Remember way back when, when wines like Springton Claret, Hermitage Dry Red, Springton Riesling and Hamilton’s Ewell Moselle were a standard feature of every pub bottle shop? Or when Hamilton’s Gold Label Whisky was one of the three best-selling Australian brands? If you’re old enough or honest enough, this was back before 1979, the year when Mildara purchased Hamilton’s Ewell Vineyards, which at one stage was Australia’s sixth largest wine producer. The sale of his family business deeply hurt Mark Hamilton, a young Adelaide solicitor and a sixth generation direct descendent of the company’s founder, Richard Hamilton. He had dared to imagine that in time the business would be his to run. Ever since Richard Hamilton made the state’s first wine in 1841, having settled there with his family four years earlier, Hamilton’s name is inextricably entwined with the history of South Australian wine. The family business became known as Hamilton’s Ewell vineyards after Richard’s eldest son, Henry, planted his first vines on a property named Ewell after a village in Surrey. By the time of its sale to Mildara, Hamilton’s Ewell operated vineyards in the Eden Valley, Nildottie (on the Murray in South Australia) and at Wood Wood near Swan Hill in Victoria, plus wineries at Ewell (Adelaide), Eden Valley and Nildottie. But less than a decade after its entry into the Mildara Blass stable, the name of Hamilton’s Ewell was but a distant memory. Fate began to move in Mark Hamilton’s favour in 1982 when his father Robert Hamilton, himself the last chairman and managing director of Hamilton’s Ewell Vineyards, bounced out of premature retirement and bought back from Mildara the family’s old vineyard and winery in the Eden Valley village of Springton. Until 1993, when these assets were bought by Mark Hamilton and his wife Deborah, Robert Hamilton grew, made and sold good wine there under his own name. Mark Hamilton took his first plunge into vineyard ownership in 1990, buying several small Barossa vineyards between then and 1993, when he renamed the Springton vineyard as Stonegarden, a label he now reserves for a deep, spicy grenache made from its 100 year-old vines. After several years of exhaustive negotiations he took undisputed ownership of the Hamilton’s Ewell brand in 1998 and, with his father taking an overview of winemaking processes, Mark Hamilton is today operates a new family business under his family’s original historic name. The first full range of Hamilton’s Ewell wines was made in 1998 and includes a couple of densely structured and intensely flavoured shirazes crafted in the modern super-ripe style. The Railway Shiraz 1998 is luxuriant and smooth, bursting with concentrated spicy ripe berry fruit and vanilla oak, while the Fuller’s Barn Shiraz 1998 is a thicker, darker and even riper wine with flavours in the plum/prune and bitumen end of the spectrum. Made from mature 25 year-old vines, they’re too thick and spirity for my taste, but at $26 per bottle will doubtless win over legions of followers here and overseas, especially since they stack up very well against wines of similar weight and structure at twice their price. Hamilton’s Ewell, which is an entirely separate business from the very successful Hamilton Wine Group owned and operated by Richard Hamilton, Mark’s first cousin once removed, now owns vineyards in the Barossa, Eden Valley, Wrattonbully and on the Murray River at Nildottie. Mark Hamilton has no idea where his wine business will take him or how far it will grow, but says with total conviction that it’s more than just a business to him. ‘When you spend your Saturdays as a boy exploring wineries with your father, it gets in your blood’, he explains. But with a name like his, he hardly has to.
