Convivial Pursuit

One of the worst things about trivia is that it is invariably boring. Nobody wants to know Andrew Peacock’s birthday or how many Japanese Sumo wrestlers you can squeeze into a Mitsubishi truck. But wine is different. It encourages people to talk about it. It makes some people, like myself, particularly talkative.

As you might expect, wine provides its fair share of odd moments and events. It is grown everywhere in Australia from Alice Springs to the Victorian Alps in sight of Mount Buller, and is consumed with gusto from Broome to Brisbane. It was grown in the times of the Pharaohs but they are still discovering new viticultural regions all over what modern historians, invariably European ones, like to call the ‘New World’, which does include Australia. It can cost four dollars for four litres or four hundred dollars for one litre. Price, however, is supposed to reflect a the quality of a wine, although scarcity usually has something to do with it as well.

A world record, of a sort at least, was recently established when three American businessmen paid US$5900 A$6785 for a bottle of port at a Caribbean restaurant. The bottle in question, a 1931 Quinta do Noval Nacional, is admittedly rather special and only a mere 250 cases are produced each year.

Observers, however, remain completely mystified by the price, seeing that the same bottle is more or less readily available from any number of London wine merchants at a retail price of about $A1500 US$2550. Remember, don’t be fooled by an expensive label.

Most expensive Australian wines have back labels. If a wine has a back label it should be interesting enough, in theory at least, to have something to say. But don’t pick a bottle just because it comes with an instruction manual, however fanciful the description may be. Most back labels say that the wine shows flavoursome ripe fruit flavour perfectly balanced by new oak, is drinking well right now but will undoubtedly cellar well for twenty years.

History shows how useful back labels can be. A chap by the name of Ian Lappins was driving through the Adelaide suburb of Morphetville when his headlights picked up a group of teenagers acting suspiciously.

When he slowed down he saw them toss a briefcase into a rubbish bin before disappearing. Ian decided to retrieve the briefcase, and if possible return it to its owner, who judging by the documents, keys and a few personal items inside, belonged to one Ian McKenzie.

On mentioning the incident to his brother-in-law, Brian Marx, Brian recalled seeing the name Ian McKenzie as the winemaker on the back label of a bottle of Seppelt Drumborg Traminer he had polished off the previous night at the Adelaide Hotel.

He called the guest speaker for the night, who just happened to be Seppelt’s Fine Wine Manager, Brian Miller, who confirmed that Ian McKenzie was actually in town, judging wine at the Adelaide Wine Show. A quick phone call revealed that McKenzie’s briefcase had in fact been stolen less than twelve hours before, from his car.

A grateful McKenzie responded with a selection of Seppelt wines for the finder and has reportedly revised his attitude towards the practice of fixing back labels to wine bottles…

Former Mitchelton Winemaker, David Traegar, is on record as saying “There’s one thing I will say about the importance of wine marketing. I can make a wine in six weeks, but it takes me two months to write a back label.”

It depends on your inspiration and where it comes from. Information comes from master eccentric winemaker Geoff Merrill that the resident gander in stud at his Mount Hurtle winery, Bruce the Goose, continues the form shown last spring, when he ceased to hide his procreative designs on Daffy, the winery’s gracious resident wood duck.

All the Mount Hurtle labels have Russell Morrisson etchings and woodcuts of the local birds, but Merrill believes Bruce is going for a label of his own, which of course if out of the question. To quote, “If Russ did one of him now, it would be outright hard core avifaunal porn.”

It would be true to add that birds are not the winemaker’s best friend, for they frequently have much the same effect on a crop of grapes crop as a school of pihrana on an overweight swimmer, there is still an unproven rumour that certain Western Australian and Victorian vignerons claim to have trained falcons to chase away the clouds of hungry little beaks.

There are dozens of other vineyard pests. Aphids, fungi, birds and even moths are well-documented scourges of vineyards, but Bernie Breen of the Boroka Vineyard at Hall’s Gap in Victoria has a much bigger problem – and these ones have antlers. Not even high fences and a varied range of persuasive tactics have checked the flow of deer in and out of the vineyard from the neighbouring Grampians bushland. Come to think of it, Bernie’s rich reds would wash down a plateful of venison rather well…

I wonder had back labels been the fashion in 1872 whether or not they would have written that the 1872 Craiglee Claret would drink well over 100 years later? Not even the present occupants of Craiglee, a minute and historic winery in Sunbury, Victoria, with classic bluestone cellars in almost original condition, would have the nerve. But that’s the fact, although the story is tinged with despair.

In the ‘fifties the then owner of Craiglee, Dr Wilfred Johnstone, discovered a hoard of several hundred bottles of the 1872 Claret, laying undisturbed for eighty years or so in the hitherto un-explored depths of the Craiglee cellars. The discovery was unprecedented in Australian wine and was of immense social – and potentially monetary – significance, for around one-third of the bottles was fully intact and as it turned out, drinking rather well indeed.

The good Doctor was due to leave for an overseas trip and put the cellar in the care of a wise and trusted Melbourne wine merchant now departed this life. Johnstone’s advice was to do nothing until his return. It is history now that the merchant misinterpreted those words and by the unfortunate Johnstone’s return the entire batch was sold. Several bottles still inhabit some of Melbourne’s better wine cellars, making occasional appearances at important dinners.

At these dinners the recipients of the wine are warned to drink their minute portions in short order, for the wine itself is to delicate and fragile thanks to its great age that it only takes a minute or two to fall apart and turn to vinegar before your eyes.

You can still buy Victorian wine of a comparable age if you’re prepared to try a port, for each year Seppelt release minute portions of 100 year-old Seppelt Para Port, the 1978 release of which of 1878 material has been valued by the company at $3,500 per bottle. For me, that’s a lot of words for a single sip!

Some wine, on the other hand, can be just too young to handle. Put ponder the problem of the embryonic wine connoisseur in India, where some tropical vineyards in the country’s north, especially near Poona, could actually harvest two crops of wine each year. They are so close to the equator that the vines simply get confused. The same phenomenon also occurs in other tropical and some sub-tropical countries.

Although it’s not a grapevine, there’s a deciduous hedge in Melbourne University’s agricultural faculty that has got the calendar horribly wrong. Clearly a migrant from the northern hemisphere, it starts shooting in autumn, producing leaves for winter, which it loses in spring! Stupid plant!

While hardly the same thing, some Gewurztraminer vines harvested in the Hunter Valley, New South Wales, ripen so early they are occasionally harvested in late December of the year before that given on the label!

But back to parts foreign. Where do you think a sparkling wine called “Marquise de Pompadour, Grand Mousseux, Qualite Superieure” would come from? The land of the long white baguette?

No, back to India, of all places, for it’s made at a place called Narayangaon in Maharashtra, the “California of India” as it is promoted. Its informational leaflet describes how wine is grown in the subtropical jewel of the former British Empire: “Our vineyards in Maharashtra draw life from lime-rich soil to bear fruit. The tropical sun, at its gentlest in winter, caresses the infant grapes. Time cajoles them into maturity. And the grower’s sweat lights up the emerald bulbs, signalling harvest time”.

We are also informed that “In 1983 a group of connoisseurs sat around their familiar tables in Europe to taste this champagne…from the land of maharajahs, snake charmers and the marble wonder. “Ce vin est bon!” “This wine is nice”…JCO was the verdict that their sensitive palates gave”.

All this detail does nothing more than to strengthen my resolve to avoid both Indian champagne and copy-writers like the Black Death, to which it appears both should be sentenced.

There is a place in Champagne whose name directly relates to the condition resultant from an immoderate intake of its excellent product – the village of Bouzy. Funnily enough the village is more famous for the still red wine it makes rather than its Champagne. The red is known as Bouzy Rouge and this red wine, made from pinot noir, is responsible for the salmon-pink colour of many of the greatest Champagne Roses. The French actually describe the ideal rose colour as ‘partridge eye’, but not having recently looked a partridge in the ocular, I am in no position to endorse or to decry their claim.

To finish – another snippet of wine information that could easily be mistaken or misused as the greatest piece of wine snobbery. Let’s assume we agree that red wine does not go with fish and that most people think of Beaujolais as a red wine. You’re in a restaurant, choosing a wine to match everybody’s choice of seafood. To the abject horror of your companions you choose a Beaujolais, ignoring a stream of protestations, said and unsaid. But of course you knew all along – occasionally you’ve spotted a white Beaujolais! Bear this in mind and use it if you can and have to. It’s the wine-drinkers equivalent of an ace up the sleeve! Please login to post comment