Life is too short to drink bad wine

Dick’s
Toolbox cont.
.. savings purchasing attractive, over-priced land in nice locations and growing
grapes. Sometimes even making wine. Many years ago I helped some dear friends
in one of these quixotic adventures, and it was very hard work, though in the
end they did make some more than credible wine. Their happy progress was tragically
ended by two heart attacks and one death – not the result of the vineyard
I hasten to add – though the vines still flourish.
Accordingly I feel it is my duty to drink a reasonable amount of wine to assist
those in need. As I hold a New Zealand passport I patriotically (though not
reluctantly) assist both the country of my birth and my adopted home to the
best of my liver’s ability.
I came to wine with the general idea that one could get intoxicated with some
style and at little cost, not realising that it came, in my particular case,
with the disadvantage of world class hangovers. This is genetic and I blame
my mother. The only lesson I have learnt is that more expensive wine reduces
this effect – but I only because you generally drink less because you
are paying more. From experience I can say that drinking other people’s
expensive wine in excess gets you a better class of misery – which is indiscernible
from any other form of alcohol induced misery.
One of the more idiotic bits of advice is having ‘the hair of the dog’
the next morning – the general unreliability of which Old English maxim
can be judged by the fact that it comes from an alleged cure for rabies. If
you wanted to recover from your dog-inflicted wounds you were expected to catch
the offending canine and eat some of its hair. This bit of trivia comes from
Baron Roy Andries de Groot who was described as ‘that contradiction in
terms, a blind gourmet’ – probably a useful distinction from the
blind wine taster. His sight had failed over a period of years after the London
Blitz and he had a seeing eye dog, on which I hope that he didn’t try
this simple recipe for the morning after called ‘The Doctor’s Eye-Opener”.
Allow me to quote.
Use an extremely cold glass. Pour in the juice of half a lemon and the 1.5 *
ounces of first class Californian brandy. Stir vigorously then, just before
raising it to the lips, dust the top surface with a couple of shakes of red
cayenne pepper. Try to down it in a single gulp. Resist the immediate desire
to rush to cold water. If you feel dizzy, hold onto the table for a couple of
minutes
* 50 millilitres
Thirty years of wine consumption proceeded largely without my brother’s
help as he took a ridiculously long time to break ‘The Pledge’ that
he had sworn at a tender and misguided age. At the same time he was delivering
himself into teetotal nirvana, I was delivering my first lecture on French wine
to a bored audience of pimply hormonal teenage males in ill-fitting trousers
who, like me, dreamt of liberating alcohol from the school chemistry laboratory.
It was a world when French wine was the only wine and New Zealand wine was not
far removed from paint thinner.
But to Mike’s credit he brought the virtues of Pinot Noir to my attention
long before the film ‘Sideways’ came along with those memorable
lines given to Miles Raymond. Miles says whilst striving to at least get to
first base with Maya “ …only when someone has taken the time to
truly understand its potential can Pinot be coaxed into its fullest expression.
And when that happens its flavours are the most haunting and brilliant and subtle
and thrilling and ancient on the planet.” Now whilst this was also an
allusion to Miles’ own withdrawn nature it is a remark that I agree with.

Arguably New Zealand produces better Pinots than Australia. Therefore I recently
returned from the Land of the Long White Cloud with four interesting bottles
and consumed two of them with the family in honour of somebody’s birthday
– probably my own. Let me cruelly recommend Northburn Station and Richardson
‘Les Enfants’ with the latter being really outstanding. Complex
and structured with the Richardson having enormous finesse as well. The cruelty
comes from my doubt that you can buy them in Australia – so all I can
do is recommend that when you are in Queenstown that you drop into Wine Deli.com
and say goodbye to your money as they are each around the $45.00 mark. You can
cheer yourself up with the fact that Viggo Mortensen shopped there and that
it is cheaper than bungy jumping.

Why not Proust ?
I was in a bookshop the other day belatedly wondering what to buy with a gift
voucher that had remained unused since Christmas, when I noticed something odd.
There was large section marked Fiction from A to Z which stretched along one
wall and half way along another, and there was another smaller section on freestanding
shelves marked Literature. There is, apparently, a distinction, and it’s
one that Woolworths wouldn’t bother to make. With some pleasure I noted
that Dan Brown wasn’t in Literature, but I wondered why I checked. For
the record he wasn’t in history or religion either but in Best Sellers.
I must confess at this point that I have read someone else’s copy of the
Da Vinci Code and think that it does for literature what the Australian Wheat
Board has done for Business Ethics or George W Bush for truth. Conversely I
do know a young woman who thought the Da Vinci Code beautifully written and
that the neo-factoids inside were both true and revelatory. However she was
from Sydney and may not have known any better. I see people reading The Code
in the train and feel that like leaning over a telling them to stop, go no further,
it really is complete rubbish. Worse even than the editorials in ‘The
Australian’.
The trouble with the Da Vinci code is that it is a book that everybody ends
up reading because everybody has read it.. The same literary fate befell Du
Maurier’s ‘Trilby’, the success of which did have the bonus
of totally annoying his friend Henry James, a man who seems to have had such
a total personality by-pass that two recent biographies by more than competent
authors are just about unreadable owing to the entropic nature of the protagonist.
In a current drawing show at the National Gallery of Victoria there is a cartoon
by Max Beerbohm entitled ‘Mr Henry James revisiting America’. Mr
James looks like a bemused and self important stockbroker, though what he made
of the now politically incorrect captions is anybody’s guess.
I don’t go to the Victorian Gallery as often as I should as, after the
latest round of changes and enhancements, it increasingly reminds me of a department
store with a power malfunction that has caused all the lighting to dim unnaturally.
This curatorial trend to lower the lights in exhibitions so that one would be
better served by the issuing of miners’ hats rather than audio guides has me
bemused. I first came across 25 years ago in London in a show of Ingres drawings.
Simple graphite lines on acid free paper – what’s there to fade?
The NGV also has an excess of cafeterias. But then it has always been the triumph
of form over function.
This is the opposite of the Art Gallery of NSW, which always gives me great
pleasure whenever I go there. It does what a gallery should do without fuss,
without drawing attention to itself, and has always surprised me with a lightness
of space that makes the art even more approachable. This is a relatively old
gallery which has been intelligently enhanced to bring aspects of the harbour
into the gallery in a way that doesn’t detract from the art, but rather
acts as a counter-point. It has a judicious collection which is beautifully
rotated for exhibition, and it is educational in the best sense of the word.
It may also be that I have usually taken an hour off from work in Sydney and
therefore it is a guilty pleasure, a stolen hour from an otherwise frenetic
day.
But the indirect reason for this diatribe was that my mother recently admonished
me for wanting to write about Proust in the Toolbox. “He’s boring,”
she said “And just because you have read ‘Remembrance of Thing Past’
twice doesn’t mean that anybody else has the slightest interest.”

She may well be right …….but you have been warned