82 NOTCHES ON BRIAN BARRY'S CORKSCREW

BRIAN BARRY PHOTOGRAPHED BY KATE ELMES FOR THE INDEPENDENT WEEKLY, WHERE A VERSION OF THIS STORY WAS PUBLISHED LAST WEEK.










Brian Barry Pours His Watson Winner
Our Greatest Palate Still Sniffs Em Out
by PHILIP WHITE

When winemaking friends marvel at the mad slurp and crash that mark my repetitive passage from squalid depression to brittle ecstasy, I tell ’em the columnist has at least one deadline per week, whilst the winemaker has just one per year.

Not that I seek sympathy. The wiles of vintage aside, the wine business has been a fairly reliable clock, bringing a skeleton of longer-term rhythm to my irregular life. So far.

Winemakers have added various repetitive milestones to their cycle. They go to the Royal Adelaide Wine Show, for example, at the same time each year. Then there’s the London Wine Trade Fair, regular as clockwork, coincident with cricket. And bottling, and the bloody bank, and the interminable PR/sales tours.

Many, whose properties are now on the block, will never know that cycle again.

My fear of deadlines – which are inevitably met, if bent - feeds my addiction to any irregularity I can get, so I avoid most of these groundhog winebiz fixtures.

But there are some which are annual treasures beyond belief. Like the day, just before vintage, when I lunch with Brian Barry OA, to celebrate his birthday. Apart from this horror vintage being almost over before the birthday, his 82nd went pretty much like the others: me marvelling at his amazing history of service; both of us marvelling at the old glories he pours on the day; a little private chortling at the antics of the odd pretender, and more at the miracle of our survival.

Brian was born in 1927. He was dux of Roseworthy in 1948, and chairman of judges at the Royal Adelaide from 1974-79. He blessed many other shows with his amazing sensories. He was the Chairman at the inaugural National Wine Show in Canberra in 1976, and presided there for many influential years.

He has the best palate I’ve encountered in Australia: intensely intellectual and analytical, but priceless in its ability to name the sensual delights good wine unveils.

Brian quit wine shows a decade back. At his 73rd birthday lunch, he said “It’s extremely disappointing now. Faulty wines get awards, and very high quality ones are overlooked. The classes have become so huge, and time is so restricted, that the judges can’t possibly do all the wines justice”.

His 1999 Jud’s Hill Clare Riesling had just come in equal first (94++ points) in my 1999 Top 100 tasting. “That wine’s truly beautiful”, said Ernie Loosen when I poured one for him in The Exeter. “It would look beautiful anywhere in the world.”

But the Adelaide Wine Show judges gave it only 15.2/20, indicating a faulty wine unworthy of bronze. At the same show, Joe Grilli entered his colombard in another class prescribed for riesling and carried off one of the two gold medals awarded to that class!

“For twenty years or so, we entered our colombards in the colombard class at Adelaide”, Joe said at the time, “and it was never awarded. The judges seemed to feel that no colombard could ever win gold, because they regarded it as such a second-class variety”.

So they awarded a colombard gold, thinking it was a good riesling, and begrudged a seriously good riesling any medal at all, because they thought it was faulty.

This year, Brian poured a Jud’s Hill Clare Riesling 2001, which unravelled one’s socks before stringing them on the lightglobe. Which it had failed to do when I first tasted it, almost immediately after bottling, in that year’s Top 100. But in the next year, I awarded it 93+++, and Brian re-entered the show circuit with it.

Back then, on the occasion of his 75th birthday, I suggested we should direct ourselves forthwith to The Exeter Thirst Emporium for the odd celebratory ingestion.

“Thanks, but I’ve already had a few”, he confessed without contrition. “They reckoned I oughta head up to Sydney for the Wine Show lunch, and I’ve just come back with four trophies. Not a bad birthday present!”

We attended The Exeter anyway.

And now, he poured that eight year old birthday present again. It absolutely sang: bright, crunchy and fresh, reeking of roses and citrus, with formidable acidity and length and that tantalising, unlikely mixture of sassy tease and austere Germanic authority. It’ll live another twenty beneath that trusty screw cap.

