4 A P R 196?.
OFFICIAL OPENING OF THE DALWOOD WYBONG PARK
WINERY, N. S. W.
Speech by the Prime Minister, Mr, Harold Holt. 17th February, 1967
Mr. Chairman of the Board of Directors, and Mr. Geoffrey Penfold Hyland,
my Ministerial Colleagues of the Commonwealth and State Governments,
members of the Parliaments of the Commonwealth and of New South Wales,
many distinguished guests, employees of this historic firm of Penfolds,
ladies and gentlemen: " If all be true that I do think
There are five reasons why we drink aber
Good wine, a friend, or being dry,*
Or lest we may be by and bye IR
For any other reason why.
Now I didn't get that out of somebody's book of quotations.
I learnt that one on a visit to New Zealand about a week or so ago, and
the Minister for Agriculture was with me and I said that one of my most
pleasant chores of the week ahead when I returned to Australia was this
official opening of the Dalwood Estate Vineyard and Winery, and he said,
" Well, this may help you. This demonstrates the respectability of wine
drinking which was expressed by -an eighteenth century Anglican priest
named Aldrich." My subsequent researches have confirmed that I felt
I knew all along, that both in the Old Testament and the New Testament
are to be found authorities for the proposition that the moderate consumption,
certainly of table wine, has been encouraged by the most respectable
authorities from the earliest of recorded time.
We find that in the Old Testament we are told that " wine makes
glad the heart of man", and the lbw Testament being rather more modern
in approach and presumably a certain amount of travel having been undertaken
in the interval, warned against the danger of drinking water. " Drink no
longer water but use a little wine for thy stomach's sake, and as one of
the most regular travellers for the Commonwealth Government I would urge
that note of caution upon you.
And, of course, there are so many valuable injunctions to the man
in public life from those who have written about this precious commodity. It
was Emerson who told us a man would be eloquent if you give him good wine,
and if I go beyond the time appointed so that we miss a second parachute jump,
you will know where to attribute the responsibility for that. And we are told
by the Germans that a day without wine is a day without sunshine, and this
would be accepted, I think, by many of us who would also agree with Horace
when he told us to drown our care in wine.
Now I myself am a great believer in temperance, including
temperance itself. I think we should be temperate in all things including
temperance, and that gives us a certain amount of flexibili ty in our approach
to the problems of life. And I am sure that it's been a great pleasure to all
of us to have come along here today as guests of Mr. Penfold Hyland and all
associated with this historic name in the wine industry of Australia, and in
these beautiful surroundings find ourselves together enjoying delightful food,
agreeable company and very enjoyable wine. / 2.
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Now I mention the five reasons and I think that most of the,
if not all, can be exemplified here. Good wine we have enjoyed that.
I am told that something went wrong with the works yesterday and 200 gallons
flooded down the path inbetween these casks and will not be consumed not by
human beings, anyhow, in future. I don't know, 04ether we should rise and
pause for a moment to regret that circumstance, but we have enjoyed good
wine, Good friends, as I have looked around this room I see rma ny
people who have come from afar, from Sydney and beyond, braved the hazards
of the climate and the roads, which cannot be maintained on the quite inadequate
grant that the Commonwealth Government makes for them, but at the end of
the road of pioneering here, they are in agreeable company -and these very
pleasant circumstances. I am sure, Geoffrey, we have all felt it worthwhile
and that we rejoice with you in a day which honours the opening of this new
establishment contributing so much tc the future prosperity and progress of
the Hunter Valley. Now the Hunter Valley is itself, of course, one of the great winegrowing
districts of Australia and I predict that as people round the rest of the
world over the years come to appreciate the quality of Australian wines it will
become one of the notable wine growing districts of the world, and recognised
as such. I found it very impressive to learn from the facts supplied to me
that if there is brought into wine production the thousand or eleven hundred
acres which are under the control in this area of this organisation, the volume
of wine produced will be far in excess of that produced by all the other vineyards
at this moment of the Hunter Valley. And so this is a very remarkable
development in an area which has already contributed much to the propperity
and progress of this state of New South Wales, and here we have the elements
of a great national asset which will carry Australia's name to the approval
of those who consume its products beyond our own boundaries and far around
the world. Now one could say a great deal about the wine industry and I should
perhaps reserve that for a more suitable occasion in the Parliament. It's rather
interesting to learn as one studies the facts that the consumption in Australia of
table wine and this has been perhaps partly at the expense of the fortified
wines but of table wine has more than trebled over the past ten years. Now
that's not merely because we brought in a lot of immigrants from Europe who
have been accustomed to drinking wine as some of our people have been
accustomed to drinking beer. It's also attributable to the fact that as we
native Australians learn sonmthing of what wine can mean in more agreeable
living for ourselves, our own consumption of it has grown, and I believe it
could grow considerably more than it has. We have great natural advantages
for wine growing through most of Australia, or certainly many parts of most
of the States of Australia, an d I would gladly join with Mr. Penfold Hyland
and other spokesmen for the names that rate high in the wiine industry in a
campaign against what I might term at this point of time " snobbism' in the
consumption of wine.
You know there's a lot of guff that goes on in the consumption of
wine in public places, and the ritual that has developed around this, more
particularly over recent years, is quite terrifying to the average casual
restaurant visitor or hotel-goer. I had quite a run of experience of it in
New Zealand when I was there where most of our meals were spent out at
public places. You know. the drill that one goes through Having
settled yourselves down and got comfortable, if your host is sufficiently alert,
/ 3.
-3
he will summmn tbe wine waiter. That will depend to some extent upon the
degree of service as to the time interval which then elapses. The wine
waiter will then present you with usually -a somewhat fly-speckled little
journal which contains what the house may or may not have to offer.
