INSULTS FROM THE ARCHIVE - CHAMPAGNE

THE NULLARBOR PLAIN: ONE QUARTER THE SIZE OF FRANCE. A LOT MORE CHAMPAGNE THAN CHAMPAGNE? NOTE THE UNIQUE 70 MILLION YEAR OLD PALEOGENOUS CHALK!

Fizzhags Do Big Dummy Spit
Frogs Take Their Words Back
Methode Tasmanoise Please
by PHILIP WHITE - from the archive: dusted off and updated

Time’s up. After many years of talking about it, us Ockers are officially no longer allowed to use the word champagne for anything that’s not, well Champagne.

Put simply, the Champenoise have taken their name back.

Boo hoo.

India, Australia, South Africa, the USA ... soon it’ll all be just fizz, bubbles, sparkling, sparks, shampoo, poo, suds. Sophisticate it artfully, and it becomes bucks’ fizz.

Just how our politicians, diplomats, wine mandarins, backbiters and syndicators let this happen beats me: they just rolled over and took the boot on our behalf, and said there’d be no Australian export boom unless we conformed.

Funny, really. Champagne quite literally means an expanse of level, open country, which makes the Champenoise look a bit dumb when you realise that smack in the middle of their joint there’s a bloody big lump called the Montagne de Reims.

Confounding mob, the French. One minute they round up a posse of European Union lawyers, bureaucrats, trade fuzz and politicians to mount a serious campaign (see: campaign: there it is again) to control the language of Australia. Then the French winemakers of Australia, like Pernod Ricard Jacob’s Creek, or Domain Chandon, owned by Louis Vuitton Möet Hennessey, began plastering their bottles with words like cuvée, methodé traditionelle and brut.

Dominique Portet even began calling his Shiraz Syrah.

After William The Conqueror (left) hung the English king’s crown in a hawthorn bush at Hastings, the court and government of England spoke Anglo-Norman French for three centuries. If you were serious about removing the French from English, you’d probably leave us with about 60% of the language. I’m sure Australian ingenuity and our disrespectful creativity in the patois division would quickly fill the hole, but not many other races, including other speakers of English, would be likely to understand us.

At a mere 125,000 square kilometres, our Nullarbor Plain’s a lot more champagne than Champagne, which is only 25,606 km², and our yet unplanted plain is nowhere near so monocultural in its biomass as the big fizz district. Must drive ’em nuts. The Nullarbor’s Cretaceous chalks were deposited at about the same time as Champagne’s – over 70 million years back – but we’ve quite a lot more of it than the Frogs.

In fact, if Nicholas Baudin’s revolutionary lot had actually settled this joint instead of heading home to whinge to Napoleon about their scurvy, they would have called South Australia Champagne.

BUST OF BAUDIN AT ALBANY, ON THE SOUTH-WESTERN COASTAL EXTREME OF THE NULLARBOR PLAIN

Baudin’s maps list the location of the Ford family’s delicious Boston Bay winery at Port Lincoln as the Côtes Champagny. The bay was Port Champagny, he called Boston Island l’Isle de la Grange, and Spencer’s Gulf Golfe Bonaparte.

So Fordy would be well within his rights to release a wine called Port Champagny Côtes Champagny La Grange Golfe Bonaparte Cuvée Brut Methodé Traditionelle Syrah, which would give even the Portuguese the shits on account of them taking port back too. He could use Baudin's map, complete with Napoleon's signature, as his label. I dream of the launch at Willy’s Wine Bar, there in the Rue Des Petits Champs – champs, see? - behind the Paris biblioteque where Baudin’s maps reside.

The librarians would drink a pallet a week.

Not to mention Campania, which happens to be in Italy. That’s quite lumpy, too, come to think of it.

There was a tantalising moment in 1992, when my cobber Francois Henri, who was then the chairman of the Remy Martin champagne group, Krug/Piper-Hiedsieck/Charles Hiedsieck, toyed with my suggestion that he should remove the word champagne from the Krug label. He wanted desperately to hike the image of Krug well and truly beyond its pretender, Dom Perignon. Get it done once and for all.

“Krug is Krug, isn’t it?”, I pestered him. “It’s not just the King of Champagne – it’s beyond Champagne.”

We giggled through a three day research tour in Paris, savouring that notion. Getting well and truly Krugged.

