Launched in March 2024, The Australian Ark by Andrew Caillard MW is the most extensive history of the Australian wine industry ever written.
Andrew returns to the Drinks Adventures podcast to discuss his new three-volume epic, following our previous discussion in November 2020.
First up this episode, Andrew and I discuss the challenges involved with getting a book of this scale and ambition off the ground.
Advertisement
- Click here to open episode in your podcast player
We then explore just a handful of the individuals and events that have shaped the wine industry as told by Andrew in The Australian Ark3, such as:
- Who was the real father of Australian wine – it’s not James Busby as I previously thought;
- How colonial wine evolved from a cottage industry into a booming export industry spearheaded by the Emu brand of Australian burgundy in the late 1800s; and
- The Australian Wine Canon – Andrew’s list of the most influential Australian wines of all time, starting with the Rosehill Red Wine produced in Parramatta in 1792.
Trigger warning: This episode which includes some pretty confronting discussion about the displacement of First Nations people that sadly occurred as part of this story, and which Andrew doesn’t shy away from in his book.
I’d like to acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the land on which this podcast is produced – the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation – and pay my respects to their Elders past and present.
The Australian Ark is available in four different formats: Paperback, Hardback, Collector’s Linen Edition and Collector’s Leather Edition. All are printed in full-colour, lavishly illustrated and presented in a beautiful presentation case.
You can buy The Australian Ark direct from the publisher here.
The Australian Ark author Andrew Caillard: Full transcript
JAMES ATKINSON: Andrew Caillard, thanks so much for joining us again on the Drinks Adventures podcast.
ANDREW CAILLARD: It’s lovely to be here, thanks James.
JAMES ATKINSON: Really excited to talk to you about this incredible project, The Australian Ark. Take me back to how this project was conceived.
ANDREW CAILLARD: Yeah, so it actually began about 18 years ago and I was working at Langton’s as a fine wine auctioneer and I had been reading previously to that, a book by Max Lake called Classic Wines of Australia, which was first written in 1966.
And it’s a really beautiful book. It encapsulates the story of Australian wine. It’s not a very big book. It’s no more than about 150 pages or something like this, but in it, it details all the great wines that were produced in the post-war period and before.
And Max Lake’s descriptions of the places was really evocative and beautiful. And as an auctioneer, I thought, well, really it needs updating. And so I thought, I’m going to update it and do an homage to this book.
And so I started going through all the great wines of Australia. I got up to about 15,000 words and then I had to stop because our business was acquired by Woolworths, the supermarket group. And I realized that my life would change.
So I kind of put it in the bottom drawer for what of a better place to put it. And really I didn’t forget about it because I’ve always been very keen on wine history. And so subsequent to that, I was also working with edition seven of Penfolds’ The Rewards of Patience.
And so I was working on the history of Penfolds in that book and various articles in the media, history articles. So I always had that kind of view that this would be something that would be built into a book of some sort. It was always there in my mind.
But really it started to really gather pace about eight years ago when I was working on the Langton’s classification of Australian wine, the one before the recent release. And I wanted it to be steeped into the history of Australian wine.
You know, why are these wines, you know, kind of well known and famous and okay, they might only have a history of 20 vintages or 30 vintages or 40 vintages, but you know, the story behind them is often much longer and steeped into histories that go much, much further back.
But anyway, doing the classification and the narrative landed up being a bit of a kind of porridge with the people at Langton’s.
And so in the end, the classification was produced as a book with bullet points of Australian wine history, but it was very, very fragmented. And so I landed up reworking everything and starting all over again.
And when I’d finished the manuscript, it was about 350,000 words before we started going into the publishing phase. And that ultimately turned out to be 500,000 words, about 1200 images and illustrations and maps across three volumes.
And here we are, we’ve released it, which is absolutely amazing.
JAMES ATKINSON: And maybe just going back a bit, wine was kind of in the blood, wasn’t it? Tell me about the family history or the family connection to the Australian wine industry that you had in spite of originally moving here from the UK.
