Stephen Henschke

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

OH 692/64

Full transcript of an interview with

STEPHEN HENSCHKE

on 25 July 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 692/64 STEPHEN HENSCHKE

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 692/64 TAPE 1 - SIDE A

NATIONAL WINE CENTRE, WOLF BLASS FOUNDATION ORAL HISTORY PROJECT. Interview with Stephen Henschke on 25th July, 2002. Interviewer: Rob Linn.

Stephen, where and when were your born?

SH: I was born in Angaston in 1950, 3rd December.

Tell me a bit about your parents, Stephen. Who they were.

SH: My parents were Cyril Alfred Henschke. He was also born here, back in 1924. My mother was Doris Elvira Klemm, who was born in Truro, about 10/15 kilometres away.

So what are your earliest memories of the place here at Keyneton?

SH: Probably the most vivid early memories would be travelling with my grandfather on a little buggy out to the Angaston farm, which we still own. It’s really due west of here, about five or six kilometres. Taking sheep out to the farm and bringing them back, and stopping them on the side of the road for the horse to have a drink of water out of a puddle. So that’s probably some of those vivid memories I’ve got as early days. The shearing shed. Jumping into the wool bales and all those sorts of things. So it was very much the farm that probably influenced me in terms of my memories. And the cow shed. Milking cows and turning the cream separator and all those sorts of things.

Your earliest memories then were obviously the very basic farming nature of the Barossa.

SH: Yes.

Would it be true to say that the vines and the farming were very much inter-mixed in those days?

SH: They were. Some of the other memories were things like some of the local farmers. One guy I remember from Moculta. I was absolutely fearful of this guy. His name was somebody Wiebrecht. He lived over near the Gnadenberg(?) Church. And he used to come along for his Vermouth, and I used to have to suck the wine out of the barrel and fill up his flagons, or krugs(?) as they were called in those days—the stone jars. He’d always get a shlook(?) and then off he’d go. Sometimes I got the job if my father was busy, and there was nothing worse than sucking the hose and ending up with a lung-full of Vermouth or something. (Laughter)

What was the winery like in those days, Stephen?

SH: I think very much more a farm type winery. We had (couldn’t decipher word) shafts and belts and stationary motors that ran the equipment, and things like that. So it was more the old fashioned style of winery. Basket presses—wooden basket presses. Open fermenting tanks.

What were the main sales at that time from here? Would you recall that at all?

SH: As a young kid, there would’ve been fortified wines. Ports and sherries and Vermouths, as I mentioned. All those sorts of things.

How long had the winery been in the family?

SH: It started in the 1860’s. They bought the land in the early 1860’s, so this is my direct ancestors. Johann Christian Henschke was his name, and his son, Paul Gotthard, who—what the father tended to do as the sons got older, he’d help them buy property and he’d settle them on their property. So the older sons had already been settled by the time Paul Gotthard was around. That was in the 1860’s. When you think they arrived in 1841, Johann Christian was already about in his forties then, so he would have been in his sixties by then. So he was getting on pretty well for those days. And his son would have been in his teens—Paul Gotthard. We can

check all those dates in the Henschke history book. He would have been in his teens and he used to walk out here very day from Bethany when they bought this property, and slowly planted up orchard and vineyard and established a farm and built the old farm building. So this building here was one of the original buildings.

So they would have bought this late 50’s/early 60’s probably?

SH: Yes.

That’s about when this was subdivided.

SH: Early 60’s, yes. And I went back through the Titles and I found that the first land grant was given to somebody in 1950—William Robert Smith Cook, or something or other like that. He was on the source of the (sounds like, Coon-a-werta) copper -

That’s right. That figures.

SH: And then it went through a series of sales at different prices, and then it dropped a bit and my great great grandfather bought it. I’ve forgotten now what he paid for it but I’ve got all that sort of stuff tucked away.

That’s a fair hike from Bethany though, Stephen.

SH: It is. They used to push a wheelbarrow or something or other all the way out here and back. I remember my father finding some records of first wine sales. They were about 1868. So he made that the establishment date, where most cases with other wineries they tended to make it when the vineyard was planted as the establishment date. So realistically we could probably say that we were established in the early 1860’s, like 1862 or 3, but we don’t know for sure. So 1868’s fine really.

Are there any traces of the old vineyard still?

SH: I guess there are in a way. Down the back of the orchard of the property there’s still a tumbled down stone wall with some gooseberry, Kentish cherries and a few old vines sort of trailing around in amongst the

heap there, and I suspect that’s probably from the original vines, but I don’t know for sure.

So by the time you were born and growing up here, Stephen, what—you were saying that your father was making fortifieds. Did he have any particular practice at all that he’d adopted in the winery?

SH: Well, really it was my grandfather who was making the fortified wine. So there was a fashion change and fortified wines became fashionable, so it seems from my reading and just knowledge that I’ve acquired over the years. Fortified wines were really developed because of export to the UK, to provide wine stability. So that became a fashionable drink I guess even for local areas, so the Barossa became very much a fortified area. But we were still making some table wines. So we would have been making Claret and Hock and those sorts of things, because we’ve got old labels that describe that.

Did you have them at home when you were a child, or growing up?

