WINE EXPO'S WAR WITH GLOBALISED SWILL

COULD YOU BUY A GLOBAL WINE FROM THIS MAN? UH-HUH ... NONE IN THE SHOP. ROBERTO AT WINE EXPO IN SANTA MONICA

Barraged By Forces Of Evil Food, Drink, And Arsewipes Coles Duo Sees Light Down Under
by PHILIP WHITE

In the great Harry Dean Stanton movie, Repo Man, the punk Emilio Estevez works in a supermarket whose shelves are stacked with cans labeled only “FOOD” or DRINK”. I thought that was funny in 1984.

Unless you have been trapped in the yuppie ghetto of Port Willunga, where winemakers concentrate at times like this, to perve on each other’s partners and pass Burgundy and Ribero del Duero around the Star of Greece while their own vineyards roast, you’ve probably learned a lot about the blander corners of your Coles or Woolies grogfloggery. As the holiday moneys wane, the cleanskins and bladder packs look more savoury.

Until the winelake seeps through the community kidneys, we’ll see again how oversupply leads to a sickening slump in quality. The wine industry trains its customers to accept and expect plonk of ever-diminishing provenance. Soon, what we drank at the end of the holidays becomes acceptable day-to-day. We learn what our great wine industrialists expect the rest of the world to drink.

EMILIO DUMPS GENERIC BEER IN REPO MAN

Flick for an illo to Wine Expo, Santa Monica, California: a liquor store with sassitude, customers to match, and a battle royal against “globalised wine”.

“Once you guys succeed in making all wine taste the same, what will you do for a living?” Manager Roberto demanded in last week’s newsletter. He complains of being “absolutely barraged by the forces of evil (well, severely misguided, focus group driven winemaking and marketing at least) ... It seems the consensus ... is that Americans want wines from all over the world with fanciful names and long histories as long as they all taste the same and don't have any disconcerting ‘ethnic’ character.

“So, do we just give up and roll over? NO!!!!!!”, he concludes. “We continue to champion wines with true personality, regional style (or even outright idiosyncrasies) and a distinctive point of view while reminding those in the supply chain that those wines are huge crowd favorites at OUR ‘focus groups’ where we offer true diversity instead of merely different brands of the same old things.”


Australia’s two supermarketeers - count ’em, one, two - rank communities on their spending power, and stock the shelves accordingly. The McLaren Vale Coles is in the same district as the perverse villa rash of the down-at-heel coast, for example, so its shelves are stocked to suit the battered Datsun drivers, who outnumber the 4WD Benz and Bimmer blomos who get their fromage at Blessed Cheese, their fruitaveg at the Willunga Market, and their lovers next door. So stuff like my favourite biscuits, Vita Wheats – hardly a posh gastronomic investment, but mostly free of sugar and fat – gradually work their way to the bottom shelves as their space is taken by Coles crap, and eventually they disappear.

I learned this whilst editing Wine and Spirit Buying Guide in Sydney in the early ’eighties. Australia’s leading wine magazine, it had been bought by John David, so he could corner the Australia distribution of these new things that were called boutique wineries. John and his brother and sister owned David’s Holdings and Australian Liquor Marketers, huge, hyper-efficient trucking businesses that specialised in supplying supermarkets with food and booze. The three of them turned over a billion dollars the first year I worked there. This was partly due to their invention of the virtual Black and Gold brand. The staircase outside my office was always jammed with furtive lugubrious swarthies trying to sell shiploads of unlabelled canned beans, spaghetti, soup, lavatory paper and whatnot so Davids could wrap it in their handsome black and yellow livery and take up shelf space by undercutting hard-working Australian suppliers who branded their own products and tended not to leave too many band-aids in the beans.

While I was laughing at Estevez, this was happening under my nose.

There’s a bright duo at Coles who are bravely fighting to reverse this trend in their Vintage Cellars and 1st Choice stores. True wine lovers Jeremy Stockman and Grant Ramage scour the world – and, increasingly, Australia - for inexpensive wines with personality, regional style, outright idiosyncrasies and distinction. These offer a bright contrast to the endless shelves of crap which might just as well be labelled Dan Murphy’s DRINK or Black and Gold DRINK. Go, peruse.

This is not the time to sacrifice your last cubic centimetres of functioning liver drinking supermarket plonk for Australia. If you’re feeling nationalistic, take a drive to the Barossa, Clare or the Fleurieu and fill the boot with premium stuff from your favourite honest strugglers. These guys are doing it really tough. But shop for your daily drinkers in the imports section of VC and 1stC, and join my campaign to force, as part of the planning approval process, all new supermarkets make their roofspace available for free community vegetable and herb gardens. More of us may then tend to stray into their rotten cavernous rip-off acres of FOOD, DRINK, and arsewipes.

