The Clarendon Vineyard

When the journalist Ebenezer Ward rode out from Adelaide in December 1861 to inspect the Clarendon Vineyard, he found the approach discouraging and the destination extraordinary. Eight miles of bush track separated Clarendon from the main south road — a route of cuttings and steep ascents that wearied horses and their riders alike — but once through it, the visitor who climbed to Edward John Peake's cellars looked out over one of the most unusual vineyards in the colony. Two hills clothed from base to summit in luxuriant vines — the first of them, Ward wrote, appearing "as it truly is, a gigantic pyramid of verdure," its foliage unbroken by a single barren patch. A two-storey cellar building scarped into the hillside, already capable of holding nine thousand gallons. The wine Peake poured for him was something Ward had not expected from colonial ground:

The wine made by Mr. Peake, especially the first quality drawn without pressure from the grapes, is very delicate, and resembles in flavour and bouquet some of the finest champagne wines. It is dry, spirituous, and bright, and if properly treated would without doubt produce an excellent champagne.

Ebenezer Ward, South Australian Weekly Chronicle, 21 December 1861.

The vineyard's origins lay in a land transfer a decade and a half earlier. In 1846 James Philcox, who had laid out the township of Clarendon on part of Section 801 of the Hundred of Noarlunga, conveyed thirty-eight acres to an Englishman named William Leigh. The rest of the section went to George Morphett. The Morphetts had arrived in South Australia in 1841 — John Morphett sat on the first Legislative Council of the new colony — and it was John Morphett who planted the first vines on the hillside, probably around 1846. Who deserved credit for those first vines was contested even within a generation. By 1903, when the journalist Ernest Whitington reported on the vintage, W. H. Gillard gave his account of the vineyard's origins — one in which Peake's name did not appear at all:

The oldest vines were planted by the late Sir John Morphett 50 years ago. It was a Spanish collection this vineyard, which first belonged to Mr. Leigh, after whom Leigh Street, in Adelaide, was named.

W. H. Gillard to Ernest Whitington, 1903; quoted in Rosemary Burden, Wines & Wineries of the Southern Vales (1976).

Edward John Peake, a stipendiary magistrate, took ownership in 1858 and built the property into something altogether more serious. He extended the Spanish collection — Pedro Ximenes, Palomino Blanco, Temprana, Doradillo — across the vineyard's two hills, adding Shiraz, Grenache, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Riesling as he went. The soil, a rich red marl over decomposed slate, proved perfectly suited to the task. Peake kept ducks penned by day and released them at dusk to work through the grubs that attacked the vines at night, and he trained young men as apprentices, believing that practical knowledge of viticulture was the only thing the colony lacked.

His wine had been shipped to Calcutta, Java, New Zealand, Queensland, and Victoria, and several parcels had reached England. At the Intercolonial Exhibition in Melbourne in 1866, his wines collected six bronze medals and the champion medal for the colony's vineyards:

To Mr E. J. Peake, for the special excellence of his collection of wines, and for the care and attention devoted to their development.

Exhibition Commissioners of Victoria, 1866; cited in the Leader (Melbourne), 15 February 1868.

At the Paris Exhibition the following year, bronze medals went to his Verdeilho and his Riesling. By 1867 the vintage yielded twelve thousand five hundred gallons, with three hundred gallons of spirit of wine distilled from the refuse, and Peake anticipated the 1868 crop would produce sixteen to eighteen thousand gallons.

Peake died in 1876. When a journalist for the South Australian Advertiser inspected the property in March 1879, the vines had been under the care of manager John Frisby for sixteen years but the vineyard was in the hands of an L. M. Cullen, who had acquired it after Peake's death. The journalist noted that the cellars now held storage for two hundred thousand gallons, the three-storey building accessible from the rear at the level of its top floor, and a distillery stood by the river below — but that grape yields had fallen off in the years since Peake's illness and the place would benefit from a resident proprietor who understood what it was worth.

That proprietor arrived in 1882. Joseph Gillard had come a long way to reach Clarendon. He had emigrated from Okehampton in Devon in 1849, arriving with his first wife Jane and their young son Joseph. Jane died not long after landing; their infant daughter Jane followed at twelve days old. Gillard remarried — Sarah Howitt became his second wife, and they raised three children: Caroline, Annie, and William — and he spent time on the goldfields before returning to settle at Norwood, where he established the Sylvania Vineyard. It was that background in viticulture that he brought to Clarendon when he bought the vineyard in what the Cyclopaedia of South Australia called "a very neglected condition."

In his first year the vintage produced three thousand gallons. By 1891, when members of the Central Agricultural Bureau rode out from Adelaide to inspect the southern vineyards, the Gillard vineyard had been transformed. The reporter who accompanied the party found forty-five acres in total with thirty-eight under vine, the Spanish varieties still prominent among the Shiraz, Temprano, and Madeira. The previous year had yielded twenty-three thousand gallons. Gillard was shortly leaving for England, the journalist recorded, and would be wished a pleasant trip.

