STRAWBERRY BLONDE GRIS PINOT

Dry marmalade you can drink
by PHILIP WHITE

Something about the sorts of mates I chose early ends me up with a few survivors who seem suddenly to have lasted so long largely to make fabulous  marmalade while we share incredible ideas and sharpen the pitchforks for our  storming of the Twilight Farm.   

In the presence of the marmalade king: Bilson and White 

Kumquat is the go with my field marshals: Bilson, Tony, (made with vanilla) and Kains, Ieva, (with Cointreau). Brrrrr. 

And the marmalade queen: my English teacher, Ieva Kains

Now I'm adding Scorpo, Paul (below), for making one you can drink. Two, actually: a blonde and a ruby/garnet one, both from the grey/gris/grigio Pinot. Way down on Mornington on a rise of deep quick-rinsing volcania halfway between Port Philip and Westernport. Both wines come from the one block. Same fruit. 

He starts blonde with a hint of ginger in the Scorpo Estate Grown Merricks North Mornington Peninsula Pinot Gris 2017 ($35; 13.4% alcohol; screw cap) where the ginger smells like it's chopped and dried and slightly toasted. It steps from soaking with creamy pulped limes quite confident onto the palate, smiles for the snappers and waits that perfect pause before deciding that'll do and leaves us with a long husky sigh as tannic as a really good Viognier. A lick of limoncello. Here we are blinking in the little stars the diamonds left after the paparazzi all popped. Goodness me. 

Snapper, pink, crunchy on the outside, with pickled horseradish and a soy as old as Tetsuya please. 

Next: Pick the Pinot ripe, take 80% of the stalks away and leave the berries in a big open fermenter in a controlled cold soak while those wild southern yeasts perch round the rim like vultures. Tease 'em for days, til you hand the temperature remote to the Devil. Once he's cranked it the grey skins somehow let pinks loose in the must and you've got a Scorpo Bestia Pinot Grigio Tradizionale 2016 ($45; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap) happening. 

Same grape same vineyard as the abovementioned but the burnished pulp fiction strawberry marmalade one in the Ferrari-scarlet satin ... first ever bone-dry drinking marmalade I've encountered that brought to mind Sophia Loren after she's spent a few days eating mortadella in the New York airport lounge in, well, La Mortadella ... it's getting darker ... 

Something about that extra human Mediterranean twang seems to set this brute keening for saffron and the caramel of roast crustacean shell: I'm sure Marseille would forgive you if you smuggled it in into a bouillabaisse temple. Tell 'em it's special marmalade for seafood. Just don't try to convince 'em you're Sophia Loren. She's outside, revvin' the Enzo. 

These are real good wines thankyou Paul. They light me up.

The source of the drinking marmalade: the Scorpo Family vineyard on Mornington Peninsula

AN AUSTRALIA DAY REFLECTION

Wine businessmen of category: not many of them running  publicly-listed wine companies

by PHILIP WHITE
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On 23rd August 2003, Prime Minister John Howard officially opened the O'Leary Walker winery at Watervale in Clare. In a typically yin-yang move, David O'Leary and Nick Walker had asked whether I would formally introduce him to the big assembly of VIPs, friends and neighbours. Realising it wasn't too often you saw a Prime Minister open a winery, and in awe of Nick and David's achievement and endeavour, I agreed.

The PM had been encouraging Australians to stop gambling. Not long before the opening, he'd repeated this mantra one day and on the next announced that he wanted us as a nation to invest in stocks and shares, which seemed to me a pretty big gamble in itself.

"I want Australians to be the biggest owners of stocks and shares in the world," he'd said.

Determined to make an introduction more conservative than the speech he was likely to deliver, I spoke of how the most significant Australian wine companies were often the long-term works of great families, who over generations worked determinedly to build businesses of substance.

Families being what they are, many of these falter after two or three generations, and one heir or another eventually decides to grab the money - often through a public float on the stock exchange - and run.  

I thence suggested the short-term boom-and-bust nature of the stock market was inappropriate in the wine business, which needed people of great patience and vision to weather the very long-term cycles of finding and buying land, planting vines, waiting for them to produce a proper crop, building wineries, making wine, and then waiting for it to mature for market and the chance at some income.

By their nature, modern publicly-listed companies could never plan and endure such patient, visionary ten and twenty-year cycles of planning, major investment and gradual brand establishment before profits could be expected.

I quoted the Melbourne wine critic Walter James, who'd written in the Wynn Winegrowers Diary, 1970:

"When you choose to direct your life to the task of making money you may be sure that your success will arouse the admiration, and the envy, of a vast army of men who have had similar aims. Should you set out not to make money but to make something really worthwhile in itself, your success will with equal certainty be rewarded with the admiration, and the goodwill, of men who really matter - men of category ...

