And ever the twain shall meet

by PHILIP WHITE

In the late ’seventies, when Tony Bilson worked the pans at the mighty Berowra Waters Inn, serving French-influenced cuisine with European-style wines, we developed contentious theories about wine not marrying harmoniously to Chinese cuisine.

After Shen Nong discovered the importance of boiling drinking water for good health 3,000 years back, it wasn’t long before some Camellia sinensis fell into the pot and teas began to evolve alongside Chinese regional dishes.

We felt that food which had developed over millennia with tea would only work with wine if it became more tea-like. Our new “fruit-driven” wines were heading further away from tea in structure.

In 1998 Senior Professor Bert Vallee, of the Harvard Medical School, reported that many Asians did not produce the dehydrogenase which processes alcohol in the liver. As tea-drinkers, there was no need for their DNA to switch the mechanism on. But the smallest shot of grog made them very drunk, and sick until their skin managed to sweat the poison out.

European cultures, in contrast, developed in filthy big cities where the water was lethal. Although tea was common on posh tables by 1700, Round Eyes didn’t understand the importance of boiling water until Pasteur. Since the Georgians began drinking wine in about 5,000BC, we’d evolved drinking fermented brews, with all their vitamins, minerals and antioxidant tannins. Vallee even suggested that "…throughout western history the normal state of mind may have been one of inebriation".

In contrast, the Chinese may have been wide awake with kung-fu chai, but they were relatively sober and healthy until we hit them with opium, which we took there from India - to swap for tea - until 1908.

While this seemed to reinforce our theory, twenty years of determined thirsty travel in the meantime taught me that China, and Asia, have teas of a much wider range of flavours, colours, and textures than anybody ever dreamed of achieving in wines.

There are fatty, cheesy teas that taste like big malo-lactic chardonnays; unfermented green teas as crisp and savoury as verdelho or sauvignon blanc; pu-erh teas like plummy, tarry shiraz; teas as nutty and cherry-like as pinot noir. The aged cake teas of Yunnan can be as sweet, leathery and meaty as mourvedre or muscat; good jasmine can be as floral and spicy as Alsace gewürztraminer; some chrysanthemum teas are like aged pinot gris.

So, to think backwards, any Asian cuisine that grew up with teas like those should just as easily be enjoyed with such wines.

The human mouth detects sweet, sour, salt, bitter, water, chilli heat, and umami (a combination of glutamates - like MSG - and ribonucleotides). Just as these totally natural flavours harmonise in good food, they make up the pleasant aspects of good tea and wine.

But the trick of successfully marrying them on the table is as much about texture as actual flavour. So the viscosity, or the oiliness of the food and drink, and the degree of polymerisation, or softening, of its naturally preservative tannins, provide vital keys to the sort of cuisine you can experience at the table of a genius like Cheong.

Even the dreaded “fruit-drivens”, like sauvignon blanc, simple rosé, or unwooded chardonnay, often go very well with the spicy, chilli, ginger and verbena cuisines of Thailand and Malaysia, which have traditionally been eaten with fresh fruit juices as much as simpler teas.

Acids are also very important. Leaner ones, like ascorbic, tartaric and malic, dominate sauvignon blanc and riesling, while the fatty amino acids that we first taste in mother’s milk occur in wines which have undergone the secondary, or malo-lactic fermentation, in which bacteria, not yeast, convert the hard, metallic, malic acid of chardonnay or red grapes to the softer lactic acid of milk.

With acid and viscosity, the clever host might just as well devise a contrasting effect as much as a harmonious marriage. If you’re serving a fatty fish, like European carp, or steamed flounder, you can choose whether to bolster that characteristic with a big fat pinot gris or peachy wood-aged chardonnay, or provide a piquant counterpoint with a crunchy sauvignon blanc, its acid like the oxalic flavour of rhubarb, to slice through the fat of the bottom-feeding flounder, with its guts full of bottom-of-the sea roadkill.

Similarly, the fat of bottom-feeding ducks or pigs can be contrasted or reinforced, which is why they go so well with pinot noir, which can be either chubby with malo fat or more austere and steely, like riesling.

But in the end, while the secret may seem a mysterious marriage of new science and ancient gastronomic dreaming, you can forget it if your ingredients aren’t the very best. Start fresh, clean, and organic and your journey of exploration will be much less hazardous than mine. But I’m not compaining.

