State Library of South Australia Jd Somerville Oral History Collection

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

OH 692/128

Full transcript of an interview with

D’ARRY OSBORN

on 13 March 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 692/128 D’ARRY OSBORN

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 692/128 TAPE 1 - SIDE A

NATIONAL WINE CENTRE ORAL HISTORY. Interview with d’Arry Osborn at McLaren Vale on 13th March, 2001. Interviewer: Rob Linn.

Well, d’Arry, could you give me a bit of background. dO: Well, yes, the reason we got into the wine industry I think was that Dad actually did medicine for three or four years but flunked out, and he was doing it in Ormond College, where they did in those days. And his health wasn’t too good, I think. And my grandfather, who was a director of Thomas Hardy & Sons—Joseph Row(?) Osborn—bought him the property down here because he was a friend of Tom Nottage, and Nottage, we can imagine, said, ‘You know, what about buying the vineyards—the Milton property alongside of our Tintara vineyards, though the Tintara vineyards is for sale, and it’s a nice young vineyard’. So he bought that, and this is where we’re sitting now, in the original house they built in about 1880. I think they planted the vines in about 1890, and there were fifty-six acres here at the time. And they must’ve been pretty good because Dad told me that the first vintage he got 250-odd ton off, and that was a lot for a dry grown fruit in those days, off fifty-six acres. Grandfather, being a director of Hardys, of course, was a strange fellow insofar as he signed the pledge. He was a Methodist lay preacher, I think, or something. Very strong pillar in the Methodist Church. And he married my grandmother in a registry office, which was most peculiar, we discovered eventually. My brother researched this out. And he’d been married before. Nobody knew that. (Laughs) And what happened to his first wife and his family I have no idea. But that’s amazing. It’s one of those mysteries that surfaced when Rowen started digging through the records of marriages. He was married by his friend, Rev Stow, in the Stow

Memorial Registry Office. In front, not in the Church itself, which is strange. Anyway, he was also a great athlete, and he was the first Captain/President of Norwood. His picture’s up there in the relics(?) club. And he also was a very keen racehorse breeder and racing bloke.

And he’s a Methodist! (Laughter) dO: Yes, he didn’t bet. No, that’s right. Didn’t bet. And we wonder if he didn’t bet because he made a lot of money out of it, I think. Or must’ve made quite a lot of money out of it at some stages. And one of the most famous horses that he had was one called Foot Bolt, which has a picture out there in the tasting room, and hence the Foot Bolt Shiraz, which is written on the back label about that.

Sorry, I’ve had that d’Arry. (Laughs) dO: Yes. Well, Dad, when he came here of course, it was only a vineyard. And it was all horses and so on. And a fellow called Norm King and his wife came with him and lived in this cottage, and he batched with them. And then he built the two rooms on the other side of it there, which is now our open office, which was actually two rooms in those days. And in 1920 he married my mother, Eleanor d’Arenberg, and she used to cook out here in a dirt floor kitchen in a lean-to on the side, and lived in those rooms while they built the house, which I live in over there. About 1920 that was built. He went to the War—the First World War—in 1915 in the AIF, the 43rd battalion. And had a bit of a scratch wound. He used to say that it was just a scratch but I think it slowed him up a bit. And there his great friend in the 43rd battalion was one Sam Tolley, who married my aunt, my father’s youngest sister who was widowed when her husband, Felstead— Theo Felstead—was killed in the War, in the Air Force out in France. And she married Sam Tolley when they came back. And Uncle Sam, of course, was TST Brandy in the Barossa Valley and lived in the house and vineyard alongside the distillery, which is owned by the—it’s Elderton Wines. His

name was Samuel Elderton Tolley. That’s Elderton Wines. So that’s how it got the name Elderton. What’s the name of the people? I can’t think what their name is now. Anyway, they’ve got that vineyard there. They’ve divorced actually. Well, the fellow died, didn’t he?

I believe so. dO: His widow’s got it, yes. Anyway, my other uncle who married Dad’s eldest sister, Jim Marshall, he looked after the property while Dad was at the War and helped plant some of the vineyards on the north side in 1916.

So in 1912, they buy here. Is that right? dO: Yes, that’s right. And Dad planted vines straight away. (Sounds like, Small sand), that was planted in 1912, I was told, and 1916 he planted, what we call, the other side over here, which is Grenache, Mataro and—oh, Grenache and Shiraz. And actually the fellow planting them was a fellow called Will Humphries, who’s Humphries from the Hardy’s—father. Jim Humphries’ father. Gradually, of course, when Dad got back from the War and started to get back into it again, he really wanted to do more than just be a grape grower, and he made wine in partnership with Wilkinson, who eventually became Ryecroft, and is now Rosemount, and about to become Southcorp. About to become Southcorp or something. (Laughs) So he made wine out there. And he used to cart the grapes out there in a old chassis, which is a trailer over there now, a Willys-Overland chain- driven solid tyred—rubber tyred—vehicle, which lay as a wreck for years in my childhood out there. And went over Chalk Hill Road and out the back there. In fact, it’s the sort of thing that makes your memories twig a bit, is that on one occasion we were going out—and he used to be able to drive flat along Chalk Hill Road and straight on out through the swamp there, past the back of Tinlin’s and onto the flat road. That’s the straight road— goes through there. You can’t now.

Is that Penney’s Hill? dO: No, no. Just out the bottom of this property, it is.

Did that used to go right through? dO: Chalk Hill did, yes. Into the flat road where the school is, and so on. It used to be a track through there. It was pretty rough. And in that rough track was a lot of ironstone rocks like this, which came out of this paddock out here when they cropped it, and they put it there because it was boggy, you see, and they couldn’t drive through there with a truck. All that stone’s still there. I’ve seen it there. Anyway, a bit of useless information I suppose but it’s fascinating when you go down there and you see it, and you think, ‘Ah! I know what that is’. I can imagine my father and his slaves putting it there with horses and drays, or whatever in those days. Anyway, my mother had—I have an older sister and an elder brother. My sister’s the eldest, who’ll be eighty this year. My brother will be seventy- seven. I’ll be seventy-five.

What are their names, d’Arry? dO: Antionette—my sister. My brother’s Rowen. And he’s named for Grandfather, whose name was Joseph Row Osborn, but he raced under the name of Mr Rowen. And Rowen was named for that.

So with your mother, d’Arenberg heritage, was she French? dO: No. She was born in Adelaide with—my grandfather d’Arenberg came out from England. There’s a whole list of stuff on that actually, if you want to get some of that. It probably would be worth having but it would be better if my brother gave it to you. He’s done the history on it. I get it wrong a bit. And all sorts of stories, some of which are surmised a bit. But the story has it that the—it’s a very royal family of Arenberg of Europe. You know, princes and dukes around the place. Some of them buy wine from us to this day. But our relationship to them is very obscure. And in

fact, Prince d’Arenberg who discovered the d’Arenberg family label—my label in 1970 or somewhere, with his crest on it, which I pinched when I put the red stripe on it in 1958. Just went down the Public Library and got a d’Arenberg crest, you see. I thought it was a good idea. And of course, I had no idea there were princes all over the place. And this was his personal family crest and, of course, had the wrong motto under it. It’s got Vinum Vita Est(?). And he reckoned that wasn’t too good because—so he got his archivist on the job and they eventually decided, after about thirty- two pages, that our name was (sounds like, Abbots-hauser). And the theory has it that the (Abbots-hauser)—and they didn’t say this but there’s always talk of a duel in the family, way back. And the (Abbots-hauser) had a duel with a d’Arenberg when they came back from the Napoleonic Wars, with Napoleon and Germany, and the (Abbots-hauser) killed the d’Arenberg and he had to flee the country, and he went to Ireland. And this is our Great Grandfather, I think. Or Great, Great Grandfather. I get the generations mixed up, but Rowen’s got a lot of this stuff now.

Yeah, thanks, d’Arry. Sorry to take you off the track. We’ll come back to talk about your father. dO: Yeah. And anyway, they actually changed their name back to their true name of d’Arenberg in 1871, and that’s when he came out here, and he’s my mother’s father. Of course, my grandfather. And of course, I didn’t know anything about the d’Arenbergs until this fellow wrote to us in the 1970’s and then we started digging it all up. Or very little about it. Anyway, my mother died when I was born in 1926, and Dad’s various mates around the place said, ‘Come on, Frank, if you’re going to build a winery, let’s do it’. Uncle Sam helped him, and designed it, and they built the little winery that was there for—when I came home in 1943, and started working. And that, of course, has developed into quite a large boutique winery now, crushing two and a half/three thousand tons.

d’Arry, could you just tell me a little bit—what was McLaren Vale like in your youth? dO: Well, we knew everybody. It wasn’t a very big town. There were seven or eight wineries here. Emu and Tatachilla—the real Tatachilla—and Penfolds, which was Pridmore’s originally, which is now called Tatachilla. Ingoldby’s out at Ryecroft, and Kay’s, and Johnston’s and ourselves. I think that’s about it.

Was Shipsters still here then? dO: No. Well, Shipster had the property next door to us, and his son, Reg, has only just died recently—the last year or so.

Yes, that’s correct. John Vickery told me that. dO: That’s right.

Just over two years ago because Reg taught John his trade in the early 60’s. dO: That’s right. He was at Leo Buring’s. And Shipster was our next door neighbour. And Rex (couldn’t decipher name)—not Rex, but his father, bought that property, and he had a lot of sections there at one stage—Rex did. Anyway, he gradually cut it all up and sold it all, and I bought a bit of it. And Shipster went off somewhere else. I’m not quite sure where.

So what was the nature of that local wine industry in the 1920’s and 30’s? dO: Well, it was all export. Yeah, export. And it had a bit of a run when the bounty came in. There was some sort of Empire bounty that was done in the late 20’s or 30’s I think. Then, of course, Dad built the winery ‘28, and he went straight into the jolly depression really. So he never made much of a go of it really. And when I came home we were actually selling grapes. And I can remember that in 1943—yeah, about ‘43 it was—a ton of Shiraz was £9 sold to Emu, and Norm King’s wages was £9. And today a ton of

Shiraz in this area is two and a half thousand dollars for a good ton of Shiraz. And the wages are probably about $420. (Laughs) So there’s a bit of difference there.

That’s a huge difference. So certainly in the 20’s and 30’s it wasn’t a wealthy area at all. dO: Well, yes, I guess the wineries were considered to be—we were called the fishheads, I think, by the locals as time went by.

I didn’t want to raise this. (Laughter) I’ve heard this. dO: Have you?

