[WINE] Studio portrait of John Charles Johnston of Craiglee Vineyard, Sunbury, Victoria, late 1860s.

Albumen print photograph, carte de visite format, 104 x 63 mm (mount); recto inscribed in ink in a fully contemporary hand in the lower margin: ‘J. C. J. … Sunbury’; verso inscribed in the same hand ‘John Charles Johnston’, and with the gilt back mark of ‘Johnstone, O’Shannessy & Co., Artist Photographers, 3 Bourke Street East, next the Post Office, Melbourne’; the print and the mount are both in excellent condition.

Vines were first planted at Sunbury’s Craiglee Vineyard in 1863 by politician and businessman James Stewart Johnston (1811-1896). From that time up until its temporary closure in the 1920s, the vineyard was largely run by his sons – including vigneron John Charles Johnston (d.1921), the dashing young gentleman pictured in this quite possibly unique portrait by Johnstone, O’Shannessy & Co., one of the leading Melbourne photographic studios of the 1860s.

In the nineteenth century, wines made at Craiglee – most notably its 1872 Hermitage (shiraz) – received international recognition. Happily, Craiglee was revived in the 1970s and today the vineyard flourishes once again, producing fine wines from mainly shiraz, cabernet sauvignon and chardonnay varieties.