THE CONSTANT TEMPTATION FOR AUSTRALIA'S INDUSTRIALIST WINEMAKERS IS TO ATTEMPT TO EMULATE EVERYTHING EUROPE HAS TO OFFER. SOMEBODY SHOULD TELL THEM ABOUT THE DESERT.

HILTON TIGHTWADS EMPTY THEIR GRANGE

THE AUTHOR IN GOOD CULINARY COMPANY, WITH CHEF SO HON HUANG, LEFT, AND CHEONG LIEW, RIGHT, CLEBRATING SO'S RETIREMENT AT T-CHOW LAST YEAR. ALL EYES ARE ON CHEONG NOW: WHAT''LL HE DO NEXT?

MILTON WORDLEY PHOTO

A Triumphant Exit The Great Cheong Moves On Hilton Lets Its Genius Go
by PHILIP WHITE - A version of this story first appeared in The Indepndent Weekly


While you were away, the Hilton military determinedly set about the closure of its restaurant strangely called The Grange. They had a farewell dinner for Cheong Liew, the singularly great chef they singularly failed to appreciate, respect, or support, with, well, funding. They wouldn’t even buy him a wall for his restaurant.

Many of the old hard-core trencherboard faces were at the trough that night, and a few pretenders. People who live off, not on, magazine food: stuff designed to be photographed, celebrated and discussed, but rarely eaten. The chow that feeds our booming gastroporn industry. Some of them even seem to think Cheong’s food fits that same bitter bill. Expecting an embarrassing and emotional night, I went in tidy.

I know I’ve said this before, but it deserves drumming in. Since he arrived here, a reffo, in 1969, Cheong has had a bigger effect on the lives of Australians than any politician. He changed the way we eat, with his invention-cum-liberation of our tucker. East-west fusion they called it, twenty-five years ago. Cheong, the ultimate Australian, now calls it “Australian food”. Perfect. You rarely hear the fusion word uttered now, wherever on Earth this cuisine appears and it appears all over the Earth. Most people simply think it’s food, shovel it in, and wash it down.

THE STUFF WE USED TO EAT



















We’re very lucky the Australian name has not followed the fusion, for while the awkward sprogs of this cuisine are now served all over the world, most of it is half-hearted crap, disrespectfully ignorant of its pedigree of tireless, rigorous ingenuity.

Given the weight of the occasion, and hugely keen to see what they would pour at this feast, I was impressed to see the old faithful, utterly professional floor staff proudly serving Dom. For a naive instant, I thought the budget must surely eventually extend to the even greater Krug, but that was dumb.























We sat, and yes, out came wave after wave of utterly remarkable food. Brilliant, delicious inventions made triumphantly to be adored, savoured, and digested. Healthy food, for Bacchus’ sake! The gastronomic encapsulation of thirty years of relentless invention. But as the evening progressed, the quality of the wine took a determined dive. If they had made a serious attempt to raid what’s left of the cellar, pity help the future Hilton diner. I am not well known for leaving a table littered with half-full glasses, but there they were.

One of the suits made a speech about the complete set of Grange there in the big glass case being the only one on public view: a cool quarter of a million bucks worth, lying on their backs like dead marines. We were supposed to ooh and aahhh. Cheong followed this with a humble, statesmanly delivery in which he revealed a secret otherwise known only to the two of us. He never let on that the Hilton actually leases that set of Grange from Fosters, who dutifully add the new release each year, or that the restaurant pretty well had to close, as the cabinet’s full, and times being as they are, well, the Hilton budget wouldn’t stretch to a new one, and, Jeez, you know, Fosters certainly hasn’t any spare furniture cash lying around. But Cheong didn’t spill them beans.

Instead, he concluded: “Don’t worry about the set of Grange. Philip and I drank that years ago.”

The thing about a complete set of Grange is that nobody ever drinks one. So nobody will ever know whether that set was long ago kidney-filtered by Cheong and Whitey, who simply drank it, refilled it with Jacob’s Creek, recorked it, fudged the capsules from bits and pieces scavenged at Grange recorking clinics over the years, and locked the bottles back in the cabinet. Like gastroporn food, and The Grange, this Caucasian artefact has value only as long as it is never used for its original purpose.

Anyway, we ate our exquisite meal, and suddenly, there we were, the Liews and Whitey, out the front of the Hilton. A calm and dignified exit. Queuing for cabs like everyone else, in a city devoid of a winemaker who can match Cheong’s culinary revolution. A city which now has not one serious cutting edge restaurant. Of course you can go silver service and pay ridiculous amounts for the wine to keep the linen budget covered, but there’s not much food on that top-end napery that will beat the lovely, inexpensive stuff you can find in Wah Hing or Indian Village.

The Grange name can now go back safely to the 1844 farm at MacGill, where Dr. Penfold’s fierce winemaking wife, Mary, picked her first crop of grenache, and set this whole mighty ferment fizzing. And there in Victoria Square young Simon Bryant’s brasserie absorbs that sacred gastronomic battleground while he replaces Maggie Beer with a Quixotic campaign to stop the Chinese eating dogs. Woof woof.



