BILSON KNOCKS INTO THREE COCKED HATS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A VISIT FROM TONY AND TIGER BILSON

Check this. In the coldest windiest day of winter my beloved friend of forty years rocked up with his half sister, whom I've know for only twenty. They pulled me outa the whisky murk quicksmart. That's Tony and Tiger Bilson on the veranda of Casa Blanca this arvo ... they transported me to a very cool and warm lunch at Salopian. Perfect.  I coulda slept there.

The white coats are about to remove about half of Tony's organs (let's face it: some of us already watched what happened to them in the name of commitment to the cause and scientific research), (snap), but he's flat out anyway, determined to put the best restaurant in the world into China, which he loves and understands more than most Ocker boofheads. He is more respected there. Something has gone wrong with Australia.

This is one of the great photographs of Bilson at the peak of Berowra Waters:

It was taken by Paul Lloyd the day our hire Merc drove down the hill all by itself, straight through the roller door of the posh Pennant Hills house Bilson and Gay rented to get some respite from that endless gastronomic explosion, Berowra Waters Inn. That day, I put my new antique pocket watch through the Bilson washing machine. It was never the same. This was, I think, before the night a hire BMW woke up in the El Alamein fountain in King's Cross. German cars were tricky in those days. I reckon there were more gravity lenses then. 

I took this one below at Kangarilla when Bilson had Kinselas pumping and needed a wee break in the deep south. I call it it my Charles Bronson Bilson. Must be about '83. Note the sticky tape holding the specs together. Biffo. Walther P38.

All this shiny gastroporn bullshit and the iron chef and whatever aside, Bilson and Cheong Liew are the most influential chefs Australia has seen. We have much to thank them for. In those Kinsela days I met another life-changer, Tetsuya. After a night on the armagnac with Shiva Naipal at the mezzanine bar, I ducked down to the Kinselas kitchen for a blast of nitrous oxide from the whipped cream machine, like just to ease the head, interrupting Tets, who  was making hamburger mince for lunch. He asked Tony if this was a usual Australian sort of behaviour; one worth learning to expect. Tets was Kinselas' king burger flipper.

That's Amanda Bilson and me eating red berries and kirsch at Tony's Fine Bouche about '90. I was well over 120 kilos then, due to my work. For the empire traditionalists, I managed for a while over 20 stone. Shit we had fun. And there's so much left to do! I can't recall who took this photograph, but I reckon it was Peter Powditch, whose perfect works adorned those walls ... and here be Tones and Tiger ... kisses everywhere. More please.

   
 

TONY BILSON: RATTLIN' THEM POTS'N' PANS

BILSON DOES BRONSON: PICKIN' SOME SOUP TINS OFF THE FENCE, KANGARILLA, ABOUT 1988 photo PHILIP WHITE

Australia's most accurate bellwether for impending international financial chaos: Tony Bilson: his front-running restaurants seem to be the first to shiver when the money suddenly disappears.

On her Radio National ABC program, Julia Baird chats with "the godfather of Australian cuisine" about Bilson's forthcoming memoir, Insatiable, just as all the money in the world crumbles and his two Sydney restaurants go into voluntary administration. Click the image above to hear or read Julia's tantalising interview. DRINKSTER will review this remarkable book as soon as it's been properly chewed and digested.

Assisted by trainee chefs from Le Cordon Bleu's Adelaide campus, Bilson will be back at Yangarra Estate, McLaren Vale, to cook his annual feast on October 29th. Call the winery on 08 8383 7459 for bookings.

Go here to see the menu and the breath-taking wine list at the triumphant Penfolds dinner Bilson presented with Peter Gago in Australia's Paris embassy earlier this year.

LONG DRY ROUTE TO THE KING OF THE RIVER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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:

STACKING UP THE ANCIENT PENFOLDS

GRANGE CREATOR MAX SCHUBERT IN AUSSIE DIGGER'S CLOBBER IN CAIRO DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR










An Overseas Guest
Muscles Like A Cutting Horse

by PHILIP WHITE

March 13^th 2006 I made my annual pilgrimage to Penfolds’ Magill Cellars to visit Peter Gago, taste his new babies, and a few of their great-grand-parents. It’s a zen thing: the pacific sanctuary of the old wood-panelled boardroom; the way Peter treats it like Geoffrey Penfold Highland was still sitting in the office through there, smoking, and Max, dear Max, in the tiny office out there, blending. Always blending reds, Max. Making the best mud pies in Australia.

