John Germov

Julie McIntyre

Australia became known as a wine drinking nation in the 1970s, and our national love affair with wine continues. Yet Australian winegrowing is as old as European Australia. While the Hunter Valley is not the ideal place to grow grapes climatically, it's the only Australian wine region planted in the nineteenth century to continuously host vineyards. Hunter Wine profiles the people, history and technology that have shaped the region's wine from vine to glass, including families like the Wyndhams, McWilliams, Lindemans and Tyrrells. It traces the evolution of Hunter winegrowing, and its winegrowers, from frontier violence in the 1820s and early British and German-born wine producers, to the development of large-scale vineyards and wineries in the early twentieth century, and the new style Hunter wines produced since the 1960s and 70s. Sales Points: first history of Hunter wine for many years; covers the industry, the people, the success and the setbacks. includes the history of many of the big families in the Hunter wine industry such as the Wyndhams, McWilliams, Lindemans and Tyrrells. packed with images, many not been seen publicly before Julie McIntyre is one of Australia's foremost wine historians and an expert on the Hunter Valley.

A History

Hunter Wine

First Vintage explores the forgotten history of the early Australian wine industry. Few people know that vine cuttings were brought to Australia on the First Fleet and planted in Governor Arthur Phillip’s garden at Circular Quay, or that botanist and champion of colonial development Joseph Banks encouraged plans to create a wine industry from the earliest years of the colony. Before the assisted migration of German vinedressers in the 1830s, any convict or free settler with a hint of vine growing or wine making expertise was quickly drafted to the cause. First Vintage reveals the people who dreamed of making Australia a wine-drinking country, including influential colonists Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson, Richard Windeyer, John Macarthur and Thomas Mitchell, who all had vineyards. It shows the challenges of choosing vine stock, the battles to protect against pests and diseases, and the innovation of new technologies which assisted small scale growers, many in wine regions which vanished from the landscape and memory for much of the twentieth century.

Wine in colonial New South Wales

First Vintage

Stéphanie Lachaud-Martin

Corinne Marache

Mikaël Pierre

Wine as a product arises from human connections in know-how and trade as much as from the natural environment in which grapes are grown. The authors in this collection offer new studies of the individuals and groups who act as connectors in these networked systems, intermediating in the delivery of wine from growers' vines to consumers' glasses.

Julie McIntyre

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