Auld Family Wines

Patrick Auld arrived at the Port of Adelaide aboard the Fortitude in 1842, two years after his son William Patrick Auld was born near Manchester. He had been a publican and a wine and spirit merchant in his old life, and within three years of landing he had begun planting vines at Magill, on a property he called Auldana. By the 1860s it was among the largest vineyards in the young colony, and the suburb that now stands on the site still carries its name.

Before William settled into following his father’s winemaking footsteps, he went exploring (in a big way). In December 1861, he joined John McDouall Stuart’s sixth expedition, the first to finally cross the continent from south to north and back, a journey of more than a year through landscapes no European had mapped. The horse that carried him was a dark brown stallion named Wilberforce, a descendant of the first English horses brought to Australia. William and Wilberforce (get it?) were together for the best part of four decades, and The Auld family still names a tier of its wines after the animal.

When the wanderlust was out of his system, William returned to Adelaide and took up the family trade in earnest. He managed Auldana, earned a reputation as a vigneron and a wine judge, and in 1910 founded the merchant house W.P. Auld and Sons with two of his own sons. He married Eliza Strawbridge—a poet whose worked reflected on vineyard life in South Australia—and their descendants have worked in Australian wine more or less continuously since, across the Hunter Valley and the Barossa.

The present chapter belongs to Jock and Sam Auld, sixth-generation brothers based at Bethany in the Barossa who grew up among vines, broke into their father’s port barrel earlier than they should have, and absorbed the family trade through their pores. What they make now is recognisably Barossa, drawn from old-vine fruit and built on the relationships with growers that the region runs on.