The wines made in Gillard's cellars won dozens of gold medals at European wine shows and were regarded as among the finest from South Australia in their day. The principal wines — Clarendon Claret, Chablis, ports, sherries, Constantia, and Frontignac — filled a four-storey building capable of holding two hundred thousand gallons. Grape pickers at vintage season brought the fruit down from the steep hillside on packsaddles, each holding around two hundred pounds; in a good season ten to twelve tons could be collected in a day. Much of the wine was sold in bulk to Penfolds.

Joseph Gillard died in 1897. A correspondent writing from Clarendon in March of that year referred already to "the late Mr. Gillard's time" and the prizes his wines had taken. His two sons divided the family's wine interests between them: Joseph Jnr, who had become manager of Penfolds, continued in that role, while the younger son William took over the running of the Clarendon Vineyard. William managed the property for the next three and a half decades, and Whitington, visiting in 1903, found twenty-two thousand gallons made from the season's crop, the oldest vines still among the most productive on the hill.

William held the property until the 1930s, when it passed to an E. Mason, who converted most of the remaining vineyard to orchards. In 1976 the upper section of the winery complex was extensively damaged — the State Heritage listing records simply that it had suffered from "natural forces" — and by that time the lower storeys stood largely empty, the slate fermenting tanks still in place, an old hand press beside them, a few acres of original vineyard still producing grapes among the orchard paddocks around them. Some replanting was attempted in the 1990s, though by the time new owners arrived those vines had gone unmanaged for years.

The two surviving storeys of what Peake had built in 1860 were restored in the 1980s and opened as the Old Clarendon Inn, with a restaurant and accommodation. The inscription Peake had set high on the front of the building — crediting himself, in stone, with the founding of the vineyard — was still legible. In 2020 Emmanuelle and Toby Bekkers purchased the property, taking on what they described as custodianship of the site. The terraced slopes were tangled with blackberries and the vines unpruned for years; by the 2022 vintage, after retraining and new plantings on the steep hillside, the vineyard was bearing again.

Sources

• South Australian Weekly Chronicle, 21 December 1861 — "Our Vineyards and Orchards. No. IV. The Clarendon Vineyard, the Residence of Mr. E. J. Peake" (Ebenezer Ward; full description of vineyard, varieties, wine character, and cellar buildings). Trove
• Leader (Melbourne), 15 February 1868 — "A South Australian Vineyard" (reprinting an Advertiser account; Peake's winemaking methods; 1867 vintage 12,500 gallons; Melbourne and Paris medals). Trove
• South Australian Advertiser, 21 March 1879 — "Vinegrowing and Winemaking in South Australia: The Clarendon Vineyards" (property held by L. M. Cullen after Peake's death; manager John Frisby 16 years; storage for 200,000 gallons; character of site and soil). Trove
• South Australian Register, 3 April 1891 — "Viticulture South of Adelaide. Inspection by the Agricultural Bureau." (Agricultural Bureau visit; Gillard's vineyard, 38 acres, first planted by Sir John Morphett; 23,000 gallons; varieties; oidium; packhorses). Trove
• Chronicle (Adelaide), 3 April 1897 — "The Vintage: The Southern Vineyards. No. II" (Clarendon district; "the late Mr. Gillard's time"; new management; 150 acres under fruit trees). Trove
• Geoff Webster, Ted Webster, Roger Norris-Green, Clarendon — the Town, Its People (Clarendon Historic Hall Committee, 1973) — vineyard history; Peake as Member for Burra and Clare; "Gillard's Wine Cellars at Clarendon, built in 1859"; grape cutters 1907; ownership succession
• Rosemary Burden, Wines & Wineries of the Southern Vales (1976), Chapter 10 — Clarendon vineyard and winery; Gillard family; wine styles; state of property in 1976 (Murray Miller, apple orchard; two lower storeys intact)
• Cyclopaedia of South Australia (1907) — Joseph Gillard purchase 1882; wine styles; gold medals; output averages
• City of Onkaparinga heritage register, Heritage ID 11193 — Clarendon Winery Complex, Alt 101 Miller Street, State Heritage Place; original buildings 1860; damage by natural forces 1976; restored
• State Library of South Australia, B 1675 — Clarendon Winery viewed from across the Onkaparinga River, c.1890
• State Library of South Australia, B 34318 — portrait of Edward John Peake at the Clarendon winery
• State Library of South Australia, B 20670 — Clarendon township and winery from the Onkaparinga River, 1936
• State Library of South Australia, B 35547 — grape pickers at the Gillard winery, Clarendon, c.1907
• City of Onkaparinga Libraries, catalogue nos. 1148435, 1256614, 1375639 — photographs of Clarendon Winery (pre-renovation and 1984/1987)