Yes. dO: And of course, there were a lot of other growers around like Dick Trott and these sorts of guys who—and Greg, of course, has now got a winery. But Dick was a great mate of mine. I played golf with him for twenty/thirty years. Thirty years, I suppose. And he was forever having a shot at the winemakers, you see. And I said, ‘Build your own bloody winery. Don’t grizzle (couldn’t decipher word/s) to grow’. He got sick of it so he built his own winery. So I said, ‘Why don’t you?’ Well, he didn’t, of course, but Greg did, in the old Wigley ruin actually, which is quite an interesting set- up there. Very lovely set-up really.

This is Wirra Wirra? dO: Yeah, that’s right. Anyway, of course, one of the things that Dad didn’t do was calling it d’Arenberg. I did that after he died. He died in 1957, and I got married in 1958, and Pauline and I decided to do this red striped label. She claims the credit for it but actually it was pretty much my idea, too. (Laughs) And it’s my old school colours, which she hates me saying, but it’s true. The red stripe is (couldn’t decipher words). And that all goes back to the sort of thing in the 50’s when we were all going square-dancing and carrying on as unmarrieds around the place, and with the marrieds. About

every other Saturday night there was a big party. Bring a plate and a bottle and we’d all have a lot of fun. And Chaffey had moved into the district in ‘48/’49 or something and -

That’s Ben Chaffey? dO: Ben Chaffey, yeah. And he was pretty innovative and so on about bottling wine and whatever, you see. And he said that if—we were all talking about bottling. He said, ‘You’ve got to get a label. I’ve got a sea- gull on mine. It’s Seaview, and it’s a sea-gull. You’ve got to have something that people are going to recognise as a label’, which is very true, of course. It’s very true. A label wants to be distinctive. If you’ve got a good brand, you want to be able to recognise it well. You couldn’t do much better than a red stripe. (Sounds like, It’s known) all over the world now. It’s an international brand, and other people have copied it. But nobody wants to know them much because it’s d’Arenberg. And, you know, we’ve got wine in forty countries now, and quite large—(sounds like, more than half of it) goes overseas.

Who designed it for you, d’Arry? dO: Well, Don Ormond(?) actually put it altogether, who is my—we were sort of groomsman and best man at each other’s weddings and so on. And he sort of was the commercial artist at the Adelaide (couldn’t decipher words), but we actually laid out the stripe and everything, and got the crest and all that sort of stuff. He sent me down to Mr Marquis(?) down at the library, I think, to sus out this d’Arenberg crest. He wasn’t there actually when I went there, I don’t think. And was it Darcy Cowen(?) I think who suggested Vinum Vita Est(?) for a motto, which is ‘wine is light’ in Latin. And, yeah, we put all that together. Of course, Dad didn’t call it d’Arenberg, I did. Bundarra Vineyards, he called it. The same as Bailey Brothers in Glenrowan. And of course, as things got going a bit, I can remember when somebody said to Dad, ‘Oh, there’s a Bundarra in Victoria’,

which we found out. There’s also a town called Bundarra in western New South Wales. And eventually—I went to the Wine Weeks. And I remember at the Chevron in St Kilda or somewhere at a Wine Week dinner, and I sat next to Alan Bailey, and I said to him ‘I’m not going to call it Bundarra. I call it d’Arenberg’. But he said, ‘It’s got Bundarra Vineyards written on it’. And I said, ‘Well, (sounds like, Vineyards) don’t worry you’, that sort of thing. ‘Cos there wasn’t much—our wine going there and his wasn’t coming our way. Anyway, subsequently he applied for trademark protection. And Tom Angove, of course, was very smart on all the—and Tom Bodroghy was his headsman up there, and Tom was a friend of mine. He married Margo Valentine. Anyway, he’s still around—Tom. And Margo. As far as I know. And anyway, he rang me up to say that, you know, you’d better do something about this because—it was silly because if Alan Bailey had only rung me and said, ‘Look, this is getting ridiculous. Your wine’s are getting around. It’s confusing’, I would’ve stopped doing it. But we’d just printed a whole heap of labels. He had to pay the labels out, which he did. And we stopped using the word Bundarra and called it d’Arenberg vineyards, which was commonsense. And just recently we’ve now amalgamated the three sort of groups here. It was Osborn vineyards—the partnership my father, my brother and sister formed, and with me becoming managing partner as a 50% owner of it after Dad died, which was set up in the agreement with his death in view, I guess, to some extent. And we also, in 1968, had to form companies because partners couldn’t be licensed under the Act as Rowen was a civil servant in Foreign Affairs, and my sister was living in England as a non resident and couldn’t be licensed. So we had to form a company. And we formed a company called FE Osborn & Sons Pty Ltd, and called the vineyard Osborn Vineyards. And we formed another company called d’Arenberg Wines Pty Ltd, and this is an important part of the life when—because Doug Collett had joined me

in the 60’s to help me with the wine business. And he’d been working with Chaffey, and prior to that he’d been General Manager of the Berri Coop, and all sorts of things. Winemaker up there. And so he was helping me a lot as we got bigger and—what was the train of thought I had there? Yes, we had to form these companies, you see, so we formed one called d’Arenberg Wines Pty Ltd, which was purely a bottling company. We decided to do our own bottling, because Ingoldby had been doing it out at McLaren Vale Wines, and it wasn’t very satisfactory really, doing it somewhere else. Shifting it out there, and for all sorts of reasons I won’t go into. It was better once we changed away from doing that. He and Eg Dennis were running that—McLaren Vale Wine set-up. And so I did my own bottling. And Doug came in with me. Well, d’Arenberg Wines was 49% him and 51% me—or FE Osborn & Sons. And FE Osborn & Sons had the trademarks and everything, anyway. And then Doug retired in ‘85 after Chester came home, and I bought him out. d’Arenberg Wines business, of course, wasn’t worth much then, but it’s worth a lot more now.

Is that when Doug when went and set up Woodstock? dO: He already had Woodstock going, yeah. And he was worried that Ches was coming home, and I said, ‘Don’t worry about it, Doug. When it suits you, and when we’re ready, just go off’. And he tried to sell it actually to, I think, Brian McGuigan or somebody. I know he was interested. But he tried to sell them his shares without talking to me. (Laughs) I said, ‘No way’. Course he couldn’t do it without my authority because it was a company.

Gee, McGuigan would’ve loved that. (Laughs) dO: Yeah, and I wouldn’t be in it. McGuigan at one stage actually bought our distributing network interstate from Peter Walker Wines. He bought that out. And we suddenly were dealing with all our distribution in Melbourne through Cessnock, which was another disaster. And Brian came

down to—because I said that I was going to break it off. And he came down to see me and he agreed that it was pretty hopeless. (Laughs) So he bowed out. But for quite a while we were fairly close. I’ve known Brian since he was a twenty year old at Muswellbrook with Penfolds—Wybong.

We’ve actually interviewed Brian and Perc. dO: Have you?

Yes. dO: Well, he started off at Wybong. I went up there with—because we used to go to these Wine Weeks in my early days, of the social part, after I got married. And Jeffrey Penfold Hyland was an old family friend, anyway. And he said, ‘Go up -’, and I said, ‘We’re going back through the Hunter’. He said, ‘Well, go to Muswellbrook and have a look at the Wybong situation. Stay the night at Muswellbrook’. And I remember we’d have a (sounds like, coal mine) or something. And then we went up to—and then we met Brian. He was just getting going then at Wybong.

Could I take you back just a little bit, d’Arry, to when you came home from the War. This is ‘46, would it be? dO: No, I came home from school. I left school. I didn’t go to the War.

So you came ‘43, you were back here? dO: Yeah, ‘42 I left school. ‘43 was my first year full time at home.

What was it like here in 1943? dO: Well, we had five or six draught horses. Had up to seven at times but I think at that stage we had about six—or five. And we had a couple of cows, which I had to milk every morning and night as a sixteen year old. And separate the milk and make butter. Get the cream, and sell the cream when we had enough to—on the train down to McLaren Vale—the town— every bloody week, sort of thing. We never had time to prune the vineyard. I mean, it was War years—the Second World War—and there was never enough labour. We were always

behind. Trying to prune, trying to plough. Horses was very slow. There was no petrol or anything, of course. We had five or six stationary engines running the plant. Pumps and—I became a bush mechanic very early part of my life. (Laughs)

Were they running off kero? dO: Mostly kero. Yeah, mostly kero. There were one or two petrol ones. Two were petrol. The chaff-cutter was petrol driven, and the house tank one was a petrol Fuller & Johnson pump. The bore, which was the main water supply, which wasn’t a bore—we always called it a bore but actually it was in a well at that stage. Was a hundred feet deep. Had a petrol/kero motor on it. You started on petrol and put it onto kero. And the big engine in the winery was petrol/kero, and the lighting plant, which was a Delco— because we had our own lighting plant. There was no power here. The power came in about 1951, after Chaffey got here. Because he was horrified to find just thirty miles out of Adelaide there wasn’t electricity. (Laughter) And there were about twenty-seven of us put on the McLaren Vale extension, I think, in one hit. Farmers and two or three wineries. Seaview (couldn’t decipher word) and Kays and ourselves. And they didn’t charge us for putting it on. They charged us 20% more for the power we used for about five years and then they wiped that off. So it was a marvellous—it would never have happened if Playford hadn’t nationalised the Adelaide Electric Supply Company because, you know, shareholders could never afford to do that sort of thing. The State Government moved in and—I’m not always in favour of nationalising everything, but I think it was a great—I know it was a very sad—my grandmother had shares in Adelaide Electric Supply Company. She didn’t get a very good price from the government. (Laughter) But it set the State up and made a huge difference to the State, and certainly this area.

I wrote ETSA’s history. dO: Did you?

Yeah. dO: So you know a bit about that.

Know about that, yeah. dO: Used to be down there on Richmond Road, didn’t they?

Yeah. That’s right. dO: Well, I remember that sorts of things, of course, too—vaguely. Often think about them. Still got the name on the building there, hasn’t it?

