“I have learnt a good deal in the last week, but I want you to tell me now how you managed to put your wines on to the European market and get a sale for them against the competition of the French, German, and Spanish wines which had had the vogue for centuries, their vineyards are all within five hundred miles of London, for instance, and here you’re ten thousand miles away. How did you manage it?”
This chapter is not an advertisement of Australian wines in general or of the products of Seppeltsfield in particular, and therefore I shall not say everything that he told me, but the nett result came to this: When the wine-growing industry of Australia began to get a bit too big for Australia’s consumption, and when it was found that varieties of European vines produced wines of delicately differentiated flavours, it became a question where markets were to be found for the products of an industry which was growing much more rapidly than the native consumption.
When they found the solution of this problem the Australian wine-growers did one of the best strokes of business that ever was done within the confines of real business. By real business, I mean honest business. Those who know a great deal more about the subject than I will see much more meaning in those two words than perhaps I do. If Australian wine was going to make its way in the markets of the world it had to be wine; in other words, those who made it had to rely for their success and for the interest on the capital and the brains that they had put into the work upon a reversion to principles as old as the days of Solomon. They had to make wine from grapes and nothing else. Their rivals in the European markets had already learnt everything there was to be known about fortifying and flavouring and chemical essences. They knew how, for instance, German potato spirit could be turned into seven-year-old brandy in a few weeks, and how sherry which had never been within a hundred miles of a vineyard could be made such a perfect counterfeit of the original fluid that a custom’s expert couldn’t tell the difference between a cask worth sixty pounds and one worth six. They made many failures, but in the end they not only got into the European markets, but actually out-sold the home wine-growers who had had hundreds of years start of them.
The Australian grape goes into the crusher as grape it comes out as grape-juice, and as grape-juice it crosses the seas and makes its appearance in bottles and flagons on our tables. It has been fermented and sterilised and that is all, and it is not too much to say that, saving these two necessary processes, when you drink a glass of Australian wine, red or white, still or sparkling, you are actually drinking the juice of the grape and nothing else; wherefore it may be fairly said that the development of the Australian wine industry from very small beginnings, as, for instance, from that one acre first planted with vines at Seppeltsfield into the two thousand odd acres of to-day yielding two thousand tons of grapes and eight hundred thousand gallons of wine a year, is just about as good a proof as one can get that honesty is sometimes the best policy even in business.
Grape-crushing by machinery at Seppeltsfield. The Grapes from which Australian Wine is made are never touched by hand (or foot) after the process of Wine-making has begun.
Happily there was no speculation about the wine industry in Australia. If this were also true of her gold-mines and her wool-crops she would be a good deal richer and more honestly wealthy than she is.
I have seen French colonists in French colonies, Germans in German colonies, and colonists of many nationalities under the alien flags of the South American Republics, where, as a rule, they do a great deal better than in their own colonies, if they have any, but never have I seen such a perfect realisation of the ideal of cosmopolitan colonisation as I saw during my stay at Seppeltsfield.
Day after day we drove out along broad roads through the pleasant vineyards and farmlands which lay under the ranges that shielded them from the hot north winds, and every hour or so we pulled up in a village which might have been picked up by superhuman hands out of Germany, or France, or Holland, Ireland, Scotland, or England, and just put down there in the midst of what forty years ago was the South Australian Wilderness.
My host was a German and the son of a German, and he has nine sons, all good Australians, true sons of the soil, worthy citizens of the empire who have found all that men seek to find within the wide confines of the Pax Britannica.