THE POWER OF ONE OCTOPUS PIE

One of the canals of Sète, 'The Venice of the Languedoc' on the Mediterranean near Montpellier ... photo © www.tomcorser.com

À la recherche du temps perdu: good times can still roll if you're smart
 by PHILIP WHITE


It's all too human that good people are often driven apart by shared grief. The depth and savagery of the loss eventually become so confounding and crippling that we each need to take grief alone to the wilderness before we can afford to publicly live with it. Sometimes this takes years. Decades. Lifetimes. 

A couple of weeks back at a splendid luncheon at the Broderick family's Basket Range vineyard and winery I met Léa Bru, from the north-west Mediterranean town, Sète. It's next to Frontignan, near Montpellier. 

Long way from the Languedoc: the view from the Basket Range winery in the Adelaide Hills, source of intense, elegant blends of the Bordelaise varieties ... photo Philip White
   
Léa, who is the opposite of grief, brought a scrumptious octopus pie she'd made to her homeport recipe. Even before we'd broached its crust I was tripped to that proud seaside town, reminding me of a comrade, Francois Henri, who retired there after leaving his eventual chairmanship of Champagne Krug, and another, Dennis de Muth, who'd worked with Francois in Remy Australie through the 'eighties and loved to visit his old boss in France. They were best mates. With Clare and Ingrid, they'd hire a boat and hit the canals. 

Other determined trenchermen, Colin Richardson (left) and Stephen Tracey, also worked with them. Once we'd met, we formed lifelong friendships. We were bad. They sold distinguished products like Remy Martin, Krug, Paul Jaboulet, Charles Heidsieck, Quelltaler Estate and Blue Pyrenees Estate. Francois, Colin and Stephen are long dead; in the grief I lost track of Dennis. 

That handsome pie Léa made took me to those old cobbers via Sète, through the bottles of Basket Range, Craneford, Wendouree and whatnot before us; glories all. Long table fellowship in a breezy dappled shade. We were in Manet mode. Those bright Hills memories kept my brain bouncing for a week. 

The author with Stephen Tracey, on our way home from our last grand lunch together ... he was dying of cancer ... photo Milton Wordley

I wondered what had become of Dennis. Then I saw a newspiece on the ABC website: Syrian refugee lands dream job with Sydney silversmith company. Ping! Dennis had pursued the sacremental and ceremonial silverware business when he'd got as far away from the brutal new wine game as he could. The genteel, respectful, well-humoured days had gone in what their eventual Remy-Blass partner, the domineering Wolf Blass, called "essential industry ratchnalization." 

This yarn about the Syrian refugee landing the dream silversmith job had a whiff of Dennis de Muth about it. Sure enough, there he was in the story. Not only had he got into the sacramental silver business, but he'd bought and expanded Australia's last traditional manufacturing silversmith, W. J. Sanders. Amongst their many wonders, apart from a glittering line in wine chalices, the Sanders website provides videos of them making the Melbourne Cup and the Australian Men's Open Tennis trophy. I whizzed them an e-mail; Dennis called straight back. 

"Philip," he said, "you know all that respect we learnt in those days: the true worth of great things, their history, their provenance, their inner value? The high ideals of grand old families? Those are the ideals I've always applied to this old business we bought. Avo Bayramian is a master. He brings generations of silversmithing knowledge. His skills will spread to all our apprentices." 

Krug delivery truck in the '80s

I didn't ask whether W. J. Sanders provides any wine trophies to the industry Dennis escaped, but I imagine a crew of great craftsfolk accustomed to making Melbourne Cups, Australian Open trophies and chalices for Jesus' blood could produce a beauty that don't leak if the wine show authorities could scratch some style together and fill the old fountain pen up with chequebook blue. 

It's not gratuitous or demented bullshit about good old days I'm chewing over here. Since I first met these gentlemen and the wineries they worked for I have watched through sickening swings of boom to bust, from ecstacy to exhaustion; we have watched the industrialisation of the old Australian wine business. 

As the takeovers and bulldozers and vast irrigation networks boomed through those 'eighties, 'nineties and 'noughties, spitting out whoever got in the way, we saw even more savagery and grief in the retail world. This should have come as no surprise. When we invited leading political journalist and Canberra liquor stores owner Richard Farmer to address the Sydney Wine Press Club in June 1984 he began "Fellow drug peddlers..." and went on "I think we should dwell on the thought of what happens to this industry when we get chainstores taking over and applying chainsaw marketing techniques which cut down on the number of brands on the shelves ... 

"If you think there’s a bit of a scurry to get your goods on the shelf now, I think you should start worrying about the scurry that’ll happen when Coles and Woolworths control a great portion of the Australian Wine Industry." 

While the number of wineries increased tenfold by 2013, when Coles and Woolworths really began to take over as very few believed they could, there was a decline in the number of brands that survived their discounting. Now, even they themselves attempt to add texture and range to their shelves by making their own wine and hiring somebody with a haircut to think up names. Those big barns contain a lot more acres of bogus brands than any range of distinguished flavours. 

This change was not confined to Australia, of course. As the wine market truly transnationalised, the family that owned Remy Martin lost control. Krug was absorbed by Louis Vuitton Möet Hennessey. Remy Blass disappeared into Mildara Blass which disappeared into what is now Treasury. Or Adsteam or Southcorp or Fosters or whatever it was at the time. Quelltaler became Eaglehawk then Black Opal then Annie's Lane to be shut by Foster's and now be bought by Warren Randall's Seppeltsfield. 

Warren Randall in his mid-'eighties days winemaking at Seppelts' Great Western, where he became famous for his discovery of a yeast that made sparkling wine disgorgement easier and cheaper but it tasted horrid ... photo Philip White

Warren's making an increasing amount of Treasury's outsourced bulk wine under contract so Treasury faces less of the ignonimity of employing your actual winemakers and further distances itself from growers who want to buy socks for their kids to wear to school. 

So you have the supermarkets making their own wine while the likes of Treasury increasingly pay somebody else to make theirs in the hope the supermarkets who'll sell it for them eventually price it fairly against the wines the supermarkets make for themselves. Eh? 

All this mentality's international. And now in reaction to decades of mindless, greedy "ratchionalization" of ownership, management, manufacture, flavour and quality, we have the latest manifestation of how the fashion and business cycles of wine and music follow each other. Unplugged music has been followed by wines that were at first unoaked, then unfiltered, unfined, unfinished and now as unmade as perfectly natural vinegar. 

Most of this reactionary profusion seems to be marketed with line drawing labels like the naive stuff I put in my diary when I was seventeen. 

While all that edification actually edified, we encouraged global warming to the point where now, few great vignobles have much faith in their ability to  maintain the styles of wine they've always grown and made. There's chaos as people search for new varieties; more fractal mess as these new breeds propagate and winemakers try to learn what to do with them, even before they're shredded and shattered and shelved by that great wrecking machine outlined above. 

In other words, it's a total bloody mess of a drug-peddling business. 

Oh, the endless grief it bares. I suppose one could always become an æsthete, draw on the long dark robes  and retreat for life in a cell deep below W. J. Sanders, to meditate on the ways all those beautiful trophies influence the flavours of wine. Research. For tippling the tinctures, there's gotta be a return to the personal grail eventually. Everybody should carry their own. There's also something warm and comforting about the notion of a solid gold W. J. Sanders spittoon.