SH: Yes. We had a little glass of wine occasionally at teatime, as we called it. But I can’t really remember what we would have drunk as kids, whether it was table wine or fortified wine. It’s too long ago. And my father really got interested more and more in table wine. And I think there was a combination of things. I mean, you just don’t go off as a pioneer and start making table wines unless there’s a reason for doing it, and I suspect that over the years he was visited by a number of people—wine buyers, wine merchants. People like Doug Lamb in Sydney, Frank Castle(?), Oscar Crittenden in Melbourne -

Yes, Doug’s father.

SH: - who were looking at supplying this developing restaurant market. Peppis(?) is a good example in Sydney. And I guess there were similar examples in Melbourne, like maybe Florentinos—I’m not too sure—but

there would have been similar examples. And so slowly and surely my father started developing more table wines with these sort of markets. He also had a lot of individual sales on his books to places like naval military clubs and all those sorts of things. He had records of all that. So I guess as time went by then he got more and more interested in making table wine because the market was developing. There was this demand from restaurants and clubs and things like that, and he was happy by about 1959 to effectively stop making fortified wine and concentrate just on table wine.

Had your father, Cyril, done any formal training at all?

SH: After high school he went and worked at Hardys Siegersdorf winery for a while. I don’t know who he would have worked with in those days.

Roger Warren was coming and going.

SH: Jack Kilgour?

Yes, Jack Kilgour.

SH: It could have been those sort of people. I certainly know from what he said that they influenced him significantly in terms of his winemaking, and what he’s interested in making in terms of table wine.

Was it expected that you would actually come into the winery?

SH: It’s hard to say. I had an older brother, so I guess he would tend to expect the older brother to take it over.

Is he your only sibling, Stephen?

SH: No, I’ve got a younger sister as well. But as it turned out he was at university ahead of me, did microbiology, came home for a year in 1970 when my father went on his Churchill Fellowship trip and looked after the winery that year. Didn’t mind the winemaking but didn’t like running the business side. So went back to uni and carried on. Did his honours, PhD, and went off to England. Got married in the meantime and found a life,

where I was a couple of years younger. I went to uni, but about that time when I was studying at uni -

This is at Adelaide?

SH: This is Adelaide science course. What my brother started with as well. About that time there was a guy by the name of Professor Helmut Becker who was coming over and helping Alan Antcliff at Merbein to do some development of new vine breeds for Australia. That’s how Tarrango came about, for example. He said to me, ‘Come and study with me’. I was actually booked into Roseworthy but he said, ‘Come and study with me in Germany’. And having met him, I was quite keen on that. I’d done German at school. So I went through the process of getting the paperwork for Geisenheim organised. So by the time I’d finished university then, instead of going off to Roseworthy I did some vintage experience in the Hunter at Rothbury Estate at the end of ‘73.

That would have been pretty exciting times up there. (Laughs)

SH: Pretty (sounds like, new) days in those days. And Murray Tyrrell was just down the road. Gerry Sissingh was at Rothbury. So it was pretty interesting. Yes, some real characters there. And I became good friends with Ralph(?) Fowler, who’s a winemaker at Tyrrells, and Bruce Tyrrell. I worked there for a while and then I came back again and carried on working with my father through ‘74. So I did two vintages actually in ‘74, one in the Hunter and one here. That was our worst year we’ve ever had in our history. It was a shocker.

‘74?

SH: ‘74, yes. We had Hunter weather here in ‘74 as well, so I think I was blamed for bringing it back.

‘74? I’m just trying to think, because my uncle had a property down on the flats and at Mount Pleasant and we were running to and fro.

SH: It was a very wet season. And I’d met Prue at uni. We were good mates then and before I went off to Germany we decided to get married and she came along as well. Did some study at Geisenheim with me. Worked in the (couldn’t decipher word) Institute. Worked in the vineyards of Becker and his breeding institute. So she got a really good broad hands- on education in that field, and I did winemaking and viticulture as a course.

Was Geisenheim challenging?

SH: It was because it was in German. So I needed to get my German up to scratch. Fortunately what helped a bit was that Dr Max Loder had come across to the Barossa and was working on bud mites in the Barossa, the (couldn’t decipher word) station, and his wife, Ursula, was the Director of the (couldn’t decipher name) in Freiburg, and so she booked us into the (couldn’t decipher name), to the (sounds like, Girt) Institute and things like that. So we stayed in Freiburg for a while. And also my father had made friends with Dr Bruno Gertz(?) who was living in (couldn’t decipher name), just near Freiburg. So we sort of had a pseudo family over there, which was lovely. So we flatted just out of Freiburg and went to school every day, learning German. Prue needed it because she had no German at all. I got to a level where I passed a (couldn’t decipher word) level in German and was able then to go on and study at Geisenheim. And the course started in I think in August/September, the end of the holidays.

Were there core things that you feel that you’ve retained from that time?

SH: Oh, there’s a lot that I’ve retained from that time. That had a huge influence on my thinking in terms of white winemaking, in terms of—the Germans are real perfectionists, so I learnt this perfectionist attitude in terms of winemaking. There were a lot of things that were different that at the time I thought were important. I did quite a bit of extra time at the economics institute, but in reality that wasn’t really applicable for the Australian situation. But certainly the winemaking and the viticulture were very relevant and gave us a really broad outlook on terms of how to assess

yield in a way they look at it. Everything there is dry-grown actually. There was some very good approaches and very good fundamentals that I still use.