The Grange Restaurant & Cheong Liew’s Last Long Table

Friday 18th December 2009

The Adelaide Hilton International Hotel
Victoria Square
Adelaide
South Australia



MENU


Prawn Plum
2000 Dom Perignon

Jellied Abalone Chicken and the Sea Dances
Drunken prawns, oysters
Olive fried octopus
Calamari turban with squid ink pasta
Tuna with soy-cured egg yolk pasta
Fried soft shell crab with salted duck egg yolk
Turnip in pastries
2008 Mountadam High Eden Riesling
2007 Cape Mentelle Wallcliffe Sauvignon blanc Semillon

Shark fin pouch in game consommé
Salt-baked ocean trout, grilled vegetables with fragrant rice
2005 Chandon Vintage Rosé

Roasted Muscovy duck with sour cherries
Spice-grilled Wagyu beef
2007 Mitolo G.A.M. Shiraz

Russian praline torte
Portuguese custard tart, chocolate sauce, durian cream
Black rice and palm sugar pudding
Flavoured fruit ice, sorbet fruits, agar agar, adzuki beans
Veuve Cliquot Demi Sec NV

Vale


CHEONG JUDGING AT KRIS LLOYD'S CHEESE FEST AT THE PENFOLD'S MAGILL ESTATE RESTAURANT LATE LAST YEAR. WILL THE GRANGE NAME NOW RETURN TO THE PLACE IT BELONGS? BRENT LIEDERITZ PHOTOGRAPH

DAMAGE MANAGEMENT IN RECORD TIMES

BUSHFIRE NEAR MELBOURNE, VICTORIA, SATURDAY 7th FEBRUARY, 2009

Where There's Smoke There's Fire Call The Messenger A Liar 09 "Excellent Year ... Excellent Wine"
by PHILIP WHITE

"Elizabeth and Dudley themselves were under no illusion as to the unpleasant construction that was being put on the tragedy." - Anne Somerset, Elizabeth I


On January 28th last year, DRINKSTER began reporting the extreme weather conditions which threatened vintage right across south-eastern Australia. “Another torrid vintage hits”, was the first headline. “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”.

From that day on, I published honest, day-to-day reports and opinions of the havoc Global Warming, a freak summer, the ongoing drought, whatever, was delivering to the vignoble. As the heatwave built and bullied and smashed all records, then moved across the border to blitz Victoria, I attempted to project to the international reader just a hint of that violently confronting horror.

It’s sobering reading; so blank and frank it now seems to have been written by someone else. The shock and depression triggered by the mass death and general destruction seem to have been erased from the Australian psyche as its collective brain defragged and scandisced itself back into some sort of basic operating form. We all knew people whose crops were damaged or ruined. We all knew folks in the bushfires: many had friends and lovers who perished. I was affected so severely I could barely write about wine for months. It’s called Post-traumatic Shock Disorder. It’s a very confronting thing to realise your planet is bucking you off.

So I coughed a whole mouthful of Inkwell Shiraz into my keyboard last night when I discovered that McLaren Vale, the district I love enough to make my home, now has its very own personal weatherman: it’s my mate Dudley Brown.

Dudley, an upstate New Yorker from the same school as the Sands brothers, the bosses of the beleaguered Constellation, is a fairly recent blow-in, like me, but he’s the chairman of a body called McLaren Vale Grape Wine and Tourism, which is supposed to hold this bounteous Vale together, and ensure its image is sparkling clean. (“Try marketing anything via an acronym like MLVGWATS”, the writer’s doppleganger whispers.)

Upon his election, Dudley appointed a mate from his canasta club, Elizabeth Tasker, to be his propaganda manager and office lass while he got on hand-weeding his tiny Inkwell vineyard and worked out how to scare all the lazy courtiers clear outa the palace.

DUDLEY BROWN

Not yet famous for holding his counsel when confronted by humans who don’t measure up to his exacting demands, Dudley has had Elizabeth send a royal-ish decree to his three hundred constituents, commanding them to cease talking to people like me about things like weather. The sarcastic, the cynical, and the conspiracy theorist could call this another example of the panic rife in the skrillion management councils of the buggered Aussie wine biz, but it’s better presented as an example of ordinary hubristic blundering and normal provincial naiveté.

However, the matter deserves examination. Particularly as the whole wine business hunkers down to stare another scary summer in the eye. This vintage, South Australian records began exploding in the spring, when November, the hottest ever recorded, gave us daily maximum temperatures roughly 10 C (18F) above average, and eight consecutive days above 35C (95F), the hottest November sesh since records began in 1887. This seriously damaged the McLaren Vale grenache crop in the hotter terrains. Those in the cooler spots which flowered later, did rather well.

