The London-based Emu company imports South Australian wines to UK from 1870s: 'burgundy' as its flagship brand

The London-based Emu Wine Co., importing South Australian wine to the  United Kingdom and exporting it elsewhere, and Emu Burgundy as its flagship brand. This continued into and beyond the 1950s when Emu Burgundy was being promoted (at right) as part of Queen Elizabeth II coronation celebrations.

Emu Burgundy from South Australia became Australia’s most significant wine export brand in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

London-based Emu Wines originated with Patrick Auld in South Australia in the early 1840s when he bought 400 acres of land on the rising ground above Magill, east of Adelaide. He built a house and planted vineyards before financial troubles forced him two years later to subdivide the property and the vineyards that he had planted on the lower lying land. He built a smaller house and planted more vines and produced wines under the Emu name.

In 1862, Auld started the South Auldana Vineyard Association and began exporting wine to London. At this time, prohibitive duties between the Australian colonies made it more attractive to send wine to Britain than to neighbouring Victoria or New South Wales. Auld made several trips to London where, in 1872, he set up Auld and Burton’s Australian Wine Company importing largely South Australian wines. 

That year, The Lancet reviewed Australian wines and the Auldana Ruby (selling for 30 shillings a dozen) was applauded: “Of a ruby red colour, odour agreeable, claret-like, taste resembling claret, with an after-taste reminding one of port; subacid, astringent, but free from roughness and bitterness; full-bodied and flavoured and, of considerable strength in alcohol; altogether of the claret type, yet widely different, and altogether a very superior wine.”

A representative was appointed in Australia to source wines for export. Many of these came from McLaren Vale on South Australia’s Fleurieu Peninsula. The Australian Wine Company in London registered the Emu brand in 1883 and later changed its own name to the Emu Wine Company. The Emu name became synonymous with Australian ports and sherries for more than a century. Emu was first shipped to the Canadian wine market in 1926, into Quebec. Wirra Wirra wines in McLaren Vale, established in the early 1920s, were exported by Emu under the brand Kangaroo Red.

In 1930, the Emu Wine bought a winery in Morphett Vale, south of Adelaide and, in 1934, took over the largest Australian wine importing business built in the United Kingdom by P.B. Burgoyne. In 1938, respected winemaker Colin Haselgrove became technical director and managing director of the Emu Wine Company. Haselgrove led the company through a expansion after World War II, buying the Western Australian Houghton winery in 1950.

During the 1950s, catalogues from British wine merchants include a range of “Empire wines” with Emu Burgundy featuring strongly. The flagship Emu Burgundy was called that without European winemakers objecting, as long as it was referred to as Australian burgundy. Emu Burgundy was likely a big high-alcohol red unlike French burgundies produced from pinot and gamay grapes.  Australian wine producers didn’t stopped using European wine regions for their products until the 1980s. Emu also exported a red from the Wirra Wirra winery in McLaren Vale as Kangaroo Red.

In 1976, Thomas Hardy & Sons bought the stock of the London-based parent company of Emu Wine Co Ltd/Houghton Wines. Thomas Hardy & Sons was later lost in a series of international corporate takeovers.