In the politics of European imperial power during the Enlightenment, a British ideology held that civilised colonists were those who cultivated the lands they seized from Indigenous peoples, rather than only extracting resources through mining or pastoralism. New South Wales settlers William Macarthur and James King, among others, considered wine growing to be the highest of cultivations. This form of fruit production and processing called for a greater commitment of capital than most other crops, required an intensive scale of husbandry, and depended on a collaborative community. Moreover, successful winegrowing necessitated perhaps a hundred years from first vine plantings in any given geographical region to perfect a trade reputation for that region's wine. Yet Britain had no wine grapes or wine scientists. In the 1840s, in a burgeoning international climate of vine and wine sciences in Europe, the ambitions of Macarthur and King implicated them in the transimperial development of modern viticulture and wine chemistry. This paper considers what may be learned from the relationships formed by Macarthur and King as settler scientists recasting Australian nature for profit through this branch of agricultural modernity.