And so, too, will the rieslings he’s released since.

But while riesling’s the king of all grapes, Brian has earned great success with sorts much more lowly.

In 1972 he was winemaker, with offsider Orgy Williams, at the Berri co-op on the Murray. Orgy was at lunch, too. They made a 50-50 shiraz cabernet using the radical cold settling method Brian had been working on. By leaving the chilled juice to sit quietly, he permitted the delicate water-soluble aromatics – the florals: violets and lavendar etc. – to dissolve into the wine before the alcohol-soluble aromatics - the coarser tars, lignins, licorices and whatnot – took over during ferment.

“Mick Auld rang and said he’d got some good Barossa-cured German oak” Brian said, as if that were yesterday. “You’d have to be bloody stupid to say no ... oooh boy, you could put your nose in the bung and it was bloody beautiful!”

“The co-op bosses wanted me to start showing our wines at Melbourne so I resigned from judging there and the other judges gave my Berri wine the Jimmy Watson Trophy! We were selling it for 89 cents! It won many, many awards!

It was already on the market when we won”, he reminded us, offering a stark contrast to the way the trophy these days goes generally to barrel samples. “Because of the nature of the fruit, it was possible to release it very early. It was an experimental cold-ferment wine: the same technique the winners often use these days. The runner-up was ours, too: a straight cabernet made the same way.

“And here it is”, he said, pouring that old winner.

That’s the only time the auld Watson mug’s visited the River, which is little wonder when you consider the industrial crap they tend to make these days in the tortured desert of our biggest valley. And there we were, drinking the last bottle in captivity from that trophy-winning batch, thirty-seven years later. Tired, but dignified ’neath its soused cork, it rose for a final fragile bow after thirty minutes’ air, gave us one fleeting glimpse of its pretty primary fruit, and departed.

It would have been breathtaking under a screw cap.

If you have any Brian Barry locked up anywhere, liberate one now. The ’03 riesling’s undressing as we speak.

STACKING UP THE ANCIENT PENFOLDS

GRANGE CREATOR MAX SCHUBERT IN AUSSIE DIGGER'S CLOBBER IN CAIRO DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR










An Overseas Guest
Muscles Like A Cutting Horse

by PHILIP WHITE

March 13^th 2006 I made my annual pilgrimage to Penfolds’ Magill Cellars to visit Peter Gago, taste his new babies, and a few of their great-grand-parents. It’s a zen thing: the pacific sanctuary of the old wood-panelled boardroom; the way Peter treats it like Geoffrey Penfold Highland was still sitting in the office through there, smoking, and Max, dear Max, in the tiny office out there, blending. Always blending reds, Max. Making the best mud pies in Australia.

Down there is the calm blue of the Gulf St Vincent, patron of viticulturers.

Only thing missing is Leonard Cohen. He should be there in the courtyard in his long dark robes, raking gravel.

On the wall is the fierce Mary Penfold, looking rather like Queen Victoria at a funeral. You don’t get cherry red lips like those from suckin’ oranges.

My lovely mate Tony Bilson came too. He was stacking up his ancient Penfolds for his restaurant cellar in the Radisson, in Sydney.

We’d got through all the whites, climaxing – deliberate choice, climax, not just cause it’s got a Max in it - somewhere between the 2004 Bin 04A Chardonnay and the 2003 Yattarna, thinking I preferred the 04A, when Peter came through the door again.

“I hope you don’t mind sharing with another”, he said. “I have an overseas guest.”

Peter’s overseas guests are always worth stopping for.

But I had 28 more bottles to go, so I put my ugly head down and choogled on.

I have tasted in some fairly famous and fusty cellars in my day: this is always as good as the very best; sometimes better. Today looked like better. Koonunga Hill; Thomas Hyland; Reserve Bins; Magill Estate; RWT; Ka-ding! 2001 Grange. “This is what American oak’s for” my notes gurgle. “Making the gums and cheeks gush.”