TYPICAL HEATWAVE-EFFECTED SHIRAZ, MCLAREN VALE, 9th FEBRUARY 2009

Senior climatologist at the Bureau of Meterology, David Jones, says each decade since the 1940s has been warmer than the previous one, and warns that this year is set to be even hotter, with temperatures likely to be between 0.5 and 1 degree above average.

"There's no doubt about global warming: the planet's been warming now for most of the last century," he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “Global warming is clearly continuing. We're in the latter stages of an El Nino event in the Pacific Ocean and what that means for Australian and global temperatures is that 2010 is likely to be another very warm year - perhaps even the warmest on record."

WILTING GRENACHE, MCLAREN VALE, 2 FEBRUARY 2009

That digested, we should get back to our friends at the MLVGWAT.

“Dear Members,” Dudley says (this Virgo admits to correcting petty errors of grammar, punctuation and spelling), “We have begun to receive media enquiries about the effect of the warm weather on the grape crop in McLaren Vale. As you well know, heat at this time of the year is not a major concern provided adequate irrigation is available.

“As most of you will well remember, we received a great deal of negative publicity during last vintage's heat wave as a result of a few poorly chosen comments made by both winemakers and growers. The effect of these comments was to attract enormous follow-on media coverage that badly affected many growers’ ability to sell their fruit. Moreover, this publicity cast an unfair aspersion on the overall quality of the vintage in McLaren Vale. For many growers in later ripening areas and with later ripening crops, 2009 was an excellent year and excellent wine was made from them. This sort of publicity results in damage to the McLaren Vale brand for all of us - growers and winemakers alike - both now and into the future.

“From hard experience, we know that the sort of stories that result from these sorts of enquiries only get used if there is something negative to report. No matter how well-intentioned members’ comments are, they will only result in unflattering publicity for you, your brand, your crop, your neighbour and the region as a whole.

“Given this and the economic uncertainty in the grape and wine industry, we are strongly requesting that all media enquiries received by all members be re-directed to McLaren Vale Grape Wine and Tourism at 8323 8999 and that no comment be made about anything, no matter how brief or flippant.

“Your cooperation in this is essential if we are to effectively provide the service that all members financially contribute to - marketing Brand McLaren Vale.

“Finally, please make a point of mentioning this request to others in your business.

“Sincerely, Dudley Brown, Chairman, McLaren Vale Grape Wine and Tourism.”

DRINKSTER sincerely thanks those who realise that the wine critic is indeed one of the "others in your business", and I'm grateful to those who've obeyed their chairman's orders well enough to immediately mention his request. Copies of his e-mail have even come in from rival regions, who can't believe the scale of the matter. I shall thankfully consider the document sighted, and carry on.

But next time there’s a bushfire, or a phylloxera scare, a planning threat to this bonnie vignoble, politicians to be introduced or dealt with, or another record-breaking example of this thing the green pessimists seem to be calling Global Warming, I’ll look forward to phoning Elizabeth to tell me whether her Dudley thinks it’s really happening.

McLaren Vale is one of the best vignobles on Earth. It deserves better PR than this.

STUNNING McLAREN VALE ON A NORMAL DAY: DOUG GOVAN'S RUDDERLESS VINEYARD BESIDE HIS FAMOUS VICTORY HOTEL - MILTON WORDLEY PHOTO

ANGOSTURA EXTRA BITTER IN BANK CRASH

THE STATION HOTEL, KUALA LUMPUR, TODAY

Cocktail Shakers Tremble Horrors Securing Stocks Tiny Trinidad Saves World
by PHILIP WHITE - A version of this appeared in The Independent Weekly

A ripple of horror recently swept the cocktail bars of Earth. The sudden disappearance of all the money had one unforseen effect: the Angostura Bitters company went bust. Sharp sommeliers and betuxed shakers everywhere suddenly struggled to secure the last stocks of an ingredient which they’d always taken for granted.

Johann Siegert, Bolivar’s surgeon-general in Angostura, on the Orinoco in Venezuela, invented this efficacious and astringent tonic in 1824. All too aware of the savagery jungle diseases

SIMON BOLIVAR ADDRESSES THE CONFERENCE OF ANGOSTURA, 1819




wrought to wounded troops, he worked desperately to find a blend of local herbs and plants that would ease the pain of nearly everything. His rum-based aromatic bitters was the result. His sons eventually took the factory to Trinidad, which was more politically stable. But, like the Australian wine business, it was entrepreneurs’ greed, and not rogue dictators that eventually brought the company to its knees.

Appropriately, your correspondent first collided with Angostura in the tropics. During a stay in the Station Hotel, Kuala Lumpur, in 1970, he revered the bamboo Lounge on the first floor, where corpulent Englishmen with linen safari suits and tobacco-stained moustaches sat in the gloom, reading six week old copies of The Times, drinking Pink Gins. This is a simple concoction to build: simply swirl a short glass with a few dashes of Angostura and tip in two shots of Plymouth gin. Some add water; if one adds an ice block it becomes a Coaster Cocktail.