Yeah, that’s the old Hilton garage. Well, tell me about the draught horses and how you were working in the vineyards. dO: We had three ploughs for ploughing. Eleven foot rows, you had three horses would pull the three(?) furrow. That was called striking out. That’s when you went down the middle of the row, and half the row was ploughed up in the middle of the row between the vines. And then you went down the other side and did the other side—the next row—and so it went around until you had three furrows done. And then I used to get the job of cutting down, as Norm King called it. And that was two horses in tandem who walked in the other furrow and pulled a two furrow plough, and that ploughed two—and you had to walk behind and hold the handles on it. That would plough the next two furrows over. And then the final job he used to do was with the single horse called the dodger—the finishing off plough. And that used to have a horse balanced on a wheel. You balanced the depth of the wheel to how hard it was, to give the bite on the angle of the point. And you balanced that in and out the vines. It slid in and out the vines. And every time you struck a butt the horse would stop, of course. Because it would jerk him. He’d stop. So you’d just pull the plough back and tell him to get up again, and off he’d go. Half the time, if you weren’t quick, he’d get off anyway, because he knew what you were going to do. So if you had one really well trained he was very good.

But, of course, the trouble with horses is that they’d always get faster towards knock-off time because they’d want to go home. When you turned the last—you might have two rounds to go—up and back again—and for the last two they’d go like hell going back up home because they’d think they were going home. (Laughs) And they were always quite pets, of course, in a way. Madam, in particular, was one of my favourites. She was a very big mare. She must’ve weighed nearly a ton. Huge. They were all Clydesdales. And when you were harnessing her up to put her in the dray, you’d put the back paddle on to carry the shafts in the dray (they’re called the shafters), and she, when you were tightening up the belly band if you weren’t quick, she’d nick her teeth around and bite you in the flesh around your ribs. (Laughter) Or when you were putting the (couldn’t decipher word) around her neck for the collar, and tightening them up too, she’d shift her bloody great foot and stick it on your toe if you didn’t look out. She was a quite a pet, though, just the same. She wouldn’t kick but she knew all the tricks.

I had a Clydesdale hoof on my foot. They weigh a lot. (Laughs) dO: Yes, that’s right. And then we had another called Prince—was always a great character, too. Because he, as Norm King said, had a bit of blood in him. Because Norm was a horse man. And he said that he had a bit of blood in him. And when we’d try to get them in—course, they wouldn’t have been worked perhaps for a while, and you’d get them into the stable down there and get the chaff and everything in, and they’d be very hard to get in. But Prince would be still racing around the paddock, jumping—he’d jump the fences and everything if you tried to round him up. Course, he couldn’t stay out there on his own. He was too frightened. So after you’d opened the door and left it open and got the others all tied up, he’d come in and go and eat the chaff anyway. (Laughter) It’s typical of a horse, I suppose. And he was a good natured—he was a good worker, too. He used to pull hard. But he was a bit lighter than the others.

Norm King also was an interesting character because he taught me really all about the vineyard and the winery. Dad was always—he never got involved much. He never told me anything much really. He really didn’t. But Norm showed me how to prune and all those sorts of things. And his wife used to come out with us, too, during the War years. We’d be struggling there, just the three of us, trying to prune 100 acres of vines. And eventually we started to get the half-caste Aborigines from Port McLeay—would come up. I knew a lot of those. In fact, Doreen Kontinyeri was one of our pickers.

Doreen was? dO: Yeah. (Laughs) I reckon she was. And Dulcie Wilson was—they’re great big women now, aren’t they?

Oh, yeah. dO: Dulcie was very pretty. She was a very pretty girl, as a young girl. She worked here a lot tying rods. She was nice. She was very nice. Anyway, they used to tie the canes down and things like that.

What were in your 100 acres at that time? dO: Well, we had more Shiraz than anything else. Shiraz, Grenache, Mataro. There was a patch of six acres of currants, which I rubbed out and planted, in the 50’s, to Palomino. But, yes, Shiraz was half of it, and then about—I’m trying to think now. We had quite a lot of Mataro down the other side there, which is now Grenache. And there’s Mataro over here. We call it Mourvédre now. Once we called it Mourvédre we got twice as much for it. (Laughter) Without any doubt. Yeah, I was going to say that Norm King was quite a character because he used to open the gates for the original Tom Hardy as a boy. He was born in the cottage at Hardys. His father was foreman for the Hardys. And he used to come up in the buggy and open the gates for the original Mr Hardy. And he used to drive up through the milking property, he told me, as a kid.

Because he was born in 1888, he was, and so was Dad. They were the same age. And he must’ve been—the mid 90’s I suppose he’d come up and open the gates and things. And they used to pass this magnificent block of young vines, which was called the high trellis. We’ve still got the high trellis actually. It was always fascinating to me that he knew it as a boy. I wish I’d written down a lot of his stories. He had some fantastic stories about identities, but I’ve forgotten them all. I never remember those sorts of things, but some of the old identities in the district in the early days must’ve been fantastic.

TAPE 1 - SIDE B

d’Arry, you were talking to me about Norm King, and the fact that he had this fund of stories that you can’t remember many of. dO: No, I don’t remember any of them really to talk about now. Apart from that bit about Hardy. I always remember that. He did tell me that he carted wine to—he did tell me that he had the horses. He was a real horse man, and he used to take the big team up to town with the horses and the wine barrels in the big wagon every day. He’d go up one day and back the next, I think. And he used to do that so he was very much involved with that.

So Norm taught you to prune, d’Arry? dO: Yes. He showed me how to prune, and work in the winery really. I worked with him in the winery when we started—when I came home from school—Dad, the year before, had to shut the winery. Hadn’t done anything. And he was more or less—he was just selling grapes. And we started making wine straight away because the War years—been a demand for wine again. There wasn’t much money in it. Better than selling grapes.

So they were after fortifieds at the time, were they? dO: We made both fortified and still wine. We made a lot of dry red, which used to go to Steven Smith, which was at Tatachilla. Or to Emu. We also made Port for, particularly, Emu. And we made heavy red for Penfolds. One of my first jobs in ‘43 or ‘44, or somewhere, was to fill a twelve hundred gallon jarrah tapered vat on the back of a tray-top truck, which was driven by a fellow called Lindsay Booth. It was his first bulk transport.

So that Devron’s old man, isn’t it? dO: Yeah LS Booth. And he died a couple of years ago. And a very interesting family, the Booths, too, in the history of this State. So that used to go to Rooty Hill in Sydney for making—to Minchinbury to make sparkling burgundy. And we sold a lot of wine to Penfolds when it wasn’t going overseas to Emu or to Tatachilla. But Emu was our main one for many years. And then Emu sort of folded up. They bought out Tatachilla and then they wrecked that. Well, sort of ‘skerished’ that right off. And then we went to—John Guinand was at Emu. He took over Emu. He became a great friend of mine—he and Zelda and their daughters. I used to go out with their daughters, too. And John was a terrific man and a great helper to everybody in the district. And when Emu shut down he tied me up with Tom Angove, and for about five or six years we sold to Angoves, and Tom and I became great friends—today.

Did you? I didn’t know that. dO: Because he eventually married Beverley De Roos(?), who was also one of my great associates. Or my brother’s particularly. Because Rowen’s girlfriend for many years was a Barbie Hore, and Beverley and she were best friends. So we used to (sounds like, love) Bev, and Phil(?) too, in the early days. Never see—I see Bev occasionally, of course, with Tom. Tom’s

stoned down a bit now, so John tells me. Because we’re both patrons for our sins in the industry.

I got to know Tom through the Royal Show, and I interviewed him once about his background in wine, and I would love to do him again. He really has got a lot of knowledge dO: Yes. And he’s got a very good brain. Very orderly brain. I saw quite a lot of Tom in subsequent years. And I’ll never forget on one occasion—we used to send all the samples up and whatever. The wine was in various tanks, of course, and on one occasion—and they used to analyse them thoroughly and send back all the analyses. Well, I didn’t have any skills in this direction. I wasn’t an oenologist really. Used to fly by the seat of my pants. Some of the wines were pretty good, some of them weren’t. And they’d tell me what to do with them, you see. Even if they didn’t buy them, sort of thing. And so did Jeff Penfold Hyland. They did a lot of it, too. Particularly a bit later on. And of course, obviously, it made better wine if they told me how to clean them up and whatever, and then they bought the wine. And I remember on one occasion Tom—and this is when I thought what a gentleman he was. I’ve never forgotten this. When we were filling the tankers, I got one of the tanks mixed up. Put the wrong one in. And of course, he said that it wasn’t up to sample. However, it was just as good and suit their purpose and they’d take it anyway, but we should be more careful, you know. (Laughter) I’ll never forget that. Because I felt terrible, as though I was trying to put something over him, which I wasn’t at all. And I realised then that it wasn’t the same wine. You know, I’d made a mistake. And another thing which John Guinand did, which I thought was incredibly—quite possibly was a bit sympathetic because Dad had been sick for twenty years and I had an awful battle, you know, and I stayed home and worked my butt off for nothing really. Nothing really. Just work, work, work.

So were you married by this time? dO: No. I couldn’t get married. Nobody’d marry—I had nothing to offer. Only was living with a sick old man at home. It was really pretty difficult stuff. Like, fun—out with the young people—whatever. We played sport and all sorts of things. Tennis and everything else. But anyway after Dad died, twelve months later was getting married. It was pretty well to the day—within a week of when Dad died that I was married. And John Guinand was, of course, buying all the wine and they used to buy it in January and pay for it soon afterwards, you see. Well, this was—August we were getting married, and John called me down to the—he wanted to tell me something important he said, and I had to go down and see him at the winery. I thought, ‘Oh, don’t tell me he’s not going to buy the wine. What am I going to do for money now’. And he came down and he said, ‘I’ve been talking to Jimmy Chapman(?)’, who were the owners of Emu, ‘and we decided to pay for the wine now. We thought you might be in a bit of trouble with probate and so on’. That’s exactly what was happening. We were in diabolical trouble trying to raise probate and all that sort of thing. And they paid for the money nine months in advance—before they took it—for the wine. So I’ve never forgotten that. That was one of the nicest gestures I think anyone could do to you. Because he, of course, was coming to the wedding so it wasn’t as if he was not a close friend. He understood the problems, I suppose.

That meant you were basically set on your feet in a way you wouldn’t have been otherwise. dO: Well, it just meant that one of the big worries on my honeymoon was not there. You know, the bank balance was in order again. Another person who helped a lot was—while Dad was still alive we were always right on the limits of our overdraft, and we got to the stage where we were making quite a bit of wine—the winery was full. But we weren’t selling it, you see. And a fellow called Jennings was the ANZ Bank Manager. We banked with 30 King William Street, the Head office of ANZ,

or ES & A as it was then. And Jennings, who used to come down occasionally and have Sunday lunch roast dinner with us, and things like that—the Bank Manager and his wife—and he called me in to see him one day and he said, ‘Look, your father’s very ill and very sick I know, but you’re running the business. You’re going to start doing budgets. You’re going to have to start -’ He showed me how to make budgets. Obvious things to do. But, you know, nobody thought—I didn’t think about those sorts of things, and I guess it was the start of me being a successful business man. Because that’s all we do today. And we have monthly—well, bi-monthly now—at this time of the year, finance meetings with both the Bank and our own chartered accountants and whatever, and go through the whole lot—all our budgets. Pages and pages of them. This big. Because we’re turning millions of dollars today. But that was another great step, was that advice from Jennings. He became the boss of the ES & A in Australia eventually. Red-headed guy he was. A very, very charming man.