Down there is the calm blue of the Gulf St Vincent, patron of viticulturers.

Only thing missing is Leonard Cohen. He should be there in the courtyard in his long dark robes, raking gravel.

On the wall is the fierce Mary Penfold, looking rather like Queen Victoria at a funeral. You don’t get cherry red lips like those from suckin’ oranges.

My lovely mate Tony Bilson came too. He was stacking up his ancient Penfolds for his restaurant cellar in the Radisson, in Sydney.

We’d got through all the whites, climaxing – deliberate choice, climax, not just cause it’s got a Max in it - somewhere between the 2004 Bin 04A Chardonnay and the 2003 Yattarna, thinking I preferred the 04A, when Peter came through the door again.

“I hope you don’t mind sharing with another”, he said. “I have an overseas guest.”

Peter’s overseas guests are always worth stopping for.

But I had 28 more bottles to go, so I put my ugly head down and choogled on.

I have tasted in some fairly famous and fusty cellars in my day: this is always as good as the very best; sometimes better. Today looked like better. Koonunga Hill; Thomas Hyland; Reserve Bins; Magill Estate; RWT; Ka-ding! 2001 Grange. “This is what American oak’s for” my notes gurgle. “Making the gums and cheeks gush.”

I can’t stand American oak. It belongs wrapped around a dangerous big lump of bourbon or rye. It’s too coconutty even for Islay single malt. At the risk of upsetting our friends across the big water, I’d like to go and burn Missouri to the ground for what its beloved Quercus alba has done to far too many Australian reds.

So when I praise a Grange for its amoak, everybody should open their duster just a little and rest their spare hand on their piece. I may be taking the piss.

Not that day. In came the guest, a wide, small hardman with a bonedome and muscles like a cutting horse. He spoke in whisper softer’n a rabbit shelterin’ in a holler, and put his nose straight to the winestone. No trouble there. American accent.

And hang on: speaking of the dreaded amoak, where’s the St Henri? That’s the sublime Penfold red famous for not having overt American oak!

Part way through the vertical of St Henri (1958 to 2002) I began getting the feeling that this whispery guy knew his dots on the wine scale. While I gurgled and gooed and kerchoofed and sniffed he simply got quieter. Did the work.

Later, in The Exeter, Dan The Man (who now leads Leader Cheetah) whispered something like “Jeez, Whitey, you’re a dude. Walkin in here with Maynard!”

Around about this time I began to realise who my tasting compadre was. I thought Tony Bilson was famous! But this must be the dude who a coupla years earlier broke the record paid for a magnum of Grange at auction. Rock star from the States. Band name a Tool, whom I’d never heard. I was far too deep in my tenth Tin Huey/Devo/Pere Ubu phase to know much about Tool.

“MAYNARD”, he wrote in my note book, handling my precious antique Rapidograph like a master. “WWW.CADUCEUS.ORG”.

We took lunch, and if anything, his reverent whisper got softer.

1959 Ovens Valley; 1967 Kalimna Shiraz; 1996 Block 42; 2004 Block 42 ... I boast.

Maynard’s delightful partner joined us; we dined. He told me much about how he was planting vines in the high Arizona desert; finding ancient remnant shreds of Spanish varieties that nobody’s ever heard of; propagating; starting from scratch.

“It’s what I do when I’m not screaming for my supper”, he whispered. “Every Tool tour pays for some more vineyard.”

We went our own ways.

Back at The Ex for a cleanser, I discovered my status had gone strato.

FRENCH WINERS COPIED OZ LUMBERJACKS

THE 15TH CENTURY PORTUGUESE CARAVEL TOOK ITS NAME FROM ITS SMOOTH CARVEL HULL ... FIFTEEN CENTURIES BEFORE, CELTIC BOATBUILDERS DISCOVERED THAT IF YOU BUILT THIS TYPE OF HULL, WHICH KEEPS WATER OUT, IN A COMPLETE 360 DEGREE FORM, YOU HAD A CONTAINER THAT WOULD KEEP WATER IN ... OR WINE! ... photo MERRIAM-WEBSTER VISUAL DICTIONARY ONLINE

 
They Just Had To Do Something

French Stop Wasting Shavings

Five Years Of Chipped Vin Later

by PHILIP WHITE - THIS WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN APRIL 2006


 So.  Eventually, finally, the French capitulate.  They’ve just permitted their winemakers to begin using sawdust, chips, shavings, and planks in place of expensive, carefully toasted barrels from carefully selected trees taken from brilliantly managed forests.  They’ve been sick with envy of the Australian industrialists who invented this short-cut carpentry to hack away at the bottom of their traditional market.  

