1. History of the University House Wine Symposia

John Richards

Two years before University House opened on 16 February 1954 a wine committee had been formed, recognising the longstanding association between fine wines and the House (Waterhouse 2005). Wine-tastings were popular events at the House from the very early days, as were wine-bottlings.

On 26 and 27 October 1956, the First Wine Symposium of University House was held at the instigation of the foundation Master, Professor Dale Trendall. It had a focus on Australian wines and winegrowing regions, and was organised by Professor John Lovering, then of the Research School of Earth Sciences.1

The second symposium, which is thought to have been one of the most successful events under Trendall’s mastership, was held on 1 and 2 September 1967—again with the theme of Australian wines. So successful was the event that Trendall’s initiative drew major praise from Sir Leonard Huxley, the then Vice-Chancellor of The Australian National University.

At the third symposium in August 1979—sometimes referred to as the Silver Jubilee wine symposium—during the mastership of Professor Ralph Elliott, an image of an Ancient Greek drinking cup, brought to the House by Trendall as part of a representative collection of Greek attic cups and vases, was chosen as the logo for the symposium. The role of drawing the cup fell to Richard Barwick, who was a member of the organising committee for the second and third symposia and was on the committee for the seventh. The cup logo used for that symposium was subsequently adopted by Elliott as the now well-known symbol for University House. The symposium was opened by His Excellency the Governor-General, Sir Zelman Cowen, and the after-dinner speaker at the symposium banquet was the late Len Evans, well-known winemaker, writer and critic.

The sixth symposium was held in November 1994, on the theme of wines of the southern hemisphere. Organised by the then Master, Dr Rafe de Crespigny, it featured speakers from Chile, Argentina, South Africa and New Zealand, as well as from Australia. The inaugural Helmut Becker Lecture, entitled ‘The wine cannot be better than the grape’, was presented at dinner by Dr John Possingham, then Chief Scientist of CSIRO’s Institute of Plant Production and Processing.

Records for the fourth and fifth symposia are less clear; both seem to have been run under the auspices of the University, but not at University House. The brochure for Wine Talk ’84, held in November 1984 at the ANU Staff Centre (at one stage part of University House) refers to a previous event in 1979—curiously close to the Third University House Symposium. The 1984 event coincided with the 1984 National Wine Show and so was able to take advantage of a number of key figures visiting Canberra, including Wolf Blass, Max Schubert, Murray Tyrrell and Edgar Reik.

The Seventh University House Wine Symposium was held on 20 and 21 May 2011 to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of the first commercial plantings in the modern era of Canberra and district winemaking. Like its predecessors, it featured lectures on contemporary themes, including the likely effects of a changing climate on winemaking. It concluded with a gala dinner in the Hall of University House at which the best of Canberra’s wines were on show.

Reference

Waterhouse, Jill, 2004, University House As They Experienced It, A History 1954–2004, University House, Canberra.