So d’Arry, during the war years, and just after, when your father was getting very sick, you said that your winery was getting full at that time and you couldn’t sell some of the stuff immediately. How were you actually making the wine at that time? dO: Well, we used very similar techniques that we do today. They’re all headed down. We make nearly all red. Either fortified or still wine—table wine. And was usually very big because Emu wanted it as black and as big as they could get it because they wanted it made up with the cheap (sounds like, cit-rian) stuff and sell it as Emu burgundy, and so on. So they used to blend that with cheap wine from other parts of the world. And didn’t do much good to the Australian wine industry. But when John Guinand was there in latter years, he used to bottle some of the wine for Australia that they sent over there, and it was very good. It was Tolleys, and Ryecroft and ours. There were three or four. Because Chaffey once said, when he was here, that McLaren Vale made 50% of all

the red wine in Australia. See, nobody made table wine much. It was all fortified. And we made table wine.

Were you putting it down to oak in those days? dO: No. No oak at all. Didn’t see oak until 1967. And that was only oak chips then. A lot of oak chips used today, of course. And also new oak. We spend half a million dollars a year on oak nowadays.

So d’Arry, was it straight into tanks then? dO: Yes. We put it into the open fermenters. We had nine fermenters, and eventually—oh, Dad was still alive—I built another four on, and then another four more. So we had seventeen in the end, which are still there. We still use those. Hold about four and a half ton. And they’re traditional heading down method, where you use boards to block the skins down. We used to use stalks at the mill and put boards about an inch or so apart, cross them, and then the cross pieces on the (couldn’t decipher word) and block the skins down in the juice. We had a box in the corner, which would let the juice come up. We still do this. We’ve modified it and use—you know, instead of putting stalks on we use plastic mesh, and it’s done much quicker. And we’re doing it now in—we’ve got another 200 ton of stainless steel five ton tanks there, which are exactly the same copies of our concrete ones, but they’re portable stainless steel. Have a five ton forklift to cart them around when they’re full. And you hook them up to the bowsers where the cool water is, and everything else, and head them down all the same. And you can pick them up and tip them over. They’ve got a screen built into it to let the juice out to drain them off, and then pick them up, tip them up, tip them into a chute and into the press. Cart them around and tip them into a big funnel that goes into the press. It’s fairly ingenious.

So your concrete tanks, did you have to wax them every year?

dO: Yeah. Well, every other year. And when Tatachilla sold up in the 60’s and I started to develop after Dad died—because he never wanted to do much. He didn’t want to get any bigger or anything. We bought a lot of the jarrah vats out of Tatty. We’ve still got one of those. They were built in about 1880 or 1890, or something. And they were eleven by eleven jarrahs. Beautiful timber. Not a knot in it. Beautiful timber. If we ever pull them down, the timber would be worth a packet because it’s beautiful jarrah. Seasoned in wine, and waxed. (Laughs) And it planes up beautifully. Comes up very well. And they’re two inches thick and six inches wide and eleven foot long planks. So beautiful furniture material. A lot of it’s been used. A lot of Hardys was made out of it. These desks in here are all made out of the floors out of the wool stores down at Port Adelaide. That is—that one. This one’s not.

(Tape restarted)

Yeah, that’s right, d’Arry. You were talking about Tatachilla. That you got those beautiful jarrah vats from there. dO: Yeah. They cost me sixpence a gallon, I think, to shift over and put up here. And Babidges did them. Most of them. Charlie’s son, Geoff Schahinger, did the last vats there for me, but I think he built the big new ones we built of jarrah there. They’re 11,000 gallons. But the eleven by elevens, which actually hold about 5,800, we got quite a lot of those. They had about sixty of them. We couldn’t buy—we didn’t buy them all. And of course, we had a press that Dad had put in the winery, which I used, which was a lever action. Like a wool press with a rachets on it. Two levers, one either side, and you’d have a bloke on either side swinging on them. Develops the shoulders as a young man, I can tell you. (Laughs) Very powerful shoulders. Pretty strong. And you’d jack that down. It was easy until it got to the end and then you’d really lean on it. Then eventually you’d get two on the one bar and jack it down a bit either side, one after the other, and squash it right down. It’d press it out just as well as the hydraulic does, but it took longer and a lot of effort.

I remember eventually breaking one of those bars. It snapped off. It was over an inch thick and it snapped where it went into the square—it gave me satisfaction to break the thing after all these years. (Laughs) And we had a couple of new ones made. And we never broke the new ones. The steel was a lot better. But then, of course, in 1960—and these are basket presses we’re talking about. 1960, the bag presses came in. The (sounds like, Wilm-eze) presses and these things came in—the (sounds like, Vas-lin)presses. And Yalumba sold their cock basket press, and I bought it, and it’s still our main press today. They use that first all the time. It’s about an 1890 cock press with a (sounds like, value spreader). It’s exactly the same—Cud Kay’s got one exactly the same. Has a couple of cages. Well, we had three cages on ours. And we still have.

How many times has Robert tried to buy it back from you? (Laughter) dO: I know they told me that they wished they hadn’t sold it—years later. No, he’s not approached me, but Peter Wall has (couldn’t decipher words). And anyway, when we bought another one—a hydraulic press—four or five years ago from Middlebrook down here, which was derelict at the time— and there was one there. An old Tregoning, I think it is. We shifted that up here and set it in alongside the back of this other one. And this year we made two in the modern style, copying Rocky’s new ones up there. We copied those, I must say. And we built our own trucks. We modified the cages. We didn’t use too many cages, as he has. We made them out of stainless steel, which is a copy from Alex(?) Johnson, and we modified them again insofar as they taper slightly out at the bottom. So that when you want pull the stainless steel off, the cake drops out. Whereas if they’re square they tend to lock in there. It’s a job to get the cake out. And ours don’t break apart. They’re one piece. Whereas the others you can usually break them apart and let the cake go. Well, if you taper it slightly, of course when you pick it up, it drops out. Lifts it off the cake. It’s only minute difference but it’s quite ingenious.

And they’re working very well. They’re all hydraulically operated with— they’re all computer controlled and so on. Had a few bugs with the computer stuff as usual, but I think they’re getting that right now. So we’ve got four basket presses now, and about nine or ten cages. So you can be filling cages all the time while the presses are going. And it’s very labour intensive but makes beautiful wine. Basket press has the advantage over all the modern type presses where they put five or six ton in them and they churn them around and press them with a gentle pressure, and they decompress them and churn them around again. Either screwing up or a bag blowing it out. And the thing is that every time you churn it round, you get a lot of air in amongst it for a start, so the juice is getting oxidised all the time, which is being spoilt. Even if you got a gas blanket around it, it’s hard not to get air in it. And every time you bring it out, you get a heap of soup come out. It’s all murky looking, coming out. Because when you do it in the basket press you filter it out through the skins. So it comes out much cleaner—the juice. And you can just take it gently until you get to the end, and you can give it that high pressure at the end. And we usually press it two or three times, if the stuff’s really valuable. d’Arry, this is a bit philosophical for this time of day, but when you came home from school and started working in the vineyard and the winery, is there something about taking the grapes off the vines and putting them in a basket press, and the smells, and the feel of it, that is sort of a bit peasant-like in a way? It’s that relationship with your soil? dO: Well, we of course crush them first. So then they’re pumped into a tank, they ferment and then they’re pressed. So I hadn’t quite thought of it that way, I don’t think. I just like the basket press idea better than these great big monster things. Mainly because the material coming out of them is particularly good. You know, there’s been great wines made out of the others, no doubt about it, but you have to be very careful how you do it. And I mean, with the whites (couldn’t decipher word) you get the first run, sort of thing. They don’t churn it round and do it again. Whereas with

the basket press, you get the bloody lot. Comes out—it’s beautiful stuff. We envelop the whole press with a big plastic fruit wrap. You know, those things—fruit wrap pallets. We buy those in rolls and we stick one of them around the press—around the top of the cage and around the rest. Around the cage until you go on the press, and then you tie it up around it. And

CO2 , or nitrogen, bubbling in there all the time. So all the cages coming out into nitrogen. They just stretch tight around the circular steel tray on the thing. Just stretch out tight and completely make that air-tight. So the whole lot’s in gas all the time. There’s no air getting in it at all. Paranoic about air touching the wine in my winery. Chester is absolutely.

I can remember talking to Colin Gramp on many occasions, and he was just the same. dO: Well, if you want to get green grapes, and green wine, that’s how you do it. And you have a look at (couldn’t decipher word) and their bottling techniques. You know, we’ve got them pretty well down to a fine art, too. Because everything—see, when you’re racking white wine or anything, all the hoses are filled with gas beforehand. We’ve got gas all over the place. We’ve got our own gasmaking plant there. We make our own nitrogen. Piped all over the winery. In the bottling line we’ve now got a gas rinser. We don’t wash the bottles out. We rinse them by blowing gas into them. Blow any dust or beetles out of the new bottles. And if(?) the old beetle gets in a new bottle, I don’t know what you do. You blow them out with the gas. And then they’re full of gas. Of course the wine comes straight off the machine that’s doing that and into the filler, which goes into gas. And the new filler actually has a bit of gas injected through it, too, I think. Into the neck at the finish before the cork goes in it. And as the cork enters on the corker, it evacuates some of the cork as the jaws close up, sucking through little slots just on the top of the bottle in the jaws, and they create a vacuum in the neck of the bottle for the cork to slip in. So it tends to suck into the bottle. And there’s no pressure under the cork. And we test that all the time with a gauge to see that there’s no pressure—that your vacuum pump’s working—

because you can’t tell unless you test it occasionally. So about every hour or two they shove a needle with a cage into the cork to see what the pressure is inside. ‘Hey, fellows, there’s something wrong. There’s a hose come loose’, or something. And as a result—and really our bottling techniques are very, very—of course, this is all the new technology that none of us had in those days. As I say, we flew by the seat of our pants. We made some great wines and we made a lot of bad ones. No doubt about that. (Laughs)

Going back, d’Arry, to those earlier days, I’ve spoken to Colin Gramp a few times about how he found out about the technology that he got for that early Barossa Riesling in ‘53. dO: Yes, that’s right. Well, those tanks he made, those big sausage tanks he made, I’ve got those now. We bought all those.