The Bamboo Lounge was an astonishing room from a past era: the furniture was of course bamboo; punkah wallahs stirred the air, circulating the cigar smoke; an unwatched black and white television broadcast snow and white noise through three layers of sub-titles, and if, betwixt bouts of snoring, one engaged another in conversation, it became apparent that none of the said gentlemen had ever set foot in England.

RAILWAY STATION, KL, TODAY; IN 1970 IT WAS TRAINS BELOW; BEDS AND BAMBOO LOUNGE UPSTAIRS


Weather like we’re enduring tends to sway the thirsty ginwards, and this writer finds intense pleasure playing with cocktails based on the savoury juniper-steeped spirit. There are countless gin-based cocktails in the two true mixmaster bibles: The Savoy Cocktail Book, compiled in London in 1930 by Harry Craddock, the Savoy Hotel’s cocktailor, and Harry’s ABC of Mixing Cocktails, by Harry MacElhone, in Ciro’s Club in London in 1919. Harry went on to take over Clancey’s New York Bar at 5 rou Danou in the Opera district of Paris, eventually renaming it Harry’s New York Bar.

This tiny cathedral to the maintenance and destruction of thirst is as evocative and atmospheric as the long-gone Bamboo Bar. A battered red pair of what purport to Hemingway’s boxing gloves hang above France’s first hot dog machine; downstairs resides the battered piano at which Gershwin wrote American in Paris; the air is steep and dark with the ghosts of regulars like the Duke of Windsor, Jack Dempsey, Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott and Zelda, Dietrich, Coward, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Prevert, and other great brains like Janet Flanner, who famously wrote of Hotboy Hemingway “what stands out in my memory is the fact that his heroes, like Ernest himself, were of outsized masculinity even in small matters”.

ERNIE ENGAGES IN THE SMALL MATTER OF BOXING HIMSELF

The Bloody Mary, the Sidecar, the Blue Lagoon and the White Lady were all invented in Harry’s Bar. And one pertinent to our vicious summer: the Champagne Cocktail. This is a wine glass into which is put a sugar cube saturated in Angostura Bitters. Add five dashes of Cognac and an ice block, fill it with champagne, and squeeze some lemon zest over the top.

The forerunner to this fizzy wickedness was Harry Craddock’s Champagne Cup. In a big jug, mix a tablespoon of confectioner’s sugar, one glass of Cognac, two liqueur glasses of Curacao, one liqueur glass of maraschino, one liqueur glass of Grand Marnier with a quart of champagne. Add big ice, slices of orange and pineapple, a slice or two of cucumber peel and three or four sprigs of mint: glug glug.

Craddock’s Essence of Claret Punch is a long recipe which commences with “5 gallons of Claret; 2 ½ gallons Spirits ... ”, and goes on into a hole which best explored in the chill of winter. But, having been highly impressed by the new Lobo Adelaide Hills Apple Cider, I have discovered it perfectly suits Craddock’s Cider Cup No. 1. Into a jug, pour one liqueur glass of maraschino; one of curacao; one of cognac; three stubbies of Lobo cider; one of soda water; big ice and slices of apple, pear and orange; stir gently and serve.

Sangria is also good in summer: a bottle of red, maybe half a bottle of sauvignon blanc, a cup of brandy, a bottle of soda, half a cup of confectioner’s sugar, slices of orange, cucumber, apple, maybe fresh ginger, and big ice.

If any of these induce hiccups, MacElhone’s cure never fails: souse a slice of lime in Angostura and suck.

As if to show Barak Obama some financial perspective, the Trinidad government bailed out the bitters company. Whew.




















MODERN VERSION OF THE OLD-FASHIONED COCKTAIL - HARRY MacELHONE ORIGINALLY SATURATED A LUMP OF SUGAR WITH BITTERS, CRUSHED THAT IN A SPOONFUL OF WATER, ADDED BIG ICE AND A DOUBLE SHOT OF BOURBON, GARNISHED WITH LEMON PEEL

HIGH COURT HEADKICKS PROHO DRIES

THE AUTHOR AT THE EXETER ON A TYPICAL SATURDAY NIGHT: FAR TOO SMART FOR A VEHICLE WITH AN ENGINE

Judges Side With Publicans Shaft Of Welcome Wisdom How Much Is Not Enough?
by PHILIP WHITE - a version of this appeared in The Independent Weekly

When Nicholas Binns steered that bespoke East End drink emporium, The Exeter, he once refused a friend of mine more alcohol, for annoying other patrons with his eccentric conversation and behaviour. A hyper-intelligent gent of some years, my friend has a penchant for intriguing and unusual conversation, which he is quite capable of conducting when there are no listeners. He took his orders well, and strolled purposefully to the Crown and Anchor, just up the lane, where he drank until closing. Then he drank all night, completing a full twenty-four hour shift, before confidently re-entering The Exeter, where he ordered a malt whisky with a Coopers Stout chaser, which was promptly served to him. He had, he explained, drunk off the full head of steam which has caused the earlier, er, inconvenience. There would be no more trouble.

