by Graeme Leith
We were renovating houses at the time, but these establishments didn’t mind our work clothes at lunchtime. They had not become gentrified, and I’m sure that you can still get fed at the Railway if you’re neither a retired Italian businessman nor an artisan in dapper clothing.
It was during one of the lunches at the Railway that, momentously, I announced I wanted to establish a vineyard and become a winemaker. Present at that lunch were Stuart Mair (who later set up Coal Valley vineyard near Yallourn) and David Reimers (who was about to plant vines on his family property in Central Victoria). I had ‘come out’.
The lie of the land
The Reimers’ property was at Kingower, a hamlet in the dry area north-west of Bendigo in Central Victoria, on old gold diggings, where goldminers had dug the soil more than 120 years ago. They were treading in the footsteps of their German ancestors, who had grown grapes and made wine there many years before. David and his brother Alvin had by then planted some cabernet sauvignon.
David encouraged us to look at those plantings at Kingower, already named Blanche Barkly after a huge gold nugget found there during the gold rush, in turn named after the daughter of the Victorian governor at the time. So one weekend Sue and I travelled to Heathcote, west through Bendigo and then through Inglewood and on to Kingower and Avoca.
As we drove along the dusty unmade road from Inglewood to Kingower and observed the sparse and hungry roadside forest of box and ironbark, I remarked to Sue: ‘The only thing you’ll grow here is bloody old!’ But as we approached Kingower, as we came into that little valley, we could see fig trees, peppercorns—a general greening in this otherwise dry place. We later learned that the valley had once embraced the lives of 6000 goldminers, but was home now to only a few families, who were, as it transpired, to become our friends and neighbours.
It had been a good wet year and David and Alvin’s rootlings were doing well, sprawling over a metre along the ground in their first year. The soil was impressive; it was a sandy loam mixed with some clay, ironstone and quartz amalgamated by the industry of the diggers in the gold rush as they turned over every bit of soil in their search for gold. What fortunes were made there, how many hopes and dreams were dashed? Forty years on, walking today in the silent bush behind the original Passing Clouds vineyard, looking over the endless diggers’ holes now filled with the debris of generations of trees, of ironbark, box and occasional red gums on the deepest soil, it is still easy to imagine hundreds of men spread over the rapidly denuding landscape toiling for gold.
Downstream from Blanche Barkly (if that is the appropriate direction to give for a creek that only runs a few days a year and has not run at all for the last ten years), past another rammed-earth house and behind the Gilmores’ old pub, was another property. It had been recently deserted by its occupants, Lily and Ruby Taig, who had died and moved on to a less troubled place. The house was a sad-looking affair, with two rammed-earth rooms near the road and, on the creek side, a slab hut with a one-fire stove and chimney.
In the old days they built the kitchens separately from the living quarters so that if the kitchen burned, the bedrooms would survive. Over the years the space between the two had been filled in with stud walls and a good effective fireplace, but the windows were very small and too high to look out of. The verandahs around the house had been largely filled in with flywire then covered with tarpaulins, for the Taig sisters were apparently worried about ‘Peeping Toms’.
However, the soil was good on the 15 acres of flats before the contour rose and the ground became tough and useless for anything but ironbark and box trees. The creek had obviously meandered over the flat for hundreds of thousands of years, because there were water-worn stones in the soil far away from the current creek bed. One paddock had been cleared and grew excellent grass. There were still trees and traces of Tom Taig’s original vineyard, from which, according to his son Gordon, younger brother of the now deceased Lily and Ruby, he produced ‘three bunches to a kerosene tin’. But the rest of the flat land, still covered with diggers’ holes, had regenerated with red or white gums, the pestilential boxthorn and Chinese tree of heaven. Occasional peppercorn trees, Schinus molle, had survived, as had a scattering of castor oil plants and wild tobacco, doubtless a legacy of the Chinese who followed the gold trail and often gained sustenance from the land which the white diggers had abandoned.
