A deep dive into the weird and wonderful stories behind the real Dan Murphy – starting with the fact that he existed.
Forgive me father for I have sinned and now it’s confession o’clock. I may be your faithful Editor In Chief, but until (embarrassingly) recently I had no idea that Uncle Dan – AKA Daniel Francis Murphy – was once a bona fide, living, breathing human being.
Yes, the logo being a literal picture of him should have given me a hint – but by that logic Betty Crocker should be real and so should the Pringles man. It wasn’t until I joined the team that I found out the human Dan Murphy did in fact exist and, my god, what a man.
Not only was he real, but he was a genuine force in Australia’s drinking landscape, with a cellar-full of stories to boot. And although Uncle Dan was born in 1918, there are people still working at Dan’s today who worked alongside the man himself.
So, as someone who regularly gets stuck in the strangest of Wikipedia holes, I started asking questions. Here are some of my favourite little known, true facts about Daniel Francis Murphy.
Dan was an obsessive wine nerd and he really knew his stuff. So much so that he became Australia’s first regular wine columnist with a weekly column in The Age – a feature that continued for some 12 years.
If you just so happen to be a weirdo (like myself) with a subscription to newspapers.com, you can actually find and read Dan’s column for almost every Tuesday from 1967 to 1979. It sits around the middle of the paper, right after the truly hilarious fashion pages, where you can discover such gems as:
“More than ever I am firmly convinced that the essential element of heavenly flavour reserved only for the Gods is entirely lost on palates made obtuse by the necessity of hurrying the divine nectar into their alcohol-hungry stomachs.”
Not all of it was this flowery. For the most part, it was some of the earliest and sharpest critical wine thinking and educational content provided to the public. During my investigations, I heard over and over that Dan was huge on not only educating himself about what he was drinking, but sharing that with the masses. He rallied hard against the snobbish, elitist status quo of wine connoisseurship and Dan’s writings played a huge role in making wine more accessible.
Aside from The Age, Dan also wrote detailed monthly newsletters called ‘The Vintage Club News’, which he continued to put out for over a decade. He also wrote several wine reference books – the first being ‘The Australian Wine Guide’, the best-selling Aussie wine book of the era.
For some reason it’s particularly satisfying to find out that two seemingly unrelated historical figures once crossed paths – such as when I learned that Lauryn Hill went to Zach Braff’s musical theatre-themed bar mitzvah. This Dan fact involves less Broadway songs and Jewish ceremonies, but wowed me nonetheless.
At one stage in his life, Dan developed a deep interest in art. One of his four children, Ann, was an artist and that ignited a new passion in Dan. He began studying art history, buying countless art books and visiting art galleries. As Dan’s daughter Clare remembers, “For a little
while we had a Sidney Nolan painting hanging in our home, until he needed the money for a business venture and sold it.”
Eventually, he opened his own gallery within the same Prahran arcade that housed the very first Dan Murphy’s store. (This iconic gothic building from 1890 – with 17 archways, deep balconies and carved ornamental eagles – is one you’ll certainly have noticed if you’ve ever done ‘Chap laps’.) He called the gallery Ann’s Garrett, after his daughter, and used it to foster and promote many local artists of the time.
And here’s where the crossover begins. One of the first artists Dan took an interest in was a young Howard Arkley. Fresh from finishing his art studies at the Prahran College of Advanced Education, Arkley and his wife (fellow artist Elizabeth Gower) moved into the upper floors of the Dan Murphy’s building. Dan had a good eye – Arkley went on to become a world-renowned artist.
The first iteration of that Dan Murphy’s site (more on that in a moment) ran from the 1950s to the 1980s. Many years later, in 2008, art powerhouse David Bromley took over the entire 20-room building. Derelict after many years of vacancy, he restored it to its former glory, using it as his flagship studio and exhibition space for 8 solid years. Then, in 2016 (some 60-plus years later), Dan Murphy’s returned home. This heritage-listed site is now once again the Dan Murphy’s Wine Cellar, operating as a gallery and store for the world’s greatest wines. It’s a fascinating place that you can visit if you’d like to learn more about its deep history.
There’s an alternate timeline somewhere in which the only wine Dan Murphy peddled was the Communion kind. It turns out, before joining his dad’s liquor business (to which his future alcohol empire would be a major competitor) he trained to become a Catholic priest. Apparently his parents were deeply religious, so this initial foray likely stemmed from them – two of his sisters became nuns – but ultimately it wasn’t the life for him.
Dan also studied accounting at Melbourne University. There’s little more to say here than I’m bloody glad he didn’t become a priest or an accountant. Or some sort of holy-number-crunching combination of the two.
These days you can’t throw a corkscrew without hitting a wine club, but back in 1955 Uncle Dan formed one of Australia’s very first. He called it ‘The Vintage Club’ and although it started with a humble membership of 12, by the time of its closing in 1984 membership was close to 50,000.
Dan’s whole M.O. was encouraging others to love wine as much as he did and the wine club was an ingenious way of doing just that. He drew people in with the tantalising promise of interesting, exclusive wine tastings, fashionable social occasions, and a genuine good time. It was inclusive, educational and all about “the promotion of good fellowship…and the obtaining for members of wine, spirits and other articles conducive to gracious living”, as its constitution reads (in Dan’s own handwriting).
Along with hosting monthly member dinners in the cellar and across Melbourne’s growing gourmet scene, Dan also opened The Wine Room, a retail business in the CBD where he ran lunchtime tastings for businessmen. Then there were Dan’s weekly wine lectures and courses, and, the ultimate maraschino cherry on top, his fabulous wine expeditions. Vintage Club members would tag along with Dan for up to 6 weeks at a time, visiting wine regions across Europe and Australia. High time we bring that back, me thinks.
When I first started buying cask wine, at no point did I stop to think about its origins. But the success of ‘goon’ in Australia owes an enormous amount to Dan – the industry likely wouldn’t exist without him.
In the 1970s, there was a major upward swing in wine consumption, doubling per person by the end of the decade. Cask wine, effectively a plastic bag filled with vino inside a cardboard box, was hailed as the most revolutionary wine container since the invention of the glass bottle. For the first time, everyday drinkers could keep their wine fresh for up to three months after opening – no mean feat if you’ve ever poured yourself a glass from a bottle that’s been sitting on your counter a little too long and been hit with straight vinegar.
Problem was, the casks were leaky as, and people viewed them as deeply unrefined. Major producers like Angove and Penfolds tried and failed to generate market interest in wine-in-a-box. So in stepped Uncle Dan. Sensing an opportunity, he set up a small wine-cask production line in a back room of the Chapel Street store, along with multiple 9000-litre tanks in the basement. Sourcing top notch wine from South Australia and plastic bags from Japan, Dan successfully developed a goon that worked. And, more importantly, was able to convince the Aussie public to give it a go.
If you take a look at his advertising from back then, you can see he backed the cask HARD. And it worked. It flew off the shelves in enormous quantities and other winemakers soon followed suit. By 1984, cask wine represented 64.7% of Australian wine sales – a number that totally boggles the mind.
This story captures for me what everyone kept telling me about Daniel Francis Murphy – that he was an equal opportunity wine explorer. Although he certainly had adoration for rare, expensive wines, he understood that great wine could be produced at all price points – it’s what’s inside the bottle that matters.
