PIZZINI FAMILY DOES IT COOL ON KING

Joel, Alfredo and Carla Pizzini in the cooking school kitchen at their Pizzini Wines cellar in the King Valley, in the northern side of the Victorian Alps ... photo Philip White

A Few Quiet Ones On King River
Smokes Give Ground To Drinks 
Foodnwine Family And Friends
by PHILIP WHITE

Like the idea of a vineyard with a trout stream ripping across its foot? King River’s the go.  She runs fast north down the Victorian Alps toward the Murray, threading through country that was devoted to tobacco when first I visited as a kid.  It was mainly Italians growing the stuff. As the noted weed fell from grace these tough, proud families stepped sideways into wine production, but the farms still sport the tall galvo sheds built to hang and dry the tobacco leaves.  They remind me of the oast-houses of the English countryside, especially parked amongst the verdant oak-and-birch laced sward of these lush flats. But that most Australian of building materials, rusting galvo, snaps the viewer back to Aussie, and as you raise your glass your eyes rise too, and you’re gazing through your prosecco to the granite slopes beyond and you’re lost in the blue eucalypt haze and England evaporates and anyway it’s Freddy  Pizzini you’re drinking with and he’s very obviously Italian.

Alfredo and Katrina Pizzini run the most civilised wine and food business at Whitfield.  Their stylish newsletter, Tre Amori, promotes their three loves: wine, food, family and friends, which you immediately realise is actually four until you tune back in to listen to Fred and it becomes obvious that to this mob, wine and food are one and the same.  Right beside the cellar sales tasting bench, for example, there’s a broad open doorway that leads to a big suave stainless kitchen.  That’s where Katrina and Carla Pizzini run the cooking schools.

The Pizzini Prosecco 2012 is the most delicate yet authoritative introduction to the Pizzini adventure.  It’s made from a grape called Glera, and it’s bone dry and only eleven per cent alcohol.  It’s tangy sherbert joys aside, I first suspected its gentle parsnip and radish flavours must have been unique to this scarce variety, but there they were again in the Pinot grigio 2012 and the White Roman 2012.

“White Roman’s a brand,” Fred says.  “The 2011 was an orvieto style made from Trebbiano, Prosecco, Chardonnay and Pinot grigio.  This year we made it to suit Thai and south-east Asian dishes so we blended Riesling, Gewurztraminer and Pinot grigio.” As well as those distinctive savoury tangs of the radix family, it showed another indicator of the Pizzini terroir: the acrid granitic whiff of the sediment of that broad valley floor.

We worked on, through a brilliant yet delicate Riesling (11.5% alcohol), a chalk-and-butter Chardonnay that had a third of its make done in old oak but still seemed more Chablis in style than full-blown Burgundy (12.5%), and a Sauvignon blanc of 11.5% alcohol that had no hint of Kiwi cat piss or battery acid but instead seemed to reek of plantain and banana leaf and had me yearning for vongole pasta.

The plantain reappeared in the stunning Arneis 2012, an elegant thing of the finest delight.  I remarked that this finesse and understatement of alcohol and force was an uncommon grace amongst today’s droll dunderheaded industrial grapeyards.

“We never need to add much acid here,” Fred said.  “We tweak it a little bit sometimes.  If we get really hot conditions we have no choice.  But on the other hand we get maturity here at 10 and 10.5 Beaume.”  One degree Beaume, fermented dry, will generally produce one per cent of alcohol in the finished wine.

Even the Verduzzo was elegant, in spite of this rather agricultural variety’s tendency to push honey flavours and oily textures.  “Yeah, it’s a maintenance-free variety,” Fred said, “it’s got quite thick skins.  It makes great dessert wine, but we like this dry style too.”

Like? Like?  Your little Bianco was in gastroperve heaven at that bench.

As we switched into rosso mode, I mentioned the first Pizzini wine that lured me many years ago, the 1998 Sangiovese, and an envoy was dispatched to a storage shed somewhere to quickly reappear  rather dustily cobwebbed but bearing a bottle of that very wine.  It still had fresh berries amongst its bitter chocolate, blood orange and leather. By Bacchus and Pan it was a treat!

