‘More ancient than most of Europe’s’: The astonishing secret of our old vineyards
Why do some of Australia’s gnarliest grapevines come from older, purer stock than even France’s finest? A wine historian has made it his mission to tell the surprising story.
By Luke Slattery
A grand old grapevine from Langmeil’s Freedom Vineyard in South Australia’s Barossa Valley. The shiraz vineyard, planted in 1843, is the oldest in Australia – and possibly the world.Credit: Dragan Radocaj
Andrew Caillard is aghast. In his recently published history of Australian wine, The Australian Ark, the former fine wine auctioneer tells the untold tales behind some of the country’s oldest working vineyards – most of them planted in the half-century to 1920 in the Barossa Valley.
“They’re such beautiful stories,” says the English-born Master of Wine, one of the few tertiary qualifications in which study can be aptly described as addictive. “Our oldest surviving grapevines, at Langmeil’s Freedom Vineyard, go back to 1843 for goodness’ sake.”
The energy needed to complete the three-volume, 1500-page project required some serious emotional fuel. If it wasn’t for Caillard’s own heritage, it might never have been written. His remarkably durable English accent conceals a pioneering Australian family history. Caillard is a direct descendant of John Reynell (1809-1873), who planted the first commercial vineyard in South Australia and gave the family name to the town of Reynella, now part of Adelaide’s sprawling southern suburbs.
While The Australian Ark is, as its author explains over a glass or three of crisp Margaret River chardonnay at his inner-western Sydney home, “a social history of Australia told through the prism of wine and viticulture”, it’s also an homage to his winemaking ancestors. “Their aspirations, successes and misfortunes I learnt of as a child growing up in the UK.”
Arriving in Adelaide in 1983 to study wine at Roseworthy Agricultural College, the shy 23-year-old saw few traces of the Reynell dynasty – only the winery buildings at Reynella and a couple of distant cousins. A “profound sadness” hung in the air. “At the turn of the century the Reynella vineyards extended as far as the eye could see,” he says. “The land has since been carved up for housing estates and shopping centres, thanks to post-war population growth and the suburbanisation of Adelaide.”
But there’s nothing elegiac about The Australian Ark. While it traces the ups and downs, booms and busts, of an industry facing the cluster-threat of climate change, wowserism and its own misdirection, the story it decants is one of optimism and, to borrow the Dickensian title of one of the early chapters, great expectations. Caillard describes the genesis of the Australian wine industry as “a magnificent and romantic story”.
The Australian Ark is also a fine example of history with an edge. It upends all the clichés about New World Australian wine, and challenges the industry itself with a back-to-the future vision. Those old vineyards hold the key. “Our oldest grapevines are, ironically, more ancient than most of Europe’s and beyond,” he tells me. “The Barossa’s Clifton Vineyard was established in 1854 – one year before the 1855 classification of Bordeaux. Yalumba still uses it for its top-end The Octavius Shiraz.”
Wine historian Andrew Caillard. His ancestor, John Reynell, planted the first commercial vineyard in South Australia.Credit: Ben McPherson
French wine enjoys unassailable prestige among connoisseurs, yet it’s an oft-ignored truth of Gallic – indeed European – viticulture that the majority of those premium grapevines are anchored to the earth with American roots. It’s been this way since the late 19th century after phylloxera ripped through the vineyards of Bordeaux, Burgundy, Champagne, the Rhône and beyond. The “great French wine blight”, as it came to be known, triggered a crisis in European wine markets and opened the doors for Australia to export its wines to the “mother” country.
The invasive phylloxera is a tiny, aphid-like bug – a native of the US – that dines on the roots of Vitis vinifera grapevines, causing them to wither and die. Desperate for a fix, European vignerons and scientists in time discovered that grapevines grafted onto imported American rootstocks could resist phylloxera. Old World vineyards were replanted en masse with American vine roots grafted with the desired grape varieties: cabernet sauvignon, syrah (shiraz), chardonnay and pinot noir to name a few. Thanks to this infusion of American viticultural blood, French vineyards were slowly nursed back to health.
The vine killer arrived in Victoria in 1877 but, thanks to rigorous quarantine regulations, never made it as far as Adelaide. “As a result, our 19th- and early 20th-century South Australian vineyards represent the most significant plantings of pre-phylloxera vines in the world,” says Caillard. “Our oldest vineyards were established with cuttings taken from some of the best vineyards and nurseries of France, Spain and Germany, England, South Africa, and they’ve never been subject to a scorched-earth rebuild with New World – American – rootstocks. “There is no other country in the world that can boast such significant plantings of pre-phylloxera grapevines. It’s incredible.”