So coming back to Australia, what do you bring back here that you want to introduce or talk to your father about?

SH: That’s a good question. I wanted to see the white wines improved. That was probably brought home to us pretty well when we’d had world wine tastings at Geisenheim from time to time and I’d put my father’s wines into the tastings, and they loved the red wines. They thought the red wines were fantastic. And they were very good. The whites didn’t fit into the same sort of category at all. Our whites were much more phenolic(?), broader, heavier, high alcohol wines without the same finesse and fruit. So I really wanted to introduce better equipment, better technology, for improving the white wines. The disadvantage that we had living so far out in the sticks was that we didn’t have three phase power until 1977. And so that gave us huge limitations in terms of refrigeration and bottling equipment, and all those sorts of issues.

And pressure stuff, too. You wouldn’t have been able to have any pressure machines running off that.

SH: No. So once we had three phase power put in, then we put in an ultra cooler so we could do a bit of refrigeration, and a chance to upgrade equipment.

Did you always source just from your own vines, Stephen?

SH: No. We had a lot of growers. Back in those days the growers would have supplied probably 50% of the fruit. Maybe more. Obviously became less, and really the reason that it became less was that in the 70’s there was a big boom in white wines. And my father had—at the time it was very clever but probably foolishly now in hindsight. He used to put his growers’ names on the label to give them a tribute of having supplied

Riesling and what have you. And so he had series of labels with different growers names. And he lost those growers to other companies that paid bigger bonuses to these growers. So in the end he decided that he’d plant his own vineyard at Eden Valley, which he did in 1968, and put in about 100 acres of vineyard, mainly Riesling and Shiraz, Semillon and things like that. Then we became a lot more self-reliant with fruit from Eden Valley where he’d previously been buying from growers as far out as Springton Valley and Moculta and what have you.

The cool vineyards here would have been quite low yielding, wouldn’t they?

SH: Yes. The home gardens, as we call it, the vineyards just across the road—Hill of Grace, Mount Edelstone, those sorts of vineyards—were pretty small. Well, pretty low yielding in terms of volume. And the rest was brought in from (couldn’t decipher word). We tended to lose a lot of the growers and so we planted more vineyard.

So after the three phase power comes in you managed to introduce this new technology.

SH: Yes.

Actually I’m just trying to remember. The Riesling shot up in fruit qualities pretty quickly, didn’t it, from memory.

SH: Yes. I reckon really from—I mean, there was some stunning years like ‘72 where it didn’t matter what you did to the wine, the fruit quality was so good anyway that the wines were just awesome.

The reds were amazing that year. (Laughter)

SH: You’re right. But really from I guess about the early to mid 80’s onwards our quality of the whites improved significantly, and by ‘87 we had the best Riesling in the Canberra Show. So it was starting to get serious then. (Laughs)

And how was your father approaching this enormous growth of interest in table wine through the decades of the 70’s and 80’s?

SH: I think he probably delighted in it because he knew that the quality of the fruit here wasn’t that well suited to table wine because you had to leave it hanging so much longer. It wasn’t as appropriate as it was down in the Barossa. And so I think the table wine was a side that he really enjoyed. We’ve got some good photos of him standing next to the old basket press with our hydrometer and things like that. I think he got a big buzz out of it. He used to travel a lot to Sydney. He started a wine shop in Adelaide. This was back when I was—I’m trying to remember when it was. It was 242 Rundle Street. It would have been back probably in the 60’s. He was one of the first wine bars. It was a disaster because he had a manager who ripped him off. At the time it was well ahead of its time.

About thirty years ahead.

SH: Yes.

I don’t recall that, Stephen. The east end of Rundle Street?

SH: Yes, 242 Rundle Street was the number. So it would be down somewhere opposite where Universal is. That area. There was an electronics store alongside—or opposite.

Oh, yes. I recall it. And Polites shoes.

SH: Yes. That’s right. And (couldn’t decipher name) was nearby.

Yes, that’s right.

SH: (couldn’t decipher name),who used to run the thing.

That was a very pioneering move at the time because wine shops had come into disfavour some forty years before.

SH: Yes, it’s a pity that it didn’t work. After that he became good friends with Alan Archer. And then Alan went on to develop Chester Cellars, and

Chester Wholesalers, which was the distributing arm, and so our wines are sold throughout (couldn’t decipher word).

Well, prior to that had it been just from here trucked out basically?

SH: Yes. He was doing it all independently. In the early days we were selling wines in barrels—in hogsheads. I can remember helping to roll hogsheads onto the train at Angaston, and that would be shipped off to Sydney or Melbourne. You know, to Crittenden, to all these people, where they’d obviously bottle the wine themselves and put on their own label, but often with a reference to Henschke. Some wines would go off to Lindemans, and probably Penfolds. The Cawarra Claret and all those sorts of things. So there was a whole series of markets. Gerry Sissingh was actually a wine buyer in those early days and he used to come here buying wine. I didn’t remember him but he remembered me. (Laughs) So, yes, they were pretty interesting days. As time went by then, it was late 50’s that the wine merchant demanded that the producer do the bottling. So my father built these underground tunnels to store his bottles of wine, and he developed tunnels with the capacity of about a quarter of a million bottles. Because storing the wine upstairs in what was the old horse stable, under a tin roof, led to serious disaster with wine in the summertime. I remember the frustration that he had. So he built these underground cellars, and they were well ahead of their time.

