Part One:Establishing the Facts

It may not be of as capital importance to some readers of this summary as it was and is to me, but as Margaret River wine is now of national and international standing, and was widely thought to be a sort of amateur joke when I started, it is important to get the facts of the story straight.

There have been reports that are fanciful and inaccurate. Friends who ought to know tell me that this is no uncommon experience with developments like this—all the more reason for having a clear and accurate account.

Margaret River is now WA’s largest premium wine producer and a genuinely important contributor in the national and international context. When Vasse Felix was planted, there was no serious attempt at wine-grape production at all in the South West and no back up, and something like this present summary is necessary.

The reason why vines were planted and wine was made in Margaret River, when it was, was because John Gladstone published his assessment of the possibilities in “The Australian Journal of Agriculture” in November 1965; my brother gave it to me to read and I left my small vineyards, planted around 1964 at Burekup, near Bunbury, on my sister and brother-in-law’s farm, and set out to do the same south of Bunbury. Although I have seen very little of John Gladstones since those days I have always promoted his seminal idea as his father, Harold, and mother remembered when they attended a modestly famous party we held at Vasse Felix in 1972 to celebrate the success of the district’s first wine, a Riesling.

I spent four years of all my free-time in a shed making the first vineyard and winery in Margaret River, and living in Perth, before anybody else planted a seriously significant vine. This may be no world-shattering feat but it did lead to significant consequences, which were predictable at the time. I don’t know what would have happened if I had not done it. Yes, it does affect me and this written description is merely to establish the true facts. I, and other, would prefer accounts of this now quite significant even to be truthfully recorded, and not otherwise.

I do know that you can’t always win, that failure is an orphan but success has a thousand fathers, that you can’t please everybody and that there is no pleasure like climbing a ladder against a 2,000 gallon icy-cold stainless steel tank of Riesling on a cold May morning at 6:00 am with nobody else around for miles, sticking your head under the lid and taking a deep breath. That almost makes everything worthwhile, but I wish people would not make up stories. It’s tough enough without that.

I am writing this so that there should be no doubt at all where the truth lies about Margaret River’s beginnings. It will not be taken amiss if the true facts are recorded as there is a risk that these things get slanted and become history.

What happened is that I took Gladstones’ embryo idea down to Margaret River and developed it into a full-term baby. There have been many parents since.

I would be happy if this was accepted as a true record of the very beginnings.