The new method means French coopers, too, can make good money from the sawdust they'd normally sweep into a bin.

Since the Roman invaders first reported the beautifully hand-hewn barrels Celtic boat-builders had introduced to France, barrels have been the go in the Old World.  Now, with the equivalent of food grade particle board submerged in their tanks, they reckon they’ll regain lost ground.

This surreal news broke on Radio Nash as I was purging some old desk files.  One jumped at me: Time magazine, February 18, 1980, with French gastronomes Henri Gault and Christian Millau on the front cover.  Suddenly famous for their routing of France’s ancien regime of food traditionalists, these bright, radical publishers were the herald angels of the nouvelle cuisine movement.

In the most influential editorial mention to date of an Australian wine in Time, Gault and Millau included Tyrrell’s Hunter Valley Pinot Noir in their Drinkers’ Dozen.  It sat there beside the megabuck Chateux: Petrus, Lafite-Rothschild, Mouton-Rothschild, Haut-Brion, and d’Yquem, with a few top Burgundies, one Spanish red and a Californian Cabernet.
 
The only other reference to liquor was a two-page ad for Seaview.  “All wine should be this good”, it trumpeted, boasting of 215 medals in the previous seven years.  We were then entering the era of big-time sappy American oak, without which it was nearly impossible to win show gongs.  Most drinkers quite reasonably felt the best wines were those plastered with medals. 

We’d just had a series of feasts in Adelaide, importing freshly converted practitioners of this new cuisine lite to cook it for us: Gay and Tony Bilson of the mighty Berowra Waters Inn, Stephanie Alexander (Stephanie’s), and Damien and Josephine Pignolet (Claude’s).  Tetsuya was yet to cook his first hamburger in Tony Bilson’s subsequent Kinselas; the great Cheong slaved away, largely overlooked, in Neddy’s.  His own world-changing east-west fusion was on the way, but remained overshadowed by the French revolution.

So while we drank many Australian wines smothered in American Quercus alba oak at those dinners, the French glories Gault and Millau listed showed barely a splinter.  And neither did the Tyrrell’s Pinot noir, which was always soft, from big old barrels, while dense and richly fruity, like a traditional Burgundy.

Among the list of “commandments” Gault and Millau imposed as indicators of cuisine nouvelle were recommendations of reduced cooking times for many types of meat, fish and vegetables, and “the elimination of heavy sauces that assassinated the taste of good food and masked that of bad”.

Australia’s wine manufacturers were never much for gastronomy.  Unwitting or misunderstanding of these new enlightenments, they went on to establish their cheap, reliable product internationally by masking much of its fruit with oak chips, shavings, or essences. 

This was a giant remove from the traditional wine barrel, that simple stable container which permitted gradual oxidation and gentle seasoning rather than adding the brash sap, toast, caramel or coconut flavours that came from roasted chips. 

Since that, Australia’s gone for ever-increasing levels of alcohol, as if to preserve forever that stroppy sawdust.  And now, a quarter of a century after we discovered their clean new cuisine, the French, from whom we also copied our original pre-refinery wine styles, are copying our vinous breach of the old Gault Millau laws about simple honest elegance.


THE TRADITIONAL COQ AU VIN, COOKED IN SHIRAZ OR PINOT BARREL LEES, IS HARDLY NOUVELLE CUISINE ... BUT IT CAN HANDLE QUITE WOODY SHIRAZ IF THE WINE HAS BEEN PROPERLY AGED photo PHILIP WHITE

If you’re hissing “Hypocrite!”, knowing I sometimes recommend fairly alcoholic wines, and, to a lesser extent, wines with a lot of oak, I confess to be right now working my way through a sinister broth of Spanish onion, woodsmoked bacon, porcini, ginger, lentils, garlic and pinot noir.  It’s taken four days to decay sufficiently on my stove.  1980s  Gault and Millau would call this more of a dark provincial sewer than a dish.  It is NOT cuisine nouvelle.  And I drink with it, the austerely oaky Rockbare McLaren Vale Shiraz 2004, and in contrast, the juicily fruity Five Geese McLaren Vale Shiraz 2003.  Swoon.

