Milne & Co
South Australian wine merchants

Milne & Co. was a South Australian company of wine merchants, with premises on Grenfell Street, Adelaide, founded and for much of its history run by members of the Milne family.
History
Disher & Milne
William Milne (later Sir William) (17 May 1822 – 23 April 1895) formed a partnership with brother-in-law James Wardlaw Disher and in July 1846 purchased a Hindley Street wine merchant business from Patrick Auld (1811–1886) who was returning to England.
The business operated as Disher & Milne from 1846 until July 1853 when the partnership was dissolved, and William Milne opened a similar business under his own name on Grenfell Street, opposite Elder & Co.
From August 1853 the business continued with James B. Manford as Disher & Manford, then in March 1854 was bought out by Peter G. Harris.
In 1857 William Milne was elected to the seat of Onkaparinga, and retired from business around the same time.
William Milne, jun.
In November 1869, his son William Milne, jun. (1849–1905) opened a wine and spirit store as "William Milne, jun." at 32–36 Grenfell Street (once the site of Beeby & Dunstan's flour mill), adjacent Elder, Smith & Co.'s building (later the site of Australian Widows' Fund Life Assurance Society building).
Milne & Co.
The public source identifies “Milne & Co” as south Australian wine merchants. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Milne, South and Australian.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q46996032. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1822, 1895, 1846 and 1811.
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This entry incorporates text from “Milne & Co” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.