So this is in the 60’s again?

SH: That was early 60’s that he built the first tunnel. By about ‘68 he built the second tunnel.

Was there a fair bit of interaction between Barossa winemakers in your memory, Stephen?

SH: He was in the Bacchus Club, and the Bacchus Club were people like Colin Gramp and a whole range of people. I just can’t think of the names now but all the local young winemaking Turks I guess at the time were

members of that, so they had a good association with each other. And I guess I didn’t really recognise how good it was until recently when Colin Gramp came along and said, ‘I’ve got some ‘56 Mount Edelstone. Would you like it?’ And so he’d been collecting my father’s wine, so they must have been doing swaps obviously of wine.

They were. Colin told me that.

SH: Oh, did he? Okay.

And with Rudi Kronberger.

SH: Which is fantastic.

Oh, it’s incredible, isn’t it? He’s kept a lot. I found that talking to Colin was just a revelation really. I’ve done two or three interviews with him and he commented on just how much the interaction went on, not just years, but decades.

SH: He’s brilliant because he’s got that next generation back of knowledge that I haven’t got any more since my father died, which is a shame. He’s fantastic.

He is. Yes, the things that he’s shown me in those humidified fridges of his—autocaves or whatever they’re called—is quite amazing really. His cousin, Keith, too, has an enormous collection. So this interaction comparison going on all the time, which must have boosted the overall quality.

SH: I’m sure it did, yes. I mean I’m sure they talked to each other, and those ideas helped each other to produce better wine.

You talk about the people like Colin. Were there any other figures in the Barossa that you can recall clearly that were involved?

SH: In that group?

Yes.

SH: No, I don’t really remember all that well but I know from the stories now that people like Windy Hill Smith would have been in it. Who was the guy at the Angaston Hotel?

Nicholls.

SH: Frank Nicholls, yes. Some of the doctors were involved in it—Watson and Botten. And Reg Shipster at Leo Burings, I remember him. Peter Lehmann obviously. Rudi Kronberger, although I didn’t really know him all that well. Bryan Dolan. A series of names that I sort of knew but not closely. My father was in Jaycees as well in those early days and we used to have picnics out on the farm. As kids we’d run down to the creek and fish out tadpoles and drop them into these guys beers when they weren’t watching. We must have been really wicked in those days. (Laughter)

Very good. So as you came into the business there was this heritage, if you like, of a Barossa background but also your father’s independent pioneering spirit.

SH: Yes.

TAPE 1 - SIDE B

26th August, 2002. Date is different to SIDE A.

So Stephen, reverting to where we finished off the tape previously. You come back and come into the business. How’s that running at the time that you’ve come back from Germany? Can you recall that?

SH: It was going pretty well. My father was still quite busily—that was in ‘77—making the wines. It was very much still a hands-on role that he was playing. He was always down in the winery, running down occasionally to get a phone call or something or other. But at the same time he had started building a place down at Tanunda, because we had a property down at Tanunda, just on the road out towards Rowland Flat. He was building a retirement house and winery down there that he’d started on. So that was roundabout that time.

Now are there any real downers during that period of the late 70’s and 80’s as far as your work goes here?

SH: Not that I can really think of. I know that the styles were a bit different then because we were making probably a lighter red style that was common in the 70’s and my father was selling off a lot of the pressings. I guess what we didn’t have was three phase power at the time, which meant that we were at a disadvantage in terms of being able to have proper refrigeration equipment, proper bottling equipment and things like that. So it was actually in ‘77 that we had the three phase power connected.

That would have made a fair difference.

SH: That made a huge difference in those days. It was quite interesting. It was a coincidence that my father in 1976 had, what he called, a twenty- one years of Mount Edelstone anniversary at Chester Cellars in Adelaide, and included in the people who came along for the luncheon and tasting was Donald Dunstan. Whether he was in his pink shorts or not I’m not too sure. I wasn’t here. But my father spoke about how he’d managed to produce such good quality wines in very rustic circumstances and that he really needed good power and water and those sorts of services to be able to improve the winery. It somehow must have filtered through Don Dunstan down to ETSA because they came along about three or four months later and offered to connect that three phase power. (Laughs)

Things changed pretty quickly. So Stephen, with the winery itself, what’s the path of it through the 70’s and 80’s as you come in to help look after the business?

SH: In terms of my -?

Yes.

SH: When I came back I just started working with my father. I effectively took over running the cellars—daily cellars—managing the cellar book and doing all the lab analyses and things like that because I was trained in the

chemistry side anyway to do all that. Having studied at Geisenheim I had some of my own ideas about how things should be done. I was really particularly interested in trying to get the white wines up to speed and better from my point of view, so I spent quite a bit of time learning what my father was doing, and also looking at ways of improving—certainly with having a better refrigeration system helped. We could control our juice temperatures. We could reduce oxidation problems. We could get better settling. We could control our fermentation temperatures better so we could get better quality in the wines, and get them into bottle early and all that sort of thing. So it was a playing around thing in terms of just what I considered to be faults and how to eliminate them on all that sort of razzamatazz. And then by, I think, the early 80’s I was starting to see results in better quality wines. And reds, it was just a matter really of learning how he did that red wine process, and looking at making any changes. I eliminated any finings that had been done to the red wines because I felt that was a detriment to the wine, and reduced the amount of racking and movement that was being done with reds. All that sort of thing.

