The barrel hall at Seppeltsfield that houses the 100-year-old Para Ports. Seppeltsfield Wines

Seppeltsfield offered an extremely rare bottle of its Seppeltsfield Para Vintage Tawny 1878 to celebrate this year’s Tasting Australia event in Adelaide*. This is the original 100 year-old Para—the first vintage ever produced. It immediately brought forth my own memories of that unique wine.

The year was either 1978 or 1979 and I was a sub-editor on the Albury Border Morning Mail. I was a budding wine lover and within a year I would quit working in newspapers and go to Roseworthy Agricultural College to study wine and hopefully begin a new career.

I heard of a charity wine auction to be held across the river in Wodonga, to raise money for the Wodonga Base Hospital. I found myself in the audience clutching a booklet of the lots to be auctioned. I’d optimistically circled a few of the cheaper wines.

At that time few knew of the existence of the puncheons of port Benno Seppelt had laid down at Seppeltsfield in 1878, not to be released till they reached the age of 100 years. Certainly none had ever been sold. The younger vintage-dated Paras were quite well-known to wine collectors at the time, however.

The auctioneer announced that Lot Number such-and-such was a rare and extraordinary wine, and proceeded to tell the story. The bidding began and the winner was a solidly built, well-dressed, middle-aged man with a much younger woman on his arm, and I seem to remember a gold chain around his neck and a general appearance suggesting wealth. He walked out with the bottle, for which he paid a large sum, and I imagined there was a late-model Porsche waiting in the street outside. The catalogue is long lost but my memory is that he paid around AUD $2,000, which was then an extraordinary sum for a bottle of wine.

I believe it was the first time a bottle of 100-year-old Para had even been sold or even sighted in public. The significance of this event only fully came home to me long afterwards.

It later emerged that Seppelt (as it was then, family owned) was donating the first few bottles of 1878 to various charity events as a way of publicising its debut, its emergence into the sunlight after a century of slumber in the dark Barossa Valley cellars of Seppeltsfield.

And me? I went home with a bottle of Stonyfell Metala 1971, which cost me what felt like an arm and a leg – about AUD $4.

*All you needed to do was enter your name and contact details to go into the draw. Needless to say, I did—unsuccessfully.