Publican Binns was never one for deciding how much anybody should drink. He refused to serve customers only when their behaviour irritated or concerned others, quite fairly including himself and his staff. Peace in the tills; peace in the valley. Upon his retirement, Binns was celebrated by Pat Conlon in the parliamentary grievance debate, and called “a river to his people” in a reverent piece by the great John McGrath.

I thought this line was taken from the lubricious character played by Ustinov in Spartacus, but it’s Roman in another way.

The Exeter is named after Exeter Hall in London, where the South Australian Company was set up. This hall was the home to the anti-slavery movement and housed hearty meetings of temperance activists, Protestants, and remarkable musical performances. Exeter, on the Exe River, takes its name from isca, the Roman mispronunciation and spelling of the Gaelic and Erse uisge, which means flowing water. And whisky.

EXETER HALL, THE STRAND, LONDON, 1905. THE HALL WAS DEM,OLISHED TWO YEARS LATER TO MAKE WAY FOR THE STRAND PALACE HOTEL..

In their 10 November ruling that publicans have no general duty of care to protect patrons from the consequences of drunkenness, High Court justices French, Gummow, Hayne, Heydon and Crennan have struck a Christlike blow at generations of interferist wowsers who struggle to control humankind’s eternal propensity to self-medicate. Our drug policy is written by drug companies and people who don’t take drugs; our liquor laws are written by boozemongers and wowsers. No humans.

“Expressions like 'intoxication', 'inebriation' and 'drunkenness' are difficult to both define and to apply”, asserted justices Gummow, Heydon and Crennan. “The fact that legislation compels publicans not to serve customers who are apparently drunk does not make the introduction of a civil duty of care defined by reference to those expressions any more workable or attractive ... It is difficult for an observer to assess whether a drinker has reached the point denoted by those expressions. Some people do so faster than others. Some show the signs of intoxication earlier than others. In some the signs of intoxication are not readily apparent. With some there is the risk of confusing excitement, liveliness and high spirits with inebriation. With others, silence conceals an almost complete incapacity to speak or move.”

This is some of the most exquisite sense I have heard from above for a long, long time. The ruling is a beautifully-written analysis of a terrible event, and a sparse, crisp piece of logic it is. Look it up.

Of course the inebriated should take some responsibility for their state. My friend in The Ex realised this, and, having been confronted by a good publican, dealt with it in his own way. He broke no law.

SOBRIETY TEST FOR EXETER DRINKERS: IF YOU SEE TWO PAIRS OF LEGS SITTING ON THIS FENCE, YOU'VE HAD ENOUGH

Being a thirsty type who found it impossible to drive slowly, I removed my driver’s license from myself twenty years ago. Just sat there and watched it expire, before anything terrible happened, and somebody else had to take it away from me. This has made life difficult, and could be a cop out, as I cast the responsibility upon others. But other motorists should be relieved that I have become an expert at public transport systems, hyper-aware of how many empty cars travel in every direction at almost any time of the day or night.

Which is not to say I can wash my hands of transport accidents. I was recently hit by an unmanned car parked outside a pub. I was on foot. It was stationary. Having expertly rolled off its bonnet and presented myself at the bar for a very strong drink, I was refused by a polite young fellow who suggested I might like to try a glass of water, which he presented.

After a conciliatory pint on the veranda, I digested the responsibility for my prang, and withdrew from society.

I suspect the justices of our High Court are reasonably appreciative of the notion that publicans should be rivers to their people. That is the nature of public houses. Which our Lord understood when they said of him “Behold a man gluttonous, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners.”

http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/HCA/2009/47.html

CLASSIC SOUTH AUSTRALIAN CAR OUTSIDE A CLASSIC SOUTH AUSTRALIAN PUB. GOD DRIVES A VAL. THE DEVILS DRINK IN THE EX.

JIM INGOLDBY, JEAN PAXTON DO A RUNNER

JEAN PAXTON IN HARRY WHO AT HER 100th BIRTHDAY PARTY, AT WHICH SHE ARRIVED BY BLACK HELICOPTER TO ANNOUNCE "I'VE TRAVELLED HERE IN ONE OF THOSE SELF-FLYING CRAFT". JEAN IS THE ONLY WOMAN EVER TO ASK FOR PHILIP WHITE'S HAND IN MARRIAGE! photo KATE ELMES, The Independent Weekly





Mighty Wine Characters Die
Missing Mates At Christmas
Much Else Has Gone Forever
by PHILIP WHITE - a version of this appeared in The INDEPENDENT WEEKLY.


