Patrick Coward arrived in Australia as a small boy, when his family emigrated from the north of England in the late 1960s and settled in Kewdale. Across the street lived another child of British immigrants named Martin Black. The two boys became best friends, and they have spoken nearly every day since.
The story did not begin on a farm. It began in Kewdale, and then at Talbot Walsh and Company, the engraving business in Welshpool that Patrick bought as a one-man operation and grew order by order: fifteen thousand commemorative woggles for a Scout jamboree, name badges for the Western Australian police, each job funding the next machine and the next idea. It was there, without a university degree and without apology, that he learned how a business really works.
In 1997 came the farm: 107 acres at Wilyabrup, bought with Martin, Patrick's sister Jane and a friend, because land was cheaper than a house. In January 1998, after a weekend of wine tastings, came the frustration that changed everything: why do the brilliant ideas belong to other people? A brainstorm produced a chocolate company; an image of big slabs of chocolate, cut with a knife and wrapped in brown paper like an old-fashioned grocer, made it real.
The rest is measured in queues. Chocolate in 1999, the Swan Valley in 2000, vines in 2002, preserves in 2005, a first vintage in 2006, a grand 1903 building on Murray Street in 2012, a villa in Bali named the best in the world. Every company on this page began as a conversation between two best friends, and each one is still run the same way: know your margins, sweat the details, admit mistakes quickly, and be brave. The motto has never changed: the best of everything.
The group has always known whose shoulders it stands on. When Margaret River wanted a fitting tribute to Tom Cullity, the pioneer who planted the region's first vines, it was Patrick who led the campaign to rename the road that runs past the factory, and in May 2011 the Tom Cullity Drive signs were unveiled on the factory's own corner. The same instinct now points forward: rooftop solar has powered the Swan Valley factory since 2016, the first step in a stated ambition to make every kilowatt the group uses.