Dear Francois is dead now, and I never got to ask him just how far this devilish idea got. But years later, it was a delight to watch Louis Vuitton Möet Hennessey, upon their purchase of the Krug business, work out how to admit that in its Babel Tower of brands, Krug would have to slot in above Dom, but that’s another thing.

The French, Spanish and the rest of the EU should be delighted that we adopted their terms: it was a much simpler and universal wine language than what we’d struggled to invent ourselves.

Australia had a grape called French Colombard, which Joe Grilli made famous by calling it Primo Estate Colombard. Walter Clappis wanted one too, so he reverted to the original name, French Colombard, which the French immediately said was passing off. I suggested he call it French Calembour, as in pissing off the French, but Walter sold his business to Mildara Blass and the idea went the same way as the Champagne-free Krug.

Pity. I was licking my lips to get into court. Early vignerons had only called the grape French to acknowledge the country which kindly supplied the first cuttings. It wasn’t Colombard from Spain, or South Africa. It’s like Shiraz, which Australians called Hermitage for 150 years out of respect of the French hill from whence their cuttings came. They were not passing off. Nobody in Penfolds ever suggested that Grange Hermitage was a French drink.

As if in a perfect blonde moment, Joe’s cracker Colombard suddenly became La Biondina, which has thus far failed to get a rise from Berlusconi or his whorish mob.

When I started in this racket, the Hunter Valley grew lots of a grape called Semillon, which they variously called Hunter Riesling, Hunter River Riesling, Shepard’s Riesling, just plain Riesling, or, if it had some Muscat in it, Traminer Riesling. In the Barossa the same grape was called Clare Riesling in the early 1900s, while in Clare they called the Crouchen grape Clare Riesling until well into the 1980s. Their own true Riesling was called Rhine Riesling.

To make things really clear for the punter, one company, Lindemans, always ran three Semillons. If it had heaps of sulphur, it was called Riesling. The one with the medium dose of sulphur was Chablis. The one with the least doseage was, you guessed it! Burgundy!

THE IRASCABLE MURRAY TYRRELL, LEFT, NOT LISTENING TO FORMER PRIME MINSTER MALCOM FRASER, AT THE LAST BOTTLE CLUB DINNER, 1984

I stood astonished once at Tyrrell’s cellar sales, watching that old rogue Murray Tyrrell tell customers “Yes, our old Hunter reds start out like beautiful Bordeaux clarets and end up like great old Burgundies.”

Magic.

In another stroke of sheer genius, Murray called his Chardonnay Pinot Chardonnay.

With Murray, anything was possible.

The Frogs have taken claret back, too, which is a bit rich, considering that word was a London wine merchant’s patois abbreviation of the old French clairette, meaning rosé. To celebrate the banning of our use of claret – which becomes law on September 1st 2011 - the bloodthirsty wine bats of Penfolds have blended a beauty, which is in magnums and wrapped in a handsome art deco label. And it ain’t friggin rosé. It’s claret, see.

It’ll become one of Australia’s most collectible collectibles.

Then, take port. That was abbreviated cockney slang for Oporto, so how the Portuguese can claim that as their own beats me. Let alone tawny, which is also now verboten, despite the little matter of our native flying gadget we call the Tawny Frogmouth owl (below), which is, in fact, not an owl at all, although it’s often misnamed mopoke or morepork, which sounds like a bit of a hoot, but is actually the call of the Southern Boobook Owl, which is a real owl and a raptor and a different bird altogether.

The Tawny Frogmouth’s family, the Podargidae, have been continual inhabitants of Earth since the Eocene, 56 million years ago. And they’re tawny, so how the hell somebody can prohibit our use of that name for a fortified wine should be delighted if we call it Frogmouth Fort.

But back to our true masters of gobbledygook in the Hunter. In 1983 I interviewed a famous winemaker there called Mark Cashmore, who threatened to sue my alter ego Sidney Tidemouth MW for calling him Mark Morecash. After Robert Joseph stole Tidemouth’s cartouche for his own Hong Kong dinkus Tidemouth retired hurt before he could apply the word mawkish to Crashmore, leaving Bobby-Jo to get off lightly.