I can’t stand American oak. It belongs wrapped around a dangerous big lump of bourbon or rye. It’s too coconutty even for Islay single malt. At the risk of upsetting our friends across the big water, I’d like to go and burn Missouri to the ground for what its beloved Quercus alba has done to far too many Australian reds.

So when I praise a Grange for its amoak, everybody should open their duster just a little and rest their spare hand on their piece. I may be taking the piss.

Not that day. In came the guest, a wide, small hardman with a bonedome and muscles like a cutting horse. He spoke in whisper softer’n a rabbit shelterin’ in a holler, and put his nose straight to the winestone. No trouble there. American accent.

And hang on: speaking of the dreaded amoak, where’s the St Henri? That’s the sublime Penfold red famous for not having overt American oak!

Part way through the vertical of St Henri (1958 to 2002) I began getting the feeling that this whispery guy knew his dots on the wine scale. While I gurgled and gooed and kerchoofed and sniffed he simply got quieter. Did the work.

Later, in The Exeter, Dan The Man (who now leads Leader Cheetah) whispered something like “Jeez, Whitey, you’re a dude. Walkin in here with Maynard!”

Around about this time I began to realise who my tasting compadre was. I thought Tony Bilson was famous! But this must be the dude who a coupla years earlier broke the record paid for a magnum of Grange at auction. Rock star from the States. Band name a Tool, whom I’d never heard. I was far too deep in my tenth Tin Huey/Devo/Pere Ubu phase to know much about Tool.

“MAYNARD”, he wrote in my note book, handling my precious antique Rapidograph like a master. “WWW.CADUCEUS.ORG”.

We took lunch, and if anything, his reverent whisper got softer.

1959 Ovens Valley; 1967 Kalimna Shiraz; 1996 Block 42; 2004 Block 42 ... I boast.

Maynard’s delightful partner joined us; we dined. He told me much about how he was planting vines in the high Arizona desert; finding ancient remnant shreds of Spanish varieties that nobody’s ever heard of; propagating; starting from scratch.

“It’s what I do when I’m not screaming for my supper”, he whispered. “Every Tool tour pays for some more vineyard.”

We went our own ways.

Back at The Ex for a cleanser, I discovered my status had gone strato.

Good Time Charlie’s Got The Booze

Graham "Charlie" Melton of Charles Melton Wines

by PHILIP WHITE – This was published in The Advertiser in 1992

These are very strange times. Strange times indeed.

Vintage has started, right? Right. Because of that, and the forthcoming Barossa Vintage Festival, the Barossa boys have been pretty quiet in the promotion ring, right? Yep. The wine industry’s in a nosedive anyway, sos there’s not much money going into the promotion of anything, right? Unfortunately, yes. Right. Charlie Melton runs one of the smallest wineries in the state, right? Yes, of course. If not the state, then most certainly it’s the smallest in the Barossa. Right. So he’d be the last bloke you’d expect to be campaigning his brands through the wineshops of Melbourne like he was running for Presidency of the United States, wouldn’t you say? Well, sure. So what am I doing in Melbourne, at Charlie’s expense, sitting back with the fat Melbourne food and wine prophets and scribes, chin-deep in fabulous tucker and completely awash in French wine?

Why? Launching the new releases of Charlie Melton’s Nine Popes, dunderhead.

Strange times indeed.

This is a true story. And, it turns out, a story of success.

We’re in a lovely grotty pub in the backblocks of Richmond, see, surrounded by terrible high-rise apartments crammed chock full of Vietnamese. This pub, the All Nations, is Richmond’s version of the Exeter, see. Charlie, who’s really called Graham, and never Charles, which is written boldly across his bottles, is nervous. He gets nervous when there’s Big Stuff afoot, as anyone’s who’s caught sight of him on the eve of things like the Barossa Classic Gourmet will guarantee. And here is, trapped in the All Nations, a long, long way from home. The more hardened members of the Fourth Estate are tipping in freezing beers with the Fifth Columnists, the back-biters and syndicators at the pock-marked bar, while the more prissy of the pressfolk hover warily in the background. Charlie’s pacing up and down.