It’s about balance, see.  I suppose the French should permit themselves the chance to balance their bottom rung grapes with some sawdust, just as our industrialists have done for decades, and the Greeks do with retsina loaded with pine essence.  

But is this sawdust trail the simple, smart equivalent of Gault and Millau’s recommended “reduced cooking time”, or the vinous version of those heavy sauces that assassinated the other flavours?  Will we see Le Blue Gum Pulp Smoked Big Mac served all dahn the Champs, for chomping with a Chateau Masonite Midi Mourvedre?  Ah, oui.  You enjoy some Aussie balance in there, eh Monsieur? 

Not convinced, mon cobber.

OAK PRODUCTS FOR FLAVOURING WINE FROM THE REVERED BAROSSA COOPER, A. P. JOHN ... IN THE EIGHTIES, I COULD PICK BAROSSA SHIRAZ BY ITS 'BAROSSA CHOCOLATE'  WHICH EVENTUALLY TURNED OUT TO BE THE FLAVOUR OF TOASTED OAK FROM A. P. JOHN ... MOST WOLF BLASS RED, AND PENFOLD'S GRANGE AND BIN 707, TOOK THEIR BARRELS FROM THIS MASTER COOPER photo A. P. JOHN WEBSITE

O'LEARY-WALKER BILSON DINNER ROCKED

While I’ve struggled with my review of Tony Bilson’s amazing memoir, Insatiable – My Life In The Kitchen -- my review’s as long as the book, and I’m barely halfway through -- the Godfather of Australian Cuisine put his Sydney restaurants into voluntary receivership, they were consequently shut, and the most committed gastronomers in Australia sat back and wished it wasn’t happening.

As do, of course, all those who are owed money. Friends. Enemy. Staff. Mates. True believers.

When you’re at the pointiest, most glorious, spendiest end of the nation’s cuisine, your restaurant’s generally full of stockbrokers, bankers and suits, their wives and husbands and rivals and lovers, and you see the world’s financial systems go into major organ collapse, you suddenly learn about vertigo. Or you learn it again. Business folks who one day sit in your three-star buying Burgundy and Bordeaux like there was no tomorrow will be arguing about the price of cleanskins in your wine bar next day. If you're lucky.

While he struggles to retrieve the most humble and funky of his enterprises, Bilson’s Number One Wine Bar on Circular Key, the man has lived a shattered but determined life as the forensic counters dissect every speck and your regular industry bitches and critics gnaw and hiss. In his role at Cordon Bleu Australia, he rounded up some expert assistance from its staff and students at the Adelaide campus, and kept his appointment to present a degustation dinner at O’Leary Walker’s stunning new sales and tasting rooms at Watervale, in the North Mount Lofty Ranges at Clare last weekend.

The canapés were scallop tartelet, grissini with prosciutto, salmon crouton and potato and leek soup. These were served on the hill overlooking the O’Leary Walker vineyard, facing straight across the vale to the famous calcrete slope of Watervale. It is like a priceless slice of Burgundy. As Nick Walker followed his father Norm into fizzmastery, who’d followed his Dad, Hurtle, who’d learnt from the great Burgundian, Edmund Mazure, who made a Kanmantoo red judged the best wine in the world at the great 1889 Paris Expo wine show, held to celebrate the opening of the Eiffel Tower, it was essential that we opened with the Hurtle Sparkling Pinot Chardonnay 2004.

Guests sat to an amuse bouche of jellied lobster consommé with cucumber. An entrée of carpaccio of swordfish with caviar followed, as the angels poured two exquisite Rieslings, the O’Leary-Walker Polish Hill River 2010 and 2004. The Polish Hill River vineyard usually grows wines with more wholesome umami flavours, more Germanic maybe; more ly-chee, so this intercourse, which is what it was, was a spark of genius. The swordfish looked like a Picasso.

