History of Margaret River

There was a day— blue skied, sparkling with promise sort of a day on the cusp of a south-west summertime twenty years ago—when I parked my rusting mini-moke outside the tasting shed at Pierro and paid owner Mike Peterkin a little over four bucks a bottle for that weekend’s-worth of Guillotine Red.

Today you’ll hand over rather more for Peterkin’s much-awarded chardonnay and you’ll do it in considerably finer style. A grape’s throw from his original old shed, its windows cataracts of dust and web, stands a tasting facility as handsome as you might expect from Western Australia’s most significant (for now at least) wine-growing region.

But back in 1965—the year in which John Gladstones’ seminal report, The Climate and Soils of Southern WA in Relation to Vine Growing was published in the Journal of the Australian Institute of Agriculture—Western Australia’s only commercial wine-growing region was the Swan Valley, just north of Perth, and Margaret River was just another also-ran timber and dairy town struggling to find its economic niche.

What Gladstones’ research indicated was that the soil and conditions in the “west coastal area south of Busselton”—a region which, roughly speaking, encompasses the landmass between capes Leeuwin and Naturaliste, stretching from just south of Busselton, through Margaret River and south almost as far as Augusta—lent themselves to the production of high quality table wines.

In a follow-up report published in April 1966, Gladstones was even more specific, stating that the “establishment of (a) wine industry centred on, say, Cowaramup or Margaret River would have a number of practical advantages.”. These findings echoed the words of Professor Harold Olmo, a Californian horticulturalist who visited Western Australia in 1955 and who, in his report A Survey of the Grape Industry of WA, found the future of the grape-growing industry lay not in the hot, dry Swan Valley but down in the State’s cooler south. (Admittedly, Olmo favoured Mount Barker in what we now know as the Great Southern but, to be fair he never really got much of a chance to inspect Margaret River, famously passing through en route to a dinner appointment in Busselton and, upon enquiry, being told by a Department of Agriculture employee that the region “lacked obvious promise”.)

In the Beginning
The history of the region might usefully be divided into four distinct parts. First came the European pioneers who, having arrived in Augusta to farm in the 1830s, didn’t much like their chances amongst all that tall timber and, over the next decade, made their way up between the capes towards Busselton. Then came the timber workers, who did their job so thoroughly that, by the turn of the century, wood from south-west forests was being used to pave the streets of London.

In 1920, the British and Australian governments’ Group Settlement Scheme saw thousands of immigrants arrive—not the most successful of initiatives given that, eighteen months later, half of them left again due to the hardships involved.

Apart from the odd sly-grog shop, these early settlers had bugger-all to do with the making of wine but paved the way for it nonetheless, clearing vast tracts of land—usually by hand—and populating the satellite communities which were later to feed the township of Margaret River itself. Around the same time at the Busselton end of the region, Italian immigrants and assorted others who’d emigrated after the Boer and First World wars eked out a living any way they could—planting potatoes, working on the railway, establishing farms.

And, finally, came the period which began in 1965, when a report by John Gladstones encouraged the making of wine in—and, in turn, burgeoning commercial success for—the region.

History Re-written
"Margaret River is one of the fairytale successes of the Australian wine industry. A centre for dairying, fishing and fine produce, there were no grapes grown here only thirty years ago." Australian Wine on Line

Upon such popular myth is the Margaret River legend founded. It’s easy enough to see why—to precis the truth so; to exclude those who came before ensures predominance of our own WASP heroes.

But let’s throw another name into the ring: Jimmy Meleri. Meleri was part of the immigrant invasion of the early 1900s and joined his fellow Italians in making wine long before you could buy anything other than fortifieds locally. But Meleri took things one step further and sold what he made at local dances (for a bob a bottle, reportedly) and from the farm gate, making him—not Tom Cullity, who founded Vasse Felix in 1967—the region’s first commercial wine producer (a fact, by the way, which Cullity would be first to acknowledge.)

Meleri owned a property out on the Willyabrup Ridge planted vines there in the early 1900s, close to where the Happs winery now stands. “It’s an exquisite piece of land for growing wine grapes.” says Ernie Lepidi, manager of the vineyard planted on what used to be Meleri’s property and, coincidentally (or perhaps not when you think about it) the son of one of the region’s early Italian immigrant farmers. Lepidi tours the property with me and tells how his father and Meleri drank together; of being sent down under the house for more wine where it was “cold as a fridge”.

