CANNED WINE = CANNED MUSIC, WET

SOME THINGS DON'T BELONG IN A TIN

Sofia's Canned Sophistry
VinTins V. Bladder Pack
Penfolds Goes All Glassy

by PHILIP WHITE - a version of this first appeared in THE INDEPENDENT WEEKLY

Sceptically mumbling that there’s nothing new under the Sun, your thirsty correspondent was amused and bemused to hear that Sofia Coppola, the film-directing daughter of the famous film-directing Napa wine magnate Francis, had released a sweet blend of pinot blanc, sauvignon blanc and muscat called Blanc de Blancs California. In a pink tin. With a straw attached.

In a rare accurate use of the word, the press bumpf insists this is aimed squarely at the “sophisticated” market. (My Oxford On Historical Principles advises that sophisticated means “mixed with some foreign substance; adulterated; not pure or genuine; deprived of primitive simplicity or naturalness; rendered artificial; falsified ... ”)

This was a Californicated shot at the cute little splits of champagne popular in the sorts of night clubs your writer consistently fails to frequent. After all that utter codswallop about which shaped glass the precious makers of champagne insist their suds are best served in, they feel no quirks about putting it in cute little bottles with plastic stoppers so supermodels can suck it seductively through straws when they’re draped across bars. Lipstick don’t smudge with a straw, see.

Barokes, the South Melbourne winemaker, has had the Vinsafe Wine-in-a-Can on the market for a fairly unremarkable five years. They won something shiny for their canned chardonnay at a show in Singapore, which was fortuitous, because they’re aiming their tinny ordnance at Asian sophisticates, of which there are apparently quite a few.

As the wine glut continues to swill biliously back and forth across the sodden globe, plonkmongers are trying anything, everything, to attract attention and move juice. Most of these are being sold in a fashionably verdant light: the producers generally claim their allegedly new container is more environmentally-friendly. Stuff like like PET plastic bottles, new angles on the bladder pack, and Tetra Packs.

Don’t laugh. The first Tetra-Pak wine these eyes saw was in Robert O’Callaghan’s flash leather briefcase at the Mascot airport in the early eighties. Rocky had not yet learnt the marketing filip he'd get by getting all verdant, and Rockford was still as small as it can only pretend to be today. He’d been working, with adman Tony Parkinson, on a way of emptying the tanks of the old Angle Vale co-op winery. That was back before the arrival of the green angle, but kiddylikker issues were already fomenting, and Rocky’s Sydney promo trip was futile. Parky went on to invent such magnaminities as Black Chook, Timbuktu, and Woop Woop.

And now we’ve got the new aluminium bottle. Aluminium and wine don’t marry. Many metals affect the flavour of wine. Drink your favourite red from a pewter chalice and you’ll know what I mean: it tastes like silver paper stuck in an old amalgam filling. The Barokes folks claim they’re got this cured with their patented plastic film which lines the can, but the consequent flavours still fail to impress this gnarly hack.

What the new USA users of various shapes of aluminium bottles are using to solve this problem is a mystery. Perhaps they imagine there is no problem.

Then, if you're talking about carbon footprint, the cost of smelting aluminium in Australia far outweighs the cost of doing it in nuclear-powered countries: Australia's electricity unfortunately comes from burning coal.

The glass container, for storage and serving, remains the preferred tankard at Casa Blanco. And now, it seems, it may also become the preferred seal.

PENFOLD'S GRANGE MAKER PETER GAGO

For many years, Peter Gago, Grangemaker, has fantasised about somehow having a glass bottle with a glass closure. Not like the natty Vino-Lok glass stoppers gradually appearing now; these have a polyvinyl chloride o-ring seal: the same stuff used in the thin film over the sealing wafer of a screw cap. What Peter dreamt of was a glass-on-glass closure, an emulation of the old apothecary’s bottle, with the machined glass tapered stopper in a tapered, machined glass neck.

