IN AN AUSTRALIAN VINEYARD.
Fruit Supply—Tintarra Wine—Mr. Thomas Hardy—The Temperance Question.
One of the charms of South Australia is the fruit, which, in the shape of
grapes, and pears, and peaches, and apples, you see everywhere displayed,
and at astonishingly low prices. Grapes are sold at five pounds for
sixpence in the retail shops, and I have seen magnificent grapes three
pounds for sixpence, which in London would be held cheap at half-a-crown.
If the colony is ever to be very rich, its fruit trade will be no
inconsiderable factor in the consummation so devoutly to be wished. The
farmer and the squatter have to contend with difficulties which often end
in bankruptcy, owing to the terrible droughts common in this part of the
world. But if the merchants of Adelaide will send us their spare fruit,
we in London can take any amount and at very remunerative prices. I saw
during my tour the vineyards of Mr. Thomas Hardy, within a short distance
of Adelaide, and I must own that the place is well worth a visit. Though
of small extent (the area is only 60 acres), Bankside, as the vineyard is
called, yields a more varied produce, and furnishes a better illustration
of the capabilities of the soil and climate of the district in which it
is situated, than any other estate in Australia. Mr. Hardy is a fine
specimen of a horticulturist, and well deserves the splendid silver
trophy which ornaments his drawing-room—and of which he is justly
proud—given him as one who has done more than anyone in the colony to
develop its resources. He has made good use of his grapes. We are not
all teetotalers, and he grows more grapes on his various estates than the
Australians can eat, whether as grapes for dessert, or in the shape of
raisins and currants. With the rest he makes wine. He is proud of his
wine—proud of the fact that even at Bordeaux, in the heart of the enemy’s
country, as it were, he won a gold medal for its excellence; proud of the
fact that his celebrated Tintara wine has found a good place in the
London market. As I have seen it manufactured I can testify as to its
purity. He was sending this year 45,000 gallons to London. He would
prefer to keep it longer in his cellars, but the Londoners want it, and
he cannot keep them waiting. Why not sell the original grapes? asks the
teetotaler. I reply, He grows more grapes than the community can devour
with a decent regard to its health, and as people exist who are mistaken
enough to think Paul was right when he recommended Timothy a little wine
for his stomach’s sake and his often infirmities, Mr. Hardy thinks he is
a public benefactor if he supplies the public with a genuine wine, the
produce of the grape and of the grape alone.
Mr. Hardy is no ignoramus; he is a much-travelled man, and has studied
the vineyards of France and Spain and California. In his establishment
he uses the best machinery—which of course is French—for the distillation
of the purest and strongest spirits of wine, to which purpose such grapes
are devoted as are not good enough for the production of wine of the best
quality. As to the manufacture of wine, that is a very simple affair.
The grapes are picked and placed in carts, and carried to the mill, where
they lie fermenting in a mass; the juice is then pressed off into slate
vats, a brown and by no means attractive-looking fluid. The red wines
take longer to ferment, as the outside skin contains the colouring
matter. In the case of the white grapes, the stalks are cut away by a
machine invented for the purpose, otherwise the astringency of the wine
would be too great. After a time the juice is put into casks, where it
lies stored in cool and capacious cellars till it is required by the
outside public. In some of the casks I saw the wine had been kept ten or
twelve years. Last year Mr. Hardy made in this way 160,000 gallons of
wine. He began life as a gold-digger. He commenced growing grapes for
wine in 1853, and has been at it ever since. Another charming vineyard
is that of Sir Samuel Davenport, to which Thomas Binney, when in
Australia, was always ready to retreat. It is very interesting, this
original vineyard of Mr. Hardy’s. Since 1853 he has purchased several
vineyards in various districts, the most important one being Tintara,
about 25 miles to the South of Adelaide, where he has 150 acres under
vines. It is in the town cellars that most of the blending is
accomplished. A good deal of wine is bottled off at Bankside, but the
main bulk of the generous fluid, to be poetical, is carted away in casks,
on waggons which are as un-romantic as the horses which draw them or the
men who drive. There is little of the picturesque in the manufacture of
Australian wine.
But as to the grounds, no words can describe their exuberance. Some of
the pears Mr. Hardy exhibited at the London Exhibition weighed three
pounds each, and were afterwards, I believe, eaten by Royalty. The
Bankside property consists of a very deep chocolate soil, resting on a
strong clay. Irrigation is easily practised over this small area. Water
is raised from the bed of the Torrens River to the top of the bank, and,
that being higher than the surrounding country, is easily distributed.
It is curious what good a little water can accomplish. In one part the
ground rises, and as water will not run uphill—at any rate, in
Australia—the trees have to do without, and it is astonishing to note the
difference between the trees and the fruit they bear, compared with the
others, although but a few feet from each other. Everywhere around me
were oranges ripening for the home market. ‘An acre of oranges is a
fortune, is it not?’ I asked, with my head full of what I had read.