I knew things would never be the same in the wine business when I learned that young Cashmost was addicted to those disco aerobics classes that infested white Australia in that nefarious epoch. But what nobody saw coming was his release of a great wine called Richmond Grove White Bordeaux. This was to complement his Richmond Grove Chablis, Richmond Grove White Burgundy, and Richmond Grove French Cask Chardonnay.

This white Bordeaux was made from Semillon, Sauvignon blanc, and French Colombard, names Cashmore insisted “the consumer would never remember, for God’s sake!”

This wine won invaluable publicity when the French government took him to court. He tricked them by then changing it to Hunter Valley White Bordeaux, just to make everything clear.

When I asked him why he’d changed the name of his Richmond Grove blend of Chardonnay and Semillon from Richmond Grove Pinot Riesling to Richmond Grove Semillon Chardonnay he clarified the issue thus:

“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.”

I know we don’t like having it forced on us like this, but it’s a good thing that Australia, and now France, has finally followed Mr. Cashmore’s brilliant clarification and both countries now tend to use the real names of the grapes in the bottle. While the French will no doubt continue with scams like the pearler they bunged on poor old Constellation and The Gallo Brothers, flogging em a Shiraz Merlot mix in the name of Pinot noir, they’ll no longer be permitted to release Barossa Syrah, and even Portuguese bathers will now do the freestyle in place of the great Australian crawl.

I think I’ll have a glass of champagne.

Tasmanian champagne, please.

CHAMPENOISE TOTALLY MISS THE POINT

THE NULLARBOR PLAIN: ONE QUARTER THE SIZE OF FRANCE. A LOT MORE CHAMPAGNE THAN CHAMPAGNE? NOTE THE UNIQUE CHALK!

Aussie Fizzhags Spit The Dummy
Frogs Take All Their Words Back
by PHILIP WHITE

Time’s up. After many years of talking about it, us Ockers are officially no longer allowed to use the word champagne for anything that’s not, well champagne.

Put simply, the Champenoise have taken their name back.

Boo hoo.

India, Australia, South Africa, the USA ... soon it’ll all be just fizz, bubbles, sparkling, shampoo, poo, suds.

Funny, really. Champagne quite literally means an expanse of level, open country, which makes the Champenoise look a bit dumb when you realise that smack in the middle of the joint there’s a bloody big lump called the Montagne de Reims.

Confounding mob, the French. No sooner had they begun their serious campaign (see: campaign: there it is again) to have us cease our use of the word than the French winemakers of Australia, like Domain Chandon, began plastering their bottles with words like cuvée, methodé traditionelle and brut.

Dominique Portet even began calling his shiraz syrah.

At a mere 125,000 square kilometres, our Nullarbor Plain’s a lot more champagne than Champagne, and it’s nowhere near so monocultural flora-wise. Must drive ’em nuts. If Baudin’s revolutionary lot had actually settled this joint instead of heading home to whinge to Napoleon about their scurvy, they would have called it Champagne.

Baudin’s maps list the location of the Ford family’s delicious Boston Bay winery at Port Lincoln as the Côtes Champagny. The bay was Port Champagny, he called Boston Island l’Isle de la Grange, and Spencer’s Gulf Golfe Bonaparte.

So Fordy would be well within his rights to release a wine called Port Champagny Côtes Champagny La Grange Golfe Bonaparte Cuvée Brut Methodé Traditionelle Syrah, which would give even the Portuguese the shits on account of them taking port back too. I dream of the launch at Willy’s Wine Bar, there in the Rue Des Petits Champs – champs, see? - behind the Paris biblioteque where Baudin’s maps reside.

The librarians would drink the whole shipment in a week.

Not to mention Campania, which happens to be in Italy. That’s quite lumpy, too, come to think of it.

There was a tantalising moment in 1992, when my cobber Francois Henri, who was then the chairman of the mighty Remy Martin champagne group, Krug/Piper-Hiedsieck/Charles Hiedsieck, toyed with my suggestion that he should remove the word champagne from the Krug label. He wanted desperately to hike the image of Krug well and truly beyond its pretender, Dom Perignon. Get it done once and for all.

“Krug is Krug, isn’t it?”, I pestered him. “It’s not just the King of Champagne – it’s beyond Champagne.”

We giggled through a three day binge in the bistros and bars of Paris, savouring that notion. Getting well and truly Krugged.

Dear Francois is dead now, and I never got to ask him just how far this devilishly subversive idea got.

