LIVING HISTORY
EAT // DRINK
Some of Australia’s most famous wines have made their home in the Swan Valley, with a lineage stretching back to the earliest days of Western Australia’s colonisation. By FERGAL GLEESON
THE SWAN VALLEY is Western Australia’s oldest wine region (only the Hunter Valley in New South Wales is older in Australia). Initial plantings were by English settlers but winemaking in the region has since been enriched by the arrival of Croatian and Italian immigrants after the two world wars. I spoke to four leading family wineries where you’ll find some great drops as well as gleaning an understanding of the region’s rich wine history.
Sandalford Wines Sandalford Wine’s foundation in 1840 coincided with European settlement in the burgeoning colony of Perth. Western Australia’s first Surveyor General, John Septimus Roe, was granted 4,000 acres
36 / SWAN VALLEY MAGAZINE / swanvalley.com.au
of land on the riverbanks at West Swan. Sandalford, the Swan Valley’s pioneering agrarian estate was born with crops, cattle grazing, vegetables, vineyards and fruit orchards. Commercial winemaking accelerated during the 1940s after World War II, spurred on by Croatian and Italian immigrants bringing new knowledge and techniques. The estate flourished. The winemaker at Sandalford Wines from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s was Dorham Mann - son of famed wine-making pioneer Jack Mann. West Australia’s Prendiville family purchased Sandalford in 1990s and have spent several million dollars recently redeveloping the estate’s facilities aiming to produce wines of distinction as well as