“This was our first Sangiovese clone, the Grosso, and it was a difficult one to work,” Fred said.  “But we worked hard in the vineyard and kept the vines balanced to go for lower yields and look at that: it worked ... that was only our third vintage off those vines ... we’re not alkaline here in our soils.  We’re acidic, so we’re gonna get these flavours of the ground in our wines ... keep them long enough and you’re gonna get good drinks.”

He popped his Sangiovese 2002, by which vintage they’d planted the superior Brunello clone as well.  It was an explosion of fatty chocolate acids and sweet Marello and bitter Maraschino cherries with a tantalising, languorous taper of a tail that seemed to flick a lemony zabaglione about my sensories.

By 2011 they’d established four clones of Sangiovese on four distinct geologies.  These are fermented separately and then blended.  “They’re four very different wines,” Fred explained, “but we blend to get this bold style that’s really acid-driven and assertive, but you know, we don’t want any heartburn, so we pull it back a bit and get this complex wine that’s fruitsweet, yet there’s no sugar.  It’s bone dry.”

And a complex, closed in, hammered compaction of thing it is: a brilliant and lovely drink which will eventually blow the socks off that glorious 98. As will the 2008 Rubacuori (“Stealer of Hearts”) Sangiovese, which is their super-premium $110 jobby. One small corner of a hillside vineyard devoted to the Brunello clone makes this exquisity.

“We really wanted to give Sangiovese the importance it deserved,” Fred murmured into his glass.  “So we think we finally found this spot in all our vineyards, this one corner on the hill, less than one acre, and it’s sunny and warm there.  Sangiovese likes some warmth.  We’re very proud of this wine.”

And so they should be. As far as the blood of San Jove goes, it’s bloody lovely. Those bittersweet cherries are there in abundance, and given the corks chosen are $1.80 a pop, should eventually bloom even brighter and more alluringly than the 98.

To finish, we wandered into that vague and mystical world of Nebbiolo: “the mist”.

“I won’t be opening my share of this for four years,” Fred sighed as he poured the current 2009 model.  It seemed minty and lollyshopped – nothing like Nebbiolo.  “You just gotta wait,” he said, pouring his 2002 alongside his 09.  “This is proper Nebbiolo. I took it to a Nebbiolo producers’ conference in Italy, where it poured blind among all the others and they said ‘THIS is Nebbiolo’!”

Damn right it is.  All those pickled walnuts and red berries; the orange oil; the creamy blanched almonds; the Campari bitters, the chinotto and the Fernet Branco welling together as mysterious as the mist … but even that was no mystery at all alongside the last glass of the day: the incomparable  Pizzini Coronamento Nebbiolo 2005.

This moody mess of dried sage, wormwood, juniper and currants was like a Fellini movie. Licorice, saffron, dirt, nuts, currants … you name it, it’s there.  Just proving that to this beautiful warm gutsy Pizzini family, food and wine are indeed only one thing.

Which is not to say you can’t do it in a million different ways.  Go visit. 


two more Victorian beauties found on the track:

Mount Langi Ghiran Auxerrois 2006
$20 (cellar door); 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 93 points
This rare old variety was probably brought into Australia by the Swiss vignerons who settled Geelong.  It smells a little like Sauvignon blanc from a warm year: it’s dry grass, not cut lawn.  That’s one thing.  It’s another thing completely when you get it in your mouth: after that illusory introduction, it’s surprisingly full, almost to the point of fulsome as in lugubrious, like oily, like slimy Kath Quealy Pinot gris.  But while it dangles you out there in the expectation that soon you’ll be lowered into it to be gone forever, it gives blessed relief in a slender, neatly tapering acid finish with a savoury bitter melon tannic tweak.   So it’s a fair dinkum adventure: a gastronomic ghost train with a very happy ending. I want it with a warm cannelloni bean and pork belly stew. Like now.

Best’s Great Western Dolcetto 2011
$22 (cellar door); 11.5% alcohol; screw cap; 88 points
Best’s have had this Piedmontese variety since the late 1800s.  It’s a cute frivolity; a light-hearted party red that you could serve from the ice bucket. In other words the sort of red our thick-headed wine grocers will probably never understand, which is why you’ll have to avoid them and get it direct. Dolce is sweet, the etto is diminutive, so while it means sweet littlie, it’s sweet hearted not sugary.  It is in fact dry and tannic in a rockabilly more than hard rock manner: more slap bass and polka dots than megametal.  The fruit is snappy and nutty in a hazelnut sort of way, with bright red cherry jumping about.  It’s the perfect happy red for summer, and I can’t help thinking it would make one king-hell sangria. Should be more of it!

