ROGER PIKE IN HIS 4.5 ACRE MARIUS SHIRAZ VINEYARD ON THE FAULTLINE AT WILLUNGA, McLAREN VALE, SOUTH AUSTRALIA, THE SUN IS SETTING IN THE GULF St VINCENT, PATRON OF LOST THINGS, SCHOOLGIRLS AND VITICULTURERS photo KATE ELMES
The Elusive Rake Wakes In Spring
Nobody Spits Anything At Marius
The Pike Opens Up For Drinkster
by PHILIP WHITE
“I know this much: in the late eighties a Maserati Ghibli Spyder was found abandoned on a bend near Monte Carlo. Not far from where Princes Grace died. Pretty sure the Basque said Spyder. It was traced to a pair of bikini models, sisters, from Paris – and an Englishman called Pike, a wild man who was seen driving one of them. Pike sounded interesting, it made me listen. Think about this: wine is always judged in little sips. It’s always been about wine tasting. The bouquet, how it looks in the glass. They even spit it out afterwards. They spit it out! But what happens after a litre? What’s the effect over a night? As the Basque puts it: you can admire an ocean from the beach – but to love it you have to swim out. Pike knew that. Drank European vintages to oblivion, logged their behaviours, met with their gods.
“Fingers of gas rise off the black wine to beckon me.
“Anyway, this car’s abandoned. Pretty sure Didi said a Spyder. Nobody knew what happened. Pike was never seen in Europe again. He vanished. But years later a wingman of his, from Formula One racing, was invited to a chateau behind Cap d’Ail. A stock of experimental wines was there with handwritten labels. And he recognized Pike’s hand. When he tasted the wine he knew things had changed. He went on to trace Pike to this hidden acreage. Found him bearded, living in the vines, driving an old truck. One of Europe’s great rakes, uh. Fucking mystery to everyone – unless you know what it is he discovered that day behind Monte Carlo. Today he’s just there in his vines, trying to put the secret into grapes … ”
From Lights Out In Wonderland, DBC Pierre (Faber & Faber, 2010).
Aficionados of literature as measured by the Booker Prize, the Whitbread Prize, the Bollinger Wodehouse Everyman prize, and/or the James Joyce Award from the Literary & Historical Society of University College Dublin, will be aware of DBC Pierre, the author of that great trilogy of works concerning the collapse of everything: Vernon God Little, Ludmila’s Broken English, and now Lights Out In Wonderland.
Odds are on that other, more ordinary people, who can feast on almost anything and read and drink and get proficiently on the lash, will also comprehend. DBC is king devil, in his perfectly damaged human manner.
DBC SHARING A BIRTHDAY KRUG AND A SMOKE AT CASA BLANCO photo PIKE
As if to put a full stop to end all full stops, DBC completes his unholy trinity with a line from the mysterious Pike, as in Roger, who, as the book’s elusive winemaking hero, typically appears only at its very end, to murmer one perfectly Pikish rogering, no doubt through a cloud of pipe tobacco. Pike is the sort of bloke who wouldn’t get through an airport without the odd mighty suck or two of concentrated nicotine, and it is in an airport that he delivers his lonely line. It is his sole utterance in this entire rollicking picaresque ode to extreme indulgence, and it comes in response to the narrator’s prompt: “It doesn’t get any better than this.”
So this writer felt it opportune to lately sit down with the now-you-see-him-now-you-don't Pike, at his verandah table, overlooking his four-and-half acre block of Shiraz, and record the following conversation. Click on the photo of the weird terrazzo-like geological formation Pike found and planted, to observe this exchange.
THE FREAKISH KURRAJONG TALUS GEOLOGY OF THE MARIUS VINEYARD. WHILE THIS CAME DOWN ACROSS THE WILLUNGA FAULT IN A MIGHTY EFFLUVIUM IN RELATIVELY RECENT GEOLOGICAL TIME, THE GRAVELS WITHIN IT ARE FROM VARIOUS FORMATIONS OF THE UMBERATANA GROUP, FROM 650 MILLION TO 750 MILLION YEARS OLD. CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO SEE VID CLIP.
And here are this writer’s thoughts on Pike’s current trilogy of vintage wickednesses:
Marius Sympatico 2008
“I want to wake up in the morning with that dark brown taste”, sang Eartha Kitt in I Want To Be Evil (1962); “I want to see some dissipation in my face.” Whether or not she was actually singing about smoking cigars and looking wasted is one thing; the other is that if she had a box of this under her bed she wouldna bothered getting up to sing, in the sense that she’d probly prefer to lie down and purr. If we must anthropomorphise wines in an attempt to cut out the confounding nonsense of writing about flavour and smell in a language which has few words specific to either, then we should write more about the feeling such luxuries can impart. So. This wine makes me feel like the young Eartha, as in to want, to devour, and not to be like, although enough of it would likely set even me slinking about in a very pale imitation of her. It’s moody, glowering wine. But it’s not pouting behind any curtain: it slides around your mouth like Eartha slid across the salons and dance floors of Paris, and, daring to mention smell, it has the faint reek of polished parquetry. All the nightshades, the blackberry vines, the black cherries and olives, the whiprod acidity sit smugly in this athletic panther’s frame, and it leaves the mouth dribbling for more as that black wildcat tannin seems strangely to take the form of an African cobra. So there, it’s also got a snake. Part Eatha, part black panther, part cobra, it possesses you and sucks your blood dangerously close to the surface of your kisser. Breathtaking. 95++ points
Marius End Play 2008
This is a posh peasant wine, and I believe it’s a boy. A sort of a Heathcliff, lurching loose on the moor one night, the next assuming a rough gentleman’s posture with a briar by the fire in Thrushcross Grange. It has rude whiffs of dried figs, dates and prunes, with the appropriate flesh, but no jam. Sometimes it makes me think of Pan hurling beetroots through bedroom windows as blood pudding warms in the downstairs pot; sometimes it assumes a more elegant borscht and rich cream poise; at others it reminds me of that Lindt 85% chocolate with blueberries on an afternoon stoop between Vacqueyras and Bandol, and the lack of a hot shower commonly evident in those parts. It’s sort of squishy and gelatinous, but very large of bone. More than a little like Pike, actually. Rude. 93+++ points
Marius Symphony 2008
To continue with our humanising theme, we’re back to musical lasses here, but this is a lot more Ella than Eartha. It’s more broad and relaxed; it never slithers. It has that well-danced-in tuxedo reek that Marius occasionally affects, and maybe a sprinkle of Jean Deprez’ Bal a Versailles parfum to both counteract and highlight the bouquet of a large diva who’s just sung her heart out with Nelson Riddle and his orchestra, panting gently between the stage, the cocktail bar and the boudoir. It has a background atmosphere of heavy ancient oak furniture, stained dark with two or three centuries of tobacco smoke. But while these metaphors all indicate a performance very recently past, it has the presence, demeanour, and staying power of a chanteuse so great that, given a decent rest, will re-appear for the late show, and do it all afresh, smoother and better and even more utterly astonishing and authoritative. Mighty. 94++ points
Post Script: All these wines benefit significantly from a double-decanting: splosh them in a jug, then return them to the bottle before serving.
PIKE AND HIS WORKED GODZILLA PAY THE AUTHOR A RAINY-DAY VISIT
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