Watchlords

There are lots of good, decent people in the wine industry the world over, but they don’t come much more highly respected than Nat and Rosalie White.

Now, if that was it we’d all be on our way and I would not be sitting here typing away, at least not about Nat and Rosalie. Fortunately, they also happen not only to have established the first commercial winery on the Mornington Peninsula, but to have set standards that few have ever matched, let alone topped.

The Mornington Peninsula is a region south/southeast of Melbourne, Australia’s second largest city. Around an hour’s drive, it was a mix of beaches, hills, farms, horse estates (I have no idea what one calls a horse estate, but I think you know what I mean) and more, very much the hideout for Melbourne’s rich and private.

Back in the very early 1970s there was not a vine to be found, although the earliest plantings were back in 1886. Within five years, there were six vineyards producing fruit on the Peninsula. A few years later, a similar story as endured by numerous regions at the time: economic conditions, changing customer preferences, and the march of phylloxera sowed seeds of the beginning of the end. By the 1920s, the vineyards were abandoned.

In the 1950s, Seppelt planted 100 acres at Dromana, but they were destroyed by bush fires in 1967 (something today’s winemakers would well understand after the horrendous summer 2019/2020 experienced across much of the country).

https://quillandpad.com/2020/04/06/main ... peninsula/