JIM INGOLDBY, JEAN PAXTON DO A RUNNER

JEAN PAXTON IN HARRY WHO AT HER 100th BIRTHDAY PARTY, AT WHICH SHE ARRIVED BY BLACK HELICOPTER TO ANNOUNCE "I'VE TRAVELLED HERE IN ONE OF THOSE SELF-FLYING CRAFT". JEAN IS THE ONLY WOMAN EVER TO ASK FOR PHILIP WHITE'S HAND IN MARRIAGE! photo KATE ELMES, The Independent Weekly





Mighty Wine Characters Die
Missing Mates At Christmas
Much Else Has Gone Forever
by PHILIP WHITE - a version of this appeared in The INDEPENDENT WEEKLY.


“Do you know anything about finance?” Jim Ingoldby glowered.

“No,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “Now we can talk.”

I’d known Jim for twenty-five years. But this was a different day: I was suddenly there in his home as his fair daughter Jane’s partner. His wry opener was an indicator of his intention to hang on to the family coffers as much as his disbelief at what was happening to the wine industry.

Jim died of long life a few months back, one of the last of the great post-war winemakers. He had stacked many a gift beneath the Christmas trees, allegorical or real, of his friends, family and employees through his amazingly creative life, and as I contemplate whether indeed to bother with a baubled fir on the occasion of Jesus’ 2009th birthday, I know Jim would ridicule my sentiment, but love playing with the wires and lights.

JIM INGOLDBY

Baubles are scant in the wine business firs this year. But if you could grant me just the one, another bottle of scotch with Jim would do nicely. We’d reflect on the staggering hubris of a business that had absolutely everything going for it fifteen years ago. I would suggest, as I do, that if it were the wool business, or the Australian Wheat Board, that had greedily overgrown itself by at least a third, and was now rotting in its own havoc and destruction, there’d be a Royal Commission into who was to blame. They’d be stood up, cross-examined, and locked in the stocks.

I’d recall asking Ian Sutton, Chief Executive of the Winemakers’ Federation of Australia, Wine Australia Pty. Ltd., Australian Wine Foundation and the Australian Wine and Brandy Producers' Association, which bits of the wine industry he’d consulted about his determined putsch to use $40 or 50 million of the taxpayers’ money to build the National Wine Centre in the Botanic Gardens. Sutton snarled "My job's not to consult the wine industry -- my job is to represent the wine industry". Great.


NATIONAL WINE CENTRE: AN UNFINISHED GRANDSTAND WITH ITS BACK TO THE PEOPLE? ADELAIDE UNIVERSITY NOW RENTS THIS FOR $1 A WEEK ...

That ugly pile in the Gardens is the perfect allegory for the way the whole business has gone crook. Those who put it there should be drawn to account, if not drawn and quartered. They should never be let near the levers of wine industry power, ever again. But still they hover. “This tax-payer-funded Xanadu will have little purpose beyond housing the bureaucrats who will be responsible for the next taxpayer-funded Vine-pull Scheme,” I wrote at the time. Touché?

I would recall with Jim his early days at McLaren Flat, where at Rycroft, in the seventies, he radically marketed McLaren Vale wines in bottles labelled according to the vineyards and growers whose wine glowered within – something that is finally, sensibly becoming vogue. I would recall his early adoption of the screw cap, and the ingenious machine he built to apply them. I would revel in his exquisite watercolours: always a new’un on the easel at the end of his bed. And we would roar with derisive laughter and rage at the squirming idiots who, until just a year and a half ago, were urging growers to plant more chardonnay, lay more irrigation pipes, and guarantee an endless supply of fruit at prices so low whole communities would inevitably collapse, along with the river that nurtured them.

If you could squeeze another gift beneath my tree, it should be one more bottle of shiraz with the amazing Jean Paxton, who also left us this year, at the grand old knock of 102. Jean, Mum of David, had watched their family business march bravely out of almond-growing and into viticulture. She saw her son move from an aggressive developer of inspired, but industrial vineyards, to become one of the first converts to biodynamic principles and sustainable natural practices, and eventually marry Ang, formally entwining “Them Paxtons” with the vinous blood of the great Tolley and Penfold families.

When she was a hundred, Jean proposed marriage to me: the only lass to ever do so. She mischievously joked that David would be annoyed at me “getting all the money”, and reassured me “ - but don’t worry – you wouldn’t have to put up with me for long.”

At 101 years, this mighty woman triggered a frisson of panic when she was found face down on the floor of her unit, looking all the world like she’d had a big stroke. There were ambulances, and drips and whatnot, and the usual jittery concerns. But when her family arrived at casualty, a good nurse relieved their fears. It wasn’t so bad. They’d just checked her blood alcohol: 0.13. Jean had been enjoying a bottle or two of the sublime Paxton Jean Shiraz, the pinnacle of her son’s endeavour, which had been named after her. She couldn’t understand the fuss.

I could go on with my festive cheer. But about forty per cent of the wine business won’t. It’s finished.