News
Australia/Barossa: Aggressive promotion by the Australian Wine Bureau and its director Len Evans has finally stimulated consumer demand and it is Barossa red wine that the new urban trendsetters of the 1970s want. Old, cash-strapped family wineries in the Barossa are unable to prepare quickly enough for the boom and are reluctantly selling to foreign multinational grocery companies such as Reckitt and Colman (Orlando), Dalgety (Krondorf and Saltram) and Tooths (Penfolds). These companies are introducing greater efficiency to the industry with mechanized harvesting and drip irrigation to ensure consistent production. There is also less loyalty to Barossa growers and without today's strict regional integrity laws, cheaper fruit comes from the irrigated Riverlands but still labeled Barossa.
The first bag-in-a-box wine container was invented in 1971 by David Wynn (and was popularized by Orlando as the Coolabah Cask in 1974) and Wolf Blass launched his own cellar, winning the prestigious Jimmy Watson Trophy in 1974, 1975 and 1976. However, the red wine boom ended abruptly in 1975 as consumers turned again, this time to fruity white wines such as Moselle and Chardonnay. In 1978, the Barossa faced a serious glut of red wine and when the multinational Dalgety told Saltram winemaker Peter Lehmann not to buy fruit, he rebelled by creating a producer pool, processing the fruit and by reselling them as table wine in their name. He repeated this in 1979 then left Saltram to start his own label Masterson (which later became Peter Lehmann Wines).
A mild, dry year with below average rainfall and a dry vintage produced medium weight red wines and excellent whites.