Another of Meleri’s contemporaries was a third Italian immigrant—the father of Albert Credaro. Credaro junior was born in Busselton in 1928 and still co-owns Vasse River Wines at Carbanup on the northern end of the Margaret River appelation. “Everyone knew Jimmy Meleri’s place. They used to buy flagons there for two shillings.”

It’s hard to imagine a Margaret River region before wine, but Credaro does. In the 1930s, only a “small, winding gravel road” linked Busselton to Margaret River and everyone travelled by horse and cart. Even Credaro, who lives a fifteen-minute car ride away from Busselton, visited the town just twice a year. “To give you some idea, there were still only three, maybe four motorised vehicles in the whole of Busselton and nothing much at all in Margaret River.”

Not that Busselton was exactly a thriving metropolis when Tom Cullity et al—Bill and Sue Pannell of Moss Wood, Kevin and Di Cullen of Cullen’s—hit town in the late 1960s. “Back then, our idea of a big night out was walking the Busselton Jetty.” Remembers Pannell, who sold out to Keith Mugford in 1984 and now owns Picardy vineyard in Pemberton. “There was nothing else to do back then except go to the pub. If we wanted a really big night out we’d drive to Bunbury (Western Australia’s second city, eighty-five kilometres north of Margaret River) for a hamburger.”

(For anyone who’s interested, the link between Jimmy Meleri and Margaret River continues at Vasse River Wines, where Albert Credaro is growing cuttings taken from vines planted at his father’s place in Busselton which, in turn, grew from cuttings taken from Meleri’s original vineyard. The resultant grapes—known variously as “Fragolini” and “Fragola” depending on who you talk to—grow nowhere else in Margaret River and end up in Credaro’s cleanskin red which sells by the carton for around $9 a bottle—a small price, I’d say, for a glass of history.)

Tom Cullity
“Somebody decided, once, that a block of vines needed spraying. I don’t think they had any idea what they were spraying for, it was just something you did. By the time the order got passed on to the person who did it, they used a spray designed to treat a disease in pigs. You can imagine its effect on the vines.”
Tom Cullity, A Vision of Fine Wine

It’s around 40 years since Tom Cullity, a Perth-based cardiologist who passed away in 2008, planted his first vines at Vasse Felix, thus leading the vanguard of contemporary winemaking in the region.

By the time John Gladstones’ initial finding were published, Cullity had actually already planted half an acre of cabernet sauvignon and shiraz near Burekup, a hundred or so kilometres north of Margaret River. The idea, he says, was to make a small amount of wine in a cooler area. Having spoken to Gladstones, and spurred on by Houghton’s winemaker Jack Mann and WA Government Viticulturalist Bill Jamieson, Cullity decided to try his luck even further south and spent the Winter of 1966 looking for suitable land.

The following interview took place in the early noughties, in what I imagined was his study. It is re-published in its original format.

Tom Cullity is a still-strong, succinct and vibrant man of seventy-six, with a wry, dangerous sense of humour, a firm, unwaivering gaze and strong, shapely forearms. He neither suffers fools gladly nor minces his words and, interviewing him, I find myself treading a fine line between admiration for his intellectual depths and fear at the fall which awaits should I put a foot wrong.

Cullity’s a scholar, and an eloquent bugger at that. He has the largest Oxford English I’ve ever seen and has just come up for air after fourteen years’ translating the journals of French explorer Louis de Freycinet. First, though, he decided to lift his linguistic game to heights sufficient for the task at hand by completing a BA in French. He was fifty-eight. (The resultant book, a beautiful, cloth-bound creature titled Reflections on New South Wales, has just been published by Hordern House and is doing rather well, considering it sells for around $350 a pop.)

In 1967, with the help of Di and Kevin Cullen who owned one hundred acres in the region since 1956 but had not yet got into wine, Cullity purchased eight acres in the Willyabrup Valley and named the vineyard Vasse Felix. It cost him $185 a hectare. In August the same year, he planted unrooted cuttings taken from the Swan Valley—riesling, cabernet sauvignon, malbec, shiraz. Against all odds, ninety-eight percent of them took.

Over the first two years, the busy cardiologist averaged the 600 kilometre round trip from Perth to Willyabrup more than once a fortnight, rising at 3am and leaving town in his Peugeot 403 to start work by 8am, returning late on Sunday night. Cullity spent all his holidays at the property, usually alone, and acknowledges it was a kind of madness. “I had never been south of Bunbury (Western Australia’s second city, eighty-five kilometres north of Margaret River) in my life, had no practical bent, had never changed a car tyre, did not know what a weed was and knew nothing about vines or wine-making.”

