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

OH 692/36

Full transcript of an interview with

PAM DUNSFORD

on 3 December 2002

by Rob Linn

Recording available on CD

Access for research: Unrestricted

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

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

OH 692/36 PAM DUNSFORD

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.

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OH 692/36 TAPE 1 - SIDE A

AUSTRALIAN WINE ORAL HISTORY PROJECT. Interview with Pam Dunsford on 3rd December, 2002. Interviewer: Rob Linn.

Pam, where and when were you born?

PD: Mount Barker Hospital on 25th March, 1951.

And who were your parents, Pam?

PD: Robert Gordon Dunsford and Yvonne Dunsford.

Were they based at Mount Barker, or nearby?

PD: Dad was a stock agent with Elders all of his life, and at the time he was in charge of a sub branch at Nairne.

So he would have had a fair amount of the Hills to cover in those years.

PD: Yes. And did it well. He actually has the record for yarding something like 26,000 sheep in one day in a sub branch.

26,000 sheep!

PD: Yes.

You wouldn’t get that many in the Hills today.

PD: No.

Pam, did you grow up in the Hills?

PD: No. I was born, as I say, in Mount Barker Hospital, then my parents shifted to Minlaton and I came to Adelaide when I was about four and a half.

And did you go to school in Adelaide?

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PD: The first five years were at Colonel Light Gardens Primary, and then at Walford.

And so you went right through? You matriculated from Walford?

PD: Yes.

And then did you go to Roseworthy after that?

PD: No. Then I did ag science at the University of Adelaide at the Waite. And then I went to Roseworthy. And I guess the question is the linkage?

Yes.

PD: I was doing an animals major until the end of third year and then decided that I needed to understand wine, literally, because I was drinking it, and people were talking about it, and I just needed to understand whether what they were saying was fact or fancy. And so I changed at the end of third year into a horticulture stream, and then went to Roseworthy.

Now prior to that, in your own home, did you drink wine as a family?

PD: Very rarely. Special occasion stuff. I was the youngest daughter. I had two older brothers, and hence had to go out with my parents when, after the races, they went to the South for dinner, and Dad would always order Hardy’s Old Castle Riesling and used to humiliate me by smelling it, and sipping it, and telling the waiter that, yes, that would be okay. And I knew that he didn’t know what he was talking about. (Laughs) That was the in sort of thing. You know, an occasional bottle of wine for a birthday party or something like that. We used to drink more (couldn’t decipher word) liqueur than anything.

Is that right?

PD: Yes.

Good taste. (Laughter) Very good taste.

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But at Uni, you would have been there late 60’s probably?

PD: ‘69 through to ‘72.

So that’s just as wine’s becoming an acceptable drink in the cask, too.

PD: It started as cask. It was still really flagon though. We were drinking flagon Penfolds red. Casks weren’t really developed properly, at least in South Australia I don’t think, until the 70’s.

There was a large flagon market. I can remember as a kid retailing. It was a huge market.

PD: Yes. Drumborg(?) flagons and Penfolds flagons.

Yes. Leo Burings.

PD: Didn’t used to drink the Leo Burings. (Laughs) Anyway, that’s how it happened. I started to drink red wine at Uni and then became really interested in it.

You mean in the structure of wine, and the taste?

PD: Well, when I was doing second year ag science, people like Brian Croser, Geoff Weaver, were doing fourth year. John Duval was in my year. Geoff Weaver was one year in front of us. And Robin Day. There were a lot of wine-interested people, and we didn’t stand around in clusters talking about the nuances of flavour but just knew that they couldn’t all be wrong when they were being alerted to something in the wine.

You really felt driven then to transfer from your ag science course, where you would have been getting a grounding I guess in the science side of it, to pick up the winemaking stream, which the only place that you could do that was Roseworthy at the time. Is that right?

PD: Well, it was a case where I probably would have gone on to do vet science after I finished ag science. But when I became interested in wine— my head is one of those that if I get interested in something I actually have to take it down to its building blocks. And when I realised that this thing

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was sort of gnawing at me, I decided that it was more interesting than going on with animal majors. I mean, I could have ended up being a field officer in Wanbi or Loxton or something like that. That’s not a lot of appeal. (Laughs)

There’s a lot of horizons. (Laughter)

PD: I did not want horizons. So I just sort of thought that I don’t know where this is taking me but I think I’ll go and change. But my other major was biochemistry, so that was quite easy to slip into wine.

Well, you make the jump to pick up the oenology course, and you don’t have to do the two years of ag because you would have already done it.

PD: Yes.

So what are you coming into at Roseworthy at the time, in the early 70’s? Who are the people involved and what’s the structure of the place?

PD: Have you heard about this? (Laughs)

Yes, a little bit. I’d like to hear some more.