Did you? dO: Scrap metal down at Port Adelaide. We brought them up here.

Really? dO: We’re not using—we’re using three for storage wine, and one as a brine tank for our big new fridge plant. Because our (couldn’t decipher word) draw 1,000 gallons. Double jacketed stainless steel. All painted with one of these enamels. One of these—which has been put on them. We got them for a song. Nobody wanted them. Cost a bit to cart.

Are these the original (couldn’t decipher name) Schmidt(?) ones, were they? dO: Yeah. From Orlando, yeah. Armourtech(?) bought them, and then Max Wilson bought them and he had them down at Port Adelaide. And he said to Chester, ‘Are these any good to you. I can’t sell them. Nobody wants them. Just going to cut them up for steel. With all this trouble to put the Armourtech in and nobody wants it’. Chester said, ‘We don’t want them as pressure vessels but they’d be alright for storage’. And we’ve now covered the storage ones with polyurethane

beads in a shed. So that will insulate it. And we flanged them, and taps on them, and doors on them, and done them up. So we’ve got two more for rainwater because there was still two left. They were the rougher ones but they’ll be great for rainwater.

Fantastic! dO: And they were cheap for, you know, 20,000 gallons storage of rainwater. (Couldn’t decipher word/s) cartage almost. d’Arry, in those early years of the 50’s, the buying public were consuming pretty much fortifieds at the time. You had a market for your table wine though? dO: Yeah. Dad used to fill with a hose—siphon hose—two gallon jars, or five gallon stone jars, and things like that, and people had eventually glass jars—came out. Those gallon glass jars. Half-gallon flagons, of course, were very popular, and still are to some extent, only they’re two litres now. And a bit smaller. Red was difficult. If you did reds, you had to get a barrel—and you’d fill a whole barrel at a time, if you did it by hand. So you didn’t just tap it out the barrel. It would go off after a few weeks. But table wines were dicey but Port wasn’t. Didn’t matter about Port. You could just siphon it out the barrel and, you know, leave it in the bulk. Wouldn’t go off. In fact, the air did it good. Aged it.

Where would you buy your spirit from? dO: Emu, I think. Or Hardys. See, they both had stills. And then, of course, subsequently after the 40’s—2 or 3—when Max Hackett and Alf Allen came down to visit us, I remember having—I must’ve left school I think. So it must’ve been after—yeah, about ‘43 or 4 it was. The War was still on. Max wasn’t there then though because he came back from the War. Who was the fellow—Reg Rankin, was it?—with Alf. Anyway, I remember there was somebody with him. We had lunch and he was going to take

these skins away, which we thought was an amazing thing to do. It was very nice. I didn’t have to throw them out in the paddock any more. I used to have to cart them all away in the old truck we had. Didn’t have any front-end loaders so you’d shovel them up on the truck, drive the old (sounds like, Bean)—twelve horsepower truck—out in the big paddock, which is now vineyard, and scatter it out there, and hope the cows didn’t get through the fence and eat it. Because the buggers’d get in there and they liked it, and they’d get as drunks as lords, eating this (couldn’t decipher word). Roll their eyes and bellow—young cows. It was a horrible sight, I can assure you. (Laughter) And it used to make the milk taste a bit wine-y, too. The cows also used to get into the garlic. There’s some wild garlic down there and you’d get garlic flavoured milk and garlic flavoured butter. The butter wasn’t so bad but the milk wasn’t too good. (Laughter)

I’ve heard that story from some other locals. dO: Well, it’s true. It’s true. The garlic was wild down there in the old garden, as it was called. Morgans(?) had planted a lot of apples and quinces and plum trees and things, and they’d sort of disintegrated. Dad hadn’t worried about them too much. But we used to get lots of apples, which were full of codling moth, but you’d get plenty to eat I suppose. And of course, there was garlic growing there, too.

Well, d’Arry, how about we come up to your own marriage in setting up the d’Arenberg label. dO: That was, as I say, that Chaffey said that you need to have something of your own, and we went for that stripe idea. And that partly came about because Emu used to give us a case of wine every year for Christmas and there was always a bottle or two of (sounds like, Dry-ad) sherry and some Valencia wines in it, and some White Burgundy in it, with a blue stripe on the label. And, as Chaffey said, you want something—I wanted something that looked dignified. You must remember we only had white glass and brown glass. We only used brown glass—amber glass. And we always had

our meal at home on a Blackwood table, which was a wedding present to my father. It’s still there. Beautiful Blackwood table—with table mats. And we even had—I used to come in from the vineyards and would sit down formally at lunch. You know, there was a fish bowl, which used to get a few crumbs—feed the fish—in the middle of it. And a glass of water. We never drank wine much. And have my lunch or whatever at this table. Well, of course, when we had wine occasionally—it would be bought wine, we didn’t have our own bottled wines—it would look nice on the table with a label. And things like St Thomas Burgundy, I can remember. And really, I suppose, I copied the St Thomas Burgundy presentation. It was just a burgundy bottle with a nice label on it, and a crest on it. Black and white printing with a bit of red on it, to colour. But I didn’t like the pineapple type labels that people were putting around. I mean, you know, they had a pineapple tin with a—all that gaudy stuff around it—a fruit tin. Well, there were labels like that around. They looked awful.

Pineapple Pearl. dO: Yeah, well, that’s right.

That was Wolf. dO: Yeah. Wasn’t bad drink either. Well, Pineapple Pearl—but the Barossa Pearl was a very good wine, that sparkling bulk white they made in those tanks. That was a very nice wine. Very well made wine.

Wytt Morro did that bottle and the label. dO: That’s right, yeah. Anyway, that’s how we got onto the label. And of course, then green glass came out. It looked so much nicer on green glass. In about 1962 or 3 we had green glass. And there was only green, and then eventually they had Georgia(?) green, which is where they went from white glass to green glass. Would be those half-in-halfers, because they couldn’t stop the furnace, you see. They had to mix the glass for a while. And you could get the darker coloured ones or the lighter ones as it gradually—depending

which colour you want. They looked very nice for White Burgundy, those sort of palish green-y—and then they get sort of smoky and so on.

Was this ACI, d’Arry? dO: Yeah. And ACI were very difficult to deal with. A small company had to pay the money in advance or else they wouldn’t sell it to you. Wouldn’t open an account with us. We’d have to pay the money in advance. That used to drive me mad. (Laughs)

Now what was the name of the boss there? He was notorious - dO: Sampson.

He was pretty tough. dO: Yeah. The father was. The son wasn’t quite so bad when he followed on. But we finally got Sampson around. Well, I got on alright because, after Dad died, one of the first things I did was to join the Wine and Brandy Producers’ Association. Partly because I’d go to Wine Week. And also to meet the trade. Because although I’d been a member of the Bacchus since the 40’s—’45 or 6 or 7, or somewhere—David Hardy proposed me— and I knew a lot of the Seppelts and people from that. And I’d known Penfolds before. And Hardys I met then, and so on. Well, David Hardy used to live with us for a while. When he was working down at Hardys he stayed with us for six or seven months. What was I going to tell you?

Talking about Sampsons. dO: Oh, yes. And of course, we went into the Wine and Brandy Producers’ Association, you see. Well then, of course, you meet all these guys at the Wine Week functions and so on and become friendly with them. And I said, ‘Why can’t I get an account with you?’ He said, ‘You can get an account with me’. I said, ‘Haven’t been able to for a bloody long time’. And we got an account with ACI. He said, ‘You won’t have it if you don’t pay your bills’. I said, ‘We always pay our bills’. We didn’t want any

bottles anyway. But it was a pain in the neck. You’d have to go down— you know, to get couple of pallets of bottles, you’d have to go down and pay cash, and this sort of stuff. Ridiculous! Anyway, we got one straightaway. After I got to know the fellows. So a bit goes on for social activity, I think. (Laughter)

Yeah, my word! dO: And these days we, of course, buy our bottles from France. They’re cheaper than the Australian ones. And they can’t supply them, anyway, so we have to.

Really? dO: Yeah, a lot of their bottles come from Europe. Some of them come from here. But JB MacMahon’s importing (sounds like, Juv-en-el)—calls his bottling plant—Danny MacMahon.

So is this JB MacMahon—are the cork people? dO: Yeah. They sell bottles. And we import them from a crowd called VOA, who make them in Europe. Well, I mean, there’s always money changes hands through the agents and so on. Of course, we buy a lot of wood overseas, too. And corks. With corks, they all come through some agent but they have branches in Adelaide most of them, but you still have to send the money overseas sometimes to get them. Bank drafts and all that.

OH 692/128 TAPE 2 - SIDE A

NATIONAL WINE CENTRE ORAL HISTORY. Interview with d’Arry Osborn at McLaren Vale on 13th March, 2001. Interviewer: Rob Linn.

So d’Arry, we’ve just come to the point at which you’ve created your own label. How tough is it to get your wine distributed around the place? dO: Well, I started off with trying to get distributors, and I had Doug Seabrook in Melbourne for a while, and Tom Seabrook, his father, was a friend of Dad’s. And he didn’t sell anything or do much. I’d go over and see him once or twice a year, and we’d go and have lunch at The Latin, or something like that, and he’d take along a bottle of French wine. He wouldn’t take mine. And he really wasn’t very interested, which I think was a pity. He probably missed out a bit. And then, of course, when Doug Collett joined me, he started up—he was au fait with that stuff, and we got Stan Keon, the ex member for Yarra before Jim Cairns got the seat. He was a DLP politician. And he had—what was the name of the place? Melbourne Street Cellars(?), I think. What do you call it? I can’t remember the name of the place now. Funny! And he had a young fellow called Kevin Long, who’d come from Taylor Ferguson to help him run his business, because Stan was getting pretty old and slowing down. And Kevin and I became great friends. And of course, second year (this was 1968, I suppose that happened)—and Kevin came down here to Christies Beach, which was a new pub at that stage, and we had dinner down there, and I think they were staying there. And he said that the first thing you’ve got to do is get rid of that red stripe label. I said, ‘Oh, no, I’m not going to change that’. He said, ‘I don’t like the label. That red stripe looks terrible there’. That was Kevin. I’ve never let him forget it. (Laughter) Of course, the next year was ‘69 and we won the Jimmy Watson Trophy with a ‘68. Well, of course, that was a big deal in Melbourne. And we really took off then. Not that they got that wine. There was only five hundred dozen of it, anyway. Just enough.

