In ’51, when the tidings of the great gold discoveries in Victoria were drawing fortune-seekers to Australian shores from the uttermost ends of the earth, the father of my host at Seppeltsfield came into the Collingrove district and planted a vineyard which was about an acre in extent. Not even the luckiest of all the argonauts of the fifties ever pegged out a claim that yielded as much solid and ever-increasing profit as that little patch of land in the South Australian scrub. In those days Adelaide was a pleasant little town of about fifteen thousand inhabitants; the capital of a province containing sixty-six thousand souls. Now it is a stately city with between forty and fifty thousand inhabitants, the capital of a colony with a population of four hundred thousand. Mr. Seppelt’s acre of vineyard has grown into more than two thousand, and its produce has increased to eight hundred thousand gallons of matured wine, to say nothing of vinegar and brandy. Every year two thousand tons of grapes come in from the vinelands which lie for eight miles round Seppeltsfield, to pass through the crushers and the winery into the great vats of the cellars, and thence into the casks in which their juice is shipped to lands which have never seen the Southern Cross. After I had been through the whole process of Australian wine-making from the grape-crushers—Australian wine is not trodden out of the grape by the same process that still obtains in France, Spain, and Portugal—to the laboratory in which samples of every kind of wine are tested in order to make sure that the process of sterilisation is perfect; and after I had tasted ports and sherries, Madeiras, Hocks, Moselles, and certain specialities native to the vineyard, I said to my host the evening before we had to start away in the grey dawn to catch the train at Freeling: “I have learnt a good deal in the last week, but I want you to tell me now how you managed to put your wines on to the European market and get a sale for them against the competition of the French, German, and Spanish wines which had had the vogue for centuries, their vineyards are all within five hundred miles of London, for instance, and here you’re ten thousand miles away. How did you manage it?” This chapter is not an advertisement of Australian wines in general or of the products of Seppeltsfield in particular, and therefore I shall not say everything that he told me, but the nett result came to this: When the wine-growing industry of Australia began to get a bit too big for Australia’s consumption, and when it was found that varieties of European vines produced wines of delicately differentiated flavours, it became a question where markets were to be found for the products of an industry which was growing much more rapidly than the native consumption.