same concept. I mean, for most Germans in village life, in the nineteenth century, that was just natural. Your garden was in fact an extension off your house.

LB: To me, garden is a much smaller thing. And even though our vineyard is small—I mean, the first day that I picked grapes we started in the top corner and you were just surrounded in the sea of vines, and I just thought, ‘Oh, I think this is going to kill me’. I used to pick for six weeks.

Hand pick?

LB: Yes.

Do you still hand pick?

LB: Yes. It takes ten days now.

Ten days?

LB: Yes. When I heard that the French vineyards used to get—I can’t remember what it was. It was almost like fifty pickers, or a hundred pickers, and they’d take three days. I thought that we can smarten this up a bit. So we get in a lot of pickers so that we can virtually keep up to the ripeness.

Which varies from parts of the -

LB: From year to year.

Does it?

LB: The pace of ripeness. Some years it’s very quick.

And are you using hydraulic secateurs?

LB: We’ve got a set of hydraulics—you mean for picking fruit?

Yes.

LB: No. Just snips.

And for pruning?

LB: Well, our off-sider uses a set of hydraulics for the big cuts on Cabernet just to make it a lot easier on the men’s hands. So he’ll go through and cut out the rod from last year.

Lita, how many acres under vine?

LB: Twenty-six or twenty-seven I think. It’s eleven hectares. Something like that.

And how many tons are you crushing from that?

LB: Fifty. In a good year we crush fifty.

And that’s more than enough for you?

LB: Yes. I think we have to set our limits at that. That way we can still do some planting. We can still bottle it all, label it all, get it all finished by the time vintage starts and be ready to start again, just with a small work-force.

So have you found over the years you’ve been here—sorry. When did Roly die? I’m just trying to work it out.

LB: He died in ‘88, so it was his ninetieth year.

And he kept contact with the vineyard for most of that time?

LB: Well, he was the winemaker from 1917 onwards—and his father. He retired from here in ‘83 before the fire, and I think basically he lost his—oh, not lost his licence. You know they used to take your licence away from you. It was taking him quite a long time to get ready and get to work and that sort of thing. We kept

him going for a long time. We used to get him his lunch, and I used to go and pick him up in the morning and bring him home at night for quite a while. I can’t remember how long. Just to keep him here.

Did he get quite frail at the end? I’m trying to remember.

LB: Not really. I said to his daughter after he died, ‘What did he die from?’ And she said, ‘Well, nothing really. He just died’. And I was taking his wine into him and having chats. He always drank wine, even in the old folks’ home, even though he couldn’t take it to the dining room. He’d have to drink it in his room. He was reading the paper and watching the cricket. He was very contented, he really didn’t want things in his room. He was happy to be in the old folks’ home because the nurses were there and there was somebody to help him when he needed it for various things.

Did you and Tony have a sense of carrying on what had been begun by the Birks?

LB: Yes, very much so. Roly was very generous with all his experience. Our aim really was to try and maintain something like this. Because we could see that these things were disappearing, and we just thought that that would quite a nice thing to do. And it was good at first. We used to use the old equipment. You know, the old tractors. We had equipment to do absolutely everything. In fact, more than we wanted.

Was the purchase walk-in/walk-out, was it, pretty much?

LB: Yes, except we didn’t buy any wine. So that made it a lot easier for us to actually purchase it because the wine was quite valuable. Stanley Wine Company bought that. Two vintages. ‘72 and ‘73 I think they got, because there was no wine made in ‘74 because of the downy mildew.

So that gave Roly a bit more money in his pocket basically, did it, from those vintages?

LB: Oh, no, Roly didn’t sell the vineyard. Roly had sold in something like ‘71.

That’s right.

LB: We bought from the people who—I think it was a mortgagee sale.

Yes, they hadn’t been able to carry it on at al, had they?

LB: No.

That’s right. I do recall now. I’d forgotten that part of it.

