Ullinger – still fighting
Among the ‘characters’ in the Margaret River vineyards, Bill Ullinger of Redgate was one of the most colourful.
On occasions, visitors have been startled to find their host looking less than welcoming when he erupts among them with a shotgun in his hands. It’s just Bill bent on wreaking havoc in a flock of parrots on the lawn.
Then there is the story of the wine taster who had the effrontery to demand a second glass and who watch, amazed, as Bill poured…and poured…and poured until the wine overflowed the glass, the taster’s hand and elsewhere. Asked what the hell he thought he was doing, Bill said ‘I was waiting for you to say you had enough.”
Bill’s first job was much more dangerous – piloting Lancaster bombers in World War II over Germany. After fighting stopped, Bill became a civil and structural engineer. But during his RAAF training in South Australia, he had visited the Barossa and Southern Vales and got interest in wine. So in 1977, with his son Paul, then 27, Bill bought a caravan to the land he acquired on Boodjidup Road, only 3km from Redgate Beach where the georgette was wrecked in the 19th century.
Asked what made him take up winemaking, Bill said “insanity”. But Redgate produced winning wines, including the cabernet which won the 1984 Montgomery Trophy in Adelaide for best Australian red wine.
Redgate conducted one of the more successful bird damage-control exercises in 1991 and 1992 which Phil Payne of Eagle Heritage flew two black kites over their chardonnay vines. While other vineyards lost heavily to silvereyes, Redgate lost just two per cent – and half of that was sunburn. Unhappily CALM found reason to object to the use of kites and it stopped.
Bill, with Bruce Tomlinson of Lenton Brae vineyard, has been one of the front runners in a fight over sales tax on premium wines, supporting a proposal which would bring more equity than the 26 per cent tax value adopted by the government.
His view of Margaret River: “It depends on whether we maintain the quality of our wines. That’s more important than huge plantings, some of them not in areas that produce the best wines."