Frequently one is disappointed in finding that it's ou t of stock or somebody
else had the b ottle the night before, but a further interval passes and then
finally along comes the bottle usually if it's a white wine or a sparkling
wine, contained i~ n some ice bucket, there's a further delay while it's
twisted around and juggled about a bit, and then with a flourish the fellow
will remove the cork and he'll bring the cork over you to sniff. You are
terrified you're going to do the wrong thing at that stage. You'll either
tell him to take it back when it's perfectly good or you'll bravely say
"~ go on with it" when you suspect that it mightn't be as good as you would
hope. And then he'll give you a certain portion to taste. Now I have been
host on a good number of public ce-cas ions when wine was consumed and
I've run a bit of a mental graph on these things and I find that about two
times out of five, he never comes back to the fellow who's done the tasting.
And by the time you have gone through all these processes you're about
into the second or third course and cursing inwardly that it didn't come
earlier. Now, my upbringing on drinking with meals occurred shortly
after I left the university, at a quite modest restaurant, as it was then, but
it's become rather more posh establishment now in Melbourne, known as
the Florentino. For 2/ 6d. in the currency of those days one had a three
course meal and a little bottle of wine that was plonked on the table according
to whether you said red or white. I haven't used the word " plonked" with
any special significance, because I used to find this wine quite potable, and
if one was sufficiently injudicious, or didn't have enough work to do as in
those depression years most of us didn't, to consume that q uite small bottle
( about half the current small bottle size) and say you'd like another, you paid
an extra sixpence for that, and if you wanted lobster mayonnaise extra, you
paid an extra sixpence for that. Well some might say they were the good
old days. We didn't have as many sixpences in those days perhaps as we
do now but th-e fact of the matter was that you had a good potable wine that
had no nonsense about it. It was there from the time you started your meal
and away you went. If you wanted more it came quickly to you, and those
of you who have gone to Italy in recent years will know how you can still
repeat that process there to this day.
Now it was Omar Khayam who told us, as most of you will recall:
" I wonder often what the vintners buy one half so precious as the stuff they sell."
I'd like to just amend that slightly and put " what the restauranters or hoteliers
buy one half so precious as the stuff they sell" because I find it something of
a deterrent to sit down either at a hotel or a restaurant, pick up the wine list
and find that in their enthusiasm they've added something upwards of a 1007%
to what I know that wine can be bought at, not necessarily wholesale, but even
retail. And I think it's a very abort-sighted policy because you always think
hard about the second bottle when you know you are paying over 100% on the
price you could have it at home, and if by chance at a cheaper level you are
able to consume two or three bottles, well one is less resistant to the port
or the brandy which might follow as a logical consequence, and so I would
like to see the wine industry make its best efforts not only on Governments
and I don't reject or object to the representations we receive from the wine
industry but to use their influence to reduce the ritual so that more casual
wine drinkers will be encouraged to do it without feeling that they are exposing
themselves embarrassingly in public places and also to see that the price
reaches the consumer at a reasonable level. / 4.
4-
Now I said that as a Government we meet the industry from
time to time. Quite obviously if one studies the facts this is a highly
favoured industry. There are very few areas of agreeable human
experience that remain untaxed by governments. I suppose love-making
is one and wine drinking is another. There are not many more that I can
think of. I perhaps should have th ought of this when I was with the
Premiers yesterday and they were wanting to open up new avenue-, of
taxation. But for our part we impose no tax burden on table wines.
I don't think we do, Geoffrey, on fortified wines. We certainly do on
brandy, but even here we have a smaller charge on brandy than we do
on the other spirits, which again creates a grievance with those wh'
manufacture the other spirits. In other words, you can't win in th-: sbusiness
of government, but none of us has ever regretted what we have
done in respect of the wine industry and the preference which has enabled
the surplus production of wine to be converted in many instances to brandy
and to give the Australian public the benefit of that lower price.
Now I don't want to weary you with anecdotes for they bristl. e
through the history of wine but there is one which I might leave with you
before I movre on, a story which appealed to me about Winston Churchill,
who of course did his best during his lifetime to assist the wine industry
to the best of his ability. And at one international conference in a very
large room Winston Churchill enlivened what was otherwise a dreary patch
of discussion by saying that the champagne he had drunk through a lifetime
would have filled that room. He had his scientist friend with him
he used to travel round with him the ? vbmber of the House of
his name escapes me at the moment but he quickly made some mental
calculations of the quantity which on average he would assume Sir Winston
to have consumed and he had to tell him that he wouldn't have filled that
large room. He would have only brought it up to a level of about tw-o feet
and the story runs that Sir Winston was in a rather depressed state of mind
for the rest of the proceedings.
But he is only one of a long line of notable public men who have
found in the consumption of wine in good company, relaxation, a source of
refreshment and an encouragement to get on with the tasks ahead.
Now my purpose, as you have been told, is formally to declare
open the Vineyard and the Winery of Dalwood Estates, but before I do that
as my final act I am going to ask you all to rise and join me in a toast, and
the toast is this: There is not with us today a very wonderful lady to whom
Penfolds means very much indeed and who has meant very much to Penfolds,
and I'm going to ask you to join me, as I am sure Geoffrey would approve,
in drinking a toast to Mrs. Gladys Penfold Hyland. I hope she is able to
hear what we are saying but if not, on your behalf and to her, I say from
all of us thankyou Gladys for all you've meant to Penfolds and thankyou for
being such a wonderful person as I find all the Penfolds are. So here's to
Gladys. And I now have very great pleasure in formally and officially
declaring open the Dalwood Estates Vineyard and Winery.