BILSON KNOCKS INTO THREE COCKED HATS

TETSUYA WAKUDA, TONY BILSON AND NEIL PERRY ... THE AUTHOR FIRST MET THE NOW GREAT TETS WHEN HE WAS MAKING SUSHI AND COOKING BURGHERS IN BILSON'S LEGENDARY KINSELAS, A THREE-STOREY EMPORIUM FOR HUNGER, THIRST AND THEATRE IN TAYLOR SQUARE, SYDNEY, AROUND 1985 ... PERRY HAS NEVER BEEN ON THE BILSON TEAM, BUT MAKES A FAIR GO OF IT WITH HIS FISH

FROM the blackest extremes of his dark moody gizzards, the DRINKSTER congratulates a beloved lifelong friend and colleague, Tony Bilson, for this week regaining his Three Hats in the Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide awards, and a fortnight back winning the 2011 National Award for Best Restaurant from the Australian Hotels Association, the hotel industry’s highest award for culinary perfection.

This follows his triumphant Penfolds dinner at the Australian embassy in Paris, with incredible Penfolds classics selected by co-host and sponsor, Penfolds chief winemaker, Peter Gago. The dish below is Nick Haselgrove's phone deleriousness of Bilson's Manjimup Truffles, Foie Gras, Fig and Brioche. Western Australian truffles!

Click on the image to see the entire menu and wine list.

Bilson’s restaurant history is a formidable and persistent skyrocket, at the head of Australian cuisine for over forty years. A tad spitty, maybe, when all the money in the world suddenly vanishes, and customers withdraw their tease. But Bilson was never a gastronomic fizzer, and he never goes away. From cooking chops in a pub in South Melbourne, through Johnny Walker’s steakhouse in the Sydney CBD, to, in some sort of order, Tony’s Bon Gout, Berowra Waters Inn, Kinselas, Bilson’s on Circular Quay, Tony’s Fine Bouche, The Treasury, Ampersand, Tony Bilson’s Canard, Bilson’s at the Radisson Blu, Number One Wine Bar and The Royal Exchange (the latter three which he runs simultæneously, now), this amazing man, and his family, has never ever given up, through economic slump and boom, and the odd personal health and wealth pisser that would erase lesser mortals.

From Bon Gout on, I recall great meals in each of those restaurants: dining with Bocuse in that astounding Bilson's in the International Passenger Terminal on Circular Quay; with Richard Olney at The Treasury; with Stephen Hickinbotham and David Hohnen at Berowra; with Gretel and Steggers at Kinselas; don't get me started.

AMANDA BILSON, PAUL HAMLIN BOOK EDITOR, WIFE OF TONY, AND MOTHER OF LILY AND EDWARD, THEIR RESPECTFUL BOHAUTE RESTAURANT INSURRECTIONIST OFFSPRING ... RED BERRIES IN KIRSCH AND THE AUTHOR, IN TONY'S FINE BOUCHE, CA 1990 ... THE WALLS WERE HUNG WITH PERFECTLY SENSUAL CARDBOARD COLLAGES BY PETER POWDITCH




To see the current wine list at Bilson’s at the Radisson Blu, click here. To perve on the funky bohaute cuisine of Number One, click here. To join the fustier clubland of The Royal Exchange, click here.

For a recent profile, click here, understanding the journalist’s regular mistake - there was no divorce of Gay and Tony – they never married: she changed her name by deed poll from Cheeseman to Bilson, which was easier when they had their children, Morgan and Sido.

Gleefully married to Amanda for 24 years, grrr, of recent years Bilson's been working hard with the people in the Bawaka homelands, East Arnhem Land, trustfully swapping seeps of knowledge. They're thinking of a modern industrial kitchen to swap and merge their stuff. You watch the graduates of this school!

Bilson has also been busy in Bangla Desh, building essential cultural connections through the friendship of cuisine.

In the Winegrowers' Diary introduction written by the great Walter James for David Wynn in 1970, there lies a very frank paragraph:

"In some fields of productive endeavour, of course, you cannot achieve much without substantial means; it is only a little sad that so many men of ability as they reach for success and meet it are beguiled into allowing the means to submerge the aim and in the end are content to do, adequately enough, no more than a hundred others around them are doing equally well. Their obituaries describe these people as successful businessmen and they pass promptly into oblivion."

This did not apply to David Wynn, and will never apply to the fearless Bilson.

BILSON: EASTER BREAKFAST AT WHITEY'S, BAROSSA RANGES, ABOUT 1989

For Jancis Robinson's review of the Paris dinner, click here.

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.

THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY

Philip White Sees Encircling Gloom in 2009

a version of this story appeared in The Independent Weekly on 19 DEC 08

Next year? Next year’s already been buggered by this year.

Ignoring a few modest-scale exquisities, like the early-picked rieslings of Clare and Eden, 2008 was a disgusting vintage. Even the degree of industrial accidents soared as winery workers endured impossible shifts, trying to get everything turned into wine before the heat turned it to currants.

But in spite of the empty river and the drought, Australia’s crop was up one third on last year, and yields per hectare went up by a quarter. Where the water came from beats me. Then, export volumes went down 9%; and domestic sales down 5%, leaving us with 2 billion litres of wine to drink.

To put that in scale, Italy’s just beaten France to become the world’s biggest winemaker, its production up 8 percent to 4.7 billion litres. While Italy has reduced its vineyard area, its quality is steadily increasing. To add insult to alcohol producers everywhere, French heart specialist Dr Olivier Ameisen, 55, is claiming that by taking a muscle-relaxant called baclofen, he’s lost his desire for alcohol, and wants his theories tested on more thirsty people.

And now I hear the price of temporary water from the River is less than half the price it was last November. I know where that’ll be going.

There will be plenty of wine to drink next year, and a lot of utter swill from that heatwave, industrially corrected to varying degrees of digestibility.

But in the face of increasing large-scale vineyard plantings, and grape prices at rock bottom, many, many family-scale specialist grapegrowers will hit the wall. As Foster’s disappears and Constellation withdraws, towns will empty.

Nevertheless, 2009 will be the year the lumpen mass will wallow in lousy cheap wine at the expense of the Australian countryside, setting alcohol-related public health costs through the roof. Those of the rest us who miss out on Dr Ameisen’s tests will be furiously trying to drink our favourite specialist wineries through the crisis. Small, high-quality producers will need faithful support like never before.

We will see the continuing, phenomenal rise of China as a player in the wine market. The first paper to report those Italian figures, for example, was the Shanghai Daily. They’re onto it, and they’re increasingly getting into it.

As for the little matter of all the money in the world suddenly disappearing, Tony Bilson says his three-star temple of gastronomy in the Radisson in Sydney is still packed with tourists at dinner, but the business gamblers who’d filled it for years each lunch - at, what? $200-$500 a head? - are now down at his Number 1 wine bar on Circular Quay, hassling the staff about the price of cleanskins.

We will see the continuing tightening of control of restaurant outlets, with wine lists being bought and chopped up by one or two of the transnationals, who might then allow a big family show, like Yalumba, Taylors, Angove's or McWilliams in to add a bit of colour. Unless you can buy your way in, new producers with wines over $25 can pretty much forget it. That, of course, will include hundreds of brands which are hobby or vanity additions to family vineyards planted in the wrong places to the wrong varieties for all the wrong reasons of fashion and whimsy.

The liquor retail world will continue to constrict as Coles and Woolworths ruthlessly undercut the indies with their share of that 2 billion litres. Desperate money’s flying everywhere in retail, as floor and shelf space goes to the highest bidders. Check out the brochure Yalumba’s just produced for The Edinburgh – there’ll be more of that. If you have a specialist wine store that stocks your favourite littlies, coddle it.

Which is not to say that the big guys are limited to swill: the phenomenal cheapie imports Jeremy Stockman buys for Vintage Cellars and 1st Choice have staggered me this year for their range and quality. The exotica they’re bringing in should inspire our winemakers, providing lots of ideas for new flavours.

In the kiddylikker sector, expect a return to the original coolers of the late ’eighties, when they were made from denatured or disguised wine bases rather than spirits, and tasted pretty much the same.

In the premium regions, led by McLaren Vale, we will see more determined replacement of the old petrochemical spray regimes with an internationally-unprecedented wave of rigorous organic and bio-dynamic techniques. Margaret River, Clare, the Victorian Alps ... more and more regions are seeing this beautifully healthy and brave conversion.

And, fittingly, 2008 will see McLaren Vale – Trott’s View sell out. You can buy the last copies at Wakefield Press in Kent Town. This beautiful volume of photographs of the late Trott’s favourite folks, events and locations is our last glimpse of the Vales that used to be.

The fight to retain what’s left will reach fever pitch in 2009.

.