Well, what was the wine? dO: A 1968 Cabernet. And I got the trophy as a one year old wine in 1969.

But the ‘67 Burgundy was starting to do well after that, and ‘67 Burgundy got twenty-nine golds and seven trophies in Australian shows. Had fifty- nine awards.

So is the mix of that mainly Grenache? dO: That was 75% Grenache and 25% Shiraz pressings. And there was a 6,000—or 5,800 gallon jarrah vat of it. And it was there—and I always liked the wine. It had a fantastic bouquet and so on. And Doug Collett, who had been working with me as a consultant for a while but didn’t know every vat really. He was down here as a consultant, up at Seaview and so on. He used to come in here two or three days a week for an hour or two. Or two or three hours. And we got this distribution thing sort of set up and he said, ‘That’s beautiful, that wine. What they’re doing these days, they’re getting some French oak in it, chopping it up and putting it in Nyal flywire bags. You know, to give it a bit of oak character. I reckon it would do that wine the world of good’. So that’s what we did. I chopped up three bags—we made them out of this Nyal flywire and chopped them up with little pencils out of French oak that I got from Geoff Schahinger and stuck them in there for about twelve months, I think, and we got gold medals in the open class before we bottled it even. And as I say, went on to win many awards. And after we bottled it, every year—every other year—Tom McWilliam who was a good associate of mine from Wine Weeks and so on, and Bruce Tyson, his wine man, and they were head of the shows. They were winning all the best exhibitor prizes and so on. Used to come around and see what everybody else was doing in the wineries and so on. Of course, he came into me one day and arranged that they were coming down—and we were sitting out—was 1969 because we were just building the swimming pool. We built on the house in ‘68, and ‘69 we were sitting around the—and I’d just won the gold medal in this wine after we’d bottled it, you see. And ‘67 I took it out, and we had a glass of it then. It was slightly fizzy. I couldn’t believe it. I mean, it was two years old before we

bottled it and it was slightly fizzy. It must’ve done a bit of a malolactic in the bottle. Must’ve been a bit of, you know, lactic acid or something. Because it kept the wine forever. Didn’t put it off at all. All it did was give it a bit of gas. It couldn’t have had gas after two years in oak. No way. So the gas was—’cos whenever you pulled the cork onto the show and poured it out, the nose was huge. Had this huge geranium sort of Grenache-y sort of Shiraz-y smell. Beautiful bouquet on it. Fantastic.

So the malolactic was giving a spritzig to it. dO: Yeah, well, it gives it a gas, you see, but didn’t do any damage. I mean, it can get funny flavours afterwards but it didn’t. It just was enough to kick or something. Didn’t cloud or anything. Had a few crystals in it but it was—I can’t understand how it had gas in it. We didn’t use any gas in bottling in those days. But it certainly had this lift. It would almost pop on a hot day. And wouldn’t fizz much but the bouquet would come out. It was very volatile. Huge nose would come out. Peter Weste once gave it twenty out of twenty in a wine show, and the Chairman of Judges said, ‘You can’t do that for a wine’. He said, ‘Well, I can’t fault it. Can you?’ (Laughs) Peter told me afterwards. It got its run of trophies, as I say. It got seven trophies for Best Exhibitor in the Australian shows.

Now how did those medals and the trophies affect the winery? dO: Well, of course, we had gold medal for a lot of burgundies. I got one with the ‘68, one with the ‘69—several with the ‘68 and 9. 1970, got a gold. 1971, only got a silver. ‘72 and ‘73, got golds. So we got gold medals in the shows with our wine consistently. Now, sometimes they were more Shiraz than they were Grenache. Sometimes they were all Shiraz. Never all Grenache. But they did very well, and that of course meant that the sales started to catch on. I don’t know if you remember the industry—how it went—but in the late 60’s, Len Evans had come on board. In the early 60’s/mid 60’s. He and Frank Margan were writing up red wine. And Len got the job—he got the

sack from the Wine and Brandy Corporation—the Wine Board—because Ray Kidd and these guys, who were running it, had a lot of cheap wine—a lot of fortified wine, sweet wines—to sell, and Len was promoting table wines. And he was told not to do that. And he said, ‘Well, that’s what I want to do’.

So is it this time, too, Max Lake brings out his Classic Wines book? About this time? dO: Yeah, it would’ve been. He was around. Max was around. Yeah, for sure. When he wasn’t cutting carpal tunnels out of people’s wrists, he was doing winemaking. (Laughs) He’s a character—Max. We, of course, had these wines with this terrific bouquet and stuff coming up, and all these gold medals, so that did help the sales fairly well. But it always seemed to happen. You’d have four or five thousand cases of one of these and you’d have a terrible battle to get it to sell. And it would slowly sell over a period of two or three years. Because we’d had them for five, six, seven years before we could sell them all. And then they’d all go like mad. And you had none left then. You know, it was crazy. But these days it’s just—we’ve just bottled the ‘99’s and they’re out the door already. They’ve all been going off in containers around the world as soon as we bottle them. Straight down the line and out into the containers. No labels, and all. And people screaming. If we don’t send them they get very cross. And they’re not ready to drink. I can tell you, the ‘99’s are going to be really good but they’ve only just been bottled. They’re alright but they’ll be so much better in another year or so. Anyway, they take a while to drink them, I think.

So in the early 70’s when that red boom starts, were you in on that, too, d’Arry? dO: I was going to say, Len and Frank Margan promoted wine so much, and red in particular, that it all ran out. And people were colouring it with all sorts of horrible things. And we never fell for that one but they— because we had enough colour here. We didn’t have much wine but a lot

of them didn’t have enough red so they were making white, red, with putting red in it and so on. I can remember Jim Ingoldby telling me—Jim was disgusted because he got the Montgomery Trophy with his and we got the other trophy with ours. And he said that he was absolutely disgusted because the wine that got the trophy was a tank of Pedro and he didn’t have enough—and he didn’t know what to do with it. He couldn’t sell the Pedro at all so he tipped a heap of Shiraz pressings in it and got the trophy for the best red. It was a lovely wine, I can tell you. But, you see, there was some -

(Tape restarted) d’Arry, were you caught a bit by surprise that the table wine took off so quickly, under sort of the Len Evans/Frank Margan - dO: Yes. Oh, yes, it still wasn’t easy, I don’t think, particularly for unknown brands. It wasn’t easy to get distribution all around Australia. We went with Burns Philp—we went first of all with Distillery Stock in Sydney. We had (couldn’t decipher name) Adams. That’s who it was in Melbourne—GH Adams. And then Burns Philp bought out GH Adams. And we went with Burns Philp. And Distillery Stock gave up in Sydney—or Franco (couldn’t decipher name), who’s still around the place in Trieste(?). He did quite a good job for us in Sydney really. He got the brand around, which nobody else had been able to do before. And then, of course, Burns Philp had it for years, and they sold a lot of flagons and a lot of flagon wine in the bottle—the dry red, as we called it, in the bottle. But, of course, the gold medal burgundies, they could sell those, but if they didn’t have gold medals on they didn’t do much with the rest of the stuff we had. And then Burns Philp—we had them in all States. And then suddenly—they had a very hard bargain they drew when they took it on. I mean, it had to be a document that had to pass the Trade Practices Act—all that sort of stuff. And in it they wanted protection that we’d give our word that we wouldn’t, if they got it up and running, go and sell out to somebody else, or

whatever, which I suppose they were trying to protect themselves if they’d got it really successfully going, as they were hoping to do. And then some—I don’t know how many years it was. Probably eight or ten years we were with them, and they were running our business really. And then suddenly I was in Sydney and one of their sidekicks came up to tell me that they’d been taken over by Inchcape and that we would now be—and, of course, in their contract they really couldn’t do that with us without giving us six months warning and whatever. And, of course, I never was smart enough. I learn these things down the track. But we lost 80% of our business overnight. Because the new (couldn’t decipher word) had so many—I mean, it was ridiculous. They couldn’t handle it at all. Just stopped selling it. So we lost about 80% of our trade. It was pretty tough for a while.

Now, d’Arry, at that point, flagons. Were they a quite a big part of your local sales? dO: Yes, terrific.

Because that’s my first memory—sorry, not my first memory. dO: We started with flagons.

Barrels. Barrel flagons. dO: Barrel flagons, yeah. Half gallon flagons. Then we went to—of course, when metric came in we went to the two litre flagons, which was the mid 60’s, wasn’t it? And then—they were always going on. And we’ve still got flagon, a little bit. We still do flagons. At one stage we had about 80% of the flagon two- litre market—the class that was left in Australia—but I think it’s dropped from that now. And I think the flagons are going out. Slowing right down now. d’Arry, so we’re talking about the local market you had in flagons, and you had a—well, quite a range in flagons at one -

dO: Yeah, we had dry red and dry white, and Muscat, and port for many years. Muscat, we bought in mostly. We made a bit of it but we bought it in mostly. And when I was making it one year of course—was when Doug Collett was here, and we looked at all the wines at the end of vintage and decided what we were going to do with them at that stage. You might change your mind later, but which way the burgundies and clarets and Shiraz and things—varieties—went. And we got to the end of it, and he said, ‘Oh, that’s it, I’m going’. And I said, ‘Well, you haven’t tried the Muscat’. ‘Oh’, he said, ‘I hate sweet wines. They give me toothache’. Course, he was from Berri where they ate(?) so much. He didn’t want to look at the Bordeaux (sounds like, Blanco). We called it White Muscat Alexandria. And I said, ‘You’d better try it. It’s pretty good’. He tried it and he said, ‘Gee, what did you do to that?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ It was really, as a young wine, just at the end of vintage, it was delicious. Tasted like a sauterne, only it was fortified, you know. And had this magnificent Muscat-y raisin character. It was just delicious. So we put a bottle in and took it down to Chester(?) Cellars, to the Wafflers Club where Roger (couldn’t decipher name) and a few of his mates were one day. I went there for lunch with a bottle of this and they all thought it was marvellous. ‘Yeah, bottle it’. So we had to treat it for a bit. It was a bit spirituous(?) still. Because it takes a little while for the spirit to go into them. And then we sold it as White Muscat Alexandria. 1978 I think it was. It was ‘75. Anyway, it was a very successful wine. There’s still a bit of it around, I believe. And we did that for many years. The grapes came from Bertie(?) Hamilton’s—Richard Hamilton’s father. And the reason I got them was that he used to sell all of his grapes—he used to sell me Shiraz. Had for years. But Robert, of course, was after his grapes—his nephew—down at Ewell, and he always used to take the Muscat. Even this year, he didn’t want the Muscat. And he said, ‘Well, you’ve had all my Shiraz for years when I should’ve sold them to Robert.

