Within a 24 hour period in June, Len Evans and James Halliday, two of Australia’s most prominent wine personalities, announced the sales of the wine companies they founded. Australian’s largest brewer, Fosters Brewing, spent $73 million to add Evans’ Rothbury Limited to its wine subsidiary Mildara Blass, while Australia’s largest wine producer, the Southcorp Wine Group, spent $13.5 million to make Halliday’s Coldstream Hills its first Yarra Valley label. No longer affiliated with Rothbury, the typically ebullient Len Evans, who recently turned 66, is spreading his energies around like a dealer at a busy card table. James Halliday says he scored the better half of the deal that has seen him remain at Coldstream Hills as Southcorp’s Chief Winemaker, Yarra Valley and retain his home, his Yarra Valley view and his wine cellar on the Coldstream Hills property. Evans says he has no regrets and will remain as involved in wine as ever before. He will continue his various consultancies and has already begun to expand Evans Family Wines as a maker of small-batch individual vineyard Hunter Valley specials. He has also established a negociant business, The Evans Wine Company to distribute Australian wines domestically and overseas, commencing with the UK, Holland, Sweden and Switzerland. Its budget label will be named after Evans’ historic Sydney restaurant and wine emporium, the long-remembered Bulletin Place. James Halliday says his role at Coldstream Hills will hardly alter under its new owners and says that he and the existing winery team of Phil Dowell and Greg Jarrat will be solely and independently responsible for all its style, winemaking, viticultural and blending decisions. They will ensure that Coldstream Hills wines retain their Yarra Valley origins. Still fired up with enthusiasm for Yarra Valley wine, Halliday will now be equipped for the first time with the resources he needs. ‘The challenge we have is to present vertical tastings in five and ten years time which will prove beyond doubt that the quality of Coldstream Hills and Coldstream Hills Reserve wines have improved’, he says. The first of the modern generation of Australian wine writers, Evans presently refuses to write about wine again, but is seriously contemplating a wine novel. Halliday, who will maintain his frenetic pace as Australia’s most prolific writer of wine books and columns, says he will have no involvement in the production of other Southcorp wines.