“Do you know anything about finance?” Jim Ingoldby glowered.

“No,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “Now we can talk.”

I’d known Jim for twenty-five years. But this was a different day: I was suddenly there in his home as his fair daughter Jane’s partner. His wry opener was an indicator of his intention to hang on to the family coffers as much as his disbelief at what was happening to the wine industry.

Jim died of long life a few months back, one of the last of the great post-war winemakers. He had stacked many a gift beneath the Christmas trees, allegorical or real, of his friends, family and employees through his amazingly creative life, and as I contemplate whether indeed to bother with a baubled fir on the occasion of Jesus’ 2009th birthday, I know Jim would ridicule my sentiment, but love playing with the wires and lights.

JIM INGOLDBY

Baubles are scant in the wine business firs this year. But if you could grant me just the one, another bottle of scotch with Jim would do nicely. We’d reflect on the staggering hubris of a business that had absolutely everything going for it fifteen years ago. I would suggest, as I do, that if it were the wool business, or the Australian Wheat Board, that had greedily overgrown itself by at least a third, and was now rotting in its own havoc and destruction, there’d be a Royal Commission into who was to blame. They’d be stood up, cross-examined, and locked in the stocks.

I’d recall asking Ian Sutton, Chief Executive of the Winemakers’ Federation of Australia, Wine Australia Pty. Ltd., Australian Wine Foundation and the Australian Wine and Brandy Producers' Association, which bits of the wine industry he’d consulted about his determined putsch to use $40 or 50 million of the taxpayers’ money to build the National Wine Centre in the Botanic Gardens. Sutton snarled "My job's not to consult the wine industry -- my job is to represent the wine industry". Great.


NATIONAL WINE CENTRE: AN UNFINISHED GRANDSTAND WITH ITS BACK TO THE PEOPLE? ADELAIDE UNIVERSITY NOW RENTS THIS FOR $1 A WEEK ...

That ugly pile in the Gardens is the perfect allegory for the way the whole business has gone crook. Those who put it there should be drawn to account, if not drawn and quartered. They should never be let near the levers of wine industry power, ever again. But still they hover. “This tax-payer-funded Xanadu will have little purpose beyond housing the bureaucrats who will be responsible for the next taxpayer-funded Vine-pull Scheme,” I wrote at the time. Touché?

I would recall with Jim his early days at McLaren Flat, where at Rycroft, in the seventies, he radically marketed McLaren Vale wines in bottles labelled according to the vineyards and growers whose wine glowered within – something that is finally, sensibly becoming vogue. I would recall his early adoption of the screw cap, and the ingenious machine he built to apply them. I would revel in his exquisite watercolours: always a new’un on the easel at the end of his bed. And we would roar with derisive laughter and rage at the squirming idiots who, until just a year and a half ago, were urging growers to plant more chardonnay, lay more irrigation pipes, and guarantee an endless supply of fruit at prices so low whole communities would inevitably collapse, along with the river that nurtured them.

If you could squeeze another gift beneath my tree, it should be one more bottle of shiraz with the amazing Jean Paxton, who also left us this year, at the grand old knock of 102. Jean, Mum of David, had watched their family business march bravely out of almond-growing and into viticulture. She saw her son move from an aggressive developer of inspired, but industrial vineyards, to become one of the first converts to biodynamic principles and sustainable natural practices, and eventually marry Ang, formally entwining “Them Paxtons” with the vinous blood of the great Tolley and Penfold families.

When she was a hundred, Jean proposed marriage to me: the only lass to ever do so. She mischievously joked that David would be annoyed at me “getting all the money”, and reassured me “ - but don’t worry – you wouldn’t have to put up with me for long.”

At 101 years, this mighty woman triggered a frisson of panic when she was found face down on the floor of her unit, looking all the world like she’d had a big stroke. There were ambulances, and drips and whatnot, and the usual jittery concerns. But when her family arrived at casualty, a good nurse relieved their fears. It wasn’t so bad. They’d just checked her blood alcohol: 0.13. Jean had been enjoying a bottle or two of the sublime Paxton Jean Shiraz, the pinnacle of her son’s endeavour, which had been named after her. She couldn’t understand the fuss.

I could go on with my festive cheer. But about forty per cent of the wine business won’t. It’s finished.

CHARDONNAY MONGERS' MEETING

SIR ARTHUR STREETON: 'FIR'ES ON' (LAPSTONE TUNNEL) 1891 - AUSTRALIA'S MOST AROMATIC PAINTING? CLICK ON IMAGE TO READ STREETON'S LETTER TO FRED McCUBBIN











The Look Of Smell
Sexy Sexton Stuffs
The Desert Weed

by PHILIP WHITE - A VERSION OF THIS APPEARED IN THE INDEPENDENT WEEKLY

They say the difference between drunks and alcoholics is alcoholics go to meetings. The chardonnay addicts have obviously had a meeting. But bugger their meeting: here I sit drinking chardonnay, gazing at an Arthur Streeton painting.