You’d better take the Muscat because I can’t get rid of the Muscat this year. You’ve got to take it’. So I said that, no, I didn’t want it. But I said, ‘Oh, OK’. So I took it and made this lovely wine. And then for some years after that we made it. d’Arry, tell me about Doug Collett and how you came into contact with him. dO: Well, Doug, of course, was a Spitfire pilot from—out in Italy during the War. He’s written a book—his memoirs. Very interesting reading. When he came back—he got a taste for wine in Italy and came back and did oenology. In those days it was a Diploma of Oenology. Took a couple of years. On the Repat, he did that. And his first sort of posting out was at Emu. So I met him there. And, of course, I used to play cricket with McLaren Vale A’s, and he played for Morphett Vale A’s, and we used to meet on the cricket ground, too. And then, of course, saw him around a bit, but not particularly I suppose. And then I had another friend in the industry in the 50’s, later in the industry, was Dickson Morris from (sounds like, Too-ra-vale). And I used to go up and stay with him. This is about ‘56. Somewhere in there.

So where’s (Too-ra-vale)? dO: (Too-ra-vale’s), Monash—used to be. And I’d go and stay with Dickson because I’d take a couple of nice young ladies up there and stay for the weekend. Nothing nasty, of course, in those days. But we’d have a great time, and bring one of my girlfriends, and her friend, up for Dickson to meet, and we’d all got to the dances and whatever. And then, of course, Doug and Mary Collett were up there, too. I remember the first night we went up, we went around to the—Doug was chief winemaker at the Berri Coop, which was the biggest winery in Australia. And of course, eventually after seventeen years, he finished up there and came back to Seaview, and I’d seen him off and on for years. Wine Weeks and places. Because he always represented—and that’s how it all came about.

And then I was looking for somebody to help me because it was getting too big for me, and I was not a trained winemaker and it was getting bigger. I wanted somebody who knew a bit more about the—I mean it’s all very well to do what you think and talk to people, but I really wasn’t very scientific about it. Neither was Doug, as it turned out to be. (Laughs) He was a very old-fashioned winemaker, too. But anyway, we had a lot of success and made a lot of wine. And there was a bit of a rush on the reds, of course, those days. And then eventually, when he fell out with Chaffey, or left Chaffeys, he was with—he built Coriole with Hugh Lloyd, and Molly. And they found that it wasn’t working so they each tried to buy each other out. And Doug eventually sold to Hugh and Molly, and he came—and I offered him to form this company here. Because we were acting as consultants and things then. He’d been here for a good while. Because we rebuilt the winery in ‘68 or ‘69 and started—made it much bigger and put a lot of stainless steel tanks and whatever. Started to get much bigger when he was around.

So is the next stage, after Doug, when Chester comes back? dO: Well, yes. That’s right. I guess it drifted a bit in the 70’s—mid 70’s. I’m always very busy at vintage time, in the vineyard—whatever—and the grapes, and making the wine in that respect, working like a full time navvy in the winery myself, throwing out tanks and everything with the boys. And then I became President of Wine & Brandy in 1972, and that was a pretty busy year. Busy three years, because there’s a lot of social activity involved with that. Meetings and so on. And I was on the Federal Council—Treasurer and so on of that. And Treasurer of the State one for many years before I was President and Vice President and all those things happened. And, of course, I reckoned my wine suffered. Looking back, I reckon the wines were not as good for a while because I wasn’t looking after them as well. And then when Chester started to loom up, we got Gerald McGrath(?)— have you met Gerald?

No. dO: He’s a famous promoter. He did those cracking ducks at Krondorf and all that sort of stuff. He’s a very good marketing guy—Gerald McGrath. And he was a friend of Roger Moore’s, who at that stage was our agent in Adelaide. He’d become our agent, selling our wines in Adelaide. And he did that. There’s some tapes—very funny tapes—advertising flagons about Scott down there at the Antarctic and (couldn’t decipher name) d’Arenberg at the Crimean War. I’ve got a tape of that at home. Extremely funny tapes. Adverts they were, on the radio. Some people thought that they were a bit rude but they’re really good actually. (Laughs) And Gerald did them. They’re very funny. So he was doing another one for us—to get off the flagons into bottles, you see. Sell more bottles. And he had this big presentation, as these fellows do when they think they’ve got you cold. And I remember he’d just shifted his premises from where he shared with Roger from Norwood to Melbourne Street, North Adelaide. Very elaborate premises. Very impressed as you walked in these new premises, and all the paraphernalia around. And there was this magnificent folder, you know, as he prepared his presentation. And the first thing that struck me was the $200,000 presentation. Well, to me, that was a lot of money in those days. (Laughs) So that set me back a bit for a start. And then when we sat down, he said, ‘Well, now, the presentation is—now the first thing you’ve got to do is get rid of this dreadful red striped label’, you see. That’s how he started off. So I sort of sat back in my chair because that wasn’t in the criteria at all—to do that. And he had good reasons for it. It wasn’t selling too well. Anyway, after he’d settled down a bit and he’d gone on a bit, I said, ‘Look, Gerald, as long as I’m Managing Director of the company, I’m not getting rid of the labels. The label stays’. And he said, ‘Well, you know, why do you say that?’ And I said, ‘Well, there’s nothing wrong with the bloody label. The wines aren’t good enough. That’s why they’re not selling. The

wines are old-fashioned. Chester’s here now. We’re going to go up—we’re going to spend a lot of money on the marketing, and we’ve already done it. The wines are going—modern technology and, you know, they’re changing everything’. We changed crushers and everything after a few years. The wines went from strength to strength into the more modern style. These old-fashioned wines are okay when they got old but they were rather hard and bitter as young wines. You had to sell them, you know. They’d take years to mature.

So what year was this that Chester came along? dO: ‘84. But he was around, of course, during the vintages before that. Because he was three years at Roseworthy. And he had one year here first before he went to Roseworthy, and he did about three vintages with Tulloch up in the Hunter.

Jay? dO: Yeah. Which was a new white wine cellar, which they’d spent a million dollars on. And it was great. And Pat Hall(?) was just up there then. And that was great training for him on white wine because, you know, he learnt all about air and oxygen, and they were very good at it, because Hunter whites are magnificent whites.

Absolutely. dO: And so that was great. And then in his final year at Roseworthy, I rang up Geoff Milne(?) and said, ‘Chester’s got to go and do somewhere for his vintage. Could he come in with you?’ Because Geoff was really going hard. And he said, ‘Oh, sure. Be great’. Well, he did a huge job there. Geoff found him so capable that he could walk away and leave it to Chester after telling him what he wanted him to do. And Chester was there for that vintage. He had a very successful vintage there. And then, of course, when he came home he could hardly wait to get fridge plants and everything else in that we needed. We had our own small fridge

plants but we bought the old fridge plant from Tetra Pak in Sydney for twenty-two grand, or something. It’s worth about 200,000, I think. It’s an old Budge(?) compressor. We still use that but we’ve got two others, too, now. It’s not so much this last year or two, there’s a lot of new stuff. We still buy second-hand lot of stuff though. As the big wineries get bigger they shelve off some very good equipment.

So you have no qualms at all about staying the size you are, d’Arry? dO: Yeah, well, I have qualms about getting too big, too quickly. We’ve been doubling every year. I mean, we’ve gone from—it was roundabout probably under 1,000 tons in the 70’s. We did have the odd one at 1400, I think—12 or 1400. But only occasionally. And we were doing it all with about five people. We’ve got about thirty people here doing that sort of thing now. But it’s much more elaborate. There’s all this oak fermenting and all that sort of stuff.

So what’s the biggest change over time that you’ve seen here? dO: Well, there’s several aspects of it. One is the—of course, machine harvesting means you can pick at night. Machine pruning means you have a lot more bunches out on the canopy rather than tying rods and having them all under the leaves, plaited on a wire. So the fruit’s all out in the sun better. You get lots more berries. You get more flavour and a lot bigger crops, pretty often. We’ve also got drippers, of course. We used to overhead water the portable spray lance. Well, very inefficient way of doing it. Nowadays, if we need to, we can—we don’t usually water much until December, but then we can give them a touch up and just keep them going. Keep the leaves on them. And some with drippers. So every vine gets this little bit. That’s much more efficient. Doesn’t use anywhere near as much water. We use fowl manure in the vineyard to a large extent, and gypsum every other year. Gypsum made a huge difference to these old hundred year old soils that were pretty buggered. It freed them all up again. The grasses

went green, and the leaves went green. Gypsum and fowl manure— nitrogen they wanted. And very little nitrogen it takes. I mean, you just put a little—scatter it down the row (fowl manure), and it’s amazing the difference it makes. You wouldn’t think there was enough there to make any difference.

So is this (couldn’t decipher word) shed scourings, is it? dO: Yes. Just scattered down the row. And fowl manure, you put it out as soon as vintage is over. It makes the cover crop grow. It makes the grass grow. And that then converts into the sort of good stuff that the vines want. When the grass is mowed down, or whatever, the roots produce—I don’t know. They seem to like it, anyway.