PD: At the time Roseworthy was an agricultural college and it was run by the Minister of Agriculture here in South Australia, a guy called Tom Casey. And the members of the Board included some of the professors at the Waite. This is all unbeknown to me. I just decided that I wanted to study winemaking. To take you back one step, I went to the professors in the horticulture course, one of whom was Brian Coombe(?), and said that this is what I’d like to do, would you let me come in without any prerequisite subjects? And they said that they’d think about it. A week later they said to me, yes, you can come in as long as you don’t hold the class up. What I didn’t understand was that some of these people at the Waite were actually actively trying to get women into Roseworthy. I only found that

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out probably five or six years later. But Roseworthy itself was autonomous, only answered to the Minister of Agriculture, and was an all male school. At the same time, Malcolm Fraser was making all of the educational institutions autonomous. That meant that Roseworthy could no longer be an all male college. And so even though the Principal at the time, a guy called Herriot, didn’t want to have women, very strongly didn’t want to have women in the school, because I had a degree and all the related subjects, he just couldn’t not let me enter. And there were these other persuasive elements coming from the Waite, and I think even Tom Casey, to sort of say that you’d better let a women in.

So were you the first?

PD: Yes. Came in at fourth year.

So not just the first in oenology, but the first in the school.

PD: The only one in the year because there were no entries until the following year of women into first year. So 180 sort of just post pubescent boys, and I was twenty-two.

Yes, I had a lot of fun. I got very bored. (Laughs)

PD: Did you go to Roseworthy?

No. So it was definitely a new start for you?

PD: I used to say that it was the worst year of my life, but it’s so far away now that I can’t really relate to that. But it wasn’t a good year. It was at the time of all the moratorium against the Vietnam war and all that sort of stuff. So to go from Uni where there was huge freedom, feminism and all that sort of liberation of women was all at the forefront, and then to go into Roseworthy, which was essentially an all male post schoolboy environment—you know, because a lot of them went in at fifteen and

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sixteen—in an environment that was all about technical training, so it wasn’t really the academic thing -

Sport.

PD: Yes. Technical training. Football. Football.

And more football.

PD: Yes. Well, you’ve heard probably that they put me in the infectious diseases ward. That was logical because it was the only place that had its own lavatory facilities and bathroom, but it’s also I think probably a little bit indicative of the attitude. (Laughs)

Girl germs. (Laughs)

(Tape restarted)

Pam, you were in a heavily male dominated environment at Roseworthy. What about the course itself?

PD: It was the only course that you could do in Australia at the time to study winemaking, so it was a means to an end. But I’ve got to say that I was really pleased when Roseworthy moved to the Waite Research Institute because Roseworthy was an agricultural school and the highest level of most of the lecturers was a basic bachelors degree. It wasn’t all that challenging. There were five of us that went in at the graduate level. In those days if you had a related degree, you could actually go in at fourth year. You had to sit the third year exams, which we crammed for about two months, and then went straight into fourth year. So, I mean, it was a means to an end. I wasn’t really stimulated by the course. And I went and did a Masters Degree about five years later because I thought I might learn.

Back at Waite again?

PD: No, I went to Davis, University of California.

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Davis would have been one of the top—what?—three in the world at that time?

PD: Yes. It was the only English speaking Masters Degree in the world. The others were Geisenheim and Bordeaux.

Was Amerine still at Davis when you were there?

PD: He was there as a professor emeritus. In other words, he occasionally came and gave some lectures, which were fantastic but, no, he wasn’t working as such.

So when were you there? Late 70’s, Pam?

PD: ‘78/79.

That would have been at its peak probably at that point. Olmo may have still been there. Was he?

PD: I wish it was at the peak. It was actually about five years after its peak. All those guys had retired and it was the new generation of professors. (Laughs)

Yes, those ones. (Laughs) But it still had the heritage of this terrific research base, but hands-on. All those guys, Amerine and Olmo, were very much hands-on people.

PD: They were really unique people. I mean, some of the stuff that they put out was fantastic. And I was really lucky when I went to Davis because I worked with a guy, who was actually Australian, called Roger Bolton, and he was a chemical engineer, so one of the good things about that was that you saw winemaking through the eyes of a different discipline, and that’s really important.

So, Pam, prior to going to Davis, what had been your pathway in the industry after leaving Roseworthy?

PD: I was offered two jobs. One with Yalumba wines and one with Wynns, and I decided to go with Wynns. And so I was based down at Glenloth winery, which is now defunct. But that was based in Reynella, and it was

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Wynns biggest winery in South Australia. And there I worked with Morgan Yeatman.

That had actually moved from Happy Valley across to Reynella, hadn’t it?

PD: Sorry, it was always at Happy Valley. The Glenloth winery was named after a racehorse who won the Melbourne Cup in 1920 something or other. And it was owned by—I can’t even think.

Robertson family.

