Back in the car I consulted one of the several wine maps I’d taken. Wine was what Margaret River was now best known for. In Perth they’d told me that the area already rivalled the Barossa Valley in South Australia and the Hunter Valley in New South Wales for the production of high-quality table wines – Semillons and Merlots and Verdelhos and Pinots Noirs. And yet the industry was hardly twenty years old. Dr Tom Cullity, a Perth physician, had begun it all in 1967. And other Perth physicians had followed. There were so many doctors growing grapes in Margaret River, in fact, that the area had become known as the ‘medical belt’. The reason for this, at least as it had been explained to me, was that Perth doctors were so wealthy they had to offset their incomes somehow. So how better than by popping down to the country and playing at being vignerons every weekend? Except that now the vineyards were successful and what was meant to be a tax loss had become a further liability. See how difficult it is to lose money in W.A.?

Because we were short of time and Château Xanadu was closed, we drove to the Leeuwin Estate, the biggest, richest, and most entrepreneurially inventive of the wineries. It was here, under the giant karri trees, that the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and more recently the Berlin Staatskapelle, had played on the lawn to audiences of over four and a half thousand people, not counting the kookaburras. The presence of these distinguished international orchestras in a tiny bush town on the far south-west peninsula of Western Australia was the result of a deal struck between the Festival of Perth and the owner of Leeuwin Estate, Denis Horgan, whereby he underwrote the tour and they played at his place. It was, of course, pretty smart publicity for the grapes. To be seen in Perth on the day of either of these concerts – to be anywhere other than Margaret River – was a sort of social suicide. I’d heard it said that any group planning a coup d’état could have achieved it quite bloodlessly by blocking the Bussell Highway with a single truck and walking unmolested into a deserted Government House.

But this isn’t the only way in which art and wine serve each other on the Leeuwin Estate. There is something in it for painters also. ‘The Leeuwin Estate “Art Series” labels’, a gold plaque in the restaurant explains, ‘are reserved for wines considered to be of outstanding quality and international standard. Each label bears a different painting which has been purchased specifically for the Leeuwin Estate Collection of Contemporary Art.’ Thus, you can have a Sidney Nolan ‘Dolphin Rock’ on your 1982 Cabernet Sauvignon, or a John Olsen ‘Frog in Riesling’ on your 1983 Riesling (naturally), or a Sam Fulbrook on your 1982 Chardonnay.