That sense of carrying on a tradition, has it been surprising for you and Tony that in fact you’ve been able to keep going the way it’s gone?

LB: Yes, it does. Sometimes I sort of almost reach a point where I think there’s too many things to do and there’s not enough time or energy. And then things catch up and I realise that all you have to do is to do everything properly. Even if it means doing it twice or three times. You just have to do everything properly.

There have been times when I thought that we were going to be required to go computer because of the various government departments who require records to be kept, but we’ve always kept them in a book. They come up and they have a look and they say, ‘Oh, this is the simplest book-keeping we’ve ever seen’. Tick, tick, tick. Happy. And they go away. So you just have to settle your mind to the fact that you’re going to keep going and sometimes you just wonder whether you can, and it just unrolls.

Lita, do you and Tony feel an integral part of the wine industry up here or do you feel a bit on the outer?

LB: Well, now that we don’t get people coming to cellar door we sometimes are a bit isolated, but Tony goes to the winemakers’ meetings. He’s much more outgoing than I am. We feel an integral part of—and they value us and have always really looked after us. They used to send us customers when we needed customers, and they’d keep customers away when we didn’t need customers. So, yes, there’s a really nice interchange.

You were telling me off the tape before that you’re now totally mail order or phone or whatever, so there’s not the cellar door hassles that can really beleaguer a small winery.

LB: Yes.

But do you have contact with your customers first-hand?

LB: Oh, yes, we do. They ring up a lot for various things.

Do you have any long-standing customers?

LB: Oh, yes, we do. We keep a category of long-standing customers. Because when the demand for red wine went sky-high really—the same thing happened here and I think our customer base sort of quadrupled. So obviously we weren’t going to be able to supply the old customers unless we had a system that allowed them to get first look in.

So do you know at vintage that you’ve basically sold everything you can produce, pretty much?

LB: If it’s sound and the same as our reputation for quality, yes. But then it’s only 2,000 cases. I mean, that’s not very much.

No, but it’s 2,000 cases, and I guess you have a standard that you’ve got to keep.

LB: That’s right. And they keep you to it. And you think, ‘Oh, I’ve sold that vintage’, and someone will ring you up and tell you about a corked bottle they had in some ancient—so you never really quit the responsibility.

Have you thought about moving away from corks to another form of closure?

LB: Oh, yes, we keep our mind open, but the Stelvin’s not really the way to go I don’t think. We’d much rather that cork was planted in Australia and processed here. The last lot of cork we bought was really very good. We thought we were always buying the top cork, called number one hand selected, but we found that there is a category above that, and it’s called fleur, which we bought last year. About 10% more in cost but they are superb. The supplier said to us, ‘Well, we

can get you any amount of this’. I don’t really understand how that works but that’s fine with us.

Probably because less people buy it.

LB: I would think so. It acts like a reserve.

So they’re keeping a reserve, yes.

What about export? Have you ever got involved in -

LB: No. They used to come and want to export but by that point we knew we had the sale for it here. But also it just seemed, you know, a bit auto pilot. Just too out of reach. We were never interested in it. And I hate the way the best things get sold at export. You know, you can’t buy good fish and you can’t buy—so we give priority to Clare people, and then Adelaide and Tassie gets a look in. (Laughs) Don’t put that on air because that won’t be very popular.

There’s a variety across Australia for those who didn’t hear the last bit. (Laughs)

Where do you see it all going, Lita? You and Tony.

LB: I see us getting very old here. Hopefully with the people that are working here. You realise that a lot of the things we do are somehow sort of through superstition and you work out precisely what’s necessary, and valid, and all that. So in some ways our work gets easier the more experience you have. Hopefully as we get too old to move the wines around, we’ll have somebody to do that for us. But always just be here and just make sure that things are done properly.

Brother John hopes to be laid in the crypt. That’s how long he wants to stay here.

LB: Yes. That would be right.