ANDREW CAILLARD: Yeah, when anyone ever meets me with my accent, they immediately put me into a box.
JAMES ATKINSON: Your accent certainly hasn’t been tempered with the years.
ANDREW CAILLARD: Well, that’s what you think. I think it probably has been tempered. So you can imagine how awful it was 40 years ago when I arrived here in Australia.
But I do actually have an Australian background. My mother is Australian and she comes from a winemaking family.
Her mother was Lydia Reynell and she came from the Reynell family that were some of the first vignerons in South Australia. They arrived in 1838 and really kind of planted and produced the first commercial wine in South Australia.
They certainly weren’t the very first vignerons, although they claimed it at one stage. But they were certainly extremely important and one of the largest producers at the turn of the 20th century.
JAMES ATKINSON: Sure. And once the manuscript had evolved to be so substantial, that must have kind of created some dilemmas of, well, how do we publish the book that I’ve written?
Because obviously, when you go to the big publishing houses, there’s going to have to be some pretty serious compromises. Tell us about that process.
ANDREW CAILLARD: It’s a really interesting thing because most people who write a book for a publisher, the first time around, there were two ways.
There’s producing a manuscript and then sometimes it’s people just producing a chapter and then getting the publisher interested who then commissions the writer to write a book.
I actually wrote the whole manuscript before going to a publisher. I originally had a publisher in the UK that was established by my friend Steven Spurrier, who’s unfortunately no longer with us and I thought it would be pretty cool to do it that way but during COVID, the difficulty of communications and thinking, well, actually, this is not going to work.
What happened was the funding issue, the publisher in the UK was not particularly cashed up. We discussed how we would fund it and we were talking about crowdfunding as a way of getting the book published.
But after that discussion, I went to the 70th anniversary of Penfold’s Grange and I bumped into Dr Angus Hughson who is pretty well known around Australian wine circles, he’s a wine writer who writes for Vinous, the American publication.
We were talking about it and I was talking about crowdfunding and he said, ‘mate, if you’re crowdfunding, you’re going to be the publisher. Why don’t we just publish it together?’
And I was a bit taken back with Angus saying, ‘we’, but I got used to that idea fairly quickly and about a month later, we sent out emails to friends, family and wine industry people.
I think I wrote 22 emails. On the back of those 22 emails, I raised $350,000 in about four weeks.
The West Australians, by the way, were amazing. They came back within a few seconds, all of them practically. And I can’t thank them enough because they really gave it momentum and they really understood what the project was about.
And then we had a cash crisis and so we went out and we raised another $250,000. So we raised just over $600,000 for this book.
But this is a million dollar project, you know, all the money has gone into the production of the book. I think you would agree that the production quality is absolutely brilliant.
That’s not my work, that’s the work of a whole editorial team. And I should mention David Longfield, who is also a co-publisher of this book and is an absolutely brilliant man.
And he fulfilled the role of being managing editor, if you like, as well as being the publisher. We had an editor in France, funnily enough, half Irish, half American, never been to Australia. And she was absolutely perfect. [inaudible] and I met her and I just thought, ‘oh, this is just perfect’. To have somebody who is completely divorced from the Australian wine industry, who can look at things from a very, very neutral point of view was absolutely perfect for me.
JAMES ATKINSON: Were there tensions around working with the publisher in terms of, was there ever any pressure to kind of bring the word count down or those types of things?
ANDREW CAILLARD: No, there was absolutely no pressure at all. I mean, in fact, I’m paying for the fact that there was no pressure because the original budgets that we had were based on three volumes, but all up 1200 pages.
We were going to be pretty tight with the illustrations and everything like that, but I think we just got carried away. I was revising doing all those kinds of things because even with a book this size, it’s still fragmented.
You know, there will be people in the Australian wine industry will be saying, ‘well, why didn’t he write about that or why didn’t he write about me or my family?’
Of course, as the years go by, it becomes more complex and there are just so many different people and wineries involved, you just can’t mention everything.