COUPLA TASTINGS TO BE WRITTEN

ZOE LAUGHLIN: THE FLAVOURS OF METALS

Ironstone from the Ironheart Shiraz vineyards at Yangarra Estate photo Philip White

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The brilliant and pointy Zoe Laughlin's been investigating people's preferences in the wide flavour range of metals ... her well-ground, finely-honed curiosity drives straight  through the doors into the DRINKSTER  Heretics' Hall Aflame!  We got a new one on the team!  To hear Zoe's recent Radio New Zealand discussion of this disarming work and her discoveries about the importance of the flavours of cutlery, CLICK HERE.  Forget the starched chefwits and all that shiny gastroporn.  This is the next frontier: way down under the ground. And just so youse all know, the correct pronunciation is cuttle-ree.  Cutler-ee is affectation.

Artist and maker Zoe Laughlin is a co-founder/director of the Institute of Making and the Materials Library project at University College in London. She holds an MA from Central Saint Martin's College of Art and Design and obtained a PhD in Materials within the Division of Engineering, King's College London. Working at the interface of the science, art, craft and design of materials, her work ranges from formal experiments with matter, to materials consultancy and large-scale public exhibitions and events with partners including Tate Modern, the Hayward Gallery, the V&A and the Wellcome Collection. Her particular areas of interest are currently The Sound of Materials, The Taste of Materials and The Performativity of Matter, with outputs ranging from theatrical demonstration lectures to the making of instruments and features on both radio and television.  www.twitter.com/zoelaughlin 

HEATH CULLEN AT LAZY BALLERINA

Heath Cullen played two perfect sets at Lazy Ballerina this afternoon, singing mainly about birds. In fact, it was about one hundred and ten per cent perfect. Heath's about to release his second CD, which he's just recorded with Marc Ribot, Jim Keltner, and Larry “The Mole” Taylor.  You can't get much cooler than that ... photos Philip White

RAY BECKWITH INTERVIEW VIDEO LINK

We've cut my my last interview with Ray Beckwith from 120 minutes to thirty.  To view it, click here ... photo and video by Milton Wordley.

THE WORSHIP OF BACCHUS WON'T CEASE

The Exeter photographed by Ned Meldrum in Counter Meal - recipes and stories from great Australian pubs, Funtastic 2005

Wowser Prohos Come And Go
Waves Of Dries Ebb And Flow
But The Exeter Still Runs Pure 
by PHILIP WHITE

So. The proho dries are on a rise.  Don’t panic.  They come and go.  Dry waves wear out through public boredom and the need to keep the wheels of the economy well greased.  In more ways than one, the Exeter is the ideal location for the contemplation of wowserism.  Lean your bows against her rubbing strakes, get the ebullient landlord Kevin Gregg to set one or two up for one, and ponder.

Blue-green biker: the author arrives at the Ex to contemplate abstinence.

Even the name Exeter has form. The ancient Gaelic word for water is uisge. Whisky is a corruption of usque-baugh, the water of life.  The Old Welsh Celtic for current of water is wysg; water is gwy or wy.  The Welsh take a wys, not a piss. And they tend to get, shall we say, on it.  They have a river Wysg, commonly mispronounced by the English as Usk.  As also happened with a river in Devonshire, this name was mispronounced by the Romans, who called both rivers Isca.  The Devonshire stream gradually morphed into the Exe.  It quite naturally flowed through the place which became Exeter. 

Former Exeter publican, Nicholas Binns, with the late Gabriella Bertocchi, photographed by Victoria Straub in 1996

Although his quote came from the lugubrious Peter Ustinov character in Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, my esteemed colleague John McGrath glanced nicely through the edge of this history when he called a previous Exeter publican, Nicholas Binns, on the occasion of his retirement, “a river to his people.” 
 
The Earls of Exeter traditionally lived in Cecil House, opposite the Savoy Hotel on the Strand.  It was on this site that the mighty Exeter Hall was raised and opened in 1831.  This quickly became a meeting-place for non-conformist protestants, the Anti-Slavery Lobby, the opponents of the Corn Laws, the suffragettes, and, well, the YMCA. As its main auditorium  sat 4000, it was also a favourite concert hall for the likes of the revolutionary French composer, Hector Berlioz.