‘Ah,’ replied Mr. Hardy, with a smile, ‘those books are written by men
who have land to sell.’ Then we came to the lemons. What a wonderful
plant is the lemon tree! You may see the ripe fruit growing side-by-side
with the blossom. It is productive all the year round, like—I will not
say whose; let the reader fill up the blank—like Mr. —’s great mind. As
to the quinces, I never saw anything like them, and though I intimated
that in England we did not make much of them, Mr. Hardy assured me that
in his opinion quince jam was the finest in the world. The citrons,
however, were still finer than the quinces. We had also quite a show of
olives; they grow in rows, and, like the almonds on the estate, they are
made to do duty as fencing-posts. A vine in the open air over the house
attracted my notice; it had spread over a surface of many yards, and was
a good illustration of what may be done on Australian soil. Surely every
Australian ought to grow his own grapes; and then as to making them into
raisins and currants, nothing seems easier under such a sun. The grapes
at Bankside are gathered and laid on boards to dry. Those for raisins
for the table are laid on gravel—a custom Mr. Hardy borrowed from the
Spaniards. It is not found necessary to turn them, the under grapes
drying as well as the top ones, from the heat of the gravel floor. The
turning of grapes into raisins is a more complicated process than merely
growing them for the market. The bunches of ripe fruit are placed in
oblong sieves and plunged for twenty seconds into a tank of boiling lye
made from ashes, which are got from the vine prunings. The dipping takes
the bloom off the fruit, but causes it to dry in one-third the time it
would otherwise take. They are then spread evenly on wooden trays and
exposed to the sun. When the grapes are about three-parts dried, they
are removed to kilns, heated with hot-air pipes, and the drying is
completed in from twelve to twenty-four hours, when they are taken out
and rubbed partly free of most of the stalks. The next process is to run
them through a winnowing machine which still further strips them of their
stalk. They are then packed up in boxes by girls and pressed with a
handy screw-press, six at a time. Currants are treated in a similar
manner, minus the dipping. The raisins intended for the table, I may
mention, are also not dipped, as that would spoil their appearance by
removing the bloom. In the grounds a good many sultanas are also grown;
quite equal to the fruit imported. Altogether, at Bankside, they turn
out about twenty tons of dried fruit every year.
Australia, Mr. Hardy anticipates, will be able to equal the best wine
districts in the world. A similar remark may apply to its almonds and
raisins and currants. Adelaide rejoices in a trade which bids fair to
become greater every year. As the Select Committee upon Vegetable
Produce reported at the end of 1887: ‘If the whole area of our colony now
devoted to the growth of wheat were one vast vineyard, the yield would
not be equal to the deficiency in the wine production of France through
the devastation of the phylloxera.’ Hence South Australia, to the
disgust of Dr. Hannay, calculates much on her growing wine trade.
Statistics furnished by Mr. Hayter, the Government Statist of Victoria,
give evidence of the way in which wine in South Australia is superseding
the consumption of spirits. This may account for the sobriety which
seems to characterise South Australia as compared with the rest of the
colonies. Altogether, Adelaide may claim to be the fairest city of
Australia, and to contain the kindest and best-mannered people—so far as
they may be judged by the passing stranger at their gates, and if I was
in search of an ideal life I should say it would be that of one who sits
under his own vine and fig-tree, as the South Australian grape-grower
does.
While writing of wine, it may be as well to sum up here what I have to
say on intemperance in Australia. No little excitement was produced in
Adelaide when the writer was there by a telegraphic report of a speech by
Dr. Hannay on his return from Australia, as to the amount of drinking in
Adelaide, certainly the most sober of all the prosperous cities on the
Australian Continent. As usual, the telegraphic report was wrong, and
Dr. Hannay assures me that what he did say was that he regretted to find
that so many gentlemen in Adelaide looked to the increase of the
Australian wine trade as a source of colonial revenue and colonial
prosperity. As a devoted temperance reformer, it is clear Dr. Hannay
could not have said less. It was an opinion which he was quite at
liberty to utter, and with which no one could find fault. Had the
telegraphic abridgment been correct, he would certainly have been to
blame, as, undoubtedly, Adelaide is a sober city—that is, sober as
compared with Sydney and Melbourne. In the older cities there are yet
traces of the times when, as during the madness created by the discovery
of alluvial gold, miners, who in England had been content with beer and
porter, would drink twenty pounds’ worth of champagne at a sitting,
pouring it all into a pail, and asking every passer-by to have a drink;
but that awful time of extravagance is past; however, the taint of it
remains, and there is still a startling amount of drunkenness, especially
among that part of the population who can least afford it—the
wage-earning class, who, in Australia, if they are sober and industrious,
have advantages in the way of investment which assuredly they lack at
home. Workmen as a rule are paid high wages, and, when they receive a
large amount at a time, as they often do, do not know what to do with it.
