Richard Cholmondeley and Vale Royal Wines

The Cholmondeleys of Hodnet were Shropshire gentry, the kind of English family whose roots in a place ran deep enough to be unremarkable. Richard's father, the Reverend Richard Hugh Cholmondeley, was Rector of Hodnet — a living the family had held across generations. His sister Mary would go on to become a successful novelist, her 1899 book Red Pottage earning her a place in the late-Victorian literary world. Richard himself, born in 1862, took a different road. In 1882, aged twenty, he arrived in South Australia.

What brought him south is not recorded. He settled quickly in the district around Happy Valley and Hurtle Vale, forming a business partnership with a man named Herbert Bosanquet to develop vineyards in the area. John Reynell had planted the first commercial vines in the district in 1839, and by the 1880s the southern Adelaide hills were drawing capital and ambition from across the colony.

The Name

The property Cholmondeley founded in 1888, near Bishop's Hill Road, he called Vale Royal. The name was a deliberate tribute to his family's heritage: Vale Royal Abbey in Cheshire had been the ancestral seat of the Cholmondeleys of the Delamere line for centuries. Hugh Cholmondeley, Baron Delamere — who was abandoning the old Cheshire seat around precisely this time for a life in British East Africa — was Richard's kinsman. A man a generation removed from a Shropshire rectory, planting vines on the southern edge of Adelaide, was naming his property after one of the great English family seats. The valley he was working in bore no resemblance to Cheshire. The name was an act of memory.

Horndale

In the years around 1890 — as the Broken Hill silver mining boom collapsed and money moved out of stockbroking and speculative shares into land — Cholmondeley entered a partnership with three brothers: Thomas, Percy, and Charles Horn, partners in the Adelaide stockbroking firm Horn & Co. Together they acquired a vineyard at Happy Valley and developed what became Horndale.

In 1896, Cholmondeley oversaw the construction of Horndale's stone cellars, quarrying the stone himself from the property. The cellars were considered among the finest in the district. Working simultaneously, he designed and built the cellars at Vale Royal, two and a half kilometres to the west. By 1902, Horndale covered 320 acres with 200 under vine — Cabernet Sauvignon and Shiraz, producing dry red clarets for the British export market.

The Horn brothers and Cholmondeley dissolved their Horndale partnership in August 1904. The property passed through further hands before Bernard Basedow purchased it in 1909 and operated it as a model winery and distillery. Horndale is still operating today, under the Albrecht family since 1984.

Inside the Cellars

In late February 1896 the Adelaide Observer sent a reporter down to Hurtle Vale to inspect what Cholmondeley and Bosanquet had built. Cholmondeley himself was still on the boat home from England — he had spent the previous months in London "partly on business and partly on pleasure," telling the Advertiser in late February that the English wine trade "is securing a footing and is becoming appreciated by the English people" — and Bosanquet hosted the visit.

The vineyard was, by then, 220 acres of Cabernet, Shiraz, Malbec, Mataro, Grenache, Doradilla, Carignan, Muscatel, and a small block of Almeira — "as fine grapes of the kind as one could wish to see, and of delicious flavour," the reporter wrote of the Muscatels, which had been planted out only in August 1894. The new cellars measured 80 by 40 feet, with stone walls twenty feet high to the wall plate and a further ten feet of headroom for the machinery, which "extends nearly to the roof." Twelve jarrah vats of one thousand gallons each sat inside, seven of them on the top floor; below stood a forest of casks running from sixty to five hundred gallons. A sixteen-thousand-gallon stone water tank caught the rainfall off the roof. A four horse-power Otto oil engine drove everything by belts and pulleys.

The machinery was all built by J. S. Bagshaw and Sons of Adelaide — an elevator with a detachable chain on either side that lifted the grapes to a hopper above the line; a "stalker" that stripped the bunches by means of a screw-twisted drum; a pegged-roller crusher (refined from a "crude idea" Bagshaw had picked up from Mr Hardy) that broke the skins without cracking the pips; a heavy double-screw press with compound differential ratchet gearing; and a tramway through the cellar to move the cages of skins for second pressings. The whole arrangement was designed so the grapes moved by gravity from receipt to vat.