When David Reimers rang me to say that the Taigs’ place was up for sale, I drove around to find Sue at her house, 28 Carlton Street, and said that, if it was all right with her, we would go to an auction the next day and buy ourselves a vineyard site. She agreed, for we were partners and kindred spirits, and we were looking forward to sharing this grand project. We both embraced the idea of braving the elements, facing the challenge of the land and pursuing the holy grail of making ‘the best wine in the world’.
We did the two-and-a-half-hour trip in her Mini to the auction, held in the Lions Park at nearby Inglewood. I was sweating, Sue’s knees knocking during the bidding, then the auctioneer’s gavel fell for the last time and it was ours!
After the auction Gordon Taig drove out to the house with us, showed us around, loaded his ute with some furniture and mementos, and shared a bottle of bubbly that we’d kept cold for the occasion. For better or for worse, as of September 1973, Sue and I were the new owners of the Taigs’ place. We didn’t know then that we were hatching a dragon that we would have to keep feeding for the rest of its life.
There had to be a party, of course, and a couple of weeks later a disparate and eclectic group of our friends assembled at Kingower and had just that, with singing, bush poetry and plenty of wine, although I forget what we ate.
The Kingower project begins
Some people said we paid too much for Kingower and I defended myself by saying that it was only the price of a second-hand Commodore car. Certainly, over the years, it has produced many millions of dollars’ worth of wine, providing much income to the government as taxes, and much to the purveyors of corks, barrels, bottles, labels, capsules, insurance, fuel, winemaking equipment and materials, not to mention corrugated iron and steel tubing, with a little bit left over for us as wages.
It was too late in the year to buy any grapevine rootlings. In fact, being September, a little too late, by conventional wisdom, to plant them at all that season. But we were champing at the bit, and some luck came our way.
At the time, I was doing some wiring at Lazar’s restaurant in King Street. The restaurant had an ensemble of instrumentalists who played baroque music from the ‘gods’ to entertain the diners. They were, I think, asking for more money, so Tom Lazar sacked them, a practice to which he was not unaccustomed. He decided to install a discotheque, which, of course, had to be the best in the Southern Hemisphere. It was duly designed by experts—and me—and I built it. The DJ could sit in front of a console designed like a piano keyboard and by pushing keys make all manner of good things happen. Colour wheels played huge oil-flowing designs on the walls, coloured spots were synchronised to the music, strobes lit up statues, black lights lit up people’s white shirts, teeth and dandruff to give a different look, bubbles fell from above, and at floor level ‘smoke’, as carbon dioxide gas, could be made to emerge from hidden vents, the combination of which made it slippery for the male ‘go-go’ dancer, Robin Hardiman, who slipped and fell on opening night.
Tom insisted that we have dinner at Lazar’s every night for the first week, and one way or another we became friends. A few years earlier he had set up the Virgin Hills vineyard near Kyneton and bought a large bluestone mansion there, and for his mother a bluestone cottage over the road. They had finished planting there for the year and he had some spare rootlings that I could have.
We couldn’t wait for the weekend so the night following Tom’s offer we left Melbourne after work. David and Anne Brown, Sue and I drove to Kingower in my little work van, collecting the rootlings from Mrs Lazar on the way. Armed with picks and shovels, hammers, pegs and str
ing, we arrived at Kingower and in the lights of the van we dug the holes, planted the vines, had something to eat and drink then returned to Melbourne to be ready for work the next day. I forget what we drank that night but knowing Dave Brown it would have been good, and suitably ceremonial. Five hours’ driving, three hours’ work and, after eating and packing up, back in Melbourne by about 1.30 a.m.
And so our vineyard had begun, on the site of the original Tom Taig vineyard.
Some years later, when renovating the house, we found a cancelled bankbook that had slid down between the slabs in the lining of the kitchen. It was dated, I think, 1912, in the name of Tom Taig, and showed that he had deposited about one pound a week at the Mildura branch. We assumed he’d worked up there, pruning, and had returned with some Gordo cuttings of the vines that produced the legendary bunches of three to a kerosene tin—fresh grapes in the Depression times would have been a wonderful luxury in the Australian bush.