In too many cases, in the interior more especially, they still adhere to
the custom of knocking a cheque down, as they call it. The workman
repairs to the nearest public-house, gives his cheque into the publican’s
hands, and then begins a drunken orgie in which everyone is asked to
join, till the landlord tells him his money is all gone, gives him a
bottle of rum, and then kicks him out of the house, often to perish by
the road-side, thus once more illustrating the old remark, ‘that the
tender mercies of the wicked are very cruel.’ One publican is said to
have made £40,000 a year at one time in this way. The temperance
reformers in Australia have, it is very evident, a wide field of
usefulness before them. Many of the Australians spend enormous sums of
money in drink. I travelled with an Australian, who seemed to me never
what is vulgarly called the worse for liquor, yet whose weekly bill on
board the steamer amounted to between four and five pounds, a sum of
money which assuredly might have been better employed. In one respect
Australia sets us a good example. It has taken to building temperance
coffee hotels, or palaces, as they term them, on the grandest scale. As
the meals are all served up without intoxicating drinks, these places
must have a good effect, as the guest, however fond of drink he may be,
is compelled for the time to be an abstainer. Adelaide unfortunately has
no good temperance hotels worthy of the name.
It is a great question in Australia as to which is the finer
city—Melbourne or Sydney—and the inhabitants of each are wonderfully
jealous of each other. You offend a Melbourne man if you have anything
to say in favour of Sydney, and at the latter city you hear little in
favour of Melbourne. Both cities show too many public-houses, and both
cities contain far too many drunkards; but in Sydney they are an especial
nuisance, as every house has, as a rule, two rooms on each side the
principal entrance which are used as bars, and which all day long, very
much to the annoyance of the traveller, who is compelled to use them, are
filled by a disreputable crowd, boozing from morning till night. It is
the same as regards the theatre—the bar is as conspicuous, and quite as
well filled, as the theatre itself. In many cases the bar is hired and
carried on as a separate speculation, independently of the hotel
proprietor. Two or three showy barmaids are engaged, a screen is put
before the door to shield it from public gaze, and inside there is a
license of which few people have an idea. The girls sell the drink, and
they drink themselves. As the evening advances the hilarity is of a
somewhat boisterous character. Now and then a girl comes from behind the
bar and waltzes round the room with some admirer—while she leers over his
shoulder at another. The utmost freedom is permitted, and hundreds of
idiots thus waste their time and spend their money, and injure their
health, and learn how easy and how pleasant is the road to destruction.
Fortunately, the bars are closed at eleven, and they are shut up on a
Sunday, or they would be a great deal more mischievous than they really
are; but the mischief they do is very great. In Australia the population
is of an exceedingly shifting character; men are always on the move from
one place to another, and of an evening, as they are strangers in the
city and have no friends, and time hangs heavy on their hands, they have
recourse to the nearest bar. It is there the sharper always takes his
victim. In every case, and I heard of several, in which inexperienced
travellers had been fleeced, I always found that the dupe had first been
taken to the bar and treated to a drink. As I came back I fell in with a
poor steerage passenger who had been done out of £20, a sum he could ill
afford to lose, by a repetition of the confidence trick. He made the
acquaintance of the sharper by means of the latter offering him a drink.
Hundreds and thousands of pounds have been lost in this way. There is no
place so dangerous to a ‘new chum,’ as the emigrant to Australia is
called, as the bar of a public-house. Alas! in Sydney these pitfalls are
on every side; I think that there is only one hotel in the town without
its bar.
It was the old custom to sell lots of land by auction at which a good
deal of wine was drunk, under the excitement produced by which many a
purchaser bought his whistle at a dearer price. ‘If such lunches cost
£40,’ writes one of the oldest of the Melbourne colonists, Mr. Westgarth,
‘which was given to me as a moderate average, who suffered? argued their
justifiers; the exhilaration they produced gave £400 more to the net
proceeds.’ The brisk liquor appreciably blew up the prices, as the same
lots, cut up and rearranged, would come again and yet again under the
hammer; and no doubt many a poor speculator burnt his fingers in that
way, especially when we remember how at one time there came such a
wonderful depreciation of property in what its admirers still love to
term ‘Marvellous Melbourne.’ It may be that there is less drinking now,
and that people go to business and to sales with less muddled brains.
But no one can walk in the shipping quarter of Melbourne on a Saturday
afternoon, or stop at a Sydney hotel for a day or two, without feeling
that in either town there is vast room for improvement in the matter of
drink. In both places there is a fearful amount of gambling and betting
and wild speculation, and undoubtedly a good deal of that goes on under
the influence of the drink. Many of the suicides which, as I told the
people of Adelaide, were such a matter of wonderment to me, are to be
attributed to drink, or the depression caused by it when the excitement
is over, and the poor shattered drinker is, indeed, a cup too low and
quite unable in his dazed condition to face the stern realities of life.
Travelling one day from Brisbane to Sydney, the writer met a gentleman,
of whom he asked if Mr. Blank was known to him.
‘Yes, well,’ was the reply.
‘I am going to see him.’
‘Why,’ said the gentleman, ‘he committed suicide only a little while ago;
and the Western Australian papers are full of the details.’
There was no need to say any more. The poor fellow had gone out as an
emigrant. At home he had been in the habit of drinking to excess, and in
Australia the loneliness and difficulty of his life was too much for him;
he drank to excess, and then took away with his own rash hand his
blighted life. In Australia the number of such blighted lives through
drink is far too plentiful.