 It was in these rooms that the fathers of this British colony held a meeting at which it was first decided to establish the South Australian Company. Flushed with this proud recent history, our forebears named a suburb and two pubs after it.

As wowser uprisings follow waves of over-indulgence like tides, Exeter Hall also became a favourite hangout for the proho dries of the day.  Enter one George Cruikshank (left), a second-generation political satirist, cartoonist, illustrator and drunk.  The nineteen-year-old Cruikshank had watched his father Isaac perish in a coma after downing a whole bottle of spirits in a drinking competition in 1811, but seemed to take more competitive challenge from this than purposeful consideration of its folly.  He spent the years between this and his 55th swinging in constant exacerbation between merry drunkenness and extreme and audacious creativity. His biographer, Robert Upstone was to call Cruikshank’s 1819 toon of the Prince Regent (later George IV) farting in the parliament’s face “one of the most deliberately offensive and provocative images ever produced.”  Even after the Crown paid him £100 to desist, our man was quick to be back at his feverish assault.

Between public bouts of carousal and long absences from society and sobriety -- “surely no man drank with more fervour and enjoyment, nor carried his liquor so kindly, so merrily” wrote a contemporary -- Cruikshank produced some 10,000 illustrations, etchings, paintings and designs.  He illustrated two books for Charles Dickens -- Sketches by Boz and Oliver Twist – and his annual Comic Almanac always sold out.

But at the age of 55, Cruikshank produced The Bottle, a series of eight prints portraying the collapse, through their abuse of alcohol, of a fine lower-middle-class family.  This sold over 100,000 copies in a few weeks. It was reproduced on tea sets and dining plates.  He followed this up with The Drunkard’s Children the next year.  These highly profitable enterprises led to Cruikshank morphing rather quickly, through a new-found moderation in his attitude to the booze, to outright evangelical wowserism.

“An admired, theatrical, highly-effective speaker” writes Upstone, Cruikshank “lectured  tirelessly on temperance … a mass movement … a following of around three million being claimed out of a total population of around 20 million ... The temperance movement, however, were a generally compassionate group, not usually targeting drinkers for anger but instead the distillers and politicians who benefited from the poor’s weakness. ”
 

William Hogarth, Gin Lane, engraving 35.7 x 30.5cm., London 1751

Cruikshank himself was becoming increasingly perturbed at the links he saw between alcohol and crime.  “There are a number of besettling sins connected with drinking,” he preached, “such as robberies, brutal assaults, garottings, house-breakings, suicide and murder … if we could do away with intoxicating liquors altogether, we might wheel out that dreadful instrument the gibbet … and make a bonfire of it.”

To illustrate his frustration, Cruikshank had a big idea in 1859.  He envisaged The Worship of Bacchus, a a terrifying epic work in oils, encapsulating the decay of Britain in the mood of Hogarth’s Gin Lane with respect to Pieter Breughel the Elder’s surreal The Triumph of Death. Powerpoint and the movies were still a long way off, but Cruikshank dreamed, if you like, of a huge still version of Mickey Rourke doing Charles Bukowski with a cast of thousands in Barfly, delivered, with associated promotional billboards and brochures, live to a hall near you.

The Triumph Of Death - Pieter Bruegel The Elder (c.1525-69), oil on panel

Cruikshank began pencil sketching and watercolouring immediately, but his impatience led to him working harder on the big oil than on the initial watercolour and consequent prints, which would pay his income while he toiled away at the big picture.  This bungling with the schedule caused a delay in the making of the prints, so there were no sales when they were most needed, and anyway, public interest was waning. 

“I have not the vanity to call it a picture,” he told a temperance gathering of the finished work in 1862, “it being merely the mapping out of certain ideas for an especial purpose, and I painted it with a view that a lecturer might use it as so many diagrams … In the centre of this mass is a madman … it may indeed be said that madness prevails over the whole of this mass of worshippers; for excitement from strong drink and drunkenness is in fact temporary insanity.”

When he launched The Worship of Bacchus for public view in August of that year, nobody came.

Exeter Hall, The Strand, 1905. It was demolished in 1907 to make way for the Strand Palace Hotel, which survives to this day.