There might even be some wine regions that are barely mentioned, but in the end, it is I think pretty good coverage. But a part of that revisioning, it was, well, where are the gaps?
And this is where Angus came in pretty well. He read through the manuscript and being very contemporary, so not really steeped in the same kind of history as I am, but very much involved in the contemporary side of things.
He kind of looked at some of the manuscripts and said, well, I think this would be good if we added, if you put some more in on this or that, you know, so for instance, lower Great Southern… there wasn’t enough on that, you know, so there was a few little things that had kind of escaped me.
So they ended up going from 1200 to 1762 pages with a phenomenal amount of illustrations. I mean, you know, when people see the book and they see the images and stuff, you know, it just as a picture book, it’s completely revolutionises… perceptions of Australian wine because these images are, you know, they’ve been in archives, they’ve barely been shown.
There are some which are unknown out there, but there are so many images that people have never seen. And so therefore, you know, it’s a completely fresh story about Australian wine, I think.
JAMES ATKINSON: For sure. And of course, when you talk about the budget for the project, this is after you’ve already spent however many years working on it as a passion project, I guess. So there’s no kind of remuneration for your time.
ANDREW CAILLARD: There’s none. No, no, it’s the project that keeps asking for money, actually. Well, it’s funny because it just seems like a long schlep looking back, but it’s not, you know, it was fascinating and it never, it never really felt overwhelming.
I’m overwhelmed now, to be quite honest, but I was never overwhelmed actually doing the project. It just kind of evolved.
It’s like, you know, the Johnnie Walker ad, you know, to just ‘keep walking’ because that’s basically what I did. I just, I just kept going and didn’t stop, you know, I was endlessly fascinated.
JAMES ATKINSON: Tell me about the, you know, the earliest vineyards in Sydney and the earliest colonial wines. It wasn’t really an industry, was it? Or if it was, it was a cottage industry.
ANDREW CAILLARD: Yeah, that’s right. It was cottage, it was cottage industry. I don’t think anyone really knew what they were doing, you know, when they arrived.
I mean, the early colony was very close to starvation. One of the big problems was the lack of expertise, the lack of expertise in agriculture, and particularly with wine making.
So they very early on, a couple of Frenchmen were brought into prison as a war from the Napoleonic Wars, were brought into assist with viticulture.
And they’d said that they had that experience, but they had none. You know, it was, that was another ruse.
There was a guy called Schaeffer who planted one of the early vineyards and he was a German and planted what is really very near Parramatta. And he is said to have really produced the first wine.
There’s a Canon of Australian Wine, which is in the book, and there’s about 180 wines.
And in that Canon, that was really the original classic wines of Australia idea, you know, to kind of plot the course of Australian wine history through the story of Bottles of Wine.
Well, it’s in there. And the first one is the 1792 Rosehill, which is of course Parramatta Dry Red, which is a mythological wine.
But it was a discovery of a historian called Don Seton Wilkinson, who comes from an old winemaking family from the Hunter Valley and is doing a whole lot of research on the story of convicts.
He found a really compelling letter that was really asking about the 1792 and said, ‘could it be true that this wine actually came from New South Wales?’
The story is actually in the book and I think in all likelihood, Captain Arthur Phillip, the first governor of New South Wales, in all likelihood, he brought back bottles of colonial wine to show friends.
Interestingly, Arthur Phillip was of German background and very few people know that. Makes it fascinating because it basically says that the first Australian wines were made in the 18th century. I think that’s really interesting.
JAMES ATKINSON: Yeah. I’ve always been under the impression that it was James Busby who was the father of the Australian wine industry, but your book suggests that it was possibly William MacArthur whose role was more important.
ANDREW CAILLARD: James Busby was a really important character in the history of Australian wine, but his place in Australian wine is overstated.
Calling him the father, he’s called the father for a very good reason because he brought in vinestock material that was circulated around and really forms the foundation of the Australian wine industry.
But he was the father rather than parent. It wasn’t very good parenting. After 1832, James Busby went over to New Zealand, and became the first resident there.