For five years until a house was built, Cullity lived in a sixteen by six metre galvanised iron shed. His first vintage, in 1971, was a disaster due to bunch-rot and silver-eyes but in 1972, Vasse Felix produced a riesling which created quite a stir at the Perth Show. It and the publicity that surrounded it got Margaret River noticed. In 1973, Cullity employed David and Anne Gregg to manage the property, eventually selling to them in 1984 (“I didn’t like having to sack people, I didn’t like delegation. It was time to move on.”). In 1987, the Greggs onsold to the Holmes a Court company, Heytesbury, which is still the owner.

Cullity says he’s visited Margaret River perhaps three times in the last fifteen years and doesn’t miss it one bit. Sometimes he wonders, though, whether all that early effort was worthwhile and will, he says, never forget the exhaustion and disappointment of those times. (“I sat in a ruddy tin shed for the first five years. People forget that.”) But at the time he felt driven to prove a point. “It was blatantly obvious somebody would have to plant vines in a cool area sooner or later. It seemed almost a disgrace that nobody was actually doing anything to prove a golden opportunity that would be the envy of most other countries.”

Coming of Age
“We had a man who wanted two hundred cases of pinot. When he asked the price, we said $150, meaning the wholesale price per case. He thought we meant the bottle and didn’t seem to think it was unreasonable.”
Di Cullen, A Vision of Fine Wine

Within three years of Tom Cullity planting his first vines, two other families—Bill and Sandra Pannell, Kevin and Di Cullen—had joined him, forming a triptych which was to set the scene for everything that came after.

Pannell, a GP, had already visited Victoria, met with Max Lake in the Hunter and talked with Ross Heintz at Seppelts about Olmo’s published work. Heintz agreed with the good prof that whites would go well at Mount Barker, but ventured an opinion that Margaret River (he actually specified Cowaramup) was the go for reds. This fitted in with Pannell’s plans perfectly. His parents owned a holiday home in the region and in 1968 he began, as he puts it, “poking around, looking for land in the area”.

Eventually, Pannell found what he wanted and asked the owner, Jack Guthrie, if he’d consider sub-dividing a bit off. Guthrie was a bit unsure, but his father (a real old patriarch called “The Sheriff”—they bought him a bulldozer for his eightieth birthday) was all for it. Showing a foresight uncommon amongst his peers, Guthrie senior told his son if he wanted the area to prosper, it would be a good idea to give the wannabee winemakers a chance and, in 1969, the Pannells bought six and a half hectares at $800 a hectare, and began planting vines.

The following year, Pannell started a medical practice in Busselton, which he shared with friend and neighbour Kevin Cullen. Like Tom Cullity before them, Pannell and Cullen knew little about growing grapes and even less about making wine. Unlike the commuting cardiologist, however, their intention was always to live close to their vines.

Cullen and his wife Di had already sought advice from John Gladstones on the growing of lupins at their Willyabrup farming property and Gladstones had persuaded them that grapes, not lupins, were the way ahead. Accordingly, in 1971 they planted just over four hectares to cabernet, riesling and traminer. Their first vintage—the 1974—was a bit of a dog; the 1975 substantially and encouragingly better. Then the 1976 won golds at various east coast wine shows and their 1977 riesling won best dry white in the Canberra show in the small winemaker’s section.

Already a groundbreaker in a literal as well as figurative sense, Di was also the first woman to win a trophy at the Perth Royal Show and pioneered the use of oak in sauvignon blanc in Western Australia (youngest daughter Vanya, who took over winemaking in 1989, continues the tradition.) “We liked what our friend Robert Mondavi was doing—much better than the grassy stuff that comes out of the tank,” Di told me at her home in Willyabrup, where she lived after Kevin died in 1994 of Motor Neurone Disease. “Mind you, back then I only left it in barrel for three months—I was too nervous to leave it any longer. These days we give it much longer.”

Sandra Pannell, too, was as involved as her husband in the day to day running of the winery. “When someone important was coming down—we met the most incredible people: Max Lake, Len Evans, Bill and Eileen Hardy, Robert Mondavi—I’d talk to Anne Gregg (by then with husband David managing Vasse Felix for Tom Culllity) and we’d entertain them between us. She’d do lunch, I’d do dinner.”

