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First Plantings |
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The Gramp Dynasty's second & third generation, Louise, Fred, Meta, Olga, Gustav, Alma & Emma Gramp. Hugo is yet to be born.
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Jacob's Creek is a small tributary of the North Para River about a kilometre north east of the present Orlando winery. There, in 1847, Johann Gramp planted a small vineyard having sent to Germany for the cuttings. Those vines were planted on the now famous Jacob's Creek soil. The first vintage was in 1850, the year his son Gustav was born. It was an octave, about 180 litres equivalent to 240 standard bottles, and was a hock style of white wine.
Like the grape vine itself, the Barossa grew slowly yet sturdily. Families with English names, the Smiths and the Salters, joined the Gramps, Seppelts and Hoffmanns, to lay the foundations of Australia's most famous wine valley. But it was families such as the Gramps who bestowed its very special German flavour. This was apparent in the Lutheran churches, institutions such as the liedertafel choral society, the wagons which provided all forms of transport from grape carrier to bridal carriage and hearse, in the very layout of hamlets and villages, in good preferences and in the emergence of a Barossa Deutsch dialect, traces of which still linger to this day.
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Johann Gramp wearing a traditional smoking hat, every inch the patriarch.
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Johann Gramp gradually extended and improved his property and with the maturing of his vineyards was able to increase wine production. The first born, Gustav was joined by two other sons and four daughters. A surviving photograph shows Johann, solemn in the manner of the day, to be the very model of a successful and righteous patriarch. His personal toughness and the unstressful, healthy nature of his way of life, for all its physical hard work, is reflected in the fact that he died at home at the age of 84. By then the Gramp clan extended to 48 grandchildren and 19 great-grandchildren. The original 44 acre farm had been extended to 244 acres.
Johann has, and fully deserves, his place in history as the Barossa's first commercial grape grower and vigneron. However, he viewed his winemaking largely as an adjunct to general farming. It was Gustav who, when he took over from his father in 1877, paved the way for the next, crucial era of expansion. He transferred the cellars to the present site, a decision which combined sound judgement with luck for it enabled him to be prominent among the Barossa vignerons who reaped large rewards from a boom in the 1890s. Again luck played a part but so did good husbandry and good government. The luck came in the form of a tragedy for others, the devastation inflicted by the phylloxera louse on competing vineyards across the Victorian border. The South Australian Government had taken an enlightened attitude to viticulture- the Roseworthy Agricultural College, with what was to be one of the world's leading viticultural and winemaking faculties, was set up near the Barossa in the 1890s-and this was combined with the imposition of strict quarantine laws to halt the spread of phylloxera.
Gustav Gramp maintained the tradition of steady growth from the new base at Rowland Flat, planting new areas of vineyard and increasing fermenting and storage capacity as each came into bearing. History tends to repeat itself in wine as in much else, and early generations also had to cope with changing public tastes. As wine drinkers switched from the table reds and whites, which had first been made to fortified styles, Gustav enlarged the range of his wines. In 1912 the business was sufficiently prosperous to warrant conversion into a limited company. It became G. Gramp and Sons Ltd. and in the same year the trade mark Orlando was introduced.
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