Auguste and Gottlob Fromm
History
In 1887, Frederick Wilhelm Fromm, his young family, and his father, Gottlob Fromm, planted three acres of grenache in the Schoenborn district, on the rolling Barossa country between Lyndoch and Tanunda.
By 1891 Fromms had completed a small gravity-fed cellar in the hillside on New Mecklenburg Creek, and in the following three years they planted another 80 acres on behalf of Dr. G. F. Cleland of Beaumont, Adelaide. At that time, this was one of the biggest vineyards in South Australia.
They also planted twenty acres of olives and twelve acres of almonds, remnants of which still stand.
Fromm purchased all Dr. Cleland’s interests in the property in 1917, by which time the cellars needed extending. This was done by 1921, using the same local ironstone as the original cellar, and the new high-tech material, galvanised iron. The stone-and-concrete fermenting tanks were very simple, gravity-fed devices, all completed by 1928.
Gottlob Fromm's first Wine Cellar
In spite of the British Royal family being German, Australia went to assist the British fight Germany in the Great War of 1914-1918. Many German place names in South Australia were replaced with English terms.
Amusingly, New Mecklenberg was given the name Gomersal, after a West Yorkshire village with a German name. Gomersal, in the Spen Valley, was most famous for being the site of Ned Ludd’s Luddite uprising against the mechanisation of the weaving industry in 1812.
But Fromm used an aboriginal word, Wonganella, to name his winery.
In 1964 Waldemar Lehmann and Ron Burton purchased the property and renamed it Chateau Rosevale, after the nearby village of Rosedale. The most successful product they made there was Vin Spa, a cheap sparkling white wine flavoured with fruit essences and marketed in crown-sealed beer bottles.
Sales of dry table wines were very poor after World War II, so much of the grape crop was distilled. A wide range of premixed spirit and wine-based cocktails were produced in the ensuing years. So Chateau Rosevale was Australia’s biggest producer of what the liquor trade today calls “RTDs” – ready to drink alco-pops.
The last of Fromm’s grand old grenache bush vines were destroyed in the Vine Pull Scheme of the mid-1980s. Under the guise of “rationalisation” during a grape glut, the biggest wine companies planned to replace much of the Barossa’s peasant scale viticulture with broadacre plantings. These industrialists believed such a move would increase their efficiency and profitability.
Portrait of Barry White
Gomersal Vineyard
The government was enlisted and convinced to pay growers handsomely with taxpayers’ money to destroy their ancient family vineyards and leave the business. Ironically, hardly a decade had passed before the world discovered Barossa shiraz and grenache, and the same big producers were paying up to $10,000 a tonne for grapes from the remnants of those old-style, dry-grown vineyards.
Fortunately, the scheme was short-lived; but Wonganella was nevertheless kaput. The winery closed in 1983, but was used for storage by many local winemakers in the following years.
In 2000, a group of friends led by Barry “Baz” (to all who know him) White purchased the estate and began the rejuvenation of the rambling winery. He removed hundreds of tonnes of redundant machinery from the rambling complex of buildings, and set about re-establishing the plant as a simple old-style winery and cellar.
The vineyard site was replanted with 42 acres of trellised shiraz, and eight acres of traditional dry-grown bush-vine grenache and mataro, exactly as Fromm would have planted his original three acres.
In Fromm’s day, of course, well before the invention of modern chemical sprays and industrial winemaking techniques, the whole Barossa crop was organically grown and made; Baz White’s dream for the new Gomersal Wines follows precisely that same, safe old track. Healthier for the environment and YOU.