This is, of course, impossibly expensive for a modern bottler.

But Peter’s nearly got it, shall we say, cracked. He’s found a machine that can shave the opening of a standard bottle so that its top edge is to all extents and purposes, perfectly flat. Upon this sits a special glass disk, also flat. In prototype trials your writer has observed at Magill, this can be held in place with a ceramic clip or a screw cap yet to be perfected. It is indeed glass-on-glass: no plastic touching wine.

“We know the PVC in the screw cap holds white wine stable for decades without taint”, Peter said, “but red wine? We won’t know until the same sort of time scale has passed. Glass-on-glass will remove any such concern.”

The Grange trials are borderline hush-hush, but they continue. For those wanting more oxygen in their wine – like, say, a cork would admit over time – psuedo-sintered glass is available, meaning the bottler can offer a range of disks with the capacity to admit varying degrees of oxygen ingress without the wine seeping out. So the Grange buyer could take a case in which four bottles will live for almost ever with minimal oxidation; four bottles with, say the degree of oxidation generally achieved with screw caps, and four with the same sort of oxidation you’d get with cork. And no faults.

Totally unsophisticated, see.

DAMIEN HIRST LIFTS PENNY'S HILL RED DOT

DAMO'S SKRILLION DOLLAR SCONE AFTER VICIOUS NIGHT ON SLASH. THOSE WHO CALL HIM MOZZIE SYMPO NOTE: SHOES ARE IN MOSQUE, BY HITCHING POST AND NITRO; HEAD'S OUTSIDE IN GARBAGE; LIFT HAS GONE. UP.

Dottie Pom Rips Spots Off McLaren Vale Winery

You Can Put A Red Dot On That

by PHILIP WHITE

Damien Hirst, the ingenious London artghoul famous for putting whole cows in glass tanks of formaldehyde, and infamous in hard art circles for copping out and apologising for calling the destruction of the Twin Towers as being “like a work of art”, has ripped off the Penny’s Hill label of Tony and Susie Parkinson, from McLaren Vale, South Australia.

Penny’s Hill has used the distinctive red dot logo for thirteen years, on domestic and export release. London drinks heaps.

Publicists say Hirst designed the "exclusive" label to raise money for the U.K. charity, Comic Relief.

For every bottle of this Sethefriken plonk sold, £1 goes to Comic Relief. Even St Jancis is promoting the stuff - she should be aware of the Penny's Hill dot.

A million hangovers and a huge stack of bullshit could have been prevented if Damien had simply given Comic Relief a great big stack of his money.

He recently hired artisans to make a diamond-encrusted skull which he sold for $US122 million, a record price for work sold by a living artist.

The piece, "For the Love of God," is a life-size platinum skull encrusted with 8601 diamonds. He used the skull of somebody already dead for the cast.

Last time DRINKSTER had a night on the slash with Damo, we got so maggoted on Penny's Hill the head was left out the front of the studio.

When DRINKSTER took it back in the morning, he said "Phew, thanks mate. I'd better put a red dot on that!"

SORRY FOR THE SOFT FOCUS, GUS. IT WAS A BIG NIGHT!

Hirst’s "Lullaby Spring," a three metre wide steel cabinet containing 6136 hand-crafted and individually-painted pills, sold for $US23.4 million in June.

Comic Relief believes the wines will become collectors’ items because of Hirst's "exclusive" red dot.

If the Mr. Bigs at Penny’s Hill get their way, Damien's little red pills may well become collectors’ items, too.

DRINKSTER imagines them suspended in formaldehyde in the hyper-cool Red Dot Gallery at the Penny’s Hill winery.

Or Parky could keep 'em in a jar on his telly. Warmer, see?

Comic relief, see.

COMMENT:

Re skull:

A little foreground softness is OK these days. They call it the indie look. Comes from people shooting no-budget feature films with auto-focus cameras or even phones, and recognising their own deficiencies in the work of others. The future will be just like the present only worse.