When the reporter went back two years later, in March 1898, the operation had grown again. The dry season had had no effect: "there is a splendid crop now being picked, very little falling off compared with other years." The vines were now trellised on three systems imported from France (Sylvoz cordon, Cazenavave cordon, and Thomery spallier); the soil was cultivated five times a year with American machines; no artificial manure was used, only the ash of the burnt cuttings and the composted skins and stalks. The cellars had been extended to a storage capacity of two hundred thousand gallons. Bosanquet was by then in England for his health, and Cholmondeley had hired B. Basedow — elder brother of the manager of the Stanley Wine Company at Clare, a graduate of Montpellier and Bordeaux with practical experience in France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, and Italy — to take some of the load. The output for the 1897 vintage had been close to forty thousand gallons. None of it was sold locally: the whole production was Burgundy and claret styles for the London market.

The Four Pupils

The 1896 feature ends with a paragraph that carries an outsized share of the subsequent history of the southern wine district:

Messrs. Cholmondeley and Bosanquet have four young men in their establishment, learning practically the science of viticulture. They are Messrs. Fitzroy Marshall, Mostyn Owen, George Borradaile, and Lionel Newman, apparently men of good family and education, recently from England, and who intend to take up with viticulture and start vineyards of their own as soon as circumstances appear favourable.

Adelaide Observer, 29 February 1896

The youngest of the four, Richard Mostyn Owen, went on to do exactly that. By the end of that same year, 1896, he had bought the property at Hurtle Vale that became Mount Hurtle Winery, and built the gravity-fed cellar system that still stands there. An Advertiser correspondent who returned to the district eleven years later remembered Owen as "no doubt literally representing the survival of the fittest" among the Vale Royal graduates. The English-pupil pipeline at Vale Royal was, in effect, a school for the next generation of Happy Valley vignerons.

The District

By the early 1900s, there were three substantial English-founded wineries operating within a few kilometres of each other in this corner of the southern suburbs. Vale Royal and Horndale were both Cholmondeley's work. Mount Hurtle, established by his former pupil Mostyn Owen, was a third. Cholmondeley also held a second property, Glenrowan, on the opposite side of Kenihan's Road from Vale Royal, near what is now the Happy Valley Shopping Centre. Glenloth, at Flagstaff Hill, completed the district.

The five estates operated as a community long before all of them existed. In July 1893 — before Horndale and Mount Hurtle had even been built — Cholmondeley and Bosanquet were already co-organising the district's annual vine-pruning match, held that year at Walter Reynell's vineyard at Reynella. Thomas Hardy attended and, responding to the toast to the wine industry, called Reynella "the home of the South Australian wine industry." Cholmondeley responded on behalf of the district vignerons. The lunch was hosted jointly by Cholmondeley and Bosanquet, Frampton and Horn of Glenloth, S. C. L. Douglas of Happy Valley, and E. W. Van Senden of Emden Vineyard.

In June 1901, Cholmondeley and Bosanquet organised a vine-pruning match at Glenrowan — described in the Advertiser as "claimed to be the best vineyard in one block of land in South Australia" — with twenty-seven pruners from all five properties competing under the eye of judges R. E. H. Hope and A. Basedow of Clare. The article was specific about what Glenrowan had become: 160 acres, 70 miles of trellising, 250 miles of wire, and jarrah posts shipped from Western Australia. Luncheon was served in the vineyard, with Vale Royal wines on the table.

Four years later, in April 1905, the annual vintage picnic took over three hundred employees from all five estates to Brighton for luncheon under the jetty. The local MP proposed the toast to the vignerons — coupled with the names of Cholmondeley and Bosanquet — and remarked that the crowd gave some idea of how many people the district now employed.

