James Halliday’s Australian and New Zealand Wine Companion

I doubt there’s a person interested in wine who doesn’t allow James Halliday to do much of their research for them. His annual guide, which has its roots in a larger annual format designed to update the author’s classic ‘The Australian Wine Compendium’, provides exhaustive and accurate information on much of what people need to know about Australian wine.

Several prominent wine writers have admitted to me over the years that whenever an important fact or detail eludes them, they simply reach straight for Halliday’s latest. I’m just one of that number.

This year’s edition has a more user-friendly size and shape than last year’s brick-like effort, although I note the term ‘Pocket book’ has sensibly been deleted from the cover.

Halliday works through something like 925 wineries in Australia and New Zealand and provides star ratings and tasting notes of current releases for 1350 wines.

Halliday presents a concise analysis of each winery he covers, including details such as their production volume in cases, their product range, winemaker, address, telephone and fax. Impressively, not only is each winery given a brief, pithy overview, but each wine featured in the book is given a broad description or rationale which could not fail to inform.

The only aspect of the book I would question are the food recommendations which accompany each wine. They’re all the go with some editors and publishers, but the strain of creating them for all 1350 wines does begin to show through.

There’s no doubt amongst his peers that James Halliday fully deserves his status as the most important wine critic in Australia. A former senior partner in Clayton Utz, a major law firm, he became interested in wine at a time when the strength of the Australian dollar enabled those with the interest to fully indulge their oenological fantasies, which Halliday did regularly for years at Len Evans’ famous Sydney wine institution, Bulletin Place.

Such was the extent and quality of the wines that Halliday, Evans, Tony Albert and Sydney-based wine critic and another former lawyer John Beeston presented and such was their ability to pick their identity, boosted in part by an intimate knowledge of the others’ cellars, that the group were dubbed ‘The Bulletin Place Front Row’.

Since those early days, Halliday has regularly purchased and then consumed moderately, of course a truly remarkable amount of the world’s best wine. When you consider that there isn’t another wine writer on the planet who has travelled around the world’s wine regions to a greater extent than he, Halliday is in something of a unique position from which to address his subject. And having watched him in action many a time, I would add that he doesn’t miss a skip.

One of the crew responsible for the creation of Brokenwood, now considered one of the Hunter Valley’s elite producers, Halliday was responsible for something of an uproar when he decided to change his base and move from Sydney to Melbourne. While he initially remained with Clayton Utz to establish the Melbourne office, without fanfare he directed the early days of Coldstream Hills’ establishment.

The principal reason behind what many Sydneysiders initially regarded as Halliday’s defection was his conviction that he could create world-class chardonnay and pinot noir in the Yarra Valley, a view initially inspired by tasting wines such as Mount Mary and Seville Estate. He began to plant the ‘Amphitheatre’ vineyard beneath the Coldstream Hills winery in 1985 and today this vineyard remains the source of much of the best Coldstream Hills fruit.

Coldstream Hills’ hard-fought battle to establish itself on a sure financial footing culminated with its recent purchase by Southcorp Wines. Today as Southcorp’s chief winemaker, Yarra Valley, Halliday has every intention of keeping up the frenetic pace at which he judges wine shows, consults to Ansett and to David Jones and writes about wine.

When you consider that James Halliday’s Wine Companion is as relevant to New Zealand wine as it is to Australia, its asking price looks cheaper by the minute. It is, without question, the perfect accompaniment in the bookshelf to another annual Australian wine guide, appearing this year for the first time wearing the colour green! Please login to post comment