Original research paper by Dr. Gerald Atkinson
Updated and revised version published 18th April 2020.
Copyright (©) Gerald Atkinson, 2020
The author may be contacted by e-mail at: grapevines@hotmail.co.nz
This research paper addresses the remarkable apparent discovery revealed by Julie McIntyre and John Germov in their recently published book Hunter Wine: A History[i], viz.: that a vine named ‘Shiraz’ was in New South Wales by 1823 and that it was the source of the first plantings of Syrah (Shiraz / Hermitage / Red Hermitage) in the Hunter Valley. I show that the vine in question was actually imported to Australia in 1824 as part of a consignment of vines from the Cape of Good Hope that was sent to the Governor of New South Wales, Thomas Brisbane, by the Cape colonial Governor, Lord Charles Somerset. Before long, as the paper details, it became evident that the Cape-supplied identities of the ca. 13 vine varieties in this consignment were highly questionable, as was the original belief and intention that these vines would provide new varieties to New South Wales. By 1827, it was finally determined that in fact only two of the varieties were not already in the (quite varietally-impoverished) colony, and both of them were identified under names almost certainly attached by the Sydney Botanic Gardens superintendent, Charles Fraser. These were the ‘Constantia’ and ‘Shiraz’ which — as the basis of McIntyre and Germov’s remarkable apparent discovery — thus appear in the Sydney Botanic Gardens’ November 1827 published catalogue of plants and their varieties held in its collection. At this time however, neither of these two vines had fruited, and when they did, in 1828, it became very clear that the ‘Shiraz’ in particular was spurious: it was white-fruited. (Between 1828 and 1830, William Macarthur clearly identified the other vine, the ‘Constantia’, correctly, as Muscat of Alexandria.)
This paper thus shows that McIntyre and Germov’s remarkable discovery of the pre-Busby vine collection presence of ‘Shiraz’ in New South Wales is in fact very significantly mistaken. So too are other claims by other authors and sources, also addressed in my paper, regarding other pre-Busby collection ‘Shiraz’ / Syrah importations to New South Wales (or anywhere else in Australia): there were none, prior to Busby’s in February 1833, that were either genuine and / or survived to be successfully grown on.
The crucial question is thus posed as to what was the real identity of the white-fruited ‘Shiraz’ in the 1824 Somerset – Brisbane vine consignment from the Cape. The bulk of my paper then addresses this in fact quite complex issue and its fascinating, and until now almost entirley undocumented, history.
I argue that the vine in question was very probably known only for one year, in 1827, as ‘Shiraz’, after which it was renamed ‘White Shiraz’. In turn, it was planted in one of the very first Hunter Valley vineyards, ca. 1827, at Windermere, and perhaps otherwise only in very very few other vineyards in the colony. Indeed, it is quite likely to have been withdrawn from being made available to the colony’s vine-growers in 1828 once its ‘Shiraz’ identity was exposed as spurious. By 1830 however, it had clearly been (further) re-christened (per William Macarthur) as ‘Green Grape from the Cape’. The vine is documented under this name by James Busby in his Manual, but I show that despite speculation that this name referred to (ex-Cape) Semillon, this is entirely incorrect.
In the late 1820s and into the 1830s, this white-fruited ‘Shiraz’ vine went on to be bulked-up at Windermere and distributed from there as ‘Shiraz’, ‘White Shiraz’, and even as ‘Sherry’, although it was overwhelmingly the second of these names that very much stuck and fell into widespread, conventional, usage as the Hunter Valley’s colonial vineyards expanded through the 1860s and well beyond. In time, ‘White Hermitage’ also became a (bastardised) synonym for this ‘White Shiraz’, although overwhelmingly this was the case in north east Victoria and not in the Hunter Valley. Right up to the mid-1970s, ‘White Shiraz’ — traceable, I argue, all the way back to the original 1827 Windermere planting — was a very prominent, high-cropping, variety in the Hunter Valley. It came from the 1824 Somerset – Brisbane ex-Cape vine consignment, and only in the mid-1970s in the Hunter Valley was its true identity attached to it: Trebbiano / Ugni blanc.
As part of my account of ‘White Shiraz’ in the Hunter Valley, I also show how colonial-period descriptions of the vine cohere with and underscore its identity as Trebbiano / Ugni blanc. During this period however, ampelography was largely an infant science (and especially so in Australia). I show that its first serious practicioner in New South Wales, William Macarthur, while a thorough and tenacious investigator of vine identities and characteristics, was unable to put a prime-name identity to the mystery ex-Cape white-fruited ‘Shiraz’ even after twenty years effort. After him however, no-one in New South Wales appears to have seriously and systematically addressed the vine’s identity until inter-state sources were brought to bear in the 1970s. Rather, the usage of the name ‘White Shiraz’ became entrenched, and accepted as a bona fide and prime name, in the Hunter Valley, while the vine bearing it became one of its most planted (although by no means finest) of its white wine grapes. Even today however, the fact that its origins consist in what can only have been a very minor, and mis-identified, white grape variety in the early vineyards of the Cape of Good Hope (perhaps going back to the 1660s) has been entirely unrecognised — until its exposure in this study.
In an extended coda to this paper, I argue that the name ‘Trebbiano’ / ‘Ugni blanc’ had however been proffered for the same line of vine material in Victoria from ca. 1869 onward (after Hunter Valley ‘White Shiraz’ and ‘Sherry’ were introduced to Victoria in the 1840s and ’50s). The proposed re-identification was ignored however until ca. 1915, but in the Hunter it took another sixty years to come into effect.
My paper, in concluding its coda, also addresses and definitively disposes of, the matter of the various ‘Ugne’ / ‘Une’, etc., putative Ugni blanc vines in the Busby vine collection. None of these vines has anything to do with Hunter Valley ‘White Shiraz’, and of those that survived to be grown on after the Busby collection’s arrival in early 1833, I show that none of them was genuine Ugni blanc / Trebbiano.
This research paper is available as a PDF download here:
The author may be contacted by e-mail at: grapevines@hotmail.co.nz
Footnotes:
[i] Julie McIntyre and John Germov, Hunter Wine: A History (Sydney: New South Publishing, 2018)