“We sold vine cuttings—45,000 of them once—and with the money I bought an ice cream maker and a pasta machine. It meant that when we had VIPs I could produce elegant three-course meals—lemon sorbets, home-made pasta, that sort of thing—for next to no money, which was just as well because we had none”.

The Pannells were also experiencing success on the wine circuit. In 1976, the Moss Wood Cabernet won three gold medals and two silvers at the Perth Royal Show. Pannell, a modest, happy man at ease with himself and the world, was also the first in Margaret River to plant semillon and remembers with evident pleasure how, on a subsequent visit to Burgundy, he visited friends for a wine tasting with Robert Joseph. “I asked if anyone would mind if I opened one of our semillons. It blew Robert Joseph away. He said it was one of the greatest wines he’d ever tasted.”

Keith Mugford, the current owner, began working for Moss Wood in 1979. By 1983 there was talk of he and his wife, Claire, taking over, says Pannell. “We had a young family. I was still practising with Kevin in Busselton and between us we were looking after the whole of the local population and also trying to make and market our wine. I hadn’t had a holiday in five years and basically I was burnt out.” A year later Mugford bought Moss Wood with the help of the Pannells.

Today the Pannells live in Dalkeith—another of Perth’s lovely riverside suburbs (and, coincidentally, less than a ten minute drive from what was Tom Cullity’s place), spending half their time at their beloved Picardy vineyard in Pemberton making Burgundian-style pinots and remembering, if pressed, the days at Moss Wood with a blend of nostalgia and relief: “nostalgia because we met so many great people, had so many good times; relief because it was such bloody hard work!”

Around the same time our three medico musketeers were getting down and dirty in Willyabrup, Chateau Xanadu founders John and Eithne Lagan were responding to an advertisement in the British Medical Journal; for doctors, in Margaret River. The Lagans arrived from Dublin in 1968 to find a town where the only cultural establishment was the public library and there was serious talk of closing down the hospital.

(The Pannells may have found life in burgerless Busselton a bit on the quiet side, but the town was a veritable hive of activity compared to Margaret River, where the dairying industry was struggling, the population was declining fast and the future looked bleak for those who remained.

Things were so bad that, in an echo of group settlement days, some folk had committed suicide. Others just upped and left town. Hard to imagine such a scenario within living memory, particularly given the town’s current state of commercial promiscuity; harder yet to imagine how it felt for two erudite European doctors arriving to start a new life with three young children.

Eithne Lagan says she cried for the first year: “I thought the best thing I could do was to save up to go home again”. However, after encouragement from Tom Cullity (“who appeared covered in muck and dirt… and told us to acquire land for viticulture, but to do it properly…”) they, indeed, acquired land—much of it virgin bush—and eventually planted their first vines in 1977.

Slightly quicker off the mark was David Hohnen, who founded the township’s first winery, Cape Mentelle. Hohnen—still part-owner of the winery which, in turn, is part-owned by Veuve Cliquot Ponsardin—had studied winemaking at Fresno, California and planted his first three hectares (“mostly to cabernet with a bit of riesling and various other odds and sods”) in 1970. It took a few years for the winery to go into fullscale production due to problems with birds, management and lack of irrigation. “We struggled along, sold a bit of fruit and finally went into production for ourselves after five of six years,” remembers Hohnen. “Today you’d do it in three.”)


Modern History
“There’s absolutely no way I could have envisaged what we have today, not in my wildest dreams.”
David Hohnen, Cape Mentelle.

By the time Margaret River drifted into my consciousness and I into its brine-thickshake surf in 1981, there were more than twenty vineyards in the region and you could do the slurp-and-spit Fandango at perhaps a dozen of them. Mind you, there was little in the way of tourism infrastructure and a big night out was still the $12 roast chook dinner, with all the sweets you could eat, at the Old Dairy restaurant in the grounds of historic Wallcliffe House.

Visit today and you’ll have more than four dozen eateries to choose from (including more good ones, per capita, than in the Perth metro area) and around fifty-five wineries doing cellar sales (I’d be more specific but new ones keep opening). Add to this a bunch of wannabee others doing the mail-order-only thing, over 3,000 hectares under vine and, in 2001, an annual crush of just over 27,000 tonnes. These days, in a bums-on-seats kind of world, the words Margaret River on your wine label guarantee a full house.