“Well”, he says, “well I might have a beer with youse and then, well, some of us might like to go through for the tasting ... well, it’s just a bit of a tasting I’ve set up.”

“Gorn Charlie you’re jokin’ arncha? Not a masked tasting!” the brutes guffaw, and Charlie says “well it’s a bit of a tasting” so we up and down the beers on Carlie’s tab and head through to the tasting where our man has masked a string of bottles which include several medium-to-good Chateauneuf reds, a wicked little Italian dolcetto, and his own Nine Popes from 1989 and 1990.

Now Nine Popes is so named because that is what Charlie thought neuf-du-pape meant, and he makes the black, wickedly sinful stuff more or less from the grenache grape, which is the prominent red berry in that veritable zoo of weird grapes which they run in the lumpy limestone of the Chateauneuf-du-pape region of France’s Rhone delta.

Grenache has also been a very widely planted variety in places like the Barossa and McLaren Vale, where in days gone by it was the staple red for blending with shiraz. The advent of the steely-eyed wine technologist, however, saw this rather farmyardy workhourse berry fall from favour, and things like the notorious Vine Pull Scheme sentenced swillions of lovely old grenache vines to death by dozer.

Remembering the agricultural majesty of those grand reds from the past - Max Schubert says he happily used grenache in the odd Grange – and observing both the continuing significance of the grape in France and its fall from grace in Australia, Charlie quite correctly saw it as a cheap way of getting back to the heartland of traditional Aussie wine lore, while offering his customers something warming and unusual along the way.

It worked. Nine Popes became a cult item. But here on the bench at the back of the All Nations in Richmond, the more callow of the hacks began mumbling that Charlie had gone too far, putting his booze up against the expensive Frogs.

But these are strange times, remember. To a bitch, sorry, woman, the Melbourne winos and foodists, who are not only the nation’s fattest, most precious, and certainly most parochial and parsimonious, voted Charlie’s Nine Popes 1990 the best tot on the table. Not just the best, but the best by about six furlongs. And a nose. The Barossa boy triumphed.

They all take these things with great reverence and seriousness in Melbourne, so during the meal, the guests stood, one by one, and offered their testimonials and judgements and their admirations of Melton, and I have to tell you, it gave me a little gooey rush of pride for our side of the border and latter-day pioneers like Charlie.

There is some irony in that while doffing his hat to the smelly old Aussie grenache wines, and the smelly old Chateauneuf-du-pape red wines, Charlie makes very modern, clean grenache under his Nine Popes label, and it seems this perhaps accidental major doffing of the Melton hat to squeaky cleanness and stainless technology is what attracted the palates of Melbourne’s press.

Being more of a traditionalist in the true barnyard sense, I was much kinder to many of the imported wines, and when my turn came for testimony, I suggested there was some tragedy in the ruthlessness with which my esteemed colleagues beheaded the brews which showed all those lovely whiffs of cowsheds and meatsafes and unwashed children and isovaleric acid.

These, I believe, are the very smells which make many of the greatest wines great, the not so great wines good, and, of course, many of the worst wines awful. They are not, in themselves, a sinful act. They are simply there, like the red colour, or the wetness. The mob sniggered at this blasphemy, so I sat down, and let Charlie enjoy his day.

While I completely agree that the Nine Popes 1990 is a good wine, I suspect that its reliance on grenache alone makes it more straightforward than the Chateauneuf-du-pape wines, which usually include a further fruitsalad of varieties like cinsault, mourvedre, muscardin, vaccarese, cournoise and shiraz. It is also common for the French to add measures of the white varieties piccardin, roussanne, terret noir and bourboulenc to the reds.

Few of these varieties are grown in Australia, and, until they are, close comparisons of such blends to wine like the estimable Nine Popes, or indeed the Rockford Dry Country Grenache, are of little value other than to satisfy curiosity, and, I suppose, as seemed to be the case in Melbourne, opportunities to reinforce old prejudices.