Did your father react against any of those changes, or not so much?

SH: No, because he was actually very easy going in terms of input. We discussed a lot of things. He was very easy to talk to. So we discussed a lot of the ideas and there was quite a good rapport in terms of how the wines were being made. He was very supportive of some of the ideas and changes that we were putting in and he was happy to see it all taking place. So, no, it was really quite interesting initially. I think he was a bit concerned that I could see things in the wines that he couldn’t see in terms of faults and that sort of thing. Obviously my training that I’d gone through, but other than that I think he was pretty accepting of it. And I used to work enormously long hours. I’d be working on Sundays getting all the bottling gear steamed up and things like that for bottling on

the Monday morning and what have you. So I was working some extremely long hours just to keep the whole process going.

So he was receptive, in other words, from what you’re saying?

SH: Yes, he was.

And how far did the Tanunda project go before his death, Stephen?

SH: Well, that was all built and there was an opening—official opening—to see (couldn’t decipher name). It was basically soon after that that he died.

I remember that very well. Were the wines really making an impact, do you think, across the market by the time of his death?

SH: No, I don’t think so. I think we were still making wine together at that stage, so I was his young apprentice still. (Laughs)

Relatively young apprentice.

SH: Yes, that’s right.

The son. Prue was involved to a degree with the business, wasn’t she, with the viticultural side? Or did that come later?

SH: I guess in terms of time line, when we came back, she came into the cellar and helped for a while and did her stuff, and I guess my mother sort of thought that she would run the office and all that side of it, and Prue wasn’t all that particularly keen on doing that sort of work. And in the meantime we were studying at Wagga as well, doing the Wagga course. She’d made some contacts with different people that she was interested in viticulture, and she got a job at Roseworthy College as a technical research assistant. I don’t know if I’ve told you about that already?

No. Prue might have I think. I’m just trying to remember.

SH: So she then went working with Dick Smart and Peter Dry basically in that area, and she became a research—her research was in top grafting

mainly because at that stage there was a lot of interest in changing varieties over. Trying to get (couldn’t decipher word) of Chardonnay on top of sultanas and what have you, so she had a huge job ahead of her. After she’d finished that two year project she then went into consulting work. So she’d be travelling around down to Coonawarra and all over the place consulting and training people on how to graft. That’s when she started working for us. So it was probably more like in the early 80’s that she started.

Now, from your point of view, did that make a huge difference in the vineyard?

SH: It was one of those situations where we had some really old varieties in our vineyard that we wanted to get rid of—change over—and come up to some of the more modern day varieties, and it was a good quick way of getting some of those varieties changed over. So actually in the early days we did quite a bit of our own grafting. We had a team of vineyard people trained up. We were training all sorts of people all over the place and doing lots of grafting. Yes, we changed over quite a bit of vineyard actually. It worked quite well.

So Stephen, when through the 80’s did things really begin to take off here?

SH: In ‘82 we won—Mount Edelstone—won a major prize in Sydney. That’s the Arthur Kelman(?) trophy. So that was for the ‘82 Mount Edelstone. And that really got me cranked up because that was a pretty good response I think to what was happening with the reds. And from then on we had some significant success with all sorts of things. Right through the mid 80’s into the 90’s. And the whites were sort of a harder slog because we were competing with the major wineries and all their technical skills that they had, and in terms of making white wine on a smaller scale it’s much more difficult to be consistent. You can make a good wine every now and again but to be consistent it’s much harder. And so I guess we were doing quite a bit of

work in trying to improve the whites, looking at the different varieties we were trialing and discarding some and what have you. It was probably by about ‘87 that we had really good result with our Riesling in the Canberra Show. We won the top Riesling in the Canberra Show. It was a pretty happy result. But, yes, it was always hard work. You know, with the infrastructure, using the concrete tanks, cooling the concrete tanks with an external ultracooler, not having the yeast propagation system that the bigger wineries would be just running automatically. We were having to manually work ours. It was pretty hard in the earlier days. We were changing technologies and trying to do things. I had a major accident off one of the old yeast propagators and ended up with stitches in my head one day. All those sort of little things that happen. But once the pure yeast cultures became available and you could buy bricks of yeast, just re-hydrate and get your fermentations going much more easily, then we started endorsing those. My brother was the chief microbiologist at the Wine Research so I had a bit of contact with different yeasts. We were doing a lot of trials and trying to find really fine yeast that would work well by being able to ferment at cold temperatures. Just sort of matching it all up.

