Yalumba Wines - A Visit
with Keith Conlon

Yalumba means "all the country around". It also means 150 years of winemakers in one family, with its founder, Samuel Smith planting his first vines near Angaston in 1849. The famous clocktowers and rough marble two storey frontage overlooking the Eden valley Road now masks a million-cases-a-year ultra-modern facility.

The founder of the Yalumba dynasty, Samuel Smith, was a strong Congregationalist from Wareham in Dorset. He probably saw South Australia as a step up. The news going home to England was that the young province was thriving, with new copper mines. And he said his wife Mary could get free passage to work for the Angas family. They could also lease land in the colony unaffected by England's discrimination against religious non conformists.

The Postcards crew watched interstate visitors reach for the cameras as they sighted the great stone and brick clocktower on approaching the tasting room below. It 's now enhanced by picturesque gardens and magnificent mature trees.

Samuel Smith's son, Sydney, lived just long enough to see it completed in 1908. What a contrast it made with the mud, but he'd helped his father build on the banks of the Torrens before they came to Angaston village in 1848.

He also recalled his father's working in the Angas homestead gardens by day and in his own leased vineyard by night - with a candle stuck on his wheelbarrow. By the third generation, the business was big enough to build the Yalumba landmark building as a gesture of confidence in the twentieth century.

If you've every tried going back a couple of generations in your family tree, you'll know how incredibly valuable a family archive would be. That's what Samuel Smith's descendants have, store deep in the old concrete vats of the winery. On the walls are old prize certificates from Paris, portraits and advertising signs.

I found an architectural drawing of the clocktowers in a drawer, the 1949 Centenary history of the winery and the luxurious, superbly written and presented new 150th anniversary book, "Yalumba and it's People". Only with the help of these reshuffled archives could historian Rob Lynn bring us the tapestry of the Smiths, and the Hill-Smiths as they became.

Mary Smith wrote home in the 1850's of "one little paradise", for instance. The wines from here gained prizes from London, Paris and Philadelphia in the 1880's. In the third generation, one of the sons, Walter, became known as "Tiger" Smith because of his penchant for big game hunting in India.

Tearing myself away, I wandered the Upper cask Hall, with its huge oval wooden barrels, varnished over many years. It is one of the sites for the concerts and entertainment for which Yalumba is famous. Great showbiz names have trod these boards, and the Test Cricket rest days in the gardens here are legendary. Richie Benaud recalls how Jeff "Thomas" Thompson busted his shoulder here trying to smash a tennis ball too hard. Local lore says he might have fallen off a roof! Who knows?

The Yalumba winery now creeps a long way up the rise from its park-like entrance. Up the back is a huge old stone shed . . . a hallowed hall known as the Octavius cellar, Octaves (small barrels) and hogsheads stacked in rows on the dirt floor hold the firms premium reds.

Shiraz from old Barossa vines for the Octavius, cabernet and shiraz blended for the signature series, and cabernet sauvignon from the Coonawarra maturing for the Menzies, they are all part of the movement Wyndham Hill Smith began when he inherited the task after tragedy struck the family. In 1938, his father, Walter died prematurely of cancer, and then his older brother was killed in the Kyeena air disasters, which also took sons of two other South Australian wine dynasties, Hardy and Gramp.

They were difficult times, coming out of an international depression. The new history book notes that the bank came very close to closing "Windy" and his winery down. It survived, with the help of American soldiers taking to their Galway Pipe port, and shifts to red and white wine, away from fortifieds which had been the mainstay of the state's wineries.

The late afternoon sun shifted into the old bond store, now a spacious tasting room and "cellar doors" for a decorated range of wines far beyond the kin of Yalumba's founder Samuel Smith.

150 years on, in the gardens outside the bond store I caught up with today's boss, fifth generation, Robert Hill Smith. There was a bank TV commercial in the early 90's which portrayed some of the weight on his shoulders. He's conscious he's working after a big "family" of staff, as well. And when he and his brother Samuel bought back the company from other family members, things were again very tight for a while.

Robert told the Postcards crew some stores that will surely have to go in the next addition of the Yalumba history.

"Yalumba and It's People", effectively launched by one Postcards episode centered on its 150th Anniversary, is a barrel full of yarns over five generations. I would add, it is one of the most readable and best presented local histories I've read in a long time.

They will happily sell you one at the cellar door for about $50.00. The picturesque Barossa Winery is just out of Angaston on the Eden Valley Road.