PD: Thank you, yes. And then it was bought by a series of people, finally ending up in Wynns’ hands, and they built a new winery on that same site. It certainly had been there since the early days—early sort of century.

Yes, it had. And I think Morgan had actually built the winery, didn’t he?

PD: He built the upgraded winery that was built in 1969, and then he was responsible for the upgrade of that again in ‘76.

So you came into the new winery primarily?

PD: I came in in ‘74, yes.

And did you find Morgan very willing to share his knowledge with you?

PD: Oh, Morgan was a joy. I had absolutely no experience in the wine industry. Because of the way the graduate programme at Roseworthy worked you had no training at all in hands-on winemaking. I was probably the least experienced of anyone who did the graduate school. Some of them had come from the wine industry or done some vintages. Morgan’s a very good teacher, so he basically held my hand and set the standards, and told me off in a very nice way when I didn’t do it properly.

Did he guide you through flor finos and all that thing as well?

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PD: Yes, that’s exactly right. He’s a very good teacher—Morgan. And a very good palate. I don’t know how you describe him really but it was almost like a father relationship, where he wasn’t patronising but he was just a born teacher.

He’s still got that characteristic strongly in him. My reading of Morgan is that he can almost verbally describe a visual phenomena so that you can see it in front of you.

PD: Well, the most important thing about winemaking is your palate, then the personality and attention to detail and all of those other things, but to get the palate you have to have a trainer, and Morgan had a very, very good white wine palate. He’d spent most of his life in Clare making Rieslings, and was particularly interested in flor sherry. Both of those are products that require real finesse on the palate. I mean, on the palate of the wine, not on the palate of the taster. And so he was very good at teaching those aspects of white winemaking to me. He wasn’t so much a red winemaker, and when I went there the most predominant style—the flavour of the period—was Cabernet Sauvignon. So I think I probably learnt to make red wines through the eyes of a white winemaker.

That’s a very interesting thought. What happened at Glenloth? You stayed there for how long?

PD: Twelve years. Morgan left—I can’t even remember when Morgan left. About ‘78 or ‘79. Actually I was lucky in that I worked for three bosses that I want to talk about. The first person after Morgan Yeatman was a guy called Bob Williams, and Bob was a really abrupt man. Really, really nice because he was terribly introverted. The most introverted person that I’ve ever come across. But what was wonderful about him was that he’d just explode. (Laughs) And so he’d put up with something or other and then just do his charlie, but he was completely fair. It was really funny because he’d be really frustrated by a guy called Mark Babidge, who was an incredibly difficult man to work for, and Bob would just sit there seething and you’d think he was going to blow up any minute now, and

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then suddenly he’d just go PHEW! (Laughs) and tell Mark what he thought of him, which was great. But Bob was good in that he—from Morgan I learnt a lot about wine style and just real nurturing of wine, and a lot about fining and getting wines to the finished stage, and never ever giving up on a wine. In other words, you just do not give up until the wine’s actually in the bottle. You just keep working, working, working. Bob, on the other hand, was really interested in people, occupational health and safety, and things that—he just left me to do the winemaking. And I learnt a lot from him just in terms of management. And the next one I worked for, who was also a joy to work for, was Brian Walsh. And Brian, again, wasn’t interested in being the winemaker, so he just basically said to me, ‘I’ll be there as a support to you but I’m really more interested in management and people’. I learnt a lot about management from him. He’s essentially a person who gets the best out of people.

Very much so.

PD: And they don’t even know that it’s happening.

Great encourager. Well, Walsh-y, had no formal training though, did he?

PD: No, he didn’t. But he did work for one of the best palates in Australia. He started off as a laboratory technician at Reynella under Colin Haselgrove, and Colin Haselgrove was one of the most acclaimed wine show palates etc etc, and so Walsh-y had that benefit. He had a very, very good palate. And he had done a fair bit of winemaking but never technically. And his heart was never in being a technical winemaker. His heart was really in managing people.

So in other words, you were gaining experience that was essential to winemaking but wasn’t necessarily to do with wine.

PD: Yes.

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It also shows me, from listening to you, that wine is really about people fundamentally. Because you’ve got to create it for the people who drink it, and you’ve got to work with the people who make it, so I guess it’s not just about the grapes and the wine itself.

PD: Winemaking is preventing mistakes happening. You try and get the best out of the grape, and try and get every good element of that into the bottle, but to do that you need the cooperation of all the people around you because it’s avoiding mistakes. And making people feel that committed to a perishable product, so that they don’t cut a corner, or they don’t do something that can actually just take that .1% off the quality, is really very critical. And it’s all about ego, too. I mean, people have to care that the product looks good because they see their own reflection in it, and I think if you understand that about people, or if you understand how to work with people, it brings out the best in them. I’m not sure I’m that personality, but certainly Walsh-y is.

Pam, those years at Glenloth, did you pitch naturally towards red wine, or was white wine still a critical thing for you as well?