I must say that Nine Popes aside, I found the Clos du Papes 1984 great fun because of its naughty turned French pungency and long, teasing finish; the ’83 Jaboulet Chateauneuf deeply satisfying because of its profound toasted chocolate and leather; and the ’85 Guigal Chateauneuf-du-pape fascinating for its impenetrable, taut nose, a common indicator of astonishing longevity in many of these warm climate reds. All these were purchased in Melbourne shops for around $25-$30.

The other unsung star of the day was the Charles Melton Cabernet Sauvignon 1989: a taut, big, silky, simmering wine; sweet and long and jumping with a lovely whiff of violets in there among all the darker stuff. It needs at least five years in bottle, perhaps ten, and sells for about $15. It costs less, of course, at Charlie’s cellar door. In a sense, this clean, sharp mod was closer in style and gastronomic intelligence to the Nine Popes than any of the funky imported punksters.

Anyway, we burbled and bubbled and frothed the afternoon away in the All Nations, and only when the Melbourne lot began to fall did Charlie suggest we try another establishment for the quiet cleanser. One bright spark said he’d take us to a Spanish pub, because the Spanish have grenache, and we zig-zagged through the cobbled backlanes of four or five suburbs and drew up outside a noteworthy thirst emporium prominently labeled The Robert Burns Hotel. Inside, its walls alternated from big swathes of tartan to white Spanish stucco, and, yes, the place was overflowing with Spaniards. This of course played a major role in me missing my aeroplane, my being vigorously frisked, nay, rough-handled at the aerodrome, my being finally placed in a seat surrounded by silent Moslem women, and my consequent whiling away of the hour aloft listening to a team of rather brimming footballers chatter quite loudly about the possibility of these hooded women being on a suicide mission while Charlie emptied his red ute of the wines he had for sale and drove himself back to the Barossa .

Strange times. Strange times and perilous.

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Ring Any Bells?

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by PHILIP WHITE – This appeared in The Advertiser on Sunday 22 December 1990

The fiend did it again this morning. There I was lost in that dreamy twilight zone between deep slumber and whatever else there is, listening to the local blackbird work his way through some difficult Frank Zappa riffs when the jerk next door suddenly shattered everything with his hammer. Bango. Eight sharp. Ack emma.

I’m sure this bloke’s preparing me for the horror of his Christmas and New Year’s parties. I can feel the pressure building. He just simply adores Christmas, because every time one goes by he gets another power tool. This has helped him develop his pathological obsession with industriousness, and his manic commitment to proving it superior over whatever he imagines the rest of us have in its place. Now he’s really winding it up for Jesus’ birthday. By the 25^th he’ll be frothing at the mouth.

And so, I’m sure, will I.

The style of cacophany he’s selected this morning, this Sunday, this day of rest, shows an unusual preference for the traditional instruments: the hammer-and-nail, and the hand saw. He’s usually into the more modern stuff, rapping along to the buzz-saw, the percussive masonry drill, and the electric jack hammer, sounding much more like a visit to some gargantuan dentist than this morning’s woody performance. Perhaps, out of deference to Our Lord and his carpenter Dad, he’d trying to get more Bethlehem into it.

No joking. I wouldn’t blink an eye if he started work on a manger next. There can be little else he needs.

He built an outdoor spa last week, each day attracting a new gaggle of power-tool worshippers. They wear those psychedelic Bombay bloomers and the electric blue mirror sunglasses that hang on cords around their necks. Once this mob finally got their spa finished they all up and off with their clothes and into it, saying things like “Jeez mate let’s pick the scab off a few beers”, and talked loudly about The Boongs. They have to talk loud in order to be heard above the roar and whine of the machinery that drives the volcano or whatever it is beneath them, and they must have those strings on their sunglasses to save them from falling into the cauldron full of tinea and toejam they’re sitting in.

No sooner had the terra cotta tiles dried and they started building another gadget. A sort of industrial-strength barbecue, more or less along the lines of a Tower of Babel. I remember Mick Young once saying that when he was a kid they used to eat in the house and shit outside and now that we’ve all come so far with this cosmopolitan stuff we eat in the yard and shit in the house. I think Mick got thrown outa the chamber for a session on the strength of that.