Was this a continuous research -

SH: It was a totally continuous process. And also in there I made a ten year plan in the early 80’s after my father died, was to revamp the winery (1) for the white wine side—that’s why we built that tank cellar with all those insulator tanks—and the other was to improve the quality of the oak because I really inherited a cellar-full of big old oak barrels that were better used as spa baths or dog kennels or flowerpots or something than for making wine in. And I did what I called my significant experiment with the difference between new oak and new old oak, where I made the same wine in a new oak barrel, a tank and an old oak barrel, and the difference between the three wines was extraordinary. The new oak just gave the wine so much

more complexity, and it was almost like a synergistic relationship between the oak and the fruit. It just got a deeper colour, more intense bouquet and more intense flavour. So we embarked on a programme of increasing the new oak in the cellar. It’s a very expensive exercise because each barrel is the cost of a lounge suite. And so effectively we started off with the puncheon size, the 100 gallon size, or 500 litre size barrels. But at the same time I wasn’t happy with the quality of the American oak that we were buying, or that my father had been buying. It seemed to be too sappy, too resinous. And fortunately Peter John from AP John & Sons—he’s a third generation of the cooper family. My grandfather was buying barrels from his grandfather, so it’s sort of gone down the generations—my father, and then Peter and I. And we sat down and had a big long talk and we decided that we’d set up a programme where Henschkes bought the wood. In other words, a container load of wood and cut into staves and headings. It would be seasoned at Johns. So then we would have properly seasoned oak to work with. It was really a ten year project to get the cellar replaced with newer oak barrels that we were replacing effectively on a three year rotation—three or four year rotation. The wood was seasoned for three or four years out in the weather. Wet winters to leach out the saps and resins, and hot summers to dry out the timber and season it. And so it was a fairly long expensive process, but it really worked because the quality of the reds just turned around. We started winning those sort of trophies and Qantas Cups and things in the UK and that sort of stuff that was a real signal that we were heading in the right direction in terms of how we were making the wine.

Were they an encouragement to you, Stephen? The awards as they came?

SH: Oh, yes. Every award that you won was a pat on the back to say that you were doing the right thing. I mean, that’s what it’s all about. I guess

it’s a peer type encouragement. That’s how flower shows work. (Laughter)

They do, too. Starts again on Friday. Back to the woodcutting. Stephen, so the 80’s was really a time in which things moved really quite quickly. Even though it’s a decade, that’s a big change for here, wasn’t it?

SH: It was, yes. We really turned around from a farm winery to a very much more professional type winery.

And did sales go up incrementally?

SH: I think sales were an interesting issue. We made some radical changes to the way that our wine was being distributed. That’s the other side obviously to work on. But we had a fantastic guy that my father had put in place in Sydney—Arch Baker—and so his distribution went into Melbourne and up to Brisbane. We still had a couple of other insular ones in the different States, but by 1990 then we’d put it all with Tucker(?) Seabrook, and Arch basically ended up being employed by us as a marketing consultant. And so it made a very big difference in terms of having good stability—marketing stability—and a good understanding of what the market was doing. Because a product like ours, you need to price the wine according to the reputation and the quality, and to be able to sort out the pricing and have your pricing in the right position so that your wine isn’t undersold, and then undervalued in terms of its quality reputation. And not over-priced that you get the opposite. You know, you get the rejection effect. So it’s sort of a fine balance of getting that marketing right.

Stephen, when did the export markets begin to move for Henschkes?

SH: We were approached by Negociants in the early days. There was a little bit of a boom back at the time of the Crocodile Dundee/Americas Cup thing, and we started selling a bit of wine in America then. We had already been selling wine to New Zealand, and that was going well. And

Negociants took that over and increased the performance of our sales in New Zealand. We started selling to America, but the American market was very much a fad market of Australia because of Australia being in the limelight. That fell over and there was a lot of wine companies that went through very embarrassing stages. Personally, we were only very small. We were just tickling the market then and we were starting to get some response. And by the time I did my first trip to the States—that was in 1989 actually— we’d already been selling the wine. From about ‘86/87 started to get serious with the selling of wine in America. And also in 1986 we had a visit from Richard Wheeler from Lay(?) & Wheeler in the UK. He turned up one Saturday morning with his wife. He’d been visiting his son, Johnnie, who was studying, or working, in Sydney—I’m not too sure—living in Australia for some time—and while he’d been here he’d discovered a few wines that he enjoyed and he obviously showed his father. One of them was Henschke reds. And so they came to visit us. They turned up one Saturday morning and Richard tasted through the wines at cellar door. Had no idea who he was. I used to work cellar door in those days on Saturdays. He said, ‘Look, I love your wines. I want to sell them in the UK’. And I was taken aback. I didn’t know who this guy was. I said, ‘I’m sorry, I haven’t got any wine available’. Because by then we were fairly strictly allocating our wines. Our wines were in pretty big demand. And so he went off. Arch Baker was partly taken over—because his partner sold out on him—by Matthew Clark in the UK, and they wanted to sell some of our wine in the UK. So we did a trip to the UK, fronted up at Matthew Clark’s headquarters, had lunch and spoke to their sales team and gave them a tasting. At the end of it one of them said, ‘Look, we love your wines. It’s just a pity that they’re not French’. And that’s the response we got from there. So we walked out and thought that these guys aren’t right for our wine. They just don’t understand our wine. And so we talked to Arch

about it, and we then basically put a kybosh on the marketing through Matthew Clark. Richard Wheeler conveniently turned up again about a year later to visit John and came to see us. He said, ‘Look, I still love your wines and I still want to sell them in the UK’. I said, ‘You’ve got them’. (Laughs) Because we’d found out by then that he was a three or five generation wine merchant and had a very high reputation, and very stable. He was open- minded enough to love Australian wine and want to see some potential for our wines. Our wines have gone very well in the UK.