Mortified, Cruikshank moved the work to Exeter Hall.  As if once again forecasting the movies, it was propped up on the stage.  Even at a monstrous 236 x 406 cm. the work would probably have looked small in that huge empty auditorium:.  However, it turned out that our man’s giant dry vision itself had shrunk not just in the social change from Georgian to Victorian taste, but, as critic Francis Turner Palgrave noted “his high tragic power has been exercised mainly against those abuses by which the poor and the helpless suffer. His sympathies are clearly those of a man of the people for the people; and this excludes drawing room popularity.”

For drawing room, read the private parlours, sitting rooms and counting-houses of the distillers, brewers, lawyers and politicians on the make. There was far too much money at stake, and the public remained very thirsty.

The Worship of Bacchus, etching after the oil painting (236 x 406 cm) by George Cruikshank, London, 1860-2 ... click image for closer look 

After a century hidden away, The Worship of Bacchus was restored and exhibited by the Tate Gallery in 2001, where it resides to this day, and, given the current form of the ascendant wowser wave, initially attracted much more supportive fame than it ever did in the artist’s time.

These waves, however, really do come and go.  Hannah at the Tate tells me that unfortunately, the work is back in the vaults, and Cruikshank’s bio is no longer in the bookshop there, so you’ll just have to trust my account or make the hits I suggest below.

Cruikshank went to his grave leaving a document a lot more pertinent to the nature of the colleagues moored beside you there at the bar.  Buoyed, he professed, by his obsession with fitness and teetotalism, he lived into his 86th year. His will looked well after his widow, Eliza, but provided even more proficiently for a woman called Adelaide Archibald.  This secret mistress lived just around the corner from Cruikshank’s marital home.  Of all the contents of Adelaide’s house, Cruikshank bequeathed to her “all such furniture books wines and household effects belonging to me” adding wry irony to what could have been the perfect acronym for the lass: AA.

For household effects read their ten children, for whom Cruikshank had stacked up capital in trust.

Adelaide’s relationship with her Exeter rarely gets more simple than this.  While the proho dries, the wowsers, and the busybody interferists will always come and go, order a double, and draw it so slowly you can fully digest the fact that there are always more old drunks than old doctors.  And many, indeed, are both.



The Worship of Bacchus is so big and intricate that no normal browser can handle it in any detail.  I have selected the best links to it here:

The Guardian’s Steve Bell takes us to visit The Worship of Bacchus in the vaults of the Tate Gallery.

Fine detail of Bacchus from the British Journal of Psychiatry
 
Medium and very high resolution images of the etching which was printed for general sale.

One of my all-time favourite prohos is the American evangelist Billy Sunday, whom I was taught to revere without much idea of what he was like. Turns out he was like this (official clip). Although he enjoyed the support of the Almighty, even Billy lost his battle gainst the mighty thirst of America.  You can also see him preaching on prohibition on this scratchy old doco.

The top half of Adelaide's premier thirst emporium, The Exeter Hotel, 246 Rundle Street, East End, drawn by Millie The Kid (Amelia Dickins) at 17 years of age in 1987. And oh yes, just in case you're wondering, that's my grandfather, Pastor Teddy Seymour, below. Having married his daughter, my father, Pastor Jimmy White, followed in Teddy's street-preaching footsteps, being active in the Women's Christian Temperance Union and the Lord's Day Observance Society as well as being close buddies to the likes of Rev. Ian Paisley, Pastor Wally Betts, Dr. Bob Jones Jr., and Dr. Carl McIntyre.  After that dry ebb, I'm a Mercurial wave of the opposite, thanks to Bacchus and Pan.

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GOAT'S CHEESE AND CHENIN BLANC

Dowie Doole Chenin blanc and exquisite bright acid goatsmilk cheeses from Alison Paxton at Kangarilla Creamery ... anticlockwise from top: Soft Goat, Ash Goat, Funky Goat and what may become Billygoat Milk ... photos by Philip White

Top Night With The Neighbours 
Dowie Doole Chenin Blanc Hits 
High Notes At Kangarilla Dairy  
by PHILIP WHITE 

Sometimes you get lucky.

