He had already planted half an acre of cabernet sauvignon and shiraz/hermitage on a farm at Burekup, north of Bunbury, belonging to his sister and brother-in-law. When he came to Margaret River, at that time a struggling dairy region, he described the town as “you could fire a gun down the main street and kill nobody”. He would get up at 3am on Saturday in Perth, drive down in his Peugeot 403 (part of the road was unsealed), start work at 8am and go all weekend, sleep in a galvanised iron shed 16m by 6m, and be home with luck by midnight on Sunday, ready for another week as a cardiologist.

He spent a year looking for land.“I’d wander about boring holes with an auger, looking for red gravel in redgum country, with clay about 18 inches below the surface,” he once said.“I thought I’d found it on Harry Clew’s place but I only wanted an acre and it was right in the middle so he wouldn’t sell it, understandably. But you’ve got to face the fact that down there, you go 50 yards and the soil changes. There are six or seven different soils on Vasse Felix alone. With help from the Cullens, I finally found eight acres on Sussex Location 1669 on Harman’s Road South, not far from Caves Road. It cost $75 an acre. I bought 10 more acres later.

He found friendly help in Geoff and Sue Juniper who lived nearby and could keep an eye on it. “Much of the time, in different ways, I was on my own,” he said.“I knew nothing except what I had read in books. There was no local source of basic equipment. Quite a lot of the local farmers must have thought it was a joke. There were people who helped. The Cullens (who had had 100 acres on the coast since 1956 but had not yet got into wine), the Pannells and the Junipers used to put me up. Some of the local people were very kind to me: the Minchins, the Merchants, Jim McCutcheon and eventually John and Eithne Lagan and others. Bill Jamieson and Jack Mann were unfailingly encouraging.

Noting the fate of sailor Timothee Vasse, who was lost overboard, Tom hoped for a better fate for his vineyard, and called it Vasse Felix; Happy Vasse. The trademark hawk on the Vasse Felix label came from their using one once in an attempt to deter grape-pecking silvereyes. While he had no agricultural experience, he and others did note how many doctors were involved in winemaking – the use of botany, biochemistry, pharmacy and bacteriology. “A doctor must also learn to evaluate sensory impressions and cultivate mental discipline – two attributes which take him a step further along the road to becoming a wine connoisseur” he said. “There is an ancient marriage between wine and western civilization, tradition, country life, hard work, art, solace and beauty. It has the same sort of appeal as music. Winemaking is an attractive thing to do, it’s civilised – but it’s also critical. You might the juice in the tank and then someone comes along and does just one thing wrong, gets a decimal point wrong. So perhaps there’s an affinity with what we have to do in medicine: you look at the facts, make a decision and live with the reality that you take high risks. We are not frightened by critical chemical or other decisions. Mind you, in the beginning we and the people who worked for us were all inexperienced. Some funny things happened, out of ignorance. You don’t just stick vines in the ground, you prepare the soil for two years before you plant, you put topsoil in the hole, you tamp it down, and you water them in. It has to be done properly. Someone decided once that a block of vines needed spraying. I don’t think they had any idea what they were spraying for; it was just something you did. By the time the order got passed on to the person who did it, they used a spray designed to treat a disease in pigs. You can imagine the effect on the vines.