Australia had a grape called French colombard, which Joe Grilli made famous by calling it Primo Estate Colombard. Walter Clappis wanted one too, so he reverted to the original name, French colombard, which the French immediately said was passing off. I suggested he call it French calembour, which basically means “pissing off the French”, but Walter sold his business to Mildara Blass and the idea went the same way as the Champagne-free Krug.

Pity. I was licking my lips to get into court.

And, as if in a perfect blonde moment, Joe’s cracker wine has become La Biondina.

When I started in this racket, the Hunter Valley grew lots of a grape called semillon, which they variously called Hunter riesling, Hunter River riesling, Shepard’s riesling, just plain riesling, or, if it had some muscat in it, traminer riesling. In the Barossa the same grape was called Clare riesling in the early 1900s, while in Clare they called crouchen Clare riesling until well into the 1980s.

To make things really clear for the punter, one company, Lindemans, always ran three semillons. If it had heaps of sulphur, it was called riesling. The one with the medium dose of sulphur was chablis. The one with the least doseage was, you guessed it! Burgundy!

MURRAY TYRRELL, LEFT, NOT LISTENING TO FORMER PRIME MINSTER MALCOM FRASER, AT THE LAST BOTTLE CLUB DINNER, 1984

I stood astonished once at Tyrrell’s cellar sales, watching that old rogue Murray Tyrrell tell some customers “Yes, our old Hunter reds start out like beautiful Bordeaux clarets and end up like great old Burgundies.”

Magic.

In another stroke of sheer genius, Murray called his chardonnay pinot chardonnay.

With Murray, anything was possible.

The Frogs have taken claret back, too, which is a bit rich, considering that word was a London wine merchant’s patois abbreviation of the old French clairette, meaning rosé.

Like port. That was abbreviated cockney slang for Oporto, so how the Portuguese can claim that as their own beats me. Let alone tawny, which is also now verboten, despite the little matter of our native flying gadget called the tawny frogmouth owl, which is, in fact, not an owl at all, although it also answers to the name of morepork, which sounds like a bit of a hoot.

But back to our true masters of gobbledygook in the Hunter. In 1983 I interviewed a winemaker there called Mark Cashmore, who threatened to sue my alter ego Sidney Tidemouth MW for calling him Mark Morecash. (Tidemouth was retired before he could apply the word mawkish).

I knew things would never be the same in the wine business when I learned that young Cashmost was addicted to those disco aerobics classes that infested white Australia in that nefarious epoch. But what nobody saw coming was his release of a great wine called Richmond Grove White Bordeaux. This was to complement his Richmond Grove Chablis, Richmond Grove White Burgundy, and Richmond Grove French Cask Chardonnay.

This white Bordeaux was made from semillon, sauvignon blanc, and French colombard, names Cashmore insisted “the consumer would never remember, for God’s sake!”

This wine won invaluable publicity when the French government took him to court. He tricked them by then changing it to Hunter Valley White Bordeaux, just to make everything clear.

When I asked him why he’d changed the name of his Richmond Grove blend of chardonnay and semillon from Richmond Grove Pinot Riesling to Richmond Grove Semillon Chardonnay he clarified the issue thus:

“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.”

I know we don’t like having it forced on us like this, but it’s a good thing that Australia has finally followed Mr. Cashmore’s brilliant clarification. The French will no longer be permitted to release Barossa syrah, and even Portuguese bathers will now do the freestyle in place of the great Australian crawl.

I think I’ll have a glass of champagne.

Tasmanian champagne, please.
.

GOVAN'S GREATEST VICTORY

Victory Hotel publican Douglas Govan fondles his pot of gold at his Rudderless Vineyard behind his Victory Hotel on Sellicks Hill, McLaren Vale, South Australia. That's another view of the vineyard, above, with the Gulf St. Vincent in the background.

SPEECH for the OPENING of the NEW BAR AND CELLAR at the VICTORY HOTEL, Sunday 30th November 2008

by PHILIP WHITE

Thanks Douglas.

I’m going to talk awhile about the nature of names as much as those very special qualities which mark the nature of a successful public house.

Public houses are places people attend to enjoy indulgent luxuries and wickedness they cannot otherwise procure because they’re travelling – it’s too long; or luxuries and behaviours which would simply not be tolerated at home – it’s too hard.