LONG DRY ROUTE TO THE KING OF THE RIVER

The author waits for Tony Bilson's magnificent repast at Trevor Knaggs' La Dolce Vita lunch at King River Estate

by PHILIP WHITE - A version of this story appeared in The Independent Weekly on 28 NOV 08

Horsham, drought, late afternoon. The sky is spectacular with thunderclouds: thousands of tonnes of water, stubbornly refusing to fall. Well-dressed farmers sit at footpath tables, glimpsing up, drinking coffee. There’s not much else to do. For hundreds of kilometres, every farm gate has a tractor or two for sale; a harvester; a favourite ute. There is no stock other than the odd scrawny sheep gnawing at what was supposed to be wheat, and a few bony cattle.

The roads have run down. Every village building needs paint. All those Wimmera streams that run north into the Murray are bone dry. I ask for more chilli on my chook burrito. The disbelieving lass produces a bowl of slightly mustard-coloured powder which rips the nose apart. Monosodium glutamate sprayed with Mace. It takes two beers to erase. Where’s the butcher? I ask, dreaming of edible food. Where’s the fruitaveg? “Coles”, she says.

Shops which once housed the butchers and greengrocers now brim with bric-a-brac: home-made artworks, trinkets, and useless caucasian artefacts that householders have chosen to live without.

On the hilltop west of St Arnaud, a quick thunderstorm has left one puddle. I report this to the nearest publican. “Fair dinkum”, she says. “You shoulda took a photograph of it. We coulda used it on a postcard!”

Further east, the Goulburn looks almost hearty. And so it should, if Melbourne’s new pipeline is to deliver. Across the Hume Highway the countryside turns lush green. We wind up the King Valley to Edi, where the tobacco farmers were, but now spread shooting vineyards, ash trees, oaks; creeklines thick with willow and hawthorn. Out of the car at King River Estate. “Jeez mate, this country’s looking good”, I say to winemaker Trevor Knaggs. “We get forty inches”, he says.

Perversely, the purpose of this journey is the annual La Dolce Vita Lunch. Trevor’s beautiful King River Estate wines, and a repast cooked by the great Tony Bilson, who makes the annual pilgrimage from Bilson’s at the Radisson in Sydney to King River, where he cooks for 120 in an old cowshed.

“Talk to Tony”, Trevor says. “Choose the wines. We’re proud of them. We’re going biodynamic.” A sexy tenor sax tootles away as the first diners arrive; waiters don shirts that say “Conserve water. Drink wine”. The first dish is from ancient Rome: almond gazpacho beneath a thin layer of oil. It comes with a croüton smothered in foie gras. Trevor’s 06 verdelho does it perfectly, with its faint hints of kernel supporting rather than contrasting. The duet’s ravishing.

“Now” says Tony. “This lobster tail will come out with fresh shelled oysters and seawater jelly”. The fumé, fennel and cream cheese of the 08 sauvignon blanc does the oysters and salty jelly perfectly, once again supportive rather than contrasting, just as the carambola and drying tannins of the 08 vermentino wrap that hearty lobster.

Somebody had promised to shoot some deer. No deer volunteer, and the 40 kilos of fillet Tony rattled up at the last minute in Sydney gets lost, so local venison turns up anyway. Tony roasts it and serves it in a sauce poivrade with chocolate, foie gras and juniper berries, with asparagus and a purée of potato and celeriac. The mighty King River Reserves, an 06 cabernet sauvignon and 05 merlot nail that dainty: in their different ways, both wines are chocolaty to some extent, and while the maturing chicory greens of the cabernet suit the celeriac side of the dish and the asparagus, the mossy, earthy, merlot nearly brings that Bambi back to life.

The Milawa Cheese Company presents a cheeseboard that just a decade back could be found only in Burgundy or Champagne. So we serve two unusual reds: a sweet 06 merlot, the result of a stuck ferment and some inspired tidying up, and the dry, unfortified - but tawny - 99 Nancy’s Shiraz, named after Trevor’s deceased Mum. “We gotta have this” Trevor says. “Mum’d love this”.

Tony’s mousse of chocolate with walnut cream, red berry salad and balsamic vinegar is a dryish, very adult affair, so we throw the dry 05 barbera at it. You oughta hear ’em slurp. This is one of the most utterly beautiful meals.

Coming home along the River, we first traverse hundreds of open channels gushing with water. They’re about the same width as the roads, and they’re using the new government grants to rubber-line them, but not enclose them. The chandlers are doing well in the drought: every fifty metres, there’s a neat little steel cable mariner’s ladder so critters can climb out if they slip on the rubber. But there’s only a glum puddle of a River at Echuca. From there to Swan Hill the anabranches are all dry, and there are millions of dead trees. There are no birds left on the road to Ouyen, and at Pinnaroo they’re irrigating potatoes with overhead sprinklers.

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.