"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."

To bounce off this, I cited the Walker family. Nick's grandfather Hurtle had learned his winemaking from the Frenchman Edmund Mazure at Romalo Cellars, where Hurtle's son and Nick's father, Norm, spent his life making wine for many other Australian companies. Samuel Wynn had bought Romalo, which his son David took over.

 

David Wynn tasting at Romalo, Magill, with Hurtle and Norm Walker

To fund his determined pioneering push into high country cool-climate winemaking at Mountadam in the South Mount Lofty Ranges, David floated Wynn Winegrowers, which eventually became part of the giant publicly-listed Fosters/Treasury empire, various rape-and-pillage managers of which butchered and stripped grand companies they purchased, forcing revered winemaker/employees like Nick and David to flee and make their own business.

1960s Wynn's wine box. Check that list of major wine businesses ... one of the Yellowtail Casella boys turned the Yenda winery into an ammo factory ... photos©Philip White

 

They were, I argued, men of category, building something long-term, something really worthwhile in itself which would also eventually make good profits. These men would not pass promptly into oblivion.

This took me a few minutes to say. I invited the PM to the lecturn. On his way, he folded the speech he'd prepared and put it back in his pocket. He then delivered an off-the-cuff talk about how his government's excellent tax regime had made things like O'Leary Walker possible.

Ha! Whitey aced Honest John!

It was a good day. And after those thirteen years O'Leary Walker still goes from strength to strength, making proper money processing fruit for the same brutal companies that forced them out: a cash flow which helps them steadily continue growing, buying and establishing fine vineyards, and making their own delicious products.

The Prime Ministry, meanwhile, has resembled the dog-eat-dog nature of the Stock Exchange in those same thirteen years. The players in the subsequent Howard-Rudd-Gillard-Rudd-Abbott-Turnbull fiasco may be remembered, but only because most of what they think they achieved has already passed into the grey muck of oblivion.

To read of Mazure and David Unaipon, the first aboriginal winemaker (below), my Australian of the Year for 2015, click here. 

David O'Leary (below) addresses the dinner gathering to celebrate the 2011 opening of the new O'Leary Walker tasting rooms ... Matt Walker took these two photographs ... to see more of that grand Tony Bilson dinner, click here.

COFFIN DODGERS REUNION

Here's a man with hardly any gizzards and another with only bits of functioning brain. 

When Richard Neville died in September, I dearly wanted to get to Sydney for his funeral to catch up with people I've not seen for thirty or forty years and to bid a long sad farewell to my mate Tony Bilson, who was  virtually dead of cancer of the everything. 

That grand pioneer of modern Australian cuisine had suffered the step-by-step removal of nearly every organ south of his navel - they got up as far as one kidney. Bilson was cactus. But so was I, with a battered brain and chronic PTSD ... too crook to fly. Couldn't go to say goodbye.

Back when we were alive, Bilson posed for me at Kangarilla, doing his best Charles Bronson with a Walther P38. 

In those days, I played guitar in Paul Kelly's first band, the Debutantes, and looked like this:

Which may begin to explain my shredded brain: far too much biffo.

So it was a miraculous relief to have the resurrected KillBil hit old Addle Aid yesterday: against all odds, the dear boy's clear of the cancerous death bug, so we had a quiet tea.

What a weird old life we lead.

We were both capable of taking a quiet lie down in those crazy days. We'd get  tired. 

Note lifelong habit of keeping a check on one's pulse whilst unconscious.

 

Top and bottom photos by Dr Sundance Thompson-Bilson; Tony  and me at breakfast by Kay Hannaford; Bronson by me; me in the lane by John Peachey; Bilson in the Berowra Waters Inn days by Paul Lloyd ...  and me in recline is allegedly by James Halliday ... it emerged from my camera when I got home and had the film developed.

You take it easy folks. If I knew I was gonna last this long I woulda been a lot more careful.

Or so I'm trying to convince myself.

And to put some sperkective into this, here's theoretical particle physicist Dr Sundance Osland Thompson-Bilson with his mum, Tony's half-sister,  my friend of many happy years, LeeAnne 'Tiger' Bilson, by me:

THE GRAPE AND FRANK MARGAN

Frank and Andrew Margan in their  Margan Hunter Valley vineyards at Broke, with the Brokenback Range in the background ... Frank loved his Hunter ... photo©Chris Elfes

It wasn't them it was us! How one wild colonial gourmand helped slaughter the sweet sherry mob

by PHILIP WHITE

"Most Australians when they hear the word 'wine' think of sweet sherry. Most people still have a bit of a shudder to themselves, too. We have come a long way in a decade from the mid-1950s when the wine boom got going, but there is still, in spite of our progress, a hell of a long way to go." 