I just happen to live about halfway between Alison Paxton’s new Kangarilla Creamery cheese dairy and the seventy year old Tintookie Chenin blanc vineyard of Lulu Lunn and Drew Dowie.  Actually, I’m a bit closer to Alison’s – on a still night she says she can hear me laughing. Being over the ridge in the sandy vale of Blewett Springs, Drew and Lulu are spared such sonic intrusion.

Alison was a horse nut until one deposited her rather too abruptly, so she began to make cheese, full-time.  Instead of asking why or how, concentrate instead on the fact that this wasn’t simply a crossover from equine to bovine interests, but this determined lass extended her curiosity as far as things caprine.

So smitten is she with that Pan-like aroma of goat, she goes to the extent of buying her goat’s milk warm from the udder, a little detail beyond the capacity of most cheesers. 

“It’s important that it’s warm and fresh and not cold and sanitized,” she says. “I grew up on a dairy farm at Yundi, at the top of Willunga Hill, and I loved the cow shed.  Mum used to get goat milk from a local farmer for allergy reasons. I reckon I started to think about cheese when I was in kindy. As I grew up I’d make a few cheeses and take them to dinner with friends and then I married into a wine family and the whole wine and cheese thing really took off. I just love the production process, turning that raw product into everything you can turn it into.  I eat it and dream about it and now I make it full-time.”

At the risk of upsetting Lulu (who makes her own goat cheese and works in that Central Market Holy of Holies, Smelly Cheese) and indeed the extra risk of irritating Ben Paxton, Alison’s husband, (who runs the cellar sales business at the Paxton winery), I had long planned a quiet liason of Drew and Lulu’s Chenin blanc with Alison’s goat cheese. 

Kangarilla Creamery proprietor and cheesemaker, Alison Paxton, right, with shotgun rider Annika Berlingieri, wrangler of the wood oven and proprietor at Settlement Wines, where Alison's works sometimes deck the weekend pizzas.

A good excuse for this was a visit by that venerable Bacchus of Australian cheese, Richard Thomas, who has more than a thirsty wine entanglement of his own.  He was working at winemaking at Chateau Reynella in the seventies.  This interest led him to Italy, where in his own personal bucking off moment he ate some gorgonzola and promptly became a cheesemaker.

Most great Australian cheeses are one way or another entwined with this grand wizard.  King Island Cheddar, Gippsland Blue, Milawa, Tarago River, Bruny Island, and Yarra Valley Persian feta are only a few of the cheesey delights which Thomas invented, assisted, inspired or curdled.

He says that in 1984, he made all of the blue cheese in Australia, “and I wasn’t working very hard, either.”

He’s obviously loving what Alison does.

As we settled at a table decorated with Dowie Doole Chenin blanc and several of Alison’s goat cheeses, the sage made a remark which covers most of his obsessions.

“It’s more complicated than love when you mix wine and cheese together,” he said. 

“You can put some of the greatest wines ever made with some of the greatest cheeses ever made and you get shit.  There’s an incredible mob of little molecules running around together; a lot of very complex shit going on in there.”

Which reminded me of the mindlessness with which many Australian wine show judges eat soapy mousetrap cheddar to "freshen" their palates in wine shows, when green olives would be the most appropriate cleanser.  

Or apple.  The canny cellar sales wag will serve you cheese that'll kill your palate with fat and salt til you've bought a case of the dodgy wine being flogged, then give you green apple as you leave, so you're much more critical and demanding about the next wines down the track.

Chenin blanc is a high-acid white grape from France’s Loire Valley, where goat cheese is omnipresent.  The earliest planting I know of in South Australia was at Highercombe, next to the Paracombe vineyard I wrote about a few weeks back. Upon visiting the vineyard there of the Hon. G. M. Waterhouse in November 1861, my fore-runner at The Advertiser, the irascible Ebenezer Ward MP, reported a white blend made there of “the Verdeilo, the Riesling and the Stein”.

It would appear that the Dutch East India Company delivered the first Loire cuttings of Chenin blanc to Jan van Riebeek in South Africa in 1655, where the grape became known as Steen, or Stein.  From there many early Australian white settlers collected cuttings en route to New Holland, and of course South Australia.

Dowie Doole had given me three brilliant Chenins.  The first, the standard steel tank crisp 2012 lovely -- which was insulted by the award of a lowly bronze at the recent McLaren Vale Wine Show -- sells at a snippy $16.  Then came two much more complex Tintookie Chenins (2008 and 2012; $30), made with wild yeast, and plenty of lees contact in old oak.