Might I help you, Officer?

by PHILIP WHITE

This was first published in The Independent Weekly in December 2007

Different people deserve different sorts of whisky. When George Grainger Aldridge invited your correspondent to assist in the judging of the first Cookoutback camp oven competition in Blinman fours years ago, two things swirled to mind.

The first was Cheong Liew. He should judge too. The Master.

The second was malt whisky. George should have some Lagavulin. Being spread so thin and dry beneath the galaxies of the north, the poor bugger needed some concentrate. We would carry him a bottle. So his blood wouldn’t thin.

Moist whisky sots have been known to break the gospel law: “and when ye pray, chant not vain repetitions as the heathen do”. Contrarily, such good heathen mumble the mantra of the miraculous distilleries of Islay, a sparse lump in the ocean north of Ireland near the Mull of Kintyre: “Ardbeg, Bowmore, Bruichladdich, Bunnhabhain, Caol Ila, Lagavulin, Laphroaig, Port Ellen.”

Repeat it, over and over and over. It heals thirst.

With a fair deal of confidence, Cheong, Katie Harbison and your reporter sailed north through Gepps Cross. No Lagavulin at that bottle-o. None at Angle Vale. No chance of it at Mallala. “The rep’s been crook”, somebody said.

So we went up the hill to Clare. None there, and that was our last chance. So we bought a green label Johnny Walker, a blended malt from the Highlands, near the Spey.

We forged our dry passage north to Craddock. That took hours. Cheong agreed with my recommendation of Coopers’ Stout. But there on the shelf, looking a touch Joan-of-Arc-ish , stood a lonely bottle of Laphroaig.

“Cheong”, I said, “see that bottle? That’s Laphroaig. That distillery’s almost next door to Lagavulin on Islay. It’s not as peaty, but it’s a lot closer than that highland.”

Whisky can be made from grain spirit, which is white alcohol from the still, as in vodka, not yet stained by oak. Better is malted whisky, which includes a touch of the slower fires of hell. Not just to boil the fermenting grain mash in your copper pot still, to get that stiff white spirit vapourising, but the wetted grain is smoked way beforehand.

Dried new harvest barley is soaked in water, then spread on a raking floor until it sprouts. The tiny root works its way up the outside of one side of the grain, while the stalk heads the opposite direction up the outside of the other. When these are equal in length, and the same length as the grain, like a tight little S, the starch within has politely converted to sugar to drive that growth. You need sugar to make alcohol.

This growth is most perversely arrested when the shot grains are spread by rakes on the smoking floor, which is a big tin floor with millions of tiny slits cut in it. Way down below is the peat oven, where you set fire to peat. The seeping smoke kills the grains, and caramelises that juvenile sugar. That becomes alcohol in the rough ale mash you ferment to concentrate in your still.

In the isles, where there is bugger all shrubbery, but heaps of whales’ breath, the peat tends to be sea spray and iodine-flavoured, like the salty leather underpants of a smuggler. Not that they wear ’em. The heathery highlands are full of florals; that peat is pretty, like Marylin Monroe’s bathroom. Lagavulin is the most extreme in t’other.

The friggin’ publican refused to sell the bottle. He offered us a dram, but wouldn’t part with the bot. Eventually he said it was the policeman’s favourite drink, and gave us a slug beside the stouts, whether we liked it or not.

Which we drank.

Way up further past Wilpena, on the dirt, it began to rain. The track got slippery. Katie had finally popped a stubby, in confidence of arriving, and Cheong and I were working gently on the Johnny. We came over a crest, right into a police roadblock. “I’ll surrender” I said, “and catch you up later”.

We skidded to a halt. It had to sound confident. “Might I help you officer?” I asked as the window slid down.

He got a faceful of our smoke, and my peaty breath, and said “Maybe. Are you the bastards who’ve been drinking my malt?”

We finished the Johnny once he’d knocked off, later in the Blinman, with George.

WINNERS OF 1 OCTOBER 2006 CAMPOUTBACK: Flour – Kirsty Goss Team, Barossa. Meat – Ian Klingberg Team, Port Augusta. Overall – Kirsty Goss Team.

Out for a duck

by PHILIP WHITE
This was first published in The Independent Weekly in August 2008

Outside T-Chow for his last fag, ever, your correspondent set down his big balloon of pinot, and settled back to observe. Moonta Street, Chinatown: Saturday arvo. It could be any Chinatown on Earth. Our Chinese friends know and love this fact.