Such naughtiness ranges from extreme gushings of bullshit to spilling stuff on the carpet, through, until recently, to burning holes in the carpet, to the more traditional outrage of using the carpet through friction to burn holes in elbows and knees while scorching the gluteus maximus muscles of somebody else.

Metaphorically, of course.

Given the economies of the day, the publican varyingly tolerates, facilitates, and even encourages such behaviours, and the cleverest among publicans are those which can routinely manage all three, whilst keeping a clean nose, and ensuring those customers, and sometimes also those regular customers’ partners in life, reoffend with impunity.

While beer has been popular for some 8000 years, we don’t know who first made its drinking something that should be supervised by publicans in public houses, but I’m sure it didn’t take long.

There are references to such establishments in Chinese literature several thousands of years back, but one of the earliest writings to make pubs sound rather fascinating to the young Philip White came from the Gospel According To Matthew. It was read to the congregation of the Presbyterians at Childers, in the mountains of east Victoria, by Philip’s Father, the president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, in about 1958.

And it referred to wine, not beer.

As if to prepare me for Shakespeare, who plied his thirty thousand word vocabulary at Stratford while the royal scribes across in London and Oxbridge were limited to five thousand as they worked on the King James Version of the Bible, my Father the preacher of course used that translation.

“But whereunto shall I liken this generation?” Jesus asks.

“It is like unto children sitting in the markets, and calling unto their fellows. And saying, ‘We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned unto you, and ye have not lamented’.

“For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He hath a devil!’.

“The son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Behold a man gluttonous, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners’.”

1,950 years later there was an essay competition.

“I won it with an entry under my own name”, Douglas Govan told me earlier this year.

“And I also came third with another entry under another name.

“With the winnings I bought a Sony amplifier. I had no speakers or anything. Just the amp. I’d turn it on and marvel at the little green light. There was a Japanese kid at school with big stereo headphones. He let me try them on and once I was in there – like wow! Stereo! Suddenly I understood. I got right into music. I got into some serious platter-spinning. The wheels of steel. Within a few years I was running nightclubs, and eventually made enough money to buy a pub.”

So Douglas has been here since 1989, doing renovations and rebuilds in brave, tasteful waves, which are directly relative, of course, to the numbers of sinners, apostles, and sons of gods he entertains here.

Before the mighty rebuild we celebrate today, Douglas’s last big spend was on three bed and breakfast establishments just up the hill. While these are highly convenient and polite, I think somewhere in there, back with the gamblers, Douglas should build a copy of the Great Bed Of Ware (see picture at bottom of this page), which at three metres by four in acreage, was famous for holding around twenty passengers at a time. In Billy the Shakespaw’s day this mighty cot resided in another great pub, the White Hart Inn in Hertfordshire, and the Bard referred to it in Twelfth Night, where Sir Andrew Aguecheek is urged to write down enough lies to fill a sheet 'big enough for the bed of Ware'.

Speaking of the gluteus maximus muscles, the surname Aguecheek reflects not on the bearer’s capacity to score carpetburns upon his arse, but is a slightly more polite version of quakebuttock, a popular term for the sweaty, quivering cowards of that day.

Built by Hertfordshire carpenter Jonas Fosbrooke in about 1590, the bed’s four grand posts are carved with the names of some of those lucky enough to have sailed in her. She went to The Saracen’s Head, another Ware inn, until 1870, and now lies restored but tragically unused in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Which brings us to another great pub, the Boar’s Head. As Christian beliefs overtook pagan customs in Europe, the presentation of a boar's head at Christmas came to symbolize the triumph of Christ over sin. So young Will Shakepaws appropriately named the favourite watering hole of that corpulent and profane reprobate Sir John Falstaff The Boar’s Head.

This pub was at Southwark, where, coincidentally, lived the German woodworkers who'd helped build the Great Bed Of Ware. The real Boar's Head had been owned by the warrior John Fastolf, who in hearty simile to the playwrite’s name Shake Spear, (which he often signed Shakes Paw – a walloper of one’s cods) became John Fall Staff, a character quite the opposite of John the Baptist, who neither ate nor drank but did carry a staff til Salome secured the falling of his head.

The Boar's Head Inn, outside the City of London's medieval walls on the northeast, had long been a venue for play-acting in previous decades, and Shakespeare easily modified it for use as the vehicle in which Head Bore, Fall Staff famously fell asleep, drunk.

