“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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03 February 2018

2018: TOO DAMN HOT THEN COOL, IN WAVES

Since veraison, when the berries turn red, we've had some blistering bursts of heat here in McLaren Vale. Fortunately these have always been followed by cool damp spells up here on the north-eastern ridges, and then quite stiff  breezes come on cue, to dry everything out.

I heard some truck business down by the kangaroo scrub yesterday and there was the Yangarra vineyard crew unloading the big rolls of bird netting to protect the ripening crop from our gourmandising feathered dinosaurs. In 2017, I photographed these nets going up on the 20th of February.


North-west-facing corner of Ironheart Shiraz Vineyard in foreground; that's a Chapel Hill vineyard on the fen behind ... totally different geology; different flavour ... Bernard hasn't taken his treadly for a fang since the dogs ate the Martians ... photos Philip White

below is looking south from the High Sands Grenache, across the top of Blewett Springs toward Willunga and Sellicks Hill on 30th March last year


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