After he went to New Zealand, James Busby’s involvement in the wine industry was negligible. Although his family had a vineyard up at Kirkton in the Hunter Valley, obviously there must have been correspondence and all of that stuff.
But it was William MacArthur, who really was the most astonishing human being, probably the greatest of all the colonial wine people, because he really carried on his father’s kind of imaginative dreams for what Australia would be.
The much-maligned John MacArthur, who was involved with the Rum Rebellion which took place in 1808, which was a coup d’etat and only became known as the Rum Rebellion in recent times.
But it was just a straight coup d’etat in which Governor Bligh of the Mutiny of the Bounty fame was deposed and they brought in a new government and John MacArthur was installed as a secretary.
He was a very polarising character, extraordinarily imaginative and had built a lot of wealth and had planted some of the first vineyards in Australia.
It was an agricultural economy based ‘on the sheep’s back’ as they used to say. John MacArthur brought in the first Saxon Merino sheep.
But William MacArthur was really fascinated more by horticulture and viticulture. He realised that after James Busby went to New Zealand, there was a committee formed to study, to analyse the cuttings that were surviving in the Botanic Gardens because they were planted in the Botanic Gardens up at Kirkton, Hunter Valley and also down in Camden Park.
And they realised that there were varieties that hadn’t been brought out or been mis-catalogued. There was a lot of mis-cataloguing. And there was a whole consignment never arrived which came from Spain but was destroyed.
So can you imagine, you know, we talk about alternative varieties like Tempranillo and such, that collection had survived. We might jolly well have had a different picture of what Australian wine would be today.
You know, they realised that there was no Cabernet Sauvignon. And, you know, claret was probably the most kind of popular wine, particularly in the UK.
And so William MacArthur organised to get some cuttings brought out in 1837. And that material was brought out by a guy called Didier Numa Joubert, who was a Frenchman who worked for Barton and Guestier.
And he stayed in Sydney with his brother, and they were very much involved in building the suburb of Hunters Hill, all those beautiful houses like St Malo and all that kind of stuff, which again is fascinating how the whole story of wine rubs up against the, you know, colonial ambitions in the building of a society.
But William MacArthur wrote all this incredible stuff, you know, How the Plant Vines under letters from Morrow, Morrow being Virgil. And his letters were published in the newspapers to explain how you start a vineyard, how to look after it and also how to make wine and all that kind of stuff.
And it was really, really, really well researched and brilliant because William MacArthur, you know, he was an extraordinary brain. He knew people like Charles Darwin and, you know, all the top scientists of the day.
And they were always corresponding. And so he was incredibly enlightened and the Camden nurseries, which he ran, which had all the cuttings and stuff, were sent all around Australia down to Yering Station in 1848 and then, of course, into South Australia.
I mean, the South Australian wine industry, a lot of the material that still exists through the surviving old vine is a lot of that genetic material that derives originally from Camden Park.
So William MacArthur, extraordinary. He’s described as being someone who’s quite difficult in the Australian dictionary of biography, which is really surprising to me because when I read his letters and everything he’s done, he sounds like the most engaging and wonderful person.
It’s a biography that needs to be written. I don’t think I’ve got it in me. I think this has been such a long journey, I need to turn my head probably to something else.
But it’s a biography that needs to be written because he is such an astonishing figure and his place in the world of wine should be more acknowledged.
JAMES ATKINSON: Were there any other characters that you unearthed in your research where you were like, wow, this person was extremely important in the story of Australian wine and hasn’t really been acknowledged?
ANDREW CAILLARD: Well, people like Peter Bond Burgoyne, an Englishman, was the most important wine merchant in the UK at the end of the 19th century.
He was importing huge amounts of Australian wine, firstly from South Australia, all in hogsheads, which is one of the reasons why hogsheads are used so prolifically in Australian wine, particularly by companies like Penfolds.
And, you know, the absolutely astonishing amounts, he had, you know, the Auldana brand, and he was also bringing in stuff from the Cape Colony or from South Africa, as it was known by that time.