While we're talking personal beauty hints, you might be surprised that one of my secrets is the distillate of witch-hazel. After a hot shower, a splash of this seems to tighten those crinkly bruised bits that fester like wet toilet paper beneath the eyeholes.

Also, it's refreshing. And it smells good.

I never perform this daily ritual without thinking of Barbra Cole. One of the things I remember about the 'eighties was taking my new girlfriend Kay Hannaford to Sydney for Tony Bilson's outrageous wedding to Amanda, a Paul Hamlyn book editor. 

Because the Bilsons were, well, busy, Kay had arranged for us to stay in her buddy Barbra's flat beside David Marr's joint in Surry Hills. I found my first witch-hazel in the bathroom. When I asked who and where Barbra was, Kay told me I'd get on well with her boyfriend, Frank, who had "something to do with wine" and that they'd gone "up the Hunter."

Being advised by a woman like Kay that a bloke like me would "get on well" with another usually meant that together, our collective wickedness would far outweigh the sum of our individual inputs.  Kay's advice was seamless. The bloke turned out to be Frank Margan.

Frank at the sink: my notepad sketch upon re-reading The Grape And I in 2007

Although I'd only met him through various shades of claret or golden Semillon in the Hunter Valley, or hanging out with Len Evans, Frank was already an important part of my life, or an excuse for the way I lived it.

In the earliest bit of the 'seventies, two items made me vaguely aware of the possibility of writing about wine. The first was Michael Dransfield's ANZAC day poem, Wine-tasting.

The second was Frank's 1969 book, The Grape And I.

This was a very modern work. Like unabashedly, confrontingly, out there. Not only did the damn thing look modern, but it felt modern, and it brimmed with dangerously modern content, like the paragraph I quoted at the top.

Paul Hamlyn, the publisher, was famous for the seminal modernity of his work. One comadre of that age, sweet Gretel Penninger, professionally known as the very stern Madame Lash, warned me that Paul was admirably modern on the outside, but carried ancient guilt deep within.

Those were the days.

Gret was the new Mrs. Bilson's bridesmaid, just to show that everything is connected. She'd sewn the dresses of the bridal party from the finest leather: white for the bride; scarlet for her herself, the maid. These accentuated both lasses' admirable decolletage on one side, the cleavage of the bum cheeks on the other. The backs were bare but for a criss-crossing of perfectly-stitched leather thonging, between which the flesh bulged just enough. 

For the wedding gift, I presented a hand-made ten foot R. M.Williams' bull whip and a bottle of Goanna Oil.

Mrs. Bilson, a bowl of berries in kirsch and the author ... photographer? Peter Powditch?

When he got back from the Hunter to cook us a bisque in his restaurant, Frank thought these gifts pertinent, given Lash's relationship with his publisher and the new groom.

Without its dust cover, The Grape And I was radically white hardbound, clad in a plasticised form of bookbinder's linen. The illustrator, who is not credited, used that amazing new invention, the felt-tipped pen. The font is far-out sans serif, and there are no indents or line breaks separating paragraphs. In its day, this was as dramatic a leap from what went before as the jump from the gramophone to the i-Phone.

The dust cover shows a Frank not much remembered: posh, suave, french-cuffed, coiffed, immaculately suit-and-tied. He's sitting with a suite of old wines in somebody else's cellar. We remember that bit.

Even today, I don't have to get far into this work to realise what hot stuff it was.

In his opening chapter, Frank denied the "official fictions" of the day: the notion that Australia's waves of post-war immigrants changed Australia's deadly boring cuisine and drinking habits. He wrote of how each year, 25,000 young Australians returned from jaunts abroad, where they'd discovered European table habits.

"We were quite a bit pretentious and often crashing bores about our Trip," he dared to declare. "We spent our time looking for the cheap joints that had a touch of the European atmosphere and scorning the steak and eggs eaters and the tiled pubs swilling out beer. We wanted decent food and we wanted to have wine with it and that created a demand that started today's jet climb in the wine consumption charts.

"It wasn't the migrants - if you care to keep your eyes open you'll find they have switched to beer, or flagon red wine mixed with lemonade or soda. No, it wasn't them, it was us."

Frank wrote excitedly about the wine revolutionaries of the day, contrasting the age-old styles of the winemaking of the Seppelts and the Germanic nature of the Barossa's cottage life and its bakers and butchers to the ingress of stainless steel winemaking equipment and the radical cool-ferment techniques being developed by far-sighted geniuses like John Vickery at the Orange Grove winery now called Richmond Grove.

