“Sod the wine, I want to suck on the writing. This man White is an instinctive writer, bloody rare to find one who actually pulls it off, as in still gets a meaning across with concision. Sharp arbitrage of speed and risk, closest thing I can think of to Cicero’s ‘motus continuum animi.’

Probably takes a drink or two to connect like that: he literally paints his senses on the page.”


DBC Pierre (Vernon God Little, Ludmila’s Broken English, Lights Out In Wonderland ... Winner: Booker prize; Whitbread prize; Bollinger Wodehouse Everyman prize; James Joyce Award from the Literary & Historical Society of University College Dublin)


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17 February 2016

VINTAGE 16: VINE OF THE YEAR?

They picked these baby Shiraz bush vines outside my window this cool grey morning. You can easily estimate the depth of the topsoil by the size of the vines - they're six years old. Beneath them it's not so much particulate ironstone or gibbers - galets, they call them in France - but solid terrazzo slabs of the stuff, big as houses, virtually impenetrable, like this:

In spite of their cramped tootsies, all the smallest stragglers in that tough regiment managed at least one bunch each this vintage. Here's my favourite: my vine of the year (so far), in grass from freak January rain ... that tiny bunch is in the fermenter now:

these will be the old vines of the future                                                          all photos©Philip White

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