Pivotal to the development of wine tourism in the region was the creation of the Leeuwin Estate concert, in 1985. Seven years earlier, owners Denis and Tricia Horgan had launched the winery at a party for 150 on the front lawn of the winery. “The comment we heard again and again that day was ‘you know, I’ve never been to Margaret River.’ What that concert did was show 5,000 people just how good the region was.”

The enterprising Horgans had already tried, without success, to get the WA Symphony Orchestra down to the winery to play (“They told us professional orchestras didn’t play in the bush!” laughs Tricia Horgan), so when Festival of Perth director David Blenkinsop asked them to underwrite the cost of bringing out the London Philharmonic Orchestra to Western Australia, they agreed on condition it did a gig at Leeuwin.

First though, Tricia Horgan approached the local shire: “Out of courtesy more than anything. I’m not sure we really needed their approval”. Any hint of incredulity here would be entirely forgivable, given the Leeuwin concert brings $10 million worth of revenue into the town on an annual basis and has included performances by the likes of Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, Shirley Bassey and Ray Charles, giving Margaret River an international profile.

The other major catalyst in terms of national awareness of the region was Cape Mentelle’s back-to-back Jimmy Watson wins, in 1983 and 1984. “Wolf Blass had done such a good job publicising the Jimmy Watson after he’d won it that it was in the forefront of the national wine psyche,” remembers David Hohnen. “Winning twice on the hop like that endorsed the winery big time—still does to some extent. It marked the legitimacy of Margaret River as a producer of great reds and gave the region as a whole a huge boost in confidence. It really made a huge difference.”

John Gladstones — the John Gladstones, an eloquent, sanguine gem of a man who lives in City Beach—is currently preoccupied with the updating of his highly acclaimed book Viticulture and Environment, sees the third wave of evolution for Margaret River as commencing around this time. “But if you wanted to name an actual year as a kind of coming of age for a region, I’d say about 1990. It’s really only since then, in my opinion, that the wines have fully come into their own—they really went up a notch—and in sufficient quantities to allow for wider distribution and a greater public awareness.”

The fourth and final wave, then, has been the swell of what sometimes gets called “mass production”—a misnomer which riles Sue Jackman, CEO of the Margaret River Wine Industry Association, no end. “The region produces just one percent of Australia’s wine, the vast majority of which in turn comes from wineries with an annual crush of under 1,000—hardly what you’d call mass production!”. By far and away the region’s biggest producer is Evans and Tate which, tellingly, moved its main operations from the Swan Valley in time for the 1999 vintage and last year crushed around 7,500 tonnes.

Other, older, players have increased plantings in the last five years, notably Cape Mentelle, Chateau Xanadu and Vasse Felix, all of which crushed in excess of 2,000 tonnes in 2001. Then there’s Palandri—by no means a big producer but with a major planting program and all the commercial nouse and infrastructure (serious marketing objectives, serious budget, seriously in-your-face cellar door facility smack-bang on the highway) to be exactly that.

All these expansive goings-on are worn somewhat uncomfortably by those who came to the region early and have chosen to stay small. There’s a certain frisson in the air; a sense of protectionist disquiet about what increased production will do the region’s reputation as a producer of premium wine. Gladstones is all too aware of this burgeoning groundswell of opinion—“a powerful angst” as he puts it—but sees expansion as the way ahead. “It’s one of the things in my studies that I’ve been trying—fairly unsuccessfully until more recently—to get across. That we ought to be expanding.”

By way of reassurance, Gladstones proffers Burgundy and Bordeaux. “The wines from these regions which people talk about, rave about, are a drop in the bucket of what’s produced there. Large amounts of bulk wine is made too, but it doesn’t stop people talking about the good stuff.” Indeed, the decidedly non-elitist Gladstones believes more and bigger producers is just what Margaret River needs.

“I’ve always said that if the environment suits the cultivation of high quality grapes, then it should not only be for your Chateau Lafites or Cullenses, but for bigger scale commercial production. And if the quality of the grapes is there, it seems to me entirely sensible that bigger scale producers should also benefit from the environmental conditions, rather than going out in the middle of the desert somewhere and irrigating.”

Gladstones says we should think of it in terms of a pyramid—the wider the base, the higher the potential for its peak. “It also means that, given the region’s superior conditions for grape-growing, perhaps in future we can get good quality but affordable wines that people like me can afford to drink!”