In Richard IV, Falstaff’s there drinking at two oclock in the morning with prince Henry.

enter BARDOLPH, running

"O, my lord, my lord! the sheriff with a most monstrous watch is at the door."

HOSTESS

"The sheriff and all the watch are at the door: they are come to search the house. Shall I let them in?"

It appears that the Sheriff’s looking for Falstaff over the little matter of a big stack of stolen money.

Prince Henry sends Falstaff to hide behind the arras, which, like denim, the characteristic cloth of Nimes - de Nimes - was an abbreviation for the rich tapestries and brocades made in the French town of Arras. The word came to refer to such tapestries, which usually bore heroic images of hunts or great battles, and which were hung in pubs to hide drafty unused doorways, annexes or snugs.

“Go, hide thee behind the arras”, the Prince tells Sir John.

As I’m talking about names, their meanings, and the way these change, Hardy’s or BRL or Galaxy or Heavens Above - or whoever they're currently called - that supplied this beautiful Tassie fizz we're gurgling should shout Douglas an arras as he now has the perfect location for one in his sumptuous new cellars.

Prince Henry assures the Sheriff that his quarry – as fat as butter – is not in the pub, so the sheriff leaves.

“This oily rascal is known as well as St Paul's” says the future king. “Go, call him forth”.

But Falstaff’s fast asleep behind the arras, snorting like a horse. They go through his pockets, looking for the money, but find only the day’s account from the pub.

Item, A capon (a chook),. . 2s. 2d.
Item, Sauce,. . . 4d.
Item, Sack (that’s sherry), two gallons, 5s. 8d.
Item, Anchovies and sack after supper, 2s. 6d.
Item, Bread, a halfpenny.

“O monstrous!” yells the Prince. “but one half-penny-worth of bread to this intolerable deal of sack!"

Sir John drinks in many public houses, and handily repairs to one called The Garter Inn after having been thrown into the Thames.

“Have I lived to be carried in a basket, like a barrow of butcher's offal, and to be thrown in the Thames?” he roars in the MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR. “Go fetch me a quart of sack; put a toast in't”.

In those days they served steaming hot sherry in large mugs, with a crouton or two floating on top. The sherry, which was yellow and sweet, and made before the invention of flor fino, was often so stinky and cloudy they also stirred in an egg or two to clarify it, much as we clarify consomme or indeed wines in barrel.

“Let me pour in some sack to the Thames water; for my belly's as cold as if I’d swallowed snowballs for pills to cool the reins. Call her in” Falstaff orders of the barmaid. But when Mistress Quickly arrives, he roars again “Take away these chalices. Go brew me a pottle of sack finely”.

“With eggs, sir?” she asks.

“Simple of itself” he gurgles; “I'll have no pullet-sperm in my brewage”.

“A good sherris sack hath a two-fold operation in it” Sir John trumpeted. “It ascends me into the brain; dries me there all the foolish and dull and curdy vapours which environ it; makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble fiery and delectable shapes, which, delivered o'er to the voice, the tongue, which is the birth, becomes excellent wit. The second property of your excellent sherris is, the warming of the blood; which, before cold and settled, left the liver white and pale, which is the badge of pusillanimity and cowardice; but the sherris warms it and makes it course from the inwards to the parts extreme: it illumineth the face, which as a beacon gives warning to all the rest of this little kingdom, man, to arm; and then the vital commoners and inland petty spirits muster me all to their captain, the heart, who, great and puffed up with this retinue, doth any deed of courage; and this valour comes of sherris. So that skill in the weapon is nothing without sack, for that sets it a-work; and learning a mere hoard of gold kept by a devil, till sack commences it and sets it in act and use. Hereof comes it that Prince Harry is valiant; for the cold blood he did naturally inherit of his father, he hath, like lean, sterile and bare land, manured, husbanded and tilled with excellent endeavour of drinking good and good store of fertile sherris, that he is become very hot and valiant. If I had a thousand sons, the first humane principle I would teach them should be, to forswear thin potations and to addict themselves to sack.”

A few hundred years later The South Australian in 1845 praised “the extensive and rich valley of McLaren … where almost the whole of the country inns visited on this trip are neatly and cleanly kept … everywhere the traveller meets with civility and attention … and there was no lack of good viands”. Going by the amount of sherry grape varieties then planted hereabouts, these abundant good viands must have included a fair potage of Sir John’s peculier petrol.