“Salt and acid and cheese are the friends of this wine – they’re equivalent,” Richard  gurgled as we slurped the first with Alison’s Soft Goat, a one week old curd which was creamy, acidic and dry, with that tantalising illusion of grainyness.  The liason was indeed perfect. 

Practice it up for the summer.

Next came the Ash Goat.  Alison puts vine cuttings in a charcoal burner and then grinds it to coat this bone-dry week-old cheese.

“Ash is alkaline, with potassium and stuff, so it neutralises acidity and you get more rapid growth of microflora -- moulds and yeasts and bugs -- which preserve the cheese,” Richard explained. “Most cheesemakers buy charcoal from the chemist.  No bloody good. Chemically it’s quite different to Alison’s.”

This cheese overwhelmed the unoaked Chenin, but worked just swimmingly with the 2012 Tintookie, which is due to replace the 2008 in 2014.  The wine was sufficiently complex, fresh and viscous to enhance the cheese with both counterpoint and harmony.  The blend of flavours gave the surprising taste of an adults-only dry vanilla ice cream.

“That’s a great cheese, Alison,” Richard murmered through his chew.

Then came the Funky Goat, a matured rinded cheese of four weeks maturation. 

“What I like about this mix is the spectrum of pH and texture,” Richard said. “No question the goatiness is glowing through – it’s accentuated by the wine. A good thing.”

Complex, gamy and fatty, but with sinuous appetising acid, the cheese played a bonnie duet with the unoaked 2012, but with the more complex Tintookie it made a stunning gastronomic adventure.  

“White mould cow’s cheese doesn’t go nearly so well with cold white wines,” Richard suggested, “this is bloody lovely.”

Alison presented a more mature, runnier rinded cheese next.  “We called this the Holy Goat at first, but we discovered there are too many out there called that, so we’re looking for another name.”

I suggested Billygoat Milk.  It is that goaty. This highly complex, almost acrid cheese had the beginnings of ammonia, which seemed to work a little with the softer 2008, and a lot more satisfactorily with the taut 2012 Tintookie, but once again, our sage wrapped it up neatly when he said “it’s quite alkaline, it’s thin.  The ammonia dislikes white wine.  It’d be better with the soft tannins of an aged red and a bit of sugar”, a suggestion which made me yearn for rich fruitcake to spread it on and a vintage port to send it on its way.

At which point I couldn't decide whether to eat the cheese or simply drink Chenin.

To finish, we demolished a Besace du Berger Le Chèvrefeuille from Périgord in the Dordogne.  Amongst its myriad triggers, this stunning, complex, soft cheese had a feeling, as much as the flavour, of candlewax about it, and while it went perfectly with all three wines, I came over all pervy, as pervy as Pan himself, when I squashed it around my mouth with the 2008. Funny thing: in blind tastings of unoaked Chenin, I often recognise it by its unusual waxiness.  It’s not a fault, or disagreeable, but something like copha.  Another mystery to unravel.

“The French have an advantage here, because they don’t have to kill off all the fantastic range of tiny cheesery bugs," Alison said, almost to herself.  "While we’ve got to chlorinate the walls of our cheese factories every day, we’ll never get the quality the French get.”

Like chlorine? In a place we make beautiful food?

This conundrum is reflected in the current trend amongst the more adventurous of the best Australian winemakers to revert to older oak, wild yeasts, and less obsessive disinfection and sanitation in their winemaking.  The wines are better.  The same philosophical counterpoint lay there in our glasses: test it yourself by cruising by the new Dowie Doole cellar door at 276 California Road in McLaren Vale to collect the unoaked Chenin and its 2008 grand aunt.  You can get Kangarilla Creamery cheeses at Blessed Cheese in the main street of the Vale, at the Paxton cellar door, or at the Willunga Farmers’ Market on Saturday mornings.

You'll never regret getting in with this bright and delicious business from the start. On the night, Alison may have been respectfully quiet in the presence of a guru like Dicky-T, but you trust me: Alison rocks. 

Sometimes you get lucky.  And if it’s not too windy you might hear me laughing.

Master Cheeser Richard Thomas rides shotgun too. He's more of a sawn-off man, black peppercorns in one barrel, rock salt in the other.