The writer was soon confronted by a brace of drinking types. Charles Hawker, grazier (ret.), a rugged rugby, Cooper’s Sparkling, and vintage port man if ever there was one, and his companion, who thrust forth a business card, both hands. “Dr. Eddie Chung Gon, MB. BS (Adel.), photojournalist” read its front; the back proclaimed the Doc to be an inveterate Hash House Harrier of the Kunt Foo school.

The Doc looked down at the glass. “You’re drinking pinot noir”, he said. “I can tell by the colour. Is it from Burgundy?”

“No”, was the baffled response. “It’s from Tasmania. From the Derwent.”

“Aha!” he said, staring at the glass. “Stefano Lubiana. That’s the Primavera 07. Very good!” Having picked the wine on colour alone, he lurched into an eager appraisal of the peculiarities of Lubie’s terroir…

Your correspondent had spent thirty years preaching the pinot gospel; from the days when, apart from an unlikely Barossa job from Peter Lehmann, it all came from Keppoch, where Hardy’s had planted far too much of a clone normally reserved for fizz. Fortunately, the Aussie dollar bought quite a lot of French francs then, so the eager student could easily move up into the Burgundy shelves…. To be lost there forever, if only one could live without a car, family or house… (The exchange rate changed, which is probably why they call it that.)

He had gurgled with awe the pioneering Tassie pinots, Moorilla, Meadowbank, Heemskerk, Piper’s Brook; and early ’80s pinot adventures at Mountadam. He’d corkscrewed his way around Burgundy, frequently mistaken for the dreaded Robert Parker Jr., whose face was not yet known, or Tim White, the FinRev bloke who’d been through ahead, helpfully telling Burgundians what to do.

Your writer had climbed into fermenting pinot noir for the pigeage, that slow snake dance performed naked in a fizzing tank of juice, berries and stalks: it feels like a missionary pot of live shrimps and warm Coke. (The idea is to gently disperse the hotspots that develop in the must when certain subregions of the ferment overheat, making jam). He had eventually drunk such wines upon their maturation, searching their mystery for fleeting whiffs of tootsie or shrimp.

He’d even dined at Le Bourguignon in Tokyo, where the Japanese chef speaks English with a Burgundian accent, gets his truffles and sloppy Burgundian farmhouse cheese flown in daily, and pours only Burgundies aged twenty-five years or more…

He sat through insufferable tastings of pinot with insufferable pinot snobs, and was sufficiently derided by them to be even bolder in his brattish criticism: bold enough to gain certain infamy by daring to award the newly-released Domaine de la Romanée-Conti (DRC) Echézeaux 1995 a miserly 78 points at a blind tasting – although he DID give the DRC Romanée-Conti of the same year 96++.

Tim Evans, the Negociants Australia bloke in charge of Australia’s allocation of the forthcoming 2005 release on August 1st., says all his DRC stock is accounted for, despite the Echézeaux being $560 a bottle, and the Romanée-Conti a mere $5000. I don’t think you’ll get to see too much in the way of a blind tasting going down this year.

Anyway, inspired by Dr. Eddie’s alacrity with pinot’s mischievous hue, the writer engaged Cheong Liew and eight other two-bottle fellows for a duck walk, which involves touring the duckmongers of Chinatown according to a pre-arranged schedule, each diner well-armed with pinots noir and a pair of good pinot balloons. There they were, at Morphett Street, heading for Ming’s Palace and his particular version of Peking Duck after gutsing on duck tongues and giblets in The Grange, and Cantonese duck and duck roast with Chinese mushrooms at Ken’s Barbecue, to hear Cheong excitedly announce that “Soon it’ll be all the white men riding bicycles while the Chinamen drive around in big cars”.

Like Chaucer’s rugged pilgrims those ducksters progressed, marveling at great local pinots - Romney Park; Ashton Hills – and those from further afield, like Curly Flat, Kooyong Ferrous, and yes, Lubijana’s Primavera.

Steve George brought a wondrous classic from Burgundy: a 1983 Comte George de Vogüé Chambolle-Musigny Premier Cru from 1983. It’s from a tiny vineyard called les Amoureuses - the Lovers - at the top of la Vogüé creek.

“That’s the year we planted Ashton Hills”, Steve chuckled to Peta. “Twenty five years ago. And they say pinot won’t age!”

While they finished with tandoori duck at the Indian Brasserie, your writer snuck out and lit up his last smoke, ever, wondering whether Dr. Eddie could pick les Amoureuses on its burnished colour alone. It’d be far too pale for Charlie Hawker.