The picnic continued as an annual tradition. On 7 May 1906 employees from all six estates gathered again at Brighton — from Horndale, Vale Royal, Mount Hurtle, Glenloth, Van Senden's Emden Vineyard, and Mrs. Douglas's vineyard at Happy Valley — with the Minister of Agriculture (Hon. L. O'Loughlin) and Mr. Tucker M.P. arriving to join the table. Together the six estates covered approximately 900 acres under vine, which that vintage had yielded 200,000 gallons. Bernard Basedow, by then making the wine at both Horndale and Vale Royal, noted that they had "never had such beautiful grapes, especially the Carbenet" — quality he attributed to February rains that had let the berries fill out after a dry start. Owen, speaking as a younger grower, was more candid about their difficulties: it was "rather discouraging after having put money into the industry to find that the markets were not as good as they might be." Australians in London, he added, had been "bad friends to the trade" by decrying its wines.

The following April an Advertiser correspondent returned to the district and found the Cholmondeleys back at O'Halloran Hill after an extended absence in England. Alterations to the homestead were described as "but the preface to more extensive and elaborate building operations," and Cholmondeley had resumed direct supervision of winemaking with his wife's practical assistance — she was noted as an English sportswoman with probably no equal in the country in outdoor pursuits. Vale Royal's cellars held 250,000 gallons; the 1907 vintage, still being completed, was estimated at 60,000 gallons and described as exceptional. A covered approach had been added to the cellar entrance so that trolley loads of grapes could discharge in the shade. The St. Estelle Claret had accumulated exhibition honours across the Commonwealth; Cholmondeley intended to add Burgundy and vintage Port to the range. One complication had emerged on the lower slopes: the pressure of the body of water held in the Happy Valley reservoir appeared to have forced salt through the adjacent land, rendering it entirely valueless for vines. The worst-affected block, the correspondent noted, belonged to the local blacksmith.

Three men from the English shires, planting the same slopes within a decade of each other, producing dry reds for a British market that had barely heard of South Australia.

The Family

Cholmondeley married Hilda Georgina Naylor in April 1900, the ceremony held in Chelsea — a return to England, or an arranged match. Their daughter Victoria was born in Longford, Tasmania in 1902; their son Charles Christopher was born at O'Halloran Hill on 27 January 1917, as his father's winery entered its final years of production. Richard Cholmondeley died on 30 August 1918, aged 56, and was buried at Christ Church Cemetery, O'Halloran Hill — the same churchyard where John Reynell had been laid to rest forty-five years earlier. After his death, the family returned to England.

The Journal obituary published the day after his death captured another distinction the family had not advertised:

Mr R. V. Cholmondeley, the well-known vigneron at O'Halloran Hill, died on Friday at the age of 56 years. He was a son of the late Rev. R. H. Cholmondeley, of Condover Hall, Shropshire, and came to South Australia many years ago. He started the Horndale vineyards in 1896, and he designed the extensive cellars thereon. He was a senior partner with Mr Bosanquet in the noted Vale Royal Vineyards. His partner subsequently left to reside in England, and Mr Cholmondeley carried on the business. He was the prototype of "Dick Vernon" in his sister's (Mary Cholmondeley's) clever book "Red Pottage."

Journal (Adelaide), 31 August 1918

Mary Cholmondeley's Red Pottage, published in 1899, had been one of the late-Victorian period's most successful novels — a satirical account of English country society that ran through multiple editions on both sides of the Atlantic. The character of Dick Vernon, the heroine's brother, was — according to the Journal and presumably to family — drawn from Mary's brother Richard. The Adelaide press had carried Mary's reviews for years, and the family had spoken about the connection without ever quite stating it; the obituary made it plain at last.

Vale Royal was leased to Byard and Goode, who maintained production until 1922. Then the cellars went quiet. They fell into disrepair over the following decades and were demolished entirely in the 1950s. The site now lies within the Rosa Court subdivision. By the late 1990s it was so thoroughly forgotten that Geoff Merrill — operating Mount Hurtle two kilometres away — told the Hills Messenger he suspected Vale Royal was under the Happy Valley reservoir.

