Australia

In 1788 Captain Arthur Phillip landed the First Fleet, eleven ships whose passengcers included British soldiers, convicts, and a few free settlers, along the coastline of Botany Bay, just eight miles south of the modern-day Sydney Central Business District. Captain Phillip founded the penal colony of New South Wales and its capital, the city of Sydney—Australia’s first permanent European settlement. Prior to landfall in Australia, the First Fleet stopped for supplies—including vine cuttings—at the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, and the British planted vines near Sydney upon landing in 1788. This original vineyard bore fruit three years later but did not last. In its earliest days as a penal colony, Australia suffered from little winemaking expertise, and advances in viticulture were slow. Nonetheless, the vine (a non-native plant) spread from New South Wales to Tasmania in 1823, and from Tasmania to South Australia by 1837 and to Victoria in 1838. In the Swan River Colony of Western Australia, settlers planted the first vineyard in 1830. Free immigrants arrived in Australia throughout the 1830s and 1840s from all corners of Europe, and brought winemaking traditions with them. Some of today’s most famous names arose as small family-owned wineries in this period, including Lindeman’s (1843), Penfolds (1844), Orlando Wines (1847), and Yalumba (1849). In the 1850s, the promise of gold lured even greater droves of European immigrants to southeastern Australia, and interest in winemaking burgeoned.

Boom days for gold equaled boom days for wine, particularly in the gold-rich colony of Victoria, which asserted itself as Australia’s largest producer of wine by the 1870s. However,