It is strange to recall how parsimonious we were in 1973–74, and how naive. If you were to set up a vineyard now, you’d be jotting down the following costs: tractor $30,000; spray unit $20,000; cultivator $10,000; vines $30,000; posts and wires $60,000; and so on. But we had no business plan at that stage, and no budget. However, we needed something to hold the water for the vines, so we bought a brand-new Furphy tank from the makers in Shepparton. We were enormously proud of it, its end plates proclaiming in Pitman shorthand and English: ‘Good better best, Never let it rest, Til your good is better, And your better, best.’ It bore the name ‘James Furphy and Sons, Shepparton’ and, perhaps incongruously, a stork carrying a baby. The ends are cast iron, the tank is the same as those used in the North African deserts of World War I, when parched soldiers would gather around them to drink, fill their water bottles and gossip—hence ‘furphy’, a rumour.
(I recently installed the faithful Furphy as a water feature in the dam at Musk, our new headquarters and vineyard, near Daylesford. And so the Furphy lives on!)
From the electrical contracting business I had a spare, ancient van and that was brought up and pressed into service. It became the water tanker from then on, with the Furphy inside, filled from a motorised pump at the dam. There were gum trees overhanging the vineyard so we purchased a chainsaw to deal with them and to cut firewood for winter, some of which we used ourselves and some which we sold to the Evelyn Hotel in North Fitzroy for the fireplace. To achieve that we would fill the trailer with wood and tow it back to Melbourne behind the Volkswagen throughout the winter.
We had to prepare the vineyard for the new planting the following year, 1974, so a tractor was needed. We called into Sheppard’s, the Massey Ferguson dealers at Kyneton, and were soon the proud owners of a 1954 grey Ferguson TEF 25, the last of the grey diesels, and surely the best mechanical purchase I have ever made, for today it is still going strong and ticks over like a clock. Its initial purchase price was $2000 and it hasn’t depreciated at all—we’d get more than $4000 for it now! It’s been back to Brian and Dennis at Sheppard’s twice; once it required a new clutch plate and, at the end of vintage recently, a leak developed in a hose feeding fuel to the injectors. Brian and Dennis found a brand new one in the old stock, still marked seventeen shillings and sixpence! They charged me $20 for it! Is there no end to man’s greed and avarice, I thought, as I paid them. (We speculated that had it been a bottle of Grange and appreciated at the same rate, it would be worth quite a lot more than $20.)
Trucking then was not as it is today, so Sir Samuel Ferguson Bart, as Sue later nicknamed the tractor, came up on a train from Kyneton to Inglewood where we collected him. I proudly drove him the 7 miles to Kingower, Sue following me in the Mini. We had to purchase a disc cultivator (although why we bought a second-hand one I’ll never know, for it never worked very well), and a ripper to break up the soil along the vine rows. We calculated that we had to dig about 10,000 holes so, having learned from the experience of the second-hand discs, I bought a brand-new post-hole digger to fit behind the tractor. Now everything for the vineyard was ready to go.
A simple blend
The original ‘Tom Lazar’ planting consisted of some shiraz vines and some cabernet sauvignon. These had grown well, so more vines were ordered.
The proportions of cabernet to shiraz were to be simple—40 per cent cabernet sauvignon and 60 per cent shiraz, for that was the blend we planned to make. The shiraz cabernet had worked so well for Penfolds, for Reynella, and lately for Wolf Blass, although cabernet was always considered the premier variety and shiraz the inferior. On the Wolf Blass labels, for instance, where the blend was disclosed, cabernet sauvignon was in large letters while the shiraz was in smaller letters below it, even though the shiraz component was greater.