But he was also very much involved in investing in wineries in Rutherglen, which was seen as a place that could produce the heavy, ferruginous reds that were prescribed by doctors in the UK and were really, really popular.
And there’s a really terrific anecdote in the book about this young woman from the counties who’s taking his son into the London Zoo and sees an emu in the zoo.
And she says, ‘Hey, Willie, look at that big burgundy, them things you see on the posters’, which really shows you how prolific Australian burgundy, as it was called, even though it was nothing like burgundy, how we see it today anyway.
JAMES ATKINSON: Well, this was certainly something that was news to me was this export boom that happened in the late 1800s. Tell us a little bit about how that kicked off. You’ve mentioned about the, you know, sort of the health aspect.
ANDREW CAILLARD: Yeah, it started off really small, but you know that the aphid pest Phylloxera, which came into France and it destroyed an enormous amount of vineyards in France.
I mean, you know, even now it hasn’t really recovered and will never will. So the volumes of French wine going into the UK was diminishing.
And, you know, the colonial wine industries were really keen to get a share of the UK market, but there were all these kind of deals that England had been doing with, you know, kind of European countries.
And also there was a lot of stuff about Australian wines being very high on alcohol and all the duties and stuff were related to the alcohol content.
And there was a big scandal, which is in the book, which involves a guy called [inaudible], who insisted that the Australian wines, you know, at 15.5%, 16%, were not naturally, they hadn’t been reached naturally at that level.
And the government, it suited the government policy to follow that form of thinking.
It was a kind of scientific fraud, in my view, and I think the story is in volume one, and it is really, really interesting. But anyway, the doors started opening up, and it went from a trickle to an absolute boom.
There was an enormous amounts that went in. And it was fairly concentrated with just a few importers, and Peter Bond Burgoyne was the most important one, and the other one was the Emu Wine Company.
This whole market continued right up into the First World War. And what’s really interesting is, when I first came to live in Australia, the received wisdom from everybody is that the Australian wine industry was built on a fortified wine culture, and that’s not really true.
It’s true that the very, very first wines, like from Gregory Blaxland from Brush Farm, which won the first gold medal in the UK from the Society of Arts Manufacturing.
JAMES ATKINSON: In what year was that?
ANDREW CAILLARD: 1826, 28, around the late 20s. He won a Serra’s Medal, first a silver and then a gold, around that kind of thing.
And those wines that were sent to the UK were branded to be able to preserve them in the long journey to the UK. But by the mid-19th century, that was a fairly rare thing to do.
All the wine that was being sent over in vast amounts during the 1870s, 1880s, particularly in the 1890s and 1900s, they weren’t fortified wines at all.
JAMES ATKINSON: And was that because of the advances that had been made and the understanding of the technical aspect?
ANDREW CAILLARD: Yeah, I suppose that would be to some degree, yes, but it was also because transport was more rapid.
In a sailing ship, it would take months and months and months. In a steamship, it would only take six to eight weeks or something like this, so it was much faster. And so the problems weren’t so [inaudible]. There were technical issues, by the way, of course, and also about perspectives and expectations.
As science improves, your expectations change. A good example is things like brettanomyces, which we know kind of destroys the quality of wine, but it was kind of an accepted thing, and then everyone could measure it, and then they said, ‘well, it’s a fault’.
So it’s a really interesting thing, you know, how the goalposts of quality go along.
But the Export Bounty Act of 1924, which was really given as a bonus to the Australian wine community and the Australian economy generally, for Australia’s contribution to the war effort during the First World War, that had the effect of supercharging the Australian wine industry from an economic point of view, but it destroyed it at the same time.
The aspirations of being as a fine wine producer, because all these producers, a good example is Kay Brothers in McLaren Bell, who have one of the most beautiful family histories on wine. It’s beautifully done.
They really started on the back of the export market boom for Red Burgundy. And then after the Export Bounty Act of 1924, they pivoted to being fortified wine producers, more or less.
