Terra rossa soil backs David Wynn's bold choice to buy defunct Chateau Comaum in 1951 in the Coonawarra
The Chateau Comaum three-gabled stone winery featured by David Wynn on the label of the Wynn's Coonawarra Estate range.
Images courtesy Wynns wines
Everything in 1951 pointed against David Wynn buying Chateau Comaum, a large three-gabled stone winery that had been built by the "father of Coonawarra", John Riddoch, in 1897, on South Australia’s southeast Limestone Coast.
David Wynn at that stage was running the restaurants and wine business established in Melbourne by his Polish Jewish father Samuel. From his regular buying trips (and a failed investment in a Magill winery in 1927), Samuel Wynn was familiar with South Australia and had bought Coonawarra wines for his then-brave ventures such as a wine bar in Melbourne
Samuel advised David against buying the Coonawarra winery and a report that David commissioned highlighted the climate and other difficulties of growing wine in the area. In the early 20th Century, Coonawarra’s wines were used for little more than distilling into brandy and, immediately after World War II, authorities encouraged returning soldiers to rip out the few vineyards for farm agriculture.
In the early 1950s, Australia’s biggest-selling wine was sweet sherry. But David Wynn had a vision backed by his restaurant background, studying bacteriology and accountancy at Adelaide University and learning winemaking and blending at Romalo cellars at Magill in Adelaide’s foothills in the 1930s.
He went ahead in 1951 and bought Chateau Comaum's 54 hectares of vineyards, 36 hectares of pasture, a distillery and the winery for £22,000. What he’d bought was prized terra rossa land in the cigar-shaped strip on either side of the Riddoch Highway with the shallowest red topsoil and prized limestone subsoil closest to the surface.
In 1951, Wynn employed Roseworthy college graduate Ian Hickinbotham – only the second trained winemaker at the winery, following Ewen McBain in 1898. Hickinbotham made a 1952 shiraz from a poor year. In 1954, he made the first Wynns cabernet with, as Philip White says. “the first deliberately induced and managed malolactic fermentations on Earth”.
What became one of Australia's most important wines – especially the black label cabernet sauvignon – was backed by Wynn’s innovative marketing. He was first to use the word “estate” in in Wynn's Coonawarra Estate. He commissioned artist, Richard Beck, to design a label that featured a woodcut of the winery frontage. He gave the bottle a back label featured a map showing the location of the little-known Coonawarra – both firsts.