They were halfway through the world’s loudest complete set of outdoor furniture when I bunged on some Maria Callas at about number seven to show them another type of sound. They all jumped back in the spa and yodelled along so hideously I was inclined to duck across and beg them to put the chainsaw back on.

And so I lay there, struggling to conjure up the shape of the object under construction from the rhythm of the hammer and saw, grieving for our whole bilious community. We’re sick of recession and depression and little Arab kids being gassed and poor bloody businessmen committing suicide and George Bush making dates. We lie abed, whimpering into the Tontine, too frightened to face the shopping. We sit in silent rows in front bars, knuckles slowly whitening on the butchers, wishing someone warm would wander in to share a slow, cool one and offer some reassurance and a smoke with some flavour.

Then I came over really sicko nasty, and wondered he we could get all the sorts of blokes I’ve got next door to head off to the Gulf War. It’s always the nice kids who go to the slaughter, generation after generation. But they’d lie there in the sand in their rubber suits dreaming of that spa at home and I’d feel guilty and nobody’d be any better off.

I lunched with a psychiatrist mate last week and we talked about some of these things and he advised me that if I wanted quiet rest in the Big House for Christmas I’d have to be quick or hang a particularly rococo fruity, because the best clinics are all full and the rest are filling fast. That came as no surprise, but I did shock myself when I went to call my friend a shrink and the word stuck like a fishbone in my gullet because this bloke, the Brain Farmer we joke about, suddenly turned into a nice soft doctor I might soon need to visit.

I tried reading this morning, to alleviate the The Fear and The Hammering, and after skipping over the bit about what a terrible freezing squalor of a Christmas the poor old Ruskies are bogged in, I read that this year the Tokyo Stock Exchange collapsed to the tune of twice the total outstanding debt of the Third World.

It took a passing siren to take my mind off that, and I don’t mean the saucy sort who slop about singing on rocks but the nasty types with people dying inside them, or the ones which indicate someone’s been naughty enough to drag the cops away from their automatic radar cameras, or the ones which tell you someone’s personal stuff is all afire and their teddy and their snapshot collection is crinkling up and coming apart. Always a growth period for sirens, Christmas.

The last year I bought presents, speaking of growth, I was staggering up Rundle Street like a burro laden with expensive stuff for folks who probably wouldn’t like it, savoring thoughts of all the better ways of showing love, when a madman with a knife knocked me and all my fancy goods flying. A nice young chap chased him, brought him down with a flying tackle, and set about the careful gouging of his eyes, so I gathered up my burdens and wobbled on, straight into the mess of bleeding people this nutter had just chopped up.

The sirens sang then, too, and they gassed and soothed and bandaged and they threw the luny into a cage. When I got safely down to The Exeter for a few quiet triples, I decided there and then never to buy presents for the love of God because it’s like offering burnt sacrifices and all that went out with the Old Testament. I’ve felt a lot better since. Now I buy presents when people need something, or a mate or lover makes me so runny in the middle I can’t resist.

I was going to suggest you should all buy yourselves and any kids you can get your hands on a ticket to Circus Oz and call that your present, but you know what? These awful sad days of bread and circuses and central nervous system collapse have even infested life under the big top. The poor bloody circus hasn’t got the cash to perform in Sydney, and we showed up in such dribs and drabs they can’t afford to play here any longer either. It was such a beautiful circus.

I’d worked out a way to sell my neighbour to the ringmaster, somehow getting him into a drugged haze and the white gorilla suit, but I’ve got a much better idea now they’re off down the road. I’m going instead. And I’m taking the blackbird. Season’s greetings.

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Spring rocks in

by PHILIP WHITE

Spring’s here. Well and truly. Just like spring in the ’sixties: gusty and dousing one minute; sunny and warming the next, and lots of wind. But that was spring. You know, September, October, November. This is August.