Did you really expect that to be the case? I guess, in one sense, good wine is good wine, isn’t it?

SH: Probably I didn’t expect it to be taken as enthusiastically as it was. One of the little incidents that occurred that put me off initially was that there was a well-known—I can talk about him now because he’s no longer around. He died last year unfortunately. He was a well-known Australian guy who started Decanter wine magazine in the UK by the name of Tony Lord. You may have heard of him?

Yes.

SH: And he came to visit, and he used to do that. He used to come out to Australia regularly and go around the wineries and visit them. He turned up to me one day, tasted through the wines and what have you, talking about the Shiraz, and he said, ‘Your Shiraz is never going to sell in the UK because it doesn’t look like Shiraz’. And I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘Well Shiraz has to show pepper characters, and your wine doesn’t have any pepper flavours so it won’t be accepted’. He was just a very brash journalist Aussie-cum-Pom, and that sort of put me off for a little while, but when Richard Wheeler turned up his enthusiasm outweighed this other guy. (Laughs) And I’d also had some rebuttal with our black labels from the American market, that they weren’t going to be accepted in America. So there’s all these funny little things that tended to push you around a bit.

So you do have doubts at times?

SH: Oh, sometimes you get doubts. Absolutely.

Environmentally up here, Stephen, were there years that you would rather have not happened? Were there bad vintages?

SH: Were there bad vintages?

Yes.

SH: I guess ‘83 was a classic example. Bushfire, drought, flood year. We’ve had ups and downs. ‘85 was a very cool year and the wines took a long time to come around. Some ugly duckling wines initially. The ‘87 was one of our coolest years on record, and the reds still look a bit herbal. But really since then we’ve had a pretty dream run through to about 2002 when we had extraordinarily low yields again.

Stephen, what led you to the Adelaide Hills then in the end?

SH: That actually happened pretty early in the piece. That was through Prue. You might have got that information from Prue when you talked to her. When she was working with Dick Smart at Roseworthy—and Dick Smart had actually been doing quite a bit of work on site selection and canopy management, and he was working on the cutting edge of those sort of concepts in those days. And the canopy management came in afterwards but the site selection one was interesting because he was basically looking at the climate parallels between European regions and Australian regions. And so he did (couldn’t decipher word) all over Australia—all the southern part of Australia. He could quite easily pick out places like Mansfield or Tasmania, or whatever. You could plant vineyards besides the traditional growing areas like Coonawarra. And he did some work up in the Adelaide Hills because he had a mate who had an apple orchard down towards Cudlee Creek and he did some work there. Prue saw his paper, or he gave Prue a copy of his paper. So Prue and I used to go for drives down through the Adelaide Hills.

And Alan Archer, who ran Chester Cellars, actually used to live at Lenswood. And my father had actually often talked about putting some vineyard onto Alan’s property, just out of interest sake, but never ever got around to it. And we were driving up through that Cudlee Creek road to Lenswood one day and there was this orchard for sale right at the top corner. We hopped out and had a bit of a walk around. It was a 40 degree day in Adelaide, and when you walked around in this orchard with all the green grass and athel trees and things, that felt that much cooler. The humidity obviously was there. And Prue said, ‘This has got to be a good place for growing grapes’. And it was at the time when everybody was talking about the cool climate varieties of Chardonnay, Pinot, Merlot and things like that. So with a little bit more interaction with the owner we eventually bought the property. That was in ‘81. Prue managed it then. So she became an apple orchardist then for a couple of years running the Lenswood orchard. Spent a fair bit of driving up and down. It was quite an interesting experience. We had shares in Lenswood cold-store and all that sort of stuff. Inherited some interesting equipment and some interesting spraying practices and what have you. Things were going along pretty well. We were growing some good apples and stuff like that. And then the Ash Wednesday bushfire came out of left field and burnt the orchard to the ground. And the only thing that we’d done in the meantime was that we’d planted a couple of nursery rows of vines—Riesling I think they were—and they’d been watered, and the fire just burnt right around them. So the only thing that really survived was the vines, and we felt that that was a bit of an omen. So out came the D9 and out went all the stumps and in went the vineyard. So that was really how that came about.

OH 692/64 TAPE 2 - SIDE A

NATIONAL WINE CENTRE, ORAL HISTORY. Interview with Stephen Henschke on 26th August, 2002. Interviewer: Rob Linn.

Stephen, we were just talking off the tape about change. From your perspective, what would have been the major changes in the industry over the three decades that you’ve been involved intimately with it?

SH: I guess they’re really technological changes. I guess the first change that springs to mind is probably that out in the vineyard is the mechanisation, that obviously we haven’t done a lot of. We’ve actually gone the other way. The change has been more to what I alluded to before in terms of Dick Smart’s work with canopy management, in terms of doing of more—in (sounds like, preference) to canopy management. Lenswood—that was a really good testing ground, a research and development ground, for Prue particularly to trial different canopies, different trellis work, different management techniques, and also different soil management than we’d previously been doing, because down there it’s effectively green cover all the year round. Where here, everything had been worked to a fine tilth and all the soil structure was destroyed. We had Keith Northcott’s books on different soil (couldn’t decipher word), and the one thing that really interested us, and something we didn’t understand enough of, was the soils. So we started doing a lot of work on our soils, digging holes. I think that side of it in the industry was really important. Changing management practices across to more—not exactly organic, but less working and more—people doing a lot of spraying still but less chemical input. And changing to mulch under the vines to help with the organics, help with the worms, help with reducing loss of moisture through evaporation and all that sort of thing. So that all came into it.