So what’s chardonnay got to do with Sir Arthur Streeton? Well, it has to do with the look of smell.

I can tell the chardonnay addicts – and I mean those addicted to growing and making the stuff - have had a meeting because everywhere I hear the breathless news that chardonnay is coming back. My e-mail is full of this naive hope. I find this advice rather telling, if not threatening. I even heard it, for Bacchus’ sake, at the McLaren Vale wine show. (McLaren Vale grows about 6000 tonnes of ordinary chardonnay a year, which is a drop in the total 444,000 tonnes Australian bucket.)

I’ve heard it all before. Len Evans, that old rogue who ran the wine show system for thirty years, preached incessantly that ‘chardonnay will become the vanilla of the Australian wine industry’. They took this variety from the snow and chalk of Champagne and Burgundy and planted it all over the desert and prayed that it would turn into vanilla. They told us it HAD turned into vanilla. And then they put caramelised oak chips and whatnot into it so it tasted more like vanilla. But it’s a thirsty weed in our desert: never even getting vaguely close to vanilla essence; much less the true and perfect vanilla bean.

THE LATE LEONARD P EVANS: LA-LA IN VANILLALAND

Industry leaders Dick Smart, Adrian Read and Ian Kidd even planted chardonnay at Bourke. Or got some other poor bugger to plant it, as a millennium PR stunt: the first wine on Earth to be picked in the new millennium. Read: ‘Kidding’, Smartypants.

One of the reasons our wine business is on the nose is that all the punters in the world will not, cannot, drink all the terrible chardonnay that Australia grows. If, like with albarino, they suddenly discovered it was really savignin or traminer or something they’d been passing off in ignorance, and they could rename it and relaunch it, even then it wouldn’t be drunk. Not for a profit.

There are about ten true estates in Australia making good chardonnay. Cullen, Lubiana, Leeuwin, Ashton Hills, Marchand and Burch, Tarrawarra, Romney Park, Montalto, Mountadam, Tallarook ... all reliable chardonnay makers.


Fosters and Constellation can do it well with bought fruit, but they make lakes of the worst stuff, too. And as the chardonnay gets worse, fatter or thinner, so does the dodgy intellect of those who persist with it at the swill end of the market.

Who do they think we are?

Which leads me to the 24 year old Arthur Streeton, in the Blue Mountains in 1891, painting the colour of the air above the Lapstone Tunnel, an excavation the navvies were making for the new trainline. There was an explosion, and a man lost his life. So Streeton painted the faintest wisp of blue smoke over his perfectly-measured air, there in the dry eucalypt bush with the sweat and the horses and the broken hearts and stone and gunpowder. This could be Australia’s most aromatic painting.

I am tasting five successive vintages of Giant Steps Yarra Valley Sexton Vineyard Chardonnay, made by that Merlin, Steve Flamsteed, and Dave McIntosh. These are distinctive and beautiful wines to sniff, because they do not resemble vanilla. They have a range of fruity esters that spread from the smell of Kingston Black cider apples, through stewed to fresh crunchy pear, maybe quince paste, then lemon juice and ginger, to the very edge of oxalis, like the whiff of rhubarb pie, or the taste of a soursob stalk, and on almost to methoxypyrazine, the smell of a tomato leaf, or sauvignon blanc. They are lean, naturally acidic sentinels of great longevity, almost carved from stone. And each one, to varying degrees, also has the acrid, nostril-twitching aroma of Arthur Streeton’s ‘Fire’s On’, (Lapstone Tunnel) 1891, which you can disappear into at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

These wines are grown without poison sprays, and made with the yeasts of the air. They need no shovelled acid; only a drinker patient enough to realise their beauty is not always overt, like the old peach syrup/Dolly Parton chardonnays of Rosemount’s Roxburgh, a vineyard which has just been bought by BHP-Billiton, who can smell coal.

The Giant Steps chardonnays do have a little of the chubby fatty acids that often mark the best Burgundian versions, but these simply make these staunch wines more wholesome. The 2008 version has about as much butter as the thinnest layer of flake pastry, as if all the abovementioned fruits were on a lightly-cooked tart.

Despite them regularly winning major shiny at the Royal Melbourne, these pristine, honest wines, from an honest, lovingly-tended garden, are not the sort of chardonnays those refinery managers decided to persist with at their meeting. I’ve already drunk glumly to that.

FOOTNOTE: After publishing this, the author discovered there had indeed been a meeting to stir the troops to get chardonnay back on the shelves in place of the dreaded Kiwi savvy-B. Fosters called the meeting. The wine show judges promptly obeyed!