Second entrée was a Bilson standard, and a masterpiece: quenelles of King George Whiting with a warm salad of Spanner Crab, with two Rieslings from the chalky slope opposite: the O’Leary Walker Watervale Rieslings 2010 and 2006. This more austere drinking was as sexy a match as the Polish Hill affair. Most people were dribbling by this stage.

Three reds came before the main. O’Leary-Walker Clare Valley-McLaren Vale Shiraz 2008 and 2002 (swoon: hyper-intelligent blending, the softer, soulful Vales with the austere Clare), and the brash and curt O’Leary-Walker Clare Valley Cabernet Sauvignon 2010 as a sort of nerdy counterpoint. These musketeers made a terrible mess of the aiguillette of duck with creamed spinach and baby turnips. The tip-toe dance of acids and fats was spellbinding. We knew we were in very deep.

The Grangey O'Leary-Walker Claire Reserve Shiraz 2006 was hum-dinging with Brie de Nangis and Comte and bread of red wine, walnut and fig; the tarte frangipene pathologically swervy with the O'Leary-Walker Wyatt Earp Vintage Port 2010.

I think I retired at three. I felt like I was three.

ALL PHOTOGRAPHY BY MATT WALKER

ANYTHING BUT ORDINARY CHARDONNAY

Putting The Spin On Chardonnay

Bigger Than Shiraz Now In Oz 

Keep Shovelling In The Sawdust

by PHILIP WHITE

  
“The ‘Anything But Chardonnay’ days are long gone,” wine marketing consultant Trish Barry tweeted yesterday. “Time to rediscover this fabulous varietal on 24 May.”

She referred to the third annual World Chardonnay Day. Funny how the ethanol peddlers presume special days to assist them market stuff they can’t sell as easily as they’d first hoped, back when they ripped out the native veg and installed the irrigation system.  I mean Chardonnay Day?  How does that look against International Day of Zero Tolerance to Female Genital Mutilation,  or the International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficing, not to mention World Suicide Prevention Day?

“Hang on a bit,” I shot back. “Most of the Chardonnay made in Oz is still execrable industrial piss. You've been hoodwinked!”

Australia now produces around 405,000 tonnes of Chardonnay per year: for some dumb reason it has surpassed Shiraz as our main wine grape.  Imagine 300,000 pallets of it and you’re close.  Most of this is grown in the hot inland, the desert currently drying out after two years of record flooding.  The desert is not the place for Chardonnay, which comes from Continental Europe: Champagne, Chablis and Burgundy – places where it snows. 

You could argue that we should have stuck with the previous biggest Australian wine grape: Sultana. Sully loves the desert when it’s flooded.  When it’s not flooded naturally, you can flood it by emptying the River on it.  You can get over 20 tonnes per acre!

But the punter is not a mug. The Anything But Chardonnay movement sensibly began to form up about a decade back.  So Australia’s excess “Chardy” went to export, until the Anything But sentiment justly followed it. Winemakers panicked.

This is why, a couple of years back, somebody obviously wearing a tie obviously called a meeting in their smoke-free room and decided that it was time people in the wine industry began talking Chardonnay back up.  Whoever barked the order got what they wanted: it went first through the Chairmen of Judges on the national wine show circuit.  One after another, they briefed their teams to be kinder to Chardonnay, and one after another, the teams responded with bling which the Chairmen could then boast of in the round-up speeches and droll propaganda that oozes out through the presses and the screens and phones.

Then the wine hacks who grovel to get judging berths at these huge wine races obediently went back to their editors with obsequious nonsense about Chardonnay coming of age or however it comes.

“Maybe I've been drinking the good stuff over $10 (can't comment below that),” rattled Trish, “but in my opinion lots of great options.”  Rather than waste good guitar-pickin fingernails typing the sordid details of the swill below $20 that I swim through each week, I suggested “Judges, Wine Australia, Wine Communicators, all decided eighteen months ago they'd begin saying ABC is dead. Musta worked!”

She quickly shot back “Surely that's a better message for industry to be sending than all doom and gloom.”

“I don't work for the wine industry,” I responded. “I work for my readers. The Oz wine industry as we knew it has failed. It IS doom and gloom.”

