SOUTH AUSTRALIAN WINES.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Volume XII, Issue 708, 1 October 1903, Page 26

SOUTH AUSTRALIAN WINES.

In Adelaide last week, Mr A. H. L. Browne, of Chateau Tahbilk, judged the wines exhibited at the 1903 show of the Royal Agricultural and Horticultural Society of South Australia. Mr Browne states that the exhibits were wines one very seldom came across. In his experience as a judge he had never met wines' so universally good and of such high standard. It showed that the growers, or those interested in the trade, thoroughly understood and appreciated their business when they put forward wines of such quality as they had done. It had generally been his experience in years past to be able to pick out four or five wines from the ten or twenty samples in a class because they stood above the others-, hut in the present instance the exhibits all ran very close. It had been a very difficult and anxious matter to pick out the best-wines. In the classification of

the light red and clarets he did not think they wanted a claret class at all. They knew, and they had known it for a good many years, that they did not produce a wine of the quality and standard of the impoj te 1 clarets ; ' but they produced a wine equally as good, if not better ; and they should call it a Hermitage, which it more nearly approached, or any name they liked.' Their full red wines were good, honest wines, and approached the Burgundy. They were good export wines. They had got over the difficulty of proproducing wines. It was now a question of finding a market for them. It was a great pity they had not a committee of thoroughly representative men in the trade as an advisory board to find markets and prosecute the trade. _ If they were going- to rely on the markets in the States they would be relying on a broken reed. They must find markets outside, and the wines were fully equal to the occasion. He might, say ' with reference to the Chablis and the Hock that they should call them by any other names except those, and let them depend for success on their own distinctive merits. He did not know they wanted anything better than the port wine he had judged. What the industry wanted was the markets to be exploited irrespective of individual interi sts, which were too prominent. At present they were working at sixes and sevens, instead of taking concentrated action. m