Given the region is heading way beyond its Bordeaux doppelganger tag and excelling at decidedly non-Bordeaux varieties—notably chardonnay and shiraz—there’s a whole varietal lolly shop waiting to be explored and Gladstones can’t wait. He cites Erl Happ’s work with nebbiolo, sangiovese and tempranillo as being particularly exciting, but there are others—like Janice McDonald from Suckfizzle and Mark Lane of Flying Fish Cove—who are bringing a fresh approach to what Margaret River is all about.

But surely, I ask Gladstones, he harbours deep within himself just a little bit of paternal angst as he watches the small child he helped create head off to play with the big boys? “Not at all. In a broad sense Margaret River is going where it needs to, to become a significant wine region. What we’ve had up to now in terms of the market is minute. I believe the whole of our south west has a tremendous future—that it is potentially one of THE great wine-producing regions of the world.”


Domenic Garruccio
I interviewed Domenic in the late 20th century. He was a lovely man. Here is the interview in its original format.

In the north-eastern corner of the Margaret River appellation, inland from the Leeuwin-Naturalist ridge, lies a sub-region called Jindong and, with it, an increasing number of wine-growing concerns, including the large and rather glamorous Lionel’s Vineyard owned by Evans and Tate.

A few clicks further north and, still within the appellation—in a physical sense at least—lies the antithesis of what Margaret River has become, but a reminder of what it once was; Boallia Wines, the region’s oldest surviving vineyard. It’s owner, Domenic Garuccio, is expecting me but is not entirely sure for what. Do I want wine? Why do I want to talk? Everyone visits him to talk, he says, but no-one buys the wine.
So first I buy wine. And then we talk.

We sit across from each other at a glass-topped wooden table surrounded by the flotsam of his life —a dog-eared print of Jesus, Christmas cards, a “Don’t Drink and Drive” sign, framed photographs of Garruchio as a younger man—and drink our wine from sherry glasses with an Anzac biscuit on the side. There is no spitoon.

Domenic arrived in Busselton—the region’s main commercial centre slightly north of the appelation—in July 1949. A native of Calabria, he was twenty-four years old, couldn’t speak, read or write English but knew how to grow stuff—potatoes, oranges and wheat mostly, but also grapes. Everyone in Calabria knew how to grow grapes. First off he dug potatoes and sold them for two shillings and sixpence a bag. After two years, his wife joined him from Italy and, together, they slept on potato sacks on the ground until they could afford to build a house.

When he’d saved two hundred pounds, he went to the bank manager, who queried where an immigrant like him—a “New Australian” as he was known by the locals—had got so much money. “Digging spuds from four in the morning to eight at night,” Domenic told him with what must have been barely disguised indignance. It took another four years to persuade the bank manager to lend him enough for the sixty hectares he still owns at Jindong. It was virgin bush. He cleared it by hand.

By now Domenic was missing the sort of wine he drank back in Italy but, as was the fashion, he found only fortifieds at the local hotel. The Italian wine-makers near Perth sent down a barrel by train every now and then, but it was expensive and supplies were sporadic. So in 1950, he planted the grenache and red prince vines which still guard the front of his property. You pass them on the way in and they’re absolute monsters, their hefty, sinewed, arms stretching out along the wire.

Domenic made his first vintage by crushing the grapes in forty-four gallon drum cut in half and pouring the juice straight into bottles. He didn’t go commercial (a misnomer if ever there was one—the vineyard in none of the region’s tourist literature and there’s bugger-all road signage even now) until 1987, planting cabernet sauvignon and more grenache, and producing his first vintage in 1992.

Domenic stores his reds (a cabernet sauvignon and Boallia Red—a grenache blend sourced from the fifty year-olds out the front and his later plantings) in racks made from cyclone fencing at the back of the corrugated iron shed which doubles as a tasting facility. In March 2002, he turns seventy-eight. At weekends, he opens to the public and sells to those who can find him. If no-one comes, it doesn’t matter so much. He likes being out there in the fresh air, amongst his vines. These days he’s too tired for much else. “Five years ago I feel twenty-four” he tells me. “I feel so good that if I go dancing, I do it on one leg while everyone else use two. Today if I try it, I fall over.”

When I met him around a decade ago, he still visited Jindong every day to tend the vines, returning to Busselton each evening to care for his wife. He knows or cares little for the goings-on beyond these parameters but, when pressed, remembers some people who said they were thinking about wine-growing coming to visit Boallia in the 60s.

But that’s someone else’s business not his, he says. :ooking out at that dustbowl of a front paddock filled with geriatric vines which, with each ensuing year, bear more leaf than grape and more ants than either, I can’t help but agree.