A vine leaf covered with tiny phylloxera bugs.Credit: Alamy Stock Photo
His point about Australia’s old vine treasures is sharpened by a retro moment in global wine connoisseurship. A new French association called Francs de Pied has galvanised those few French vignerons working with old, ungrafted heirloom vines planted on their own roots and untainted by American rootstocks. The most outspoken avatar of this “heritage vine” movement is Loic Pasquet, who makes the world’s most expensive wine. His Liber Pater – $40,000 a bottle on release, thank you very much – comes from a small plot of vines on scrappy land in Bordeaux’s Graves wine region in south-west France. Pasquet boasts that with ungrafted vines – uncontaminated by American roots – “the connection between the soil and the vine is total and the taste of the wine is totally different”.
His movement is the viticultural equivalent of a pure bloodline fetish: nostalgia in a bottle. In response to quibbles about Liber Pater’s eye-watering price, Pasquet shoots back: “What is the price you are ready to pay to have dinner with Napoleon?” Wine aficionados who share this view – including the movement’s patron, Prince Albert of Monaco – see a bottle of Francs de Pied wine as a time-travelling Tardis.
‘We really don’t market ourselves very well. We don’t tell our inspiring story.’
Andrew Caillard
Caillard becomes mildly infuriated when he squares Australia’s 170-year-old viticultural legacy with all the hoo-hah surrounding the Francs de Pied push and its “heritage” wines. “The Liber Pater brand shows what self-belief, a little bit of chutzpah and a great story can achieve. But Pasquet’s wines are made from vines planted just a few decades ago. In Australia, we’ve got thousands of hectares of the same kind of stuff,” he declares, “and many of our vineyards are well over 70 years old.”
Australia’s earliest vineyards were in many cases planted with cuttings from some of the truly great French vineyards of the 1830s, before they were hit by phylloxera. These include Clos de Vougeot (which has a starring role in the film Babette’s Feast), the Hill of Hermitage and Château Lafite. “Our forefathers believed that Australia would become the France of the southern hemisphere,” he says. “Their imagination, resourcefulness and magnificent ambition have given us something massively meaningful and substantial to build on.”
Caillard takes another sip, and his mild tone returns. “We really don’t market ourselves very well,” he sighs. “We don’t tell our inspiring story very well.”
His lavishly produced and painstakingly researched book is, at heart, an attempt to address this absence, fill the void. The core of the argument is both rock-solid and spot-on: the reputation of Australian wine suffers from the silence surrounding its living heritage.
Funded by friends, family and wine patrons, and self-published via Longueville Media, The Australian Ark cost more than $1 million to produce and chiselled 17 years out of its author’s life. In a set of concise panels in the book’s extensive colonial chapters, Caillard details some of Australia’s old extant vineyards – most but not all of them in the Barossa. These pre-date the Francs de Pied movement by many decades. They include the “ancient surviving shiraz vines in the Barossa Valley’s Moorooroo vineyard”, likely planted as early as 1847. The equally venerable Cirillo Estate Vineyard – “home of what is believed to be the world’s oldest grenache vines” – dates back to circa 1848. Then there is the 1850-planted Torbreck Hillside Vineyard, which still makes a contribution to Torbreck’s RunRig Shiraz.
The Henschke Hill of Grace vineyard, in South Australia’s Eden Valley, was planted in the 1860s with pre-phylloxera shiraz cuttings from the Hermitage region of France.
The long list of heirloom Barossa vineyards includes the famous Henschke Hill of Grace Vineyard, planted in the 1860s with shiraz, and the 1888-established Penfolds Kalimna Vineyard Block 42, which he describes as “arguably the oldest commercial plantings of cabernet sauvignon in the world”.
The Australian Ark is a tale about a past that has never really passed, at least not for Caillard. He’s convinced that if the story of Australia’s heirloom vines and ancient vineyards were better known, it might turn around the beleaguered wine industry’s future. “We just need a collective and more purposeful effort to highlight the specialness of our grand old vineyards and ancient grapevines,” he says. “Drinking a glass of living history captures the essence of fine wine, the cycles of nature, and a feeling of connection and belonging.”
To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.