Frank wallowed in his beloved Hunter, the closest wine region to his hometown Sydney, marvelling at the stainless steel tanks and centrifuge the young Karl Stockhausen was installing to make revolutionary new white wines - clean and stable - at Ben Ean.

He lauded the red heritage left to the Hunter by that high priest of Australian red, Maurice O'Shea, and gave a loving and colourful description of helping plant the late Dr Max Lake's now legendary Cabernet vineyard, Lake's Folly.

Dr Max Lake, founder 

of Lake's Folly

"We slept in sleeping bags on the hard floor of the winery loft," he wrote. "We worked like dogs and not all the wine in the Hunter would slake our gargantuan thirsts."

I've not seen Frank since those days. Not since Barbra and him came to stay for a while with me in Esther's Cottage in Greenock, where I lived in the Barossa. If we'd repeated that performance, we would probably have destroyed each other clearing strings of laden tables. 

The last I heard from him was a message saying that unsigned copies of  The Grape And I were worth more than ones he'd autographed and that he wasn't too well. It was still a sudden shock to hear from his winemaking son Andrew that he'd died of long life in a hospital in the Hunter.

That news brought a wave of contemplation of his amazing effort, and its profound influence on the young Whitey.

Born of a poor Irish family in Sydney's south west, Frank lasted a day and a half at his first job as a Water Board clerk. He went instead to work in a pawn shop, where he learned more about the hard end of life. The worth of things. But he really wanted to play jazz trombone and become a journalist.

By the rakish age of twenty he was running the United Press International bureau in London. He came home to become news editor of the Daily Telegraph and then the Sunday Telegraph. He edited People, Australia's attempt at a pictorial like LIFE, which he bravely purged of the cheesecake girly stuff, and then Gourmet Magazine. 

Frank went into advertising where his buddy John Singleton made him creative director at his SPASM agency, where he came up with stuff like Lolly Gobble Bliss Bombs, a blistering commercial success.

For a while he ran the Australian Wine Bureau.

With his brother Don, Frank bought the DeBeyers Semillon vineyard and vintage shed in the Hunter, famously dubbed it Chateau Lysaght after the galvo  manufacturer and promptly won a special recommendation at the Royal Sydney Wine Show.

The Margan Winery today

He loved his vineyards. "I was just thrilled by it," he wrote. "Like this: four o’clock in the afternoon, not a soul around, I’d strip off all my clothes and jump on the tractor and go and yodel down the vine rows, just for no other reason than to feel the freedom of this wonderful life."

After rebuilding and running Bali's famous Hotel Tjampuan in Ubud, with his second wife, Jenny, daughter of the revered wine man Doug Lamb, Frank taught himself to cook, annually doing a six-week stint at La Rive Gauche in Nice. After opening the first continental delicatessen in the Hunter, which was too far ahead of its time, he turned it into The Cottage restaurant, where I first met him. He then opened Le Cabanon restaurant in Angel Place, Sydney, where he perfected his deadly lobster bisque.

Frank wrote six other books, from My Baby Was Blasted to A Pictorial History Of Surfing, and The Hunter Valley: Its Wines, People and History. 

This breathless progress eventually took him back to the Hunter with his partner Barbra. Until his final illness he worked at the grand Margan winery/restaurant complex established by his brilliant son Andrew.

No average wine has ever born that Margan brand.

As his family said in Frank's obituary notes, "Like all good print journalists there was a love and reverence for words and the disciplined pattern of their use. He lamented the death of journalism way before its analogue cremation ... unlike sport we don’t honour our past journalistic greats: they just slip off into anecdotes over drinks amid an implacable fading of the light of relevance as the great media band wagon moves on. It hurt him, hurt him a lot."

So my morning witch-hazel application has become more of a respectful Buddhist ritual, after the philosophy dear Frank learned to love all those well-lived years ago in Bali.

It may not be keeping me beautiful, but it's refreshing, renewing and it smells good. It still amazes me, the evocative power of aroma.

I shall never forget this hungry, thirsty, bright mate that Andrew best described at his funeral as "belligerent, obstinate, proud, compassionate, understanding and self-effacing."

Thanks eternally, dear Frank, for helping Australia's literary gourmands and gluttons come such a long way in those fast decades since the wine boom got going in the sherry-sodden 'fifties.

Don't worry about the trombone. You were a beauty.

Ka-chink! 

pages 76 and 77 of The Grape And I, by Frank Margan (Paul Hamlyn, London, New York, Sydney, Toronto, 1969)

Frank Margan (November 26, 1931 - March 5, 2016) is survived by partner Barbra; wives Lois, Jenny and Simone; children Anthony, Sally, Andrew and Mimi; eight grandchildren; sisters Shirley and Adrienne and brothers Victor and David.