Stuart Anderson of Balgownie was growing both varieties but kept them separate; John Middleton in the Yarra Valley only used cabernet; and Baily Carrodus, also in the Yarra Valley, had his own formulas—idiosyncratic, of course. It was considered quite brave of Ron Laughton of Jasper Hill to come out years later and declare himself to be a shiraz man; yet people considered the Grange Hermitage to be the finest dry red in Australia, apparently without realising that it was at least 90 per cent shiraz, and often more.
We expounded on the virtues of cabernet but drank Wynn’s Ovens Valley Shiraz when we could. However, because we had a soft spot for the Reynella Bin 2, to which the ‘Four Winds’ gang had introduced us, we ordered 250 vines of grenache, that being a component of the Bin 2.
We also ordered a few pinot noir, although I don’t know why because Kingower is far too hot for pinot. Ignorance, I guess. It should be remembered that there was virtually no pinot growing in Victoria back then and, although there were many pinot lovers about, I doubt that they drank Australian stuff—if any was available.
We worked on the soil around the house, preparing it for a vegetable garden and, before long, and after the frosts, we had tomatoes, capsicums, aubergine, cucumbers and pumpkins growing, as well as all the herbs that might be needed. There was always sufficient water in the house’s two modest rainwater tanks and the garden thrived, although we soon learned that tending it during the day in 38-degree heat was not a good idea—it tended to induce dizzy spells, our bodies not being conditioned to such temperatures. A timer and some trickle irrigation pipes gave the garden a mid-week drink when we were not there, but every weekend Sue and I were there without fail, occasionally with my children, Ondine and Sebastian, and often with friends who would come up from Melbourne to be part of it all.
In those days of the 1970s, irrigation was a dirty word to us; irrigated wines were often green-tasting and of low quality. This was before Max Loder at Riverina College, and perhaps others, began building trellises to hold many wires to lift and open the canopy and allow the desired ratio of sunshine and shade to be applied to the ripening bunches.
Back then, grapes were generally grown on a single wire and consequently would develop the umbrella-like canopy, shading the fruit and thus often giving a green capsicum flavour to cabernet sauvignon and a green tomato flavour to the shiraz. The dense canopies also meant that it was difficult for the sprays used to prevent powdery and downy mildews to easily penetrate through the leaves and canes. We wanted none of that. We wanted unirrigated grapes grown according to organic principles.
Marking out, planting, weeding
The proposed vineyard area was marked out after much discussion on planting distances. General Viticulture by A.J. Winkler, the American viticulturist, became our bible. Among other things in it, I marvelled at the Carpenteria Vine in California that produced 12 tons of fruit and covered more than an acre of ground. It stuck in my mind then that it was buds per acre that was relevant, not necessarily vines per acre. (This was a conviction that led to our later Musk vineyard spacings being possibly the widest in Victoria at 4 metres by 4 metres.)
Eventually, spacings of 3.6 metres by 1.8 metres were decided upon for Kingower, although the first ‘Tom Lazar’ plantings had been 2
.7 metres by 1.8 metres. Over the years it has become apparent that the wider spacing is better, allowing us to later put in a ‘T’ trellis for better penetration of light and air.
Marking out the vineyard was not too big a problem. It had to be accurate so I used wires to avoid stretch and accumulation of error, which could occur with string lines. One wire had knobs soldered onto it every 12 feet and the other, longer wire had knobs every 6 feet. If we’d used paint instead to mark where the holes should be dug, the mud would have obscured it.
My younger brother Greg came up to stay. We marked out the whole grid, indicating where the holes should be dug with whitewash made from lime, for I would never have countenanced the use of ‘plastic’ paint on our pure, pristine vineyard. The idea was that the wire would be laid aside while the holes were dug, then replaced and the rootlings planted, the soil filled in and later watered in with the water truck, more to drive out air than to provide moisture, for the soil was still damp.
It worked beautifully on the small shiraz paddock. The intention was to plant more shiraz the following year, but to plant the whole cabernet complement that year on the ground that had already been cleared and needed only cultivation. We had just finished the shiraz and set up our wires on the prepared soil of the cabernet block when it began to rain.