PD: No, it changed. As I said, when I came in Cabernet Sauvignon was absolutely the voguish wine. This is before the days of label integrity, and I can tell you that the wine that was put out as Seaview Cabernet Sauvignon didn’t come just from McLaren Vale. I mean, it came from every bit of red wine that the company could find. I’m not proud of that, but that was pretty much the standard for those days. Within about two years it was Riesling, and that went from about 1975 through to about 1982. And at its hey-day we were producing about 150,000 dozen Riesling under three or four brands—Seaview, Killawarra, Wynns Coonawarra. And then it went into varietal whites, so we then became producers of 20,000 dozen Chardonnay, 20,000 dozen Sauvignon Blanc, 20,000 dozen Semillon, Frontignac—that sort of stuff—and that was all replacing what had previously been almost the generation of White Burgundy, Hock and that sort of stuff.

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When I came into the industry we used to do volunteer lectures for the Wine & Brandy—I can’t even think what they were called. But it was WEA—Workers Education Association.

Yes.

PD: And our role was really to explain to people that Claret wasn’t really appropriate, that the wines were made from Cabernet Sauvignon normally, or Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot, that Shiraz was more akin to Burgundy, but Burgundy was made from Pinot Noir. All these kind of anomalies that existed in people’s perception. And then introduce people into the concept of varietals being the identifier of the wine. So that happened, particularly in whites, in the mid 80’s. And then by the time I left Wynns, which was early ‘86, we were building a half a million dozen sparkling wine cellar. And the other thing I used to make in the beginning, too, was flor sherry and vintage port.

Now that sparkling wine cellar was to take the place of Magill, wasn’t it?

PD: Yes. We’d been actually doing a lot of the sparkling wine production at Glenloth winery for about—I can’t even remember now. About three years. We were doing all the bottling of the sparkling wine. We were making it at Glenloth, and bottling it, and then it was being stored in outside warehouses.

Did that new sparkling production area go ahead eventually?

PD: We were bought by Penfolds in May ‘85, and Glenloth winery’s days were then finalised. It was never going to eventuate. And we were about the stage where we’d spent about two and a half million dollars on building this very, very big sparkling wine facility. It was going to be the biggest sparkling wine location in the southern hemisphere. And Penfolds saw the Glenloth site, which was about eight-five acres, as being real estate, and they moved that sparkling wine facility to Nuriootpa, where now it is a small wood maturation cellar.

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The one at the Barossa is, is it?

PD: Yes. It was built as a bunker, cut into the side of the hill, to get draft free movements and constant temperature, and it was designed to have soil over the top of it and all that sort of stuff to get this heat sync. And it was all contracted by the time Penfolds bought it. So they relocated it. It wasn’t erected. They relocated it to the Barossa, and it’s a stand-alone oak shed now.

Pam, in those years that you were with Wynns, were you really focused on McLaren Vale down there, or was it more than that?

PD: I’ve always believed in cross regional blending because we used to take all of the white juice from Coonawarra, and the premium white juice from Yenda, and bring it into Glenloth. In fact, I don’t think we actually made a straight regional wine. Cabernet was a blend of McLaren Vale Coonawarra, Riesling was a blend of Coonawarra/Padthaway/McLaren Vale—very quietly she says Yenda (MIA). You know, they were always cross regional. Oh, no, we did. We made an Eden Valley Riesling. (Laughs)

That’s right.

PD: But generally they were cross regional blends.

So did you develop a love for that area down there though?

PD: I still work there. (Laughs)

That’s what I was getting at. (Laughs) You obviously did.

PD: I think it’s one of the great wine regions of the world. Even the most beautiful wine regions, and I’ve visited a lot of them, the combination of having a background of the Adelaide Hills, being able to see the coastline, and just having these gently folding valleys—and it was more beautiful before it became a monoculture of vineyards. But when it had almonds and various other things, it was just stunningly beautiful. I mean, I guess

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I’ve got a preference of vineyards that face coastlines and things like that. But if you go to Bordeaux, it’s one of the drabbest, flattest marshland type of coastlands that you’ve ever seen in your life. I mean, McLaren Vale is really a joy.

Just a very beautiful area.

PD: Stunning.

Yes, it is.

PD: I guess that’s not why I still work there. I think the fruit’s outstanding.

I wanted to ask you, those years at Wynns too, were there quite rapid technological improvements in winemaking?

PD: I was really proud of the Wynns organisation, and with respect to Penfolds, one of the reasons why I didn’t join the Penfolds group was because I thought we were so much more technically advanced. We had a very good chief chemist, a guy by the name of Barry Summersgill. He was based in Melbourne, and he was ex brewery, and so we did a lot of really ground breaking work on malolactic bacteria, yeast cultures—that sort of stuff —that breweries knew a lot about. In fact, we created a lot of problems for ourselves. Because we were really at the forefront of a lot of research, we walked into problems that no-one had ever researched, and then we had to come around and find solutions to them. But it was really exciting times. I mean, the stuff they did on malolactic fermentation was fantastic.

