‘Intoxicating: Ten drinks that shaped Australia’ - Countdown to launch: fourth chapter

Chapter four of ‘Intoxicating’ is ‘The Salthouse champagne’: in 1841, a ship carrying many bottles of fine French wine to the new settlement of Melbourne sank in Port Phillip Bay. 150 years later I was lucky enough to taste some of those bottles ... The chapter tells the story of how Australians developed an insatiable thirst for champagne in the 19th century - and sparkling wine in the 20th century – and examines our changing attitudes towards luxury and celebration. The photo comes from an article I wrote for The Age in 1994 about the historic tasting of the Salthouse bottles: it shows a young Peter Leske, now winemaker at La Linea in the Adelaide Hills, then with the AWRI, carefully extracting a cork from a bottle of French muscat salvaged from the wreck. #IntoxicatingTenDrinks