You know, large amounts went into the UK competing against cheap Spanish and Portuguese fortified wine. And within a generation, Australia’s reputation had been trashed.
JAMES ATKINSON: Were they poor quality fortified wines that have been coming into the UK?
ANDREW CAILLARD: Yes, there was a lot of that. And also things like Wallaby White and Kanga Rouge, to my family’s horror, by the way, because it was under the Reynella brand, but not when my family were involved in it.
When I told my grandmother about it, she was horrified that Kanga Rouge should be made by Reynella. The reputation of Australian wine had pretty much been trashed by that time.
And we were still making really great wines here in Australia, by the way. The old Morris O’ Sheas, the wines from Roger Warren, from Colin Crease and all that kind of stuff.
They were known here, but they weren’t made in very large quantities, so they were never seen overseas. So you had this really kind of pompous, England rules the waves type of attitude towards Australian wine.
And it kind of manifests itself in the Monty Python sketch of the early 70s. And it says a lot of people in this country poo poo Australian table wines.
And this is a pity as many fine Australian wines appeal not only to the Australian palate, but also to the cognascenti of Great Britain.
Black Stump Bordeaux is rightly praised as a peppermint flavoured burgundy, while a good Sydney Syrup can rank with any of the world’s best sugary wines.
And that’s when they talk about Chateau Chunder, Hobart Muddy, Cuvée Reservé chateau-bottled Nuit Ça Wugga-Wugga’, and stuff.
And there’s also some fairly nasty kind of things about wine having ‘the bouquet like an aborigine’s armpit’.
I know it was for the times, but it’s ugly. It’s really, really hard to read. And they were brilliant, the Monty Python people. And I don’t think there was any miserable bone in their bodies to put down or destroy anything.
But because they were so powerful and so loved in the UK, it created an attitude to Australian wine that took a long time to break.
And it was really 10 years later that Australian wines kind of gathered its feet again and landed up with this new export boom and a reputation for our very, very fruit-driven wines that the average consumer really loved.
JAMES ATKINSON: Going back to the colonial era, a sad and confronting part of the story was the displacement of First Nations people that was very much a part of the establishment of the wine industry.
And you really didn’t shy away from exposing that in the book. Was that confronting for you too when you did that research to sort of uncover the extent of that?
ANDREW CAILLARD: Yeah, it did. When I first heard people saying about in 1788, Australia was invaded by Captain Arthur Phillip and the kind of convicts and everything like that, I thought, ‘no, that’s just… what are they talking about?’
But I think anyone who kind of reads history and reads what’s happened to the First Nations, Aboriginal people, it’s horrific, it’s awful.
You know, a lot of Aboriginals died because of European diseases. And there are people, historians, who believe strongly that it was spread purposely to destroy the population.
Which, if that’s the case, it’s absolutely heartbreaking.
One of the historians who helped check the fidelity of the book was a guy called Dr. Stephen Gapps.
He was involved in the SBS programme on Australians at War, about the Aboriginal plight.
He was just saying the whole of Sydney Harbour at one stage was just full of bodies of dead Aboriginals who had succumbed to diseases like smallpox and all that kind of stuff.
So, pretty horrific, really. But as the colony expanded, and it expanded out of control, in my view, it wasn’t a government policy to destroy Aboriginal society or anything like that, but it did kind of, well, it did happen, we know it happened.
The rampant expansion of New South Wales and the squatters, you know, kind of establishing their runs outside the law, they were called squatters because it was really illegal, because they had gone beyond the boundaries to establish their farms.
And of course, there was competition for food between their sheep and cattle. And so, there were Aboriginals that were killed without anyone knowing, you know, and all those kind of things.
So, it’s almost beyond your imagination, actually. It’s so difficult to appreciate.
You know, it wasn’t, not everyone was like this. They were, not all colonial people were bad.
I mean, when I look at my own family, I know they weren’t bad.
And I know they had honourable visions and everything like that. But it was also a collision between cultures.
And they just, to integrate was very difficult. And, you know, it’s just, you know, kind of awful.