I guess you’re the inheritors of pretty good tradition there, too, with some of the people who’d done it previously.

PD: Well, Wynns also, if you recall, brought out the wine cask—or reinvented the wine cask. They weren’t the originators of it. That was Penfolds back in ‘56.

In the paint tin.

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PD: Yes.

I know about that.

PD: Wynns perfected that and marketed it. And the person who was really responsible there for doing all that was David Wynn. He was one of the great innovators in the wine industry.

Did you have much to do with him, Pam?

PD: No. I mean, I respected him from afar. He was our Chairman, and you sort of knew how much he contributed to the wine industry, particularly in marketing and just style, but personally I met him a few times.

TAPE 1 - SIDE B

Pam, I was just thinking, we got up to talking about your time at Wynns and the fact that you were really blending the wine from across a very broad number of regions. And we were talking about some of the things that Wynns were doing at Coonawarra, and the fact that you were advancing technologically. In those years that you were with Wynns, were there any things that came up that were really critical events where things went wrong, or you had to have big solutions in the industry, or were you just always able to source the juice and it wasn’t such a problem.

PD: No, I don’t think that really critical things went wrong. The time I came into Wynns was probably the worst because there was this huge demand for Cabernet Sauvignon, which literally didn’t exist. And we were asked to put a wine together that was substantial, and almost all the material came out of the Murrumbidgee irrigation area. And that was pretty tough to hold your head up and do that. In those days the company just said, ‘This is what you’ll do, and put your ego out of the way’. It

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wasn’t ego, you knew it wasn’t in anyone’s interest to do this. But that thing doesn’t happen any more because of labour(?) integrity, so I guess that was a learning curve. It was more the opposite. I think we made some incredibly consistently good wines for very, very low cost because of our technology. For example, we used to take the equivalent of about 500 tons of Riesling up at the MIA, but before it came down to us the winemaker there, who was another nice bloke, Roger Blake, used to work very closely with Ron Potter, so he was very innovative. He is one of the people that developed the Potter tank with Ron. Now, they were looking at a project that was called Brimstone, which was a double ion exchange of juices to lower pH. We used to bring in that juice from the MIA at a pH of about 2 to 2.5, which is astonishingly low, in very good condition, and probably the rest of the world if they ever hear this will be disgusted, but it was hydrogen ion exchange, and the ion exchange medium was flushed with sulphuric acid, and then the sulphate was flushed out, so it was charged with hydrogen(?) ions. The juice was passed through, having been filtered, and it was at about 2-1/2 pH. Now, I used to bring in that 500 tons of juice as juice, and we’d use that as an acidulent for all the other juices that were coming in. So we’d bring in Coonawarra juice, Padthaway juice, and we were crushing McLaren Vale, and putting all that together. So instead of using—this sounds terrible, so maybe I shouldn’t be saying it. But instead of using tartaric acid as the acidulent, we were using this hydrogen ion process, which was 100% legal in those days, and without any bad effects, and so you were producing this terribly consistent product that everything just hummed together. You know, you took the worst fruit of the region and made it an attribute. MIA’s not considered to be the greatest Riesling in Australia, but you turn it into something that can act as a terrific protection against anti-oxidation by lowering the pH and it becomes an attribute. There were lots of things that were happening in Wynns that were just really terribly innovative, and I think set Wynns on this path of making great value for money wines.

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Well, that’s the beginning of the big swing up in consumption of table wine, too. Through the late 60’s/70’s/early 80’s is when the swing begins to really show.

PD: When they brought out the first Master of Wine group to Australia in ‘85, the big thing about it was that they couldn’t believe two things. They couldn’t believe the quality of fruit, and that sort of bottled sunshine flavour, but they also couldn’t believe the price of wine. And I remember we were putting out, say, Wynns Coonawarra Hermitage at $55 a dozen into retail, and I had retailers saying to me, ‘This is embarrassing. Put your price up’. You know, the prices were just so low for what we were doing, and yet we were still making money.

Well, that’s how you’d hope it would be, wouldn’t you?

PD: Yes. So this MW trip that came out, which was championed as you know by Chris Hancock of Rosemount, really was the first time they saw the Australian wine industry. It was at our most cost effective period of course, but also after we’d had some pretty good vintages, so it worked really well.

Did you get to meet that group?

PD: Oh, yes. Wynns were one of the sponsors.

Who were the stand-outs for you?

PD: Oh, give me a break! I’m not very good on people. It was about eighteen years ago. (Laughs)

Was Jancis Robinson in the group?

PD: Yes, she was.

Because I’ve heard her name mentioned a lot as an aftermath of that, that she went back and began to push it.

