Carrodus Quad is located on Queen’s Lane, one minute away from the main College.
As a first-year undergraduate student, I live in Carrodus Quad with a beautiful view of the historic main college site. The location is excellent, being just opposite to the Exam Schools where my lectures take place. My bedroom is ensuite, spacious and well-equipped, including a desk and study space where I can carry out academic work. Housing around seventy first-year students from all over the world, there is a real sense of a vibrant and inclusive college community in Carrodus.
Shuaichu
The name
Carrodus Quad was named on 5 September 2011 in honour of the pioneering Australian winemaker Bailey Balfour Carrodus who matriculated in 1962 and completed a DPhil in plant physiology. His generous bequest funded the refurbishment and modernisation of the Quad.
Bailey Carrodus’ vineyard, Yarra Yering, produced some of the most distinctive and highly regarded wines to emerge from Australia in recent decades. On a personal level he was an enigmatic, cultured, and deeply private man who quite deliberately gave away little information about his life. By all accounts he thoroughly enjoyed his Oxford years. He was a convivial dinner host, encouraging friends to try Australian wine (then a rarity in the UK), and he cut a striking figure striding around the city in a black cloak.
At College he was President of the MCR while working on a thesis that eventually bore the title ‘Absorption and assimilation of nitrogen compounds by Mycorrhizas’. On his return to Australia he taught at Melbourne University and continued as a research fellow at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation until the late 1970s. But by this stage his attention had turned towards Yarra Yering, bought in 1969 after a careful search for a suitable plot in the Yarra Valley. The first vintage was produced in 1973, with Carrodus working on the vineyard at weekends and during his annual leave.
Recognition came gradually. Carrodus’ wines were untypical, and he was no self-publicist: he was critical of the nascent Australian industry, preferring the complexity and flavour of the classic European blends. His own wines reflected this, and critics grew to expect idiosyncrasy both in taste and personal behaviour. A good example is the unprecedented 1988 recall all of his red wines; Carrodus, dissatisfied with the crop, offered full refunds to all purchasers. Later, in 1990, he famously released a $100 bottle that is thought to be the most expensive merlot ever produced in Australia. Yarra Yering undertook little marketing, and the property initially opened for sales only once a year. But the band of loyal connoisseurs grew steadily, and by the 1990s there was no doubting that it had become one of the most highly regarded vineyards in Australia. The prominent Australian critic James Halliday rates Carrodus’ red wines as amongst the greatest ever produced in the country.
His regard for European wine was matched by his respect for European culture. His knowledge was encyclopedic; when his closest friends wanted to learn about something, they would simply ‘ask Bailey’. His house at Yarra Yering was home to an astonishingly broad collection of art and antiques, and he was known for his great knowledge of the collections of European museums. He remained a modest and charming man, however—no sufferer of fools, but generous with his time and with his money. His death on 19 September 2008 after a short illness provoked moving tributes and genuine remorse from wine-lovers all over the world.
Andrew Timms, Bursar (excerpt reproduced from College Record, December 2010)