But this Victory was then not yet built.

I’d always thought, like hundreds of other pubs throughout the British Empire, that this establishment was named after the mighty vessel upon which Lord Nelson asked his mate Hardy for “a bit more tongue” then up and died.

I liked this possibility, because the Victory had been more successfully employed off the Portuguese coast in the battle of Cabo de São Vincente – Cape St Vincent - on 18 January, 1797, under Admiral Sir John Jervis, who thence took the title Lord St Vincent and became First Lord of The Admiralty, in which position he awarded passports to the French ships which sailed from his Channel to this coast, captained by Nicholas Baudin, under the sponsorship of Charles Pierre Claret, the Comte de Fleurieu, Senator, member of the Institute of France, former Minister of Marine, governor of the palate of Versailles, and intendant-general of Napoleon's household.

Baudin, of course, named this water Golfe Josephine, after Bonaparte’s mistress, unaware that by the time his charts got back to Paris Boney’d swapped Josephine for Marie Louise.

But before the French cartographers changed Baudin’s maps, Flinders named this glittering stretch of water St Vincent after his sponsor. It’s perchance that Baudin's maps reside in the Bibliotech, opposite Willy’s Wine Bar in the Rue Petit Champs in Paris. Henri Paul, the ex SAS man who drove Princess Diana to her death, drank, sometimes heavily, in Willy’s as he lived directly upstairs and always left his Mini Cooper S parked crooked on the footpath outside. Diana of course was a Spencer, and it was her ancestor, George John, the Second Earl Spencer and first Lord of the Admiralty, after whom Flinders named the other Gulf, which Baudin called Bonaparte.

It’s simply opportune that Vincent was not just the patron of viticulturers, but also of vinegar makers, lost stuff, and schoolgirls.

When Douglas named his wine brand Rudderless, he reinforced my naive belief that this Victory was named for Nelson’s vessel after its great Victory at the Cabo St Vincente, around which smart caravels for centuries carried sherris sack from Spain to the likes of Falstaff and the lads in The Boar’s Head, just as this gulf (St Vincent) and this cape (Cape Jervis - at the toe of The Fleurieu) see today’s enormous wine exports sail off for the public houses of London.

The names of Australian public houses often referred to things royal. If the King sought to go to war, he’d have to build a navy, so he planted Royal Oak, or Kingswood. The Great Eastern and Great Western hotels, of which Australia has many, were named after the biggest vessels of their day, both built by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who was the consultant engineer on the Goolwa – Victor Harbour railway, here on our beautiful Fleurieu Peninsula. The Exeter was named after that temple of enlightenment, Exeter Hall in London, where Wilberforce held his world-changing rallies against slavery, the first emancipationists met, and the meetings for the establishment of the South Australia Company were held. Rising Sun Hotels, which are everywhere, either face east or sit on eastern pavements. This pub, indeed, would make a perfect Rising Sun.

It took Chris Davies, of Willunga, to set me right about this Victory, and point out that the old coach road that passes outside here from Sellicks Hill to Pages Flat Road was originally named The Victory Road, not after any vessel, but after the victory of Aldinga Council Chairman John Norman who was instrumental in pushing this road through to Myponga and Yankalilla.

The ceremony to open the road was held on Tuesday, March 15th 1859 at this new inn, and at the celebratory dinner which ensued, this great public house was named Norman’s Victory in the hope that it would be a perpetual commemoration of the councillor’s achievement.

So, in the spirit of Sir John Falstaff, and his foremost Australian equivalent, the NSW Premier Sir John Robertson, who upon visiting these shores in 1860 drily observed

"None of the men who in this country have left footprints behind them have been cold water men",

I urge you to pack your pottles with sack, put a toast on it, and drink one to the gulf the Kaurna called Wongayerlo - the place where the sun disappears – and to all publicans and sinners, to Douglas Govan and his mighty Victory, where each day the sun arises, to all who sail in her, and in honest expectation that if Jesus came back today, the first thing he’d do would gather the lads up from their clambake down there on Galilee, and wander up the dusty Victory track for a few long loud ones in this beautiful new cellar and bar.

To the Victory!

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