Death of a Wine Writer

It’s wine exhibition time. The unsuspecting wine writer has been conducting exhaustive research for the past four hours, moving in deliberate, dedicated fashion from stand to stand. He is about to pass out.

Suddenly, out from nowhere, a rep appears, cornering him with a smile as wide as Jimmy Swaggert’s used to be. The display lights’ bright glare bounces off three acres of sparkling teeth like a bank of white-hot arc lamps, penetrating every layer of the wine writer’s aching mind, hammered home by a voice that booms like a jackhammer.

“Gidday you old … . I’ve got this new Chardonnay. It’s a new direction for the company. Fermented and matured in French oak and earth-filtered with moon dust. The winemaker reckons it’s okay. Try it and tell me what you think”.

“I don’t want to. I want to go home”.

Pity the lot of the wine writer. If anyone else tells me what a joy it must be to spend hours shackled to the tasting bench I shall break his neck.

It’s a life of sacrifice. Sacrificing your health, your judgement and your privacy. Who would want to be Caesar’s chief food taster? Who would want to be the wine drinker’s guinea-pig?

It’s tough out there. I’ve had rieslings that retch, chardonnays that choke and semillons that suffocate. Of course the good bottles do compensate, but you never know which one will be your last, do you?

Your opinion is in demand – which you like – but occasionally you’d rather keep it to yourself. How on earth do you tell a winemaker, likely to be your friend, that his Cabernet could fly a Jumbo and his Port put man on Pluto? I doubt if Henry Kissenger could.

Lunch presents another hazard. I forget the number of times I have attended the launch of a new range over a deliciously unhealthy luncheon at one of Australia’s squizziest restaurants. To the wine companies that invite me I am eternally grateful. But it’s so easy to forget everything about the wines served, the questions asked and the answers given, especially if they were the same as the previous year.

Write them down or take a tape recorder, I hear you cry. But then I would only forget to turn the thing on, and after only the most puny of drinks my writing closely resembles that of a dyslectic Neanderthal. Life, as you see, can be impossible.

The end of the day approaches. Your palate is jaded, your head is fuzzy and your eyes neither fit their sockets nor resemble the colour specified in your passport. It’s been a big day. You go quietly out to dinner to nurse the wounds. A friend who’s a bit of a keen wino spots you and asks if you’d evaluate his wine…masked. He knows what it is, you don’t. He’d just love to trip you up, and he wouldn’t tell anyone. Not much, he woudn’t…

You can only go down, you can’t win. There are two options – pