David Wynn was a man of category ... Mountadam, early '90s, with man of category Howard Twelftree and the author [last man standing]
Men of Category
a SPEECH to the
SOUTH AUSTRALIAN WINE PRESS CLUB
at the EXETER HOTEL
Wednesday 27 March 2002
by PHILIP WHITE
I want to read
to you the opening passage from One Man’s Ambition, the introduction to Wynn
Winegrowers Diary, 1970, written by the late Walter James (below), who was a great
and humble winewriter in Melbourne.
"When you
choose to direct your life to the task of making money you may be sure that
your success will arouse the admiration, and the envy, of a vast army of men
who have had similar aims,” he wrote. “Should you set out not to make money but
to make something really worthwhile in itself, your success will with equal
certainty be rewarded with the admiration, and the goodwill, of men who really
matter - men of category, as the Spaniards call them.”
He continues:
"In some fields of productive endeavour, of course, you cannot achieve
much without substantial means; it is only a little sad that so many men of
ability as they reach for success and meet it are beguiled into allowing the
means to submerge the aim and in the end are content to do, adequately enough,
no more than a hundred others around them are doing equally well. Their
obituaries describe these people as successful businessmen and they pass
promptly into oblivion."
David Wynn, left, with Hurtle and Norm Walker, at Wynn Winegrowers' Romalo Cellars opposite Penfolds at Magill. These were originally built by the great French winemaker, Edmund Mazure, who taught his champagne-making skills to Hurtle, who taught his son Norm, who taught his son Nick, who's now half of the burgeoning Clare winemaking business, O'Leary Walker ... men of category, see?
Among the
businessmen who will pass promptly into oblivion in the near future are many of
those we see running the great Australian wine industry.
And not to be
unduly cynical, it IS a great wine industry. Again.
Just last night
I was ploughing through some old Winestate and Wine and Spirit
magazines, from back in the days when a Petaluma chardonnay was $7 and we’d
give you a free bottle of Grange if you bought a $12 annual subscription.
Australia hadn’t discovered Shiraz then.
I read an
interview I did twenty years ago with Frank Stone (left), a wine merchant from
Atlanta. He was a man of category. He cursed Australian winemakers because he
had never had one Australian wine shipper bother to visit Skinflints, his six
wine supermarkets in Georgia, that were turning over $25 million a year of
premium wine. He was also the President of an international wine education
association with 1600 members, and he’d never once been contacted by an
Australian winemaker or promoter.
Frank told me of
the phenomenal success of the Italians in the United States, quoting figures
like Villa Banfi, who’d gone from shipping nothing in 1975 to 17 million cases
in 1982, and how the Italian government had got behind its winemakers and got
some order into their promotion and made sure they went and visited blokes like
Frank.
The people
who’ve put Australia there beside the Italians might have taken twenty years,
rather than seven, but they’ve done it - they’ve achieved some very grand
things indeed, but even many of those will pass into oblivion.
Writers pass
into oblivion, too. I remember Richard Farmer, the political journalist and
major Canberra liquor merchant standing up in Len Evans Bulletin Place restaurant
in 1984 to address the New South Wales Wine Press Club. “Fellow drug dealers”,
he began, addressing an issue that has never really been faced since that day.
Then he wheeled into a loud warning about Australia’s wine explosion being the
result of the product being tax free, and said loud and clear that unless the
industry got its shit together and grew up and lobbied, it would of course be
taxed.
Now, thanks to
the lobbying efforts of Brian Croser and Ian Sutton, we have an absolute dusie
of a tax, but we don’t hear much from Richard since he penned Bob Hawke’s
immortal line that by 1990 no child in Australia would be living in poverty. As
a fellow writer, I think I know the sort of personal oblivion that might eat
Richard right up ...
In the same year
- the apocryphal 1984 that my generation of bookworms thought we’d never ever
reach - Nathan Chroman (above), wine writer from the Los Angeles Times was here,
saying he didn’t think anybody in the world needed to make better wines than
our best Shiraz.
Gerard Jaboulet
was here in the same week, handing out glasses of his La Chappelle Hermitage
(1976 - $16!), from the French vineyard which is the very source of that Shiraz,
totally disbelieving that we were spending taxpayers’ money to uproot our best
and oldest Shiraz vines, not to mention nearly all of our ancient Grenache.
There was hardly a vine of Cinsault or Carignan left after that exercise. These
just happened to be the varieties Gerard coveted from Chateauneuf-du-Pape, the
district which McLaren Vale now seems determined to emulate.
Gerard Jaboulet with Vogue Australia's Maria von Alderstein at our lunch in Sydney in 1984 ... Gerard became a great friend and mentor to the author, who took this photo
Funny thing
about these “new” rousillon varieties, Viognier, Marsanne and Roussane, that
they’re madly planting to get more South-of-Francey: they were all down there
growing brilliantly in the Vales when Ebenezer Ward was writing The
Advertiser wine column in 1862.
Gerard Jaboulet
has tragically and prematurely returned to the great silence, but I don’t think
we can say he’s gone to oblivion. I don’t know about Nathan. He’s a writer. And
so was old Ebenezer (left), who shared one or two of my human tendencies. He got his
tab in the Yorketown pub up to 50 quid in 1880, because of his derision
of the quality of the local fizz, and his irritating habit of calling
repeatedly for Krug.
Coming a bit
closer to today’s men of category, one chubby fellow who was on the National
Wine Centre board buttonholed me and boasted of how he would win his Order of
Australia Medal for getting the Centre up against all the odds and dangerous
detractors like me. I thought immediately that he was a man who had become
“beguiled into allowing the means to submerge his aim”. He will pass promptly
into oblivion.
Mark Cashmore,
the great Hunter winemaker and marketer, is a name we don’t hear too much of
any more. Before he sooled his lawyers on me for calling him Mark Morecash in
1983 I asked him the following question: “Why have you changed the name of your
blend of Chardonnay and Semillon from Pinot Riesling to Semillon Chardonnay?”
To which he
honestly replied: “Pinot Riesling doesn’t mean very much at all. Chardonnay’s
not Pinot Chardonnay and I don’t think Riesling in the context of Pinot Riesling
means very much. I mean Riesling is Semillon and Pinot is Chardonnay, and we
have more Semillon in the wine than Chardonnay, so it should be Semillon Chardonnay.”
Not to put too
much of a mozz on the Hunter, but the notorious Murray Tyrrell (left, with Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser) beat that hands
down when I rang him for a comment on one of his habitual imbroglios: “Philip”,
he roared like an old Chev blitz starting up, “what these fellers in the press
are saying about me is completely unfalse!”
But that’s
enough of that. I know what dear Walter James and David Wynn were thinking of
when they conspired to write that paragraph I read to begin. They were talking
of the true cycles of wine, and how so few of us ever really get to see it
properly, gloriously, wholesomely occur; if not our very short lives, at least
our concentration is too short to plan a flavour, and spend a year or three
selecting the ground which will deliver it, then another one preparing it for
the action. We might endure the few years it then takes for a crop to appear,
or even stick around for another four or five so the fruit begins to show some
complexity of flavour, but will we still be paying attention when those wines
reach their maturity another ten years on?
How many decades
of close attention does it take for a true believer to feel knowledgeable and
comfortable about his terroir?
I interviewed M.
Derallier-Dubrez once, and thanked him for the beautiful colour advertisements
he’d been placing for his Quelltaler Estate, which was part of his Remy Martin
empire. But I also voiced concern that the stylish ads were too subtle for
Australians, and asked him how long he thought they’d take to reflect real
change in his sales. This was in 1983, and he was nearly eighty.
“Aaaah M’sieu”,
he said from his wheelchair, “I am planning for the year 2020.”
Remy foundered
with its debt after buying Cointreau, and Derallier-Dubrez, who is still a man
of category, sold Quelltaler to Wolf Blass, who sold it to Foster’s, who shut
it down, ripped its tanks out, then put them back and opened it again. Perhaps
their new 75,000 tonne wine percolator at Bilyara’s not big enough. Whatever
will the shareholders think?
Another image from the Winegrowers Diary 1970: David Wynn's father Sam, the founder of the Wynn wine empire. As Sam Weintraub, maker of kosher wine for the Warsaw ghetto, Wynn escaped penniless to Melbourne in 1913, and was delighted to discover fresh grapes in the market. This page bears the autograph of discount king Dan Murphy, who did six months of a 30 month jail sentence for sales tax fraud in 1991 ... look what he left us ... and then there's the autographs of Norm Walker, Romalo fizz maker, and his son Nick, now of the booming O'Leary Walker Wines in Clare
Since our
staunchly anti-gambling Prime Minister has insisted on Australians becoming the
world’s biggest investors in the stock market, the popularity of wine as a
sheer investment property has boomed. I don’t mean the idiots who buy the stuff
like gold bars at auction, and lay it down and wait til it’s too old to drink,
at which point they sell it on at a grand profit to some other dunderhead
who’ll repeat the dumb cycle - I’m talking about the nature of a wine industry
which has become dependent upon short-term investors for its survival.
What happened to
Seppeltsfield without its family? Why are our heritage wineries, like Saltram
and Quelltaler, under constant threat of closure in the name of shareholder
interest? How could empires like that one which the Wynns built, over three
generations and a whole century, continue to survive this deadly slow cycle, if
their sole duty was to return value for money to their impatient but faceless
shareholders, who are scattered about the globe avoiding tax?
The two systems,
on the face of it, seem totally mismatched. To me, a wine which is good value
for the shareholder is a terrible wine to drink, and, conversely, as Richard
Farmer said on that tumultuous day in Sydney: “Small vineyards are a rich man’s
hobby.”
How can
shareholders imagine or learn or care that their fast buck comes at the expense
of salinated soil and buggered river systems, somewhere else, and how can their
managers afford to let on? How can they possibly conceive of the patience
required, the foresight and drive to establish a vineyard like Coonawarra?
Of course the
sad truth is that Coonawarra had already passed into oblivion when David Wynn
bought the old Riddoch cellars and vineyard land there for £22,000 in 1952. One
year the farm’s being sold on its value as sheep grazing land, the next Wynn
and his winemaker, Ian Hickinbotham walked in and by 1954 they were directing
the first deliberately induced and managed malo-lactic fermentations on earth.
I’ve tasted that wine many times. It’s still delicious, and the Frogs still
can’t believe it.
A case of old Coonawarras is a serious dive into the wondrous achievements of men of category, like David Wynn, Ian Hickinbotham and Norm Walker ... photo Philip White
Like Wynn, I
don’t think Hickie will be in oblivion when he goes. They’re what those
Spaniards call men of category.
And so, I
believe, might the Oatley family be. The plans Philip Shaw unveiled for the
replanting and refurbishment of Coonawarra in my piece in today’s Advertiser
are unlike the sort of thing you hear from a publicly-listed company. The
previous regime was certainly less likely to chop yields and short term profits
so dramatically. What will make the Oatleys serious men of category, who will
not pass quickly into oblivion, would be to see them carry on with the plan I
like to imagine them following. Like frighten the investors off, get the price
down nice and low, then buy the whole thing out and delist it. I’ve done my
bit.
I was wrong about Bob "Wild Oats" Oatley. Having skun Southcorp to the tune of $1.49 billion when he flogged them his Rosemount, he later assisted hand the big winemaker to the disastrous Fosters by selling them his 18.8% Southcorp stake for $585 million four years later in 2005 ... the old coffee king has yet another wine business now
South Australia
was enjoying a spectacular wine export boom exactly a century ago. Ernest
Whitington, writing in The Register of 1903, reported:
“At present time
the vintage is in full swing .... new, clean and up-to-date appliances have
taken the place of old-fashioned and dirty methods, and the results in every
case have been most gratifying”. He went on to explain that the state’s wine
production had gone up fourfold in the previous decade, and the export trade
had “gone ahead by leaps and bounds. Wine has grown to become one of the staple
products of South Australia”, he wrote, “and there is no knowing what
dimensions the industry will develop. The possibilities are almost
illimitable.”
But within
thirty years, the war, the wowsers, changing public tastes, stupid government
intervention, and a wave of investors who knew nothing about wine, at both the
British and Australian ends, saw that boom go a complete gutser.
Our sale of
strong alcoholic wines to fatten up the ration-starved Poms after the next war
worked for a while, and we enjoyed another boom. “McLaren Vale furruginous
wines” were pumped for all they were worth: smooth and alcoholic, and yes, in
some instances, even grown on ferruginous soils. But suddenly the English felt
they’d put on sufficient condition: they’d had enough, and flocked, en masse,
back to the lighter, more accessible, less heady stuff from just across the
Channel, and Australia’s great wine business belly flopped again.
Men of category
are what we need more than anything, right now. The wine industry is suddenly
in the hands of a generation which has experienced no surplus, no collapse, and
indeed has faced very little inclemency at all in this golden age. All its
investors are fairly new; many of them are in it only to avoid paying tax.
What we need is
people who are determined and wise enough to make something really worthwhile
in itself, people who will not let the money submerge the ambition. Because
there are plenty of people who really do matter in Australia, people of true
category, who will reward such enlightened endeavour with extremely valuable
admiration, delight, and goodwill. And you never know: them, their children, and
their grandchildren, might even drink.
Thankyou very
much.
.
top photo Philip White bottom photo Stephen White