New old-style French oak fermenters at Kooyong, Mornington Peninsula

There is no doubt that Australia is producing better Chardonnay than it did.  It's not saying much.  But so it bloody well should make better wine from it, having dedicated so much precious farmland to it, most of it inappropriately irrigated with water we don’t have. 

A few - just a handful of Australian winemakers of rare gastronomic intelligence – and I mean RARE: these are the MENSA dudes of wine smarts – are making stunning Chardonnays, many of which would stand their own in Burgundy, from whence we pinched the variety in the first place.  

Unfortunately for everybody else, and most of all my beloved readers, most who entered this racket never bothered to work a vintage or two there in Burgundy to learn about what they were trying to copy, so they made a terrible hash of it from the start.

Adam Wynn was first in with a serious purpose-planted high, cool-country Chardonnay vineyard at Mountadam, which his father David began in 1969.  By 1983 he was home from duxing the Bordeaux University winemaking course, bolstered with serious experience in Burgundy.  He was the first Australian winemaker with the intelligence, money and terroir to really understand the relationship between the best French barrels and cool climate Australian Chardonnay. 

Stephen Hickinbotham was another who’d studied and worked hard in Burgundy in those early student years, and was just beginning to get the fledgeling Mornington Peninsula and Bellarine Chardonnay vineyards together with his brother Andrew, who was planting them for people like Bails Myer, when he (StepHen) was killed in a plane crash.    

Australian wine would be a very different thing if Wynn and Hickie were still in the business: they provided a serious intellectual and spiritual counterbalance to the arrogant Evans-Croser axis, and from the start made wines of much more adventure, finesse and feeling.

Wynn went on developing a solid Burgundy style until a burst of ill-health forced his retirement, which was another terrible pity; at least he survives.  

I shall never forget the lunch Tony Bilson gave Paul Bocuse and his senior staff and about six of us antipodean yokels at Bilson’s on Circular Quay in the late ’eighties: I worked Australian wines in with Tony’s astonishing menu. When we poured the Mountadam, Bocuse could not grasp that the Chardonnay in his glass was not from Burgundy.

Bilson and White, 25 years later at O'Leary-Walker in Clare ... enjoying a glass of Nick Walker's racy Hurtle sparkling Chardonnay/Pinot from Oakbank, near Hahndorf in the Adelaide Hills ... photo Matt Walker

You normally see livelier eyes in a fishmonger’s window, but at that Mountadam High Eden Chardonnay 1984, the old Lion of Lyon positively sparkled. 

He left wearing an almighty, if slightly bothered, smile.

It was Len Evans, the pugnacious Welshman, who pushed this whole C-word thing along.  He up and offed from his job as storeman in the Mt Isa mine, then waddled around Australia like a bumptious missionary, preaching that Chardonnay would be “the vanilla of the Australian wine industry.”  He eventually began boasting that his early Rothbury Estate versions were exemplary.  They didn’t ring any bells for me, however, and when I found myself in his lab in the early ’eighties, innocently signing the delivery chit for a shipment of plastic drums I later discovered were labelled “Essence of Oak Chips”, I began to realise the root of the Evans faith: he was obviously an artificial vanilla essence man, not a fair dinkum vanilla pod worshipper. 

Essence of oak chips was illegal in wine.  “Oh no,” whimpered the lab rat, when he realized what had happened.  “I only use that to work out how many barrels to order.”

I suggested he’d bought enough to turn Sydney Harbour into Chardonnay, and asked if he would pour me a snifter of the dark stuff, so I could see which forest they’d distilled. 

Seemed like Missouri to me.

As he went on to take control of the Australian wine show circuit, Evans ensured that his dogma was adhered to: everybody planted the stuff, and the peachiest ones with the most overt oak won all the bling.  Some blokes, it seemed, even went as far as to use barrels.

Evans mouthing off

We should sigh a heave of relief that those scarce serious gastronomes I mention above are making stunning wines.  Vanya Cullen’s got it nailed in Margaret River; some think Leeuwin Estate does it too.  Vasse Felix is a sure triumph.  Then we see marvelous works of epicurean art like the Chardonnays in the new Penfolds premium release: drinks which really do raise the national bar. And do yourself a favour and buy a full set of the single vineyard Oakridge Yarra Valley Chardonnays: David Bicknell is gradually unleashing a suite of brilliantly distinctive wines from individual sites: they all rock.

