Golden Oldies

Golden Oldies

Directions

Whatever happened to…?

Barossa Pearl... Sparkling Starwine... Gala Spumante... Ben Ean...

If you can still sing the Aeroplane Jelly song; if you actually remember Vietnam, Apollo 11, decimal conversion, and the Johnnies O’Keefe and Farnham, chances are you’ve tasted one of these wines. And, while it’s easy now to scoff at such old-fashioned fruity crowd-pleasers (the wines, not the Johnnies), they are the very products that transformed beer-chugging, fortified-sipping Aussies into the urbane sophisticates we have become.

Agents of Change

Up until the 1950s, except for a cultured few, beer held sway in Australia. Well, for the blokes – who jammed the front bar for countless pots, schooies, middies and pints in the desperate, dripping hour before 6 o’clock closing. Shielas preferred an afternoon sherry or port and lemonade – enjoyed in a lifeless, postage-stamp-sized backroom known as the Ladies Lounge. It would be some years before Merle Thornton (yep, Siggy’s Mum) and Rosalie Bogner chained themselves to the front bar of Brisbane’s Regatta Hotel in protest against segregated drinking in pubs. (Word to the wise: be careful what you wish for.)

In the meantime, Leo Buring quietly held the line at his Ye Olde Crusty Cellars in Sydney, serving premium table wines to the cultured few, as he had done since 1930. But by the mid-fifties, change was in the wind...

The Big Fresh

It was the Germans who started it, with some ripper new technology: cold pressure fermentation tanks, which could produce white wines with all their freshness and delicate aromatics intact. It sparked a white winemaking revolution, and Aussies were in like Flynn. Colin Gramp at Orlando was first out of the blocks, purchasing two of the German-engineered tanks. Within six months, his Riesling had picked up first prize at both the Melbourne and Sydney Wine shows. Gramp celebrated the wins by heading off to Germany to purchase more equipment. It was there that he encountered Perlwein – a lightly frizzante, low-alcohol, fruit-driven wine that was stupendously popular in Germany. He determined to give the style a crack on his return.

A Pearler

Gramp added Frontignan and Muscatel during the secondary ferment (instead of the usual sugar solution) which disrupted the ferment, lowering alcohol considerably, while adding fruity sweetness. In a final coup, to deliberately position his new wine away from the popular sparklings of the day, Gramp bottled it in an elongated version of the Perrier water bottle. Orlando’s Barossa Pearl was a huge and immediate hit – and to Gramp’s great surprise – with both women and men.

Leo Buring was among the first to respond to Pearl’s remarkable success. His Rinegolde was already Australia’s leading white table wine, but Leo correctly read the zeitgeist, and – even though no great fan of it himself, apparently – produced a frizzante version of his best-seller. Sparkling Rinegolde was born.

Under Contract

The race was on. Kaiser Stuhl’s winemaker and genius business manager, Ian Hickinbotham, was eager to produce this new style of wine, but with a fledgling brand to launch, and no funds for marketing, he turned his attention to contract winemaking. For years, Kaiser Stuhl produced pearl wines and sparklings for other companies, including Sparkling Rinegolde for Buring, Pearlette for Yalumba, Asti Spumante (later, Gala Spumante) for Distillerie Stock, Mardi Gras and Tiffany for Penfolds, and others.

In 1963, Ian finally released a pearl wine under his own brand: Kaiser Stuhl Pearl. (It was the era of novelty bottles, and this one came in a waist-shaped bottle that inspired its nickname: Mae West... natch.)

Big Mistake... Very Big.

Over east, things were hotting up in the Hunter Valley. According to winemaking luminary Phil Laffer, a mistake at Lindeman’s had resulted in the production of a fruity white, which they decided to market as Moselle. They named their accidental wine Ben Ean. After a slow burn, Ben Ean went on to phenomenal success in the sixties and seventies. (At its peak, every third bottle of white wine sold in Australia was Ben Ean.)

The foundations were laid. Back at Orlando, Colin Gramp had glimpsed the future: “... we soon realised that Barossa Pearl had a market, a particular market, and I feel it was... I can’t think of the right word... an introductory market. And people... would be looking to move on to something with just a little more finesse. And so we made Starwine...”

Fast Forward

It’s Adelaide, 1973. Don Dunstan is premier; Rundle Mall is still a street. A young man walks in to a party with a bottle of his favourite wine under his arm – Orlando Sparkling Starwine. He doesn’t know it yet, but one day, he’ll become Chief Winemaker at Wolf Blass.

Looking back, he’ll remember his favourite tipple with fondness and respect: “Well, you’ve gotta start somewhere...”

Damn straight, Hatch.