In terms of winery changes, I think the practices that probably had the most significant effect were barrel fermentation, and that was something that in the process of things that I was doing in those early 80’s, making wine in the new barrels, the process of barrel fermentation became something that we were trialing from those very early days, and found extremely beneficial in terms of the quality of the wine. How the (couldn’t decipher word) integrated into the wine so much better. We seemed to get better colours and better stability of the wine. And we haven’t gone down the path that a lot of winemakers have done where, in addition to that, they use oak tannin additions, or exogenous tannins, if you like. So every time they ferment or rack the wine, or whatever, they keep adding tannin additions. And we don’t do that because we have a fundamental belief that the tannin should come from the vineyard with the fruit. So you should get your fruit mature, get all the balance right in the fruit, and then when it comes to the winery you basically keep the fundamentals of the quality of the wine from that fruit quality in the vineyard. So there’s some divergence of opinion now within the wine industry of what is, or is not, good practice in terms of red winemaking, but it’s become very heavily endorsed within the wine industry, this sort of added tannin practice. It’s sort of, if you like, an addition to the oak tannins that you get from using your oak barrels. And it helps stabilise the colour, but it also changes the structure of the wine. So you end up with Shiraz that have so much tannin that they taste like— they’ve got a Cabernet in the back palate. And I guess Robert Parker is another major influencing factor in this super high alcohol wines, super extracted, super oaked, super tannic, and all those sorts of things, made for the Parker palate that I think, in the end, is a phase. It think it’s a maturity phase. All those things are. If you look at the 70’s, you look at the 80’s, and you look at the 90’s, you can see the maturity phases that the wine industry’s gone through. In the 70’s the wine industry was embracing all this technology, and we had Bryce Rankine making all sorts of suggestions about how wine should be made in terms of

sulphur, in terms of finings and things like that. And then by the 80’s there was some rejection of some of those processes but a better understanding of the young Turks, and I guess that was probably my era, but I came with more of an overseas influence but a lot of people came out of Roseworthy. And guys like Chris Hatcher who’s ended up in Wolf Blass, who I studied with at uni, but with very much a sort of evaluative thoughtful approach to wine, so it wasn’t just a numbers. It was putting things together and evaluating it. So it was sort of that young Turk influence in terms of getting the wine quality right. Then I think the 90’s has been a greater influence in the vineyard where the vineyard now is starting to dictate the flavours of the wine. I’m sure you would remember that there was a stage where the winemaker was considered the god—to a certain extent they still are—but that sort of Brian Croser era where the winemaker was put up on this big pedestal and he could make anything fantastic out of an old sow’s ear sort of approach. But the 90’s I think has been a reversal now, where people are seeing that the wine quality is a result of the fruit quality in the vineyard. And you need to get that fruit quality right in terms of canopy management, in terms of all those processes. I think probably that’s been the greatest influence in the end, is the viticulturist, if you like, making the wine. (Laughs)

Stephen, obviously throughout your father’s era and your era as well, there have been times of struggle. You couldn’t have been in your business without those struggles, too.

SH: Oh, absolutely.

But coming into the modern era where you’ve had a large degree of success, has one of the struggles in effect been to withstand the people wanting to change the family winery into something bigger? The buy-up merchants and that sort of thing?

SH: There’s certainly been that sort of approach. Everybody wants to see more Henschke red wine. There’s always that pressure to commercialise. That pressure comes from all sorts of places. To say, well, you could get a much greater return on your investment that you’ve got by producing more

wine and increasing the size of the operation and all that sort of thing. I guess there’s been a few logistics along the way that have caused us to stay small, and they’ve been the infrastructure reasons—power and water and road, and all that sort of thing. And the old buildings and the restraints that you tend to have. But in the end that doesn’t stop you from using an external (sounds like, processor). We could do 10,000 tons easily and probably sell it all under the Henschke label, but what happens to the consumer there who wants that special bottle of red wine, and it’s everywhere. It’s in the supermarkets and it starts getting discounted and all that sort of thing. So I think that when you’ve got something precious you really need to look after it, and that can only be done by putting in that care and attention to detail, and controlling the amount. In other words, keeping that small and precious and making it better.

Do you think that what you’ve just said is what sets Henschkes apart today a bit?

SH: I think it’s very much of what sets Henschkes apart. You could imagine if the family did sell and it was bought by one of the major producers, or even overseas, or whatever the case might be—there’s always a bean counter everywhere—the logical step would be to capitalise on the name, on the reputation. Now, you’ve seen that happen, I’ve seen that happen, and it’s just an automatic thing that would happen, that somebody would effectively try to rape and pillage the brand to get the biggest commercial gain from it.

Well, Stephen, thank you for talking to me over the last couple of sessions. It’s been a delightful time.

SH: Pleasure.