Until now, it’s been rain, rain, rain. Perfect. The creeks suddenly began to flow on July 10^th; within a week the dams were brimming. And today the wind has quit and we have sunshine so scrubbed and settled it seems to fill all the space of the yard with a dense brick of perfectly transparent matter. The almonds are in full bloom. Arum lilies have suddenly appeared along the water courses. Mick the Pre-Cambrian ram is looking around for all his old girlfriends, all those thousands of ’em, who no doubt went into the mutton pot long before I was born; the foal still within the bursting balloon belly of the mare in the horse paddock next door is kicking so much you can see the lumps moving around in the mother’s stomach. The sedges are alive with baby wood ducks. That’s early. The flats swarm with calm ibis, studiously poking those long black beaks into the sod. Yesterday the blackbird performed his opening cadenza for the sunshine oratorio that feels fit to burst the season wide open any minute now.

As Michael O’Donohoe said the other night in The Exeter: “if you don’t spray poison, your insects won’t get sick. No sick insects, your birds won’t get sick. No sick birds, no slugs or snails”. Since it cut back on the spraying, and sorting out its creeklines with native vegetation in place of the cluttered European species that went malignant, the whole of McLaren Vale is crawling with birdlife that simply wasn’t here five or six years ago. When we were working on the Trott’s View photography in 2000-2001, there was almost no birdlife available to be photographed. Now every time a person tries to get a clean photograph of a cloud, friggin’ wee berrudies fly in the way.

Budburst hit the bellwether vineyard opposite The Salopian Inn on August 1^st.. Last vintage, I reckon it was the 15^th.. And look what happened then. One of the earliest vintages ever, starting out cool in every sense of the word, then suddenly coming over all hellfire and brimstone when the record fortnight of heat hit. And now, although it came excruciatingly late: six weeks of steady soaking rain. The escarpment ground is making water, right down the fault line. If it rains on into the official spring this season, we may well end up with another half a million tonnes of surplus. And a vintage rocking in a fortnight earlier than the last freak.

As Penfolds’ chief winemaker, Peter Gago, said back in April, “In the last fifteen vintages, no two have been alike ...We have to keep modulating our definition of extreme. What’ll come next?”

Bluegrass music, probably. That’s how springy it is. The Dillards. Although I’ve been plastering my ears around The Felice Brothers new’un for a week solid. They’re not bluegrass. They must be sick of being likened to The Band, but it’s probably good for business. And they do come from Woodstock, NY. Raucous, rollicking and brassy like Rock of Ages, sure, and sometimes as if they’re in an empty hall; other times woodsy in that smoky barn sort of way, but they sometimes sound like The Band produced by Lanois, and they get really spooky. Then I sniff hints of Dixie Chicken blue-eyed baptist Billy Payne piano funk. More puce and big crimson than pink, if you get my drift. It will be a delight to follow them. The Band has kept me buzzing for forty years, so a first reserve will be nice.

As there’s nuthin’ new under the Sun, Fleet Foxes drags me back, too. Syrupy pre-Eagles vocals. Like Crosby’s spaced-out solo If I Could Only Remember My Name (with Nash and Young, the Dead, J. Airplane and Joni Mitchell), with splashes of Harry Nilsson and the Beach Boys. Now they’ve learned to sing, I’d love to see them ROCK.

Which there’s absolutely no shortage of in the stunning Large Number 12s, which Mick Wordley just unveiled for me. I can’t believe ’em. He recorded their live opening blast, Every Sunday at The Pint On Punt pub in St Kilda four years ago (it’s on his Mixmaster label – check www.mixmasters.com.au/ ). Mick’s just finished polishing the follow-up, which is studio live and sizzlin’. It’ll be out in a fortnight or so: GO BUY. They sound like Dwight Twilley; 10cc; Rockpile; Thunderclap Newman; The Records; et al, with the Les Paul/Strat interchange of Mick Robbins and the Rev. Charlie Owen always dazzling up the front. Great writing, too. Which is nothing at all to do with wine, other than it makes me very, very thirsty.

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