What the Son Did

The boy born at O'Halloran Hill in 1917 grew up in England after his mother took the family home following Richard's death. Charles Christopher Cholmondeley attended Canford School in Dorset, read geography at Oxford, and in the Second World War joined the Royal Air Force. He became a member of the Double Cross Committee — the intelligence body overseeing British deception operations against Germany.

In 1943, Charles Cholmondeley was one of the two men who devised Operation Mincemeat: the plan to dress a corpse as a British officer, pack it with false documents suggesting the 1943 Allied invasion of Europe would strike Greece and Sardinia rather than Sicily, and float it ashore in Spain where German agents would find it. The deception worked. The Germans repositioned forces away from Sicily. When the real invasion came, casualties were significantly lower than they might have been.

The man who co-designed one of the most effective intelligence operations of the war was born in a house on a wine estate in the Adelaide hills, the son of a Shropshire-born winemaker who named his vineyard after a Cheshire abbey and quarried his own stone for cellars that no longer exist.

Charles Cholmondeley was portrayed by Matthew Macfadyen in the 2021 film of the operation.

Sources

• Chronicle (Adelaide), 10 June 1899 — Vale Royal and Horndale cellars description (Trove)
• Adelaide Observer, 26 December 1891 — R. V. Cholmondeley appointed Justice of the Peace, "of Happy Valley" (Trove)
• Advertiser (Adelaide), 26 February 1896 — Cholmondeley returns from London aboard R.M.S. Rome; English wine trade "satisfactory" (Trove)
• Adelaide Observer, 29 February 1896 — feature on the Cholmondeley & Bosanquet vineyard at Hurtle Vale: 220 acres, varieties, Bagshaw machinery, and the four English pupils Marshall, Owen, Borradaile, and Newman (Trove)
• Advertiser (Adelaide), 12 March 1898 — feature on the cellars: 200,000-gallon storage, 1897 output ~40,000 gallons, trellising systems, B. Basedow as assistant, London market (Trove)
• Journal (Adelaide), 31 August 1918 — R. V. Cholmondeley obituary: died 30 August 1918 aged 56; Condover Hall; Horndale 1896; "prototype of Dick Vernon in his sister's clever book Red Pottage" (Trove)
• Mary Cholmondeley — Wikipedia
• Operation Mincemeat — Wikipedia
• Evening Journal (Adelaide), 10 July 1893 — vine-pruning match at Walter Reynell's vineyard: Cholmondeley and Bosanquet co-hosting; Hardy's speech calling Reynella "the home of the South Australian wine industry" (Trove)
• Advertiser (Adelaide), 26 June 1901 — vine-pruning match at Glenrowan: 160 acres, 70 miles trellising, 27 competitors, A. Basedow of Clare as judge, Vale Royal wines at luncheon (Trove)
• Advertiser (Adelaide), 20 April 1905 — annual vintage picnic at Brighton: five estates, 300+ employees, toast to Cholmondeley and Bosanquet (Trove)
• Observer (Adelaide), 12 May 1906 — vignerons' annual picnic at Brighton: six estates, 900 acres, 200,000 gallons, Basedow at both Horndale and Vale Royal, speeches by O'Loughlin, Tucker, Basedow, Owen (Trove)
• Advertiser (Adelaide), 17 April 1907 — "Among the Vineyards: Vale Royal and Mount Hurtle": Cholmondeleys returning after extended absence; 250,000-gallon storage; 60,000-gallon 1907 vintage; St. Estelle Claret; reservoir salt damage (Trove)
• Hills Messenger (Adelaide), 5 November 1997 — "Vanishing vines": Geoff Merrill's belief that Vale Royal lay under the Happy Valley reservoir (Trove)
• Australian Dictionary of Biography — Richard Cholmondeley