So are you still putting a barley along the rows or just a pasture? dO: Yeah, we have (sounds like, tric-o-car-ly) and permanent rye, and we’ve got various things in various soils. Faba beans in some of the heavy ones and so on. It varies with different soils—what you do. But a lot of it’s permanent sward now. We don’t wet the ground at all. But if you’re putting a cover crop in, of course you have to work it to put the cover crop in. But this is all new technology, but it seems to work. But mechanical pruning is a great thing. You have to clean up very tidily afterwards though. It’s no good just—they’re much rougher. But the vines are better spread out and instead of getting rank with the—the wood’s thinner. It’s all fairly thin. The vine grows what it wants to grow, if you leave lots of buds. And you can’t—see, every time you prune with a saw or a mechanical thing, you have—there was a bud there last year, probably a shoot that threw two shoots. Well, next year there’s going to be two shoots there instead of one, and there’ll be four buds. So there’ll be four. So the next year there’ll be double that again. So you have to watch it that you don’t get too much spindly wood covering up the foliage. But that’s just a matter of having a commonsense approach to it. Getting stuck into it with the saws we use, or the cutters we use, to prune them

mechanically—hedgerow them—and then following through afterwards with a team chopping out—very quickly more or less walking past, chopping out the stuff that’s missed, the stuff that’s too long, or anything that’s hanging down too much. There’s a lot of skill in that, actually getting it right. Because if you leave it four buds, it’s going to hang down as soon as you get some fruit on it, and it will go down below the machines if they’re low vines, and so on. So there’s all sorts of angles to that. d’Arry, it’s a bit of a change from Adam and working the soil over with your horse teams, isn’t it? dO: Yes, that’s right. Well, I mean, the time we used to spend cultivating! Once I got a tractor in 1947 or somewhere—got a tractor. Well that was great fun, of course. You don’t have to feed the horses for a start. (Laughs) And you drove to work in the tractor. It was much quicker. And I used to have the vineyard looking a picture. We’d cultivate it and work it and clean it up, and I didn’t see a weed anywhere sort of thing. Nowadays we spray under the vines with Roundup. We spray the vines every fortnight to three weeks all through the growing period, from when they’re about five or six inches long—as preventative sprays. And once the hot weather hots up, as it did this year, you can give it away. You don’t have to worry about it then. Sort of stops in mid December, I think. Might’ve been one or two blocks where we get a lot of oidium, but we had a very clean crop this year. But last year it was covered in oidium after the season finished. Powdery mildew, which is very nasty stuff to have around. And we get more trouble with that than we do downy mildew. Downy mildew you only get in certain conditions. This is not really downy country here. I mean, it will grow if you get wet enough but—anyway, you have to spray. And we use tonics, of course, in sprays. We use—what do you call it?—biological controls for light brown apple moth. Quite expensive stuff, which knocks off the light brown apple moth, which is a real pest in this area. And it’s going to get a lot worse now.

See, when you start changing the practice—now, when we used to burn the cuttings, we had the incinerator which we used. Terrible job burning the cuttings. You’d prune them by hand, threw them in heaps, and then went around with the incinerator pulled by a couple of horses and burnt them. Well, we stopped doing that in about 1960, and within four or five years we had downy mildew. Never seen it before. Because all the cuttings stayed in the ground until they breed the disease, and they rotted there. They developed all these spores on it, and then—especially when you got rain in the summer time all the spores’d up on the vines and you’ve got downy mildew. We never had it before. I didn’t know what it looked like, when we burnt the cuttings. So it was a lot easier to put a rotary hoe over and chop the cuttings up instead of burning, but all the diseases came. Now we spray regularly—all the time. Didn’t used to have to bother about that. I didn’t know what spraying was about.

So that’s mechanical harvesting, and spraying. What else has - dO: Yes, spraying. Mechanical pruning.

Mechanical pruning, yeah. dO: Mechanical pruning. You mean mechanical harvesting because a lot more bunches to pick. (Couldn’t decipher words) to pick them with a machine if they’re not covered in bunches. We just bought our own machine actually this year. And I paid for it in January. $300,000 machine. 150 hp French diesel. It’s a French machine. An Italian diesel drives it. It’s called a Broad, and the factory’s owned by New Holland, and they make three a day on the production line. 146 people working there. The works manager, who’s a fellow called (couldn’t decipher name), he’s out here at the moment. Been here this weekend. He’s putting stuff on our machine. It’s playing up. And he was here with us. Lovely guy. And the week before we had the design engineer who designed the machine, and head of the designing team that designed it all, were out here. Because there were fifteen of these that came to Australia. This is a brand

new machine. It’s a copy of one of the others but it’s been developed in different ways—for Australian conditions—and they want to use these machines in America. They want to sell them in America. So this is a trial in Australia to get the bugs out of them. And we’re getting a few of those. But, oh, beautiful machine for harvesting. Much more gentle than all the others. And picks all the fruit up. You don’t get any spillage much at all. The bucket system’s quite unique. And the harvesting system’s quite unique.

TAPE 2 - SIDE B

Well, d’Arry, with all the changes that we’ve been talking about, has there been a continuum that’s running through here? dO: Well, we still make the same sort of wine, headed down on the skins and that earthy richness that we get. And of course, you were saying just now about the success of the industry overseas. Well, one of the big differences I think the Australian wine compared with the European wines particularly, is the middle palate. It’s much fuller. It’s much rounder. We used to get English people in here and they’d try the wine and say, ‘Oh, how can you drink that?’ They just couldn’t understand at all. They’d have a flagon wine and they’d say, ‘Oh, that’s nice’. Because it was lighter, you know, and fresher and younger. But the older wines were huge and big in the middle palate. Nowadays they’ve discovered that this is very good value for money—this great big mouthful of grape and fruit and sun. And they love it, and they’ve got used to it. And they look for it now. Even the Jacobs Creek and things like that have got that lovely richness. I mean, try a lot of the cheaper wines from other parts of the world and they don’t have that. They’re thin and acid in the finish. I mean they really are not satisfying to us.

My friend, Doug Collett, used to say after he joined us down here, ‘This district spoils you for wine’, because he came from the river. After you’ve had McLaren Vale reds, nothing else satisfies you. But there’s a lot of wine in Australia now made like that. Even the Riverland stuff is much better. They’ve cut back the volume on their vines and improved the quality. Got the flavour there. And we’re all working at that. We realise there’s too many grapes around probably, but the thing is we’ve got to keep a step ahead with the quality. We’ve got to keep that quality up. And I guess there will be some surpluses in some areas of some varieties shortly. I think the biggest problem is that there won’t be enough infrastructure to handle the crop when we get a bumper year—when it all comes in. There just won’t be enough wineries around to process it.

I’ve heard a few people saying that. dO: I think that’s where the biggest problem’s going to be. Because the export follows down the track. But you’ve only got to have a couple of big years and you’ve got nowhere to store it. It doesn’t go out immediately. It’s not going to double up entirely straightaway, you wouldn’t think—in export. But there’s a huge—I think the strongest point in export that we’ve got is the fact that we’ve got about three or four percent of the export of the world—export of wine. And that’s not very much. If you make it six percent it nearly doubles our part. And we have to have twice as much to do it. So I think that’s the strongest part. But we don’t want any scandals, and we don’t want—the government still doesn’t seem to realise that they tax us so heavily on wine, and that we pay very big income tax, and if they didn’t tax us so heavily we’d pay more income tax but we’d be able to place our money much better to make more money, more quickly. We’d be able to be much more efficient with our production if we didn’t have to pay so much tax and could turn our stuff over a bit quicker.

And what about—any of the wine districts we could point to, d’Arry, but down here, what about the employment levels that have come on since the industry’s begun to move in a big way? dO: Yeah, well, it’s just huge. I mean, we used to have about fourteen or fifteen people working. We’ve now got seventy at the moment. It’s over seventy, I think. At any time it’s usually about forty-five/fifty working(?) our vineyards and wineries and bottling plants and offices and exports. And everybody’s the same. There are a lot of vineyards gone in here. There’s been a huge demand for vineyard labour to train the young vines. I mean, it’s labour intensive. Then, of course, when it’s come to the picking and pruning, it’s done with machines. But even so, there’s a lot of harvesters around here. A lot of fellows working double shifts. Machines changing gangs during the night, and another ten comes in. Four or five people running around. Two pick- ups. One stick boy, usually a boss running around, and a driver. So there’s five or six people still picking the grapes all night, and they’re doing it for a long time. And then there’s all the mechanics that keep these machines going. We’ve had them running around here like—after this new machine, we’ve had three or four fellows down several times at a time trying to find where the buggers have broken a wire somewhere, or the computer sold out on it, or whatever. It’s been going better the last day or two. It’s had a good day today. It’s had three rocks(?) today. Last night it had a run, and the two nights before that we did about forty acres of our own stuff, which was a hell of a slice of Shiraz to do in -

Forty acres? dO: Well, we did—it wasn’t that much. I’m exaggerating. We did about twenty acres. It does about an acre in half an hour. We did two shifts. Twelve hours, I think. So hardly stopped for a couple of days. Knocked off a lot of the fruit. It does it pretty well.

Well, d’Arry, at least for this instalment—we might talk again—but can I just thank you very much for your time today. dO: Yes, it’s been a pleasure.

d’Arry, are your family still involved in the business? dO: Yeah, well of course, Chester’s making the wines now and is really— he’s really running the thing. I’m Managing Director but Chester’s all the nuts and bolts. But my brother and sister still own the business with me. And we’ve just had a simplification of the three sort of companies I was talking about earlier—the three groups—and it’s all leased by the one company now, which is called d’Arenberg Pty Ltd. So the old FE Osborn manufacturing company is really—leased the d’Arenberg Wines bottling line and leased the Osborn vineyards, and it’s all one company. And Chester is making the wine, and my daughter’s involved with our agents in Sydney. Looks after our sales of d’Arenberg on the North Shore, which gives me a great deal of pleasure.

What’s her name? dO: Jackie. Jacqueline. And my brother and sister and I still own the business. We’re all, as I say, getting older but we still own it.

So that’s Rowen and Antoinette and yourself? dO: Yes. That’s right. And I’ve got the kids on the side in a trust. I’ve split my half into a trust with them—a lot of it. I’ve actually got much bigger proportion because I bought Doug Collett out. So I’m by far the biggest operator now. But it’s just nice to have the family all involved. And of course, I do a lot of work with Jackie in Sydney, doing dinners and promotions. And in fact, I do a lot of work around the world now. I go to New Zealand next month I think, or the month after, to do promotions. And do all the States around here, including Darwin and Perth and places. Quite enjoy that side of it.

So d’Arry, although it’s become international, you’ve still got a family focus? dO: Yes, that’s right. Well, Chester does most of the overseas stuff with our marketing guys, who are (couldn’t decipher name) Brooks, who was for some five or six years, and now Rick Anderson. And he spends a lot of time—or a month or so—in the States every year, and a couple of visits usually to the UK and Expo. So he does quite a bit, too. (Couldn’t decipher word) just come back from England again for the London Trade Fair and so on. The UK market’s our biggest market. So, anyway, it means it’s still very much a small business. And we’re drawing some very good staff because they like to be involved with a small family company rather than a multinational or a public company. In fact, two or three of the fellows we’ve picked up have come to us about a job because they didn’t like the way the companies they were with were turning into a company where they talk to a Board of Directors they never see, which I think is understandable. It might be hard work here and a bit of a mess but you feel part of the mess. (Laughs)

Well, that’s a very good point to finish on. Thanks, d’Arry.