To go from one Oakridge bottle to the next is like taking a stroll down a back lane in the Côte-d'Or, cellar-to-cellar; vineyard to vineyard.  If David can keep this up, these wines will be the first set of Australian Chardonnays to sell out each year.

Closer to AddleAde, get into the new Romney Park Hahndorf Blanc de Blancs fizz: a pristine, elegant, totally disarming Chardonnay which must surely be the most stylish suds made this side of Tasmania. It takes me immediately to Mesnil, the heart of Champagne’s best Chardonnay patch.  
 
There are others, of course, and so there should be.  We have over 2,530 wine producers now; 1,707 of them have at least one Chardonnay.

But let’s just pause a minute.  Apart from Tasmania, and a few isolated bits of Australian upland, we have no climate which gets close to Champagne, Chablis or Burgundy, the places where the Chardonnay templates, like it or not, were set.

Apart from wines like that Romney Park and the exquisite sparklers that Ed Carr somehow continues to make for Heavens Above or Universe or the Milky Way or whatever Constellation’s now called – think Arras and Bay of Fires – we have little in the way of really good Champagne-style Chardonnay, and little chance of making much more.

We could follow the Chablisiennes, and make high acid Chardonnays without oak, if only we had enough cool climate vineyard to guarantee the high natural acid that makes Chablis special.  But we don’t, and generally, we can’t.

Which leads us to Burgundy, which is highly reliant upon the skill of its unique coopers, the tonnelleries.  It’s not uncommon to be tasting there in a cellar there with the winemaker when somebody else lets themselves in with a key, and starts tasting barrels on their ownsome.  That’ll be the local consulting cooper, making sure the wines fit the wood flavours he’s chosen, and vice versa.  "I think I'll put one more stave of Vosges forest in next year's barrels." You don’t get too much of that sort of service or trust in Australia.

New egg-shaped French oak fermenters from Taransaud

Which leads me in turn to the matter of oak.  We can’t make Chablis.  We’d be better off sticking to Riesling if we want unoaked, steely whites.  Fizz needs no new oak, so we can approximate Champagne in Tassie and Hahndorf and the odd spot here and there, but not much of it.  So we attempt, to varying degrees, to make our Chardonnay after the style set in the slightly warmer Burgundy, where some new oak seems essential.

When you ferment wine in a good barrel, and leave it there on its yeast lees, an electro-static reaction not only attracts the dead yeast lees to the inside of the staves, but makes them cling there.  Stir the wine – a nine iron is perfect – in the act called battonage, and the skeletal remains of the dead yeast form a thin calcarious film which lines the entire barrel. It moves up the sides, covers the heads, and stays there.  So when your Chardonnay soaks into the oak, to derive those lemon, spice, ginger and caramel flavours that make the great wines of Burgundy what they are – even soot, if the barrel’s been toasted – it must first pass through that natural chalky filter.  When it oozes back out of the wood, it must pass through the same layer again.

This is an absolutely vital key to good wooded Chardonnay.

A little well-placed wood can get you a long way

So here comes that doom and gloom: Australia has 405,000 tonnes of Chardonnay.  Say we extract 700 litres of wine per tonne on the average, and ferment that Chardonnay in 230 litre French oak barrels.  My figures err to the conservative side.  The average French oak tree harvested for cooperage is 170 years old and produces nearly enough staves to make two barrels.  We’d need well over 600,000 170 year old oak trees per annum to properly make our Chardonnay in the manner we’d like everyone to imagine we do: over  1,200,000 barrels.  But regardless of the French being the best forestry managers on Earth – silviculture, it’s prettily called - France can’t even get its total barrel production up to 300,000 units per year – 250,000 is more like it. 

Which means that if Australia’s Chardonnay makers got every French oak barrel produced in France, and there were none allocated for any other winemakers on Earth, including the French themselves, Australia’s Chardonnay would still be a million barrels short.  Every year.

So where do all those new French oak barrels come from that we read of on the back labels?   It’s simple: sawdust, shavings, splinters, chips, cubes, planks, inner staves, “wood derivatives”, “tea bags” … these are very much cheaper, but they do not work like a barrel.  There is no electro-static reaction. There is no calcarious filter between the raw sap and the Chardonnay.  Especially if you use essence of oak chips.