PD: I was about to say Jancis Robinson, but they were all really high quality MW’s. I remember in that same week there was a function held at

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Reynell’s homestead for the MW’s. Greg Trott organised it. And I thought that I was going to a free lunch but of course there’s nothing free in the wine industry. (Laughs) And at the end of that she had a film crew who— was it the same week? Or it must have been very soon after. She had a film crew sort of saying, ‘Okay, what’s Australia, and why is it different?’ And then that went straight back to the UK and was broadcast everywhere. I remember the question that I was asked about Australia as a viticultural region, and I inverted Australia into Algeria and said, ‘Well, this is where we are climatically, in terms of our latitude, relative to the equator, but these are the reasons why our wines don’t taste like Algerian wine’. And it was all to do at that stage with machine harvesting, night harvesting, must juice temperature control, stainless steel—you name it. Use of enzymes to settle juices. You know, just things that were standard procedure in Australia that weren’t being used anywhere else in the wine industry in the world.

Those technological advances had come through groups like Wynns experimenting. Were there other characters in the industry who had also pushed some of those frontiers?

PD: I don’t know who brought in peptic(?) enzymes. I would have thought Orlando were the peptic enzyme people, and cold settling of Riesling and juices.

Well, that goes back to the early 50’s with them, in fact.

PD: Well, they were certainly stainless steel in the early 50’s.

And cold and pressure fermentation as well.

PD: Yes, but I’m not sure about the cold settling.

No, you’re quite right.

PD: Don’t take out of the equation people like Tim Knappstein and what was happening up at Stanley, and a few things in the Clare. And of course people like BRL Hardy when Croser was making wine for them in the early

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70’s, they were going into earth filtration of white juices, and so there was a lot of stuff happening simultaneously.

Pam, was there a lot of exchange of ideas in the industry? Or not so much?

PD: Huge. I think the first technical conference was held in about 1973 in the Barossa. And it was people just standing up and saying that this is what we are doing. And it was quite a small hall. It was in the Tanunda hall. But the sort of information that you were getting was just inspiring, and you’d sort of think that I must go back and try that. Whereas nowadays, a lot of the stuff that’s happening in technical conferences is coming out of research institutions, and it’s of such a level of micro chemistry that I don’t think a lot of it can be used by winemakers in their day to day operations. It’s more trying to understand why something works rather than what we were originally getting at those conferences— ‘This is my experience. This is what I think I’ve achieved’. You were really getting the horse’s mouth experience.

Well, those technological advances in one sense obviously impressed those MW’s who came out.

PD: Yes.

I’ve heard that quite a few times. Also the product did. And from what I gather they didn’t expect to see what they saw.

PD: I don’t think they expected the openness. And we’re naive people, we tell everybody everything. I think that’s one of our problems. We’re not quite as naive as the New Zealanders. (Laughs) But to an MW, who was used to having the Bordelaise(?) and the French attitude, which is (French words), and tell them nothing, I think they really appreciated the fact that they could ask a technical question and get an answer that they thought was honest, and they weren’t being manipulated. And that wasn’t so much that we understood their own technical competence. I don’t think we did. I think we were just perfectly naive and open people who answered their questions honestly. Does that make sense?

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Yes, it does. What I’m trying to move towards, is that visit then one of the real beginnings of the export boom that has come up to now—2002?

PD: I don’t think one of the beginnings, I think it was the beginning. Our company had been trying to get into export for a long time, and we had an export manager and sub manager and they worked around the world all the time trying to push the story, but as standard line individuals it wasn’t working. Of course, they were targeting countries like Japan too, which has been shown to be a very, very difficult country, and we still haven’t penetrated. It was the teamwork of everyone cooperating on that first MW trip, and also the fact that it coincided with some pretty outstanding wines. I mean, they saw the ‘82 vintage from Coonawarra, which is one of the benchmark vintages, and the early 80’s were all very, very good vintages. The 60’s and some of those older wines were still around to show them some of the greats of the Australian wine industry, so it was a combination of a lot of things. But the industry just had it together I think. And we also had some surplus wine, so the prices were very fair. It was ready to find export.

You mentioned previously that one of the reasons that you eventually left Wynns was that you felt that the company that took it over at the time really weren’t ahead so much in technology as Wynns. Did you go straight from there to Chapel Hill?

PD: No.

I’m all a bit vague with dates.

PD: I’d been making a lot of the base wine for the sparkling wines that Wynns made, and we were specialists in méthode champenoise. That was through Norm Walker and his father before him. Well, I’d always had an ambition to go to Champagne but I realised that I could never get there because we used to call our wines Champagne, so we really offended the French about that. And when I left Wynns I thought, well, what would you really like to do? I was totally impetuous. I spat the dummy and said, ‘I’m

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out of here’. And I thought, well, what am I going to do? Why don’t I go to Champagne? So I applied for various ways to get into Champagne, one of which was a Churchill Fellowship, and you had to have referees. I asked Len Evans if he would be a referee for me. He said, ‘Of course, my dear, and you know my connections with Andre(?) Krug and Christian (couldn’t decipher name). And of course I hadn’t even thought about that. I just wanted someone who would give me a reference that would get me on the first step. And he opened the doors to Champagne for me. That was an unbelievable experience. I went there for ten months, worked with seven of the Grande(?) (couldn’t decipher name) houses, and spent a year in France. Then came back, and having been away for a while, thought, what am I going to do? I don’t want to be a corporate pawn again because you work hard and then you’re taken over by someone, and all the brownie points are just erased that second. I thought that I’m not going to have that happen to me twice. So the only other option then was to actually be a consultant. In the old days, a consultant wasn’t really a very reputable -

They drove around in light brown Volkswagens, didn’t they? (Laughs)

PD: Well, hang on! I used to have Volkswagens. (Laughter) No, it just wasn’t considered to be a kosher job, but Brian Croser and Dr Tony Jordan had set up a company called Oenotec and that had given a lot more credibility to the role of a consultant. And so I thought, oh, well, I’ll become a consultant. So I came back here—didn’t put out a brass plaque—and organised a consulting company. In the meantime I took on a couple of jobs. One was lecturing at Roseworthy, and another one was lecturing at the hotel school at Regency Park until I got enough clients that I could spit the dummy there. (Laughs)

I never saw you as an academic, Pam. (Laughs)

PD: Wasn’t really an academic. I mean, they were pretty much hands-on courses.

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You were a teacher. I’ve taught in one myself. Regency certainly was very hands-on for what it did. So how did you come to be involved with Chapel Hill?

PD: Robert Gerard had just bought Chapel Hill in ‘87, and the truth of the matter was that—well, the story he tells is that he was taking Chapel Hill wine out to dinner parties and noticing that the host put it back on the back bench and brought out his own. (Laughs) One of my brothers, who knew Robert, said, ‘You need Pam’s help’. And that’s apparently how it happened.

Was that Cole(?), was it?

PD: I think it was Trevor. So Robert Gerard gave me a ring and I went down to see him. When I told him what my rates were, he sort of coughed and said. ‘Do you want to work for me four hours a week as a consultant?’ So I started off with four hours a week as consultant at Chapel Hill. And at that stage he only owned it 50%. A couple of years later he owned it outright, and it just grew from there. But I had other clients, and Chapel Hill was really tiny and wasn’t very significant in those days.

What was Chapel Hill like as a place when you first saw it?

PD: Well, it was stunningly beautiful. It’s perched over the Onkaparinga Gorge, so it looks back into McLaren Vale. At night, in summer, you see these beautiful Willunga Ranges just clad in purple, and if you walk 100 metres the other way you look down to the coast via the Onkaparinga Gorge. And that’s really why Robert bought it, it was just such a pretty place. And it potentially had everything going for it in terms of a business, but it also, because it’s in the hills face zone, it had lots and lots of legislative problems. I mean, everything we’ve done, we’ve had to get the Minister’s approval. And every interested group in hills face zone and Landcare and everything else has a say in whatever we’ve done. So there’s been some hurdles, but the good thing about that is that it’s made us develop it in a way that’s really been environmentally—probably ground

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breaking. And aesthetically, of a very high standard. So it’s come out really well.

As you said, you began four hours a week -

PD: Yes.

- and that obviously increased over time.

PD: Yes.

Did you source all your grapes from the property there itself, or were you bringing in grapes from outside?

PD: Originally it was just from the property. It was a tiny vineyard, about four and a half hectares, and it was a mismatch of Riesling, Grenache, Chardonnay, Shiraz, Cabernet etc. And when I started I just literally produced that wine, and then over the next few years pulled out vineyards, and now we’ve got about forty-four hectares in McLaren Vale.

So you’re sourcing from all around?

PD: Depending on what the variety is. We actually buy Cabernet from Coonawarra and Chardonnay from Coonawarra because that suits our style and cross regional blending a lot. We buy in the region, Chardonnay, Cabernet and Shiraz because I think that’s what the region does well, but we also buy Chardonnay from outside the region, and Cabernet from outside the region.

Have there been any particular things that have developed at Chapel Hill over the years, Pam, that have really given it a quite distinctive face to the public?

PD: Probably not the things it should have been, which is exploiting a female winemaker angle of it. (Laughter) I’m not a marketer’s bootlace. Yes, we’ve put a lot more emphasis on French oak, and no oak, than a lot of other people. I really personally have a great objection to over-use of American oak, and our wines are hopefully more elegant, hopefully more fruit driven, and I think it’s a style that people will come to. I think it’s a

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style that women will probably come to faster than men. They’re not so butch in their oak use and alcohol use. But because of my background in making huge amounts of whites like Riesling and all that sort of stuff, we were very quickly into unwooded white, and now put out a Verdelho that is unwooded. I don’t know if you know that I’ve worked, for ten years, for a French oak cooperage.

I did not know that.

PD: So about 1991 I took on looking after this oak importing business for a company called D & J—Dargaud & Jaegle—mainly because I really liked their oak. So for this company I’ve worked ten years, bringing in their oak, and for all people in Australia, so it turned out to be quite a big business. Part of the marketing of that oak was that Chapel Hill used it. (Laughs) You know, it was a mutually symbiotic relationship with Chapel Hill and my consultant company. (Laughs)

Win/win.

PD: Yes, it was win/win. Exactly. Because they got to use some very good oak. Feel a little bit guilty about that but - (Laughs) So Chapel Hill put a lot more emphasis on French oak than probably a lot of other people for a long time.

Other than promoting yourself as a place with a female winemaker. Pam, looking after your time in the wine industry, having come from large (couldn’t decipher word) and stuff to that, what would be the biggest changes that you’ve seen over time?

PD: I think there’s much more a pursuit of excellence. For example, when I first started, especially as Wynns was really a flagon company—if you remember they had the sauce bottle flagon—and wine cask, and we produced a huge amount of bottled wine but it was at a very low price point. And it’s been something that I haven’t really pushed as much as some other people might have in Chapel Hill, which is pushing prices up for the sake of doing it.

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Pursuit of excellence in terms of trying to be more stylistic. I don’t think that’s happened across all of Australia. I think some people are hanging on too long to styles that have been accepted, and that have made their name. With respect, I put Barossa Shiraz there. But you look now and there’s a lot more Barossa boys who are using different techniques with their Shiraz than they would have four or five years ago. The cult winemakers have had some influence there. We haven’t really had so many cult winemakers in McLaren Vale, but D’Arenberg is obviously more of a cultish winemaker. So, yes, I think there’s a lot more concentration on style and quality, mainly because people can get more money for their wine. In terms of occupational health and safety and environment, the South Australian Wine & Brandy Industry Association has really put a lot of emphasis on making it easy for us to become, as small winemakers, responsible managers. And whilst you’ve had this standard of excellence amongst the really big corporates in occupational health and safety and enterprise agreements, and lots and lots of things that they’ve done in a very, very corporate sense, there would have been the danger that the small wine companies didn’t get there. And I think that that’s happened through the Wine & Brandy Industry Association, but also because of people being trained in corporate and coming back into small wine industry stuff. That’s all pretty boring. What else has happened? A lot more women in the wine industry nowadays.

Yes.

PD: And people sort of say are women different? And the answer is that they’re probably not, but it may be just that there are more pioneers still among the women coming into wine than there are men because men have been in it for such a longer time. But there’s some pretty fantastic palates among the small number of women that there are in the industry already, and whether that’s because they’ve got an interest in food from an earlier age and they’ve been cooking, or whether it’s because they don’t like the

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big bull-tearing wines—and there’s something innately about women that want more fruit—I don’t know. But I do think that you can see in some company’s winemaking—I think of Wendy Stuckey at Wolf Blass having had a huge influence on style. And some other people like Vanya Cullen having a huge influence on style that a lot of people have been aware of and followed. I’m probably being really unfair to other significant winemakers, but in some companies the winemaker can’t have an influence. For example, in Penfolds, the styles are all predetermined and the winemakers influence is a lot less significant. But, yes, I think that female winemakers are having an influence in style. Do you want to prompt me on any other areas?

Yes, Pam, just one thing to finish off. This sounds stupid but it was probably the most obvious question I should have asked a long time ago. Was it difficult for you as a women to come into the industry, or did Morgan actually facilitate that in a way that some others wouldn’t have at the time?

PD: The worst part about it was the year at Roseworthy when there was really no reason to continue. I didn’t find it academically fulfilling, and the environment was just unpleasant, and it wasn’t necessarily just their fault. It was really a boys’ boarding school type of atmosphere and, whilst I’ve got some good friends out of those years, it was really a very boring year for a twenty-two old. But once I was in the wine industry I really didn’t meet any hurdles. I really only had support from all the people in the wine industry. People pushed to get me into things like wine judging. People were very welcoming. You know, it’s been a non sexist industry as far as I’m concerned. Morgan was like a father/daughter relationship in a way, that he just took me under his wing. I wouldn’t have stayed if the person hadn’t have been so good, I would’ve moved on. But, yes, it was a very gentle relationship. But there was another person at Wynns who was good, too. I had a foreman who was fantastic, and he taught me how to be his boss. He knew more about running the winery than I did, but he effectively trained

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me to tell him what to do. So, you know, I don’t know how many people would have had that opportunity.

Well, thank you very much for talking with me today, Pam. It’s been delightful.

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