The First Families Of Wine: HENSCHKE
Among the 120 hand-picked guests fortunate enough to attend Henschke’s 150th anniversary celebrations at the winery in 2018 was Hieu Van Le, the 35th Governor of South Australia. Stephen Henschke, CEO and chief winemaker at Henschke and the fifth generation of the family to run the iconic winery in South Australia’s Eden Valley, told the guests that the Governor’s presence at the celebrations was particularly appropriate. “We were thrilled that the Governor attended our celebrations and it was not lost on us the parallels between his arrival in Australia and the arrival of my great-great-grandfather 136 years earlier,” Stephen said.
Stephen’s great-great-grandfather, Johann Christian Henschke, was a refugee, arriving by boat from Europe in 1841. Van Le arrived in Australia by boat from Vietnam in 1977. Stephen told the story from the old cellars at the Henschke winery, north of the town of Keyneton. The doorways of those cellars are so low that most visitors have to stoop to go through them. Around the walls are dusty bottles of Hill of Grace with their original white labels and simple black type: “Henschke Hill of Grace, 1962, Premier Quality Estate Bottled, CA Henschke and Co, Keyneton, S.A.” The cost of a bottle back then was less than $2.50 in today’s value.
Both inside and outside these cellars you could be forgiven for thinking that little has changed here over the past century. Then again, at Henschke very few things are rushed. As veteran wine commentator James Halliday said, when he was writing about the winery’s 150th anniversary, which coincided with the 177th anniversary of the arrival of