JAMES ATKINSON: I think we touched on this earlier, but the Australian Wine Canon, your list of some of the most important wines, was that a painstaking thing to put together?
ANDREW CAILLARD: Oh crikey, yes, it was really, really difficult. And it was really the original idea for the book actually, you know, as part of the kind of classic wines of Australia.
The plan was to kind of pinpoint wines that really shaped the story of Australian wine. And, you know, some of them were really easy to do.
One of the most obvious wines is the very famous 1962 Penfolds, Bin 68, Coonawarra Cabernet Kalmina Shiraz. That was an astounding wine that, you know, was lionised by wine aficionados all around the world.
But there are a lot of wines that people don’t know about and I think going into the 19th century, the wines that were winning gold medals in, you know, kind of the wine exhibitions, you know, the great exhibitions of 1851, 1855 and, you know, the Bordeaux exhibitions that took place in the 1880s.
And there were exhibitions everywhere and Australian wine was shown there and they won gold medals and all sorts of, you know, different accolades.
And there was a belief that Australia would be the France or the Southern Hemisphere, that Australia would become, you know, one of the greatest wine nations in the world.
And that was a belief that many outside observers saw. And so in the Canon, it names them.
And some of them are a little bit loose because the wines might not have been commercially available… but they were described in the actual wine shows.
So they might have only been, you know, kind of samples and stuff like that.
But they still show what the ambition of the industry was. And if you just take it apart, the Canon of Australian Wine, it just really kind of shows you that the ambitions of the Australian wine industry was a fine wine aspiration. That was it.
You know, what changed everything was really our post-First World War soldier settlements, economics, politics, the Export Bounty Act of 1924. All of those changed the wine industry’s whole fabric.
And over a generation or two, people have then got really what the original aspirations of Australia were. And particularly now, where we are in a crossroads, you know, it behoves anyone who is in the wine industry to look back at history, to see what happened in the past because it will inform them about what they need to do now and for the future.
I’m hoping that The Australian Ark will help people give some perspective to the decisions they make for the future.
JAMES ATKINSON: One of the chapters that I wasn’t really aware of because it was before my time in the industry and probably before my time even as a wine drinker was the era of the cult wines in the 90s.
Tell us about that era, that phenomenon and did those wines live up to their cult status?
ANDREW CAILLARD: It was an incredible phenomena. I mean, I was a wine auctioneer at the time with Langton’s, running the Langton’s business in Sydney and the whole cult thing came in like a storm.
It was incredible. You know, Robert Parker, the most powerful wine critic at the time started aiming his sights at Australia and was impressed by the very kind of, you know, concentrated fruit-driven wines that were being produced out of the Barossa Valley, McLaren Vale and all those, you know, kind of places.
And he landed up championing a number of producers that had not really gained traction here domestically.
And examples were that Chris Ringland, Clarendon Hills, Australis, wines like that.
The scores that he was giving, 100 points for some of them, at a time when 100 points was actually a rarity.
Nowadays, everyone gives 100 points to several different wines. But in those days, getting 100 points was an astonishing achievement.
And people like Chris Ringland with his Three Rivers, wine as it was called then, you know, really landed up having a cult status.
And so as an auctioneer, you know, there were people who they would call flippers because they would buy the wine and then flip it through the auction market and, you know, make profits of, you know, kind of over 100% or more on the wines that they were selling.
You know, these wines were criticized by a lot of the observers of the day saying this is not what Australian wine is all about and blah, blah, blah, blah.
But there were certainly a lot of fairly high alcohol wines that were bought by American customers who put them in their cellars and they were disappointed a bit later on.
But they were getting huge marks by Parker. But what was really interesting about the cult wine scene is that it actually changed the narrative for Australian wine for a lot of positive reasons.
I mean, it put Australia on the fine wine map, sure, but it also created debates and there was a very kind of rancorous debate about Parker’s influence on Australian wine and James Halliday wrote an essay and gave a speech about it one time.
I think it was because a lot of people felt that Australians should shape their future, not an outsider.
But what was really interesting is that like with all these kind of brands and stuff like that, they land up finding their own level.
So some cult wines like Chris Ringland have become very much a part of the mainstream and others just faded away, not to be seen. That’s the nature of all products.
JAMES ATKINSON: You say in the book that the wine industry is in good hands and its future is assured. There’s been a lot of negativity in recent weeks about the One Grape and Wine Sector Plan released by the wine industry bodies.
What’s your view on it and why are you so sure that the future is safe?
ANDREW CAILLARD: I think that the Wine Sector Plan, I think it’s a pity that a lot of grievances are being aired publicly because I don’t think it’s a good look for Australian wine.
I think it diminishes our reputation. I wish that these arguments were done in-house. But I suppose in these internet days and social media and everything, it’s really inevitable.
JAMES ATKINSON: Is the rest of the world watching as we bicker on LinkedIn?
ANDREW CAILLARD: I would say that they are watching and it will just create more negativity because that’s what happens. So it’s a real pity.
But ultimately we will find our way and we will prevail. But when I’m talking about being in good hands, I’m talking about the winemakers and the viticulturists.
I mean, we’ve got the most amazing people, extraordinary thinkers, extraordinary resourceful people. And I’ve got absolute faith that the Australian wine industry is going to prevail and do really well.
But we’re at crossroads. There’s no question about that. And we have to decide about, you know, what we stand for and where we’re going to go.
And we have to be self-assured. We have to believe in ourselves. You know, we’re all arguing out in public. It gives an idea of dissonance. And I don’t think that’s a good thing.
JAMES ATKINSON: Where can people get their hands on the books and tell us about the formats that they’re available in? Because there’s paperback, hardback, and there’s also a third deluxe version, isn’t there?
ANDREW CAILLARD: Yeah, there are in fact four versions. And the way you publish books is you obviously print the guts and then you combine them in various ways. So the majority of the books are printed in paperback.
And the paperbacks are now available through retail stores. And unfortunately, they’re being discounted, but a great advantage to people who want to get the book.
The paperbacks are only available, they’re available through us, but through retail. Hardback, which are retailing at almost $400 through the australianark.com.
And then there’s a linen version. I think we’ve run out of linen, but we’ll produce more.
They’re being sold at, I think, $500. And then we have leather versions, which are being sold at $1000. I mean, those are really specialist.
I mean, in my view, the hardbacks are the most durable, the most fantastic. They’re the ones to go for if you’re a collector.
If you’re a student, the paperbacks are beautifully produced as well. And yeah, you can get them through bookstores, which is brilliant.
JAMES ATKINSON: But probably better for your project if people buy direct, right?
ANDREW CAILLARD: Yeah, if you buy direct, it’s best for us because this is a non-for-profit venture. For me, it’s vocational. And even with the editorial team, they’ve gone above and beyond to get this book to where it is.
But for us, it’s better to buy online rather than through retailers. But buying through retail is also good because we are obviously selling to the retailers and we’re very happy with that result and we’d like to see people buying through there as well.
But there’ll be much better value now through retail, unfortunately.
JAMES ATKINSON: Well, Andrew, congratulations on the publication of The Australian Ark.
It’s a phenomenal achievement and an incredible legacy for you as a wine industry person.
I think what I really want to say is just that even though it’s such a big piece of work, it’s very engagingly written and I haven’t read it cover to cover yet.
But every time I open it up at a different page, I go down a rabbit hole and just get really excited by some of this incredible history.
So, congratulations.
ANDREW CAILLARD: Yeah, so thank you very much and I don’t expect people to read from beginning to end.
That’s what I’m hoping is people will dip into it and go back to it all the time. That’s what I’m hoping.
JAMES ATKINSON: Thanks for your time today.
ANDREW CAILLARD: Thank you very much indeed.
More:
Andrew Caillard MW on ultra-fine Australian wine: S7E4
Seppelt Show Sparkling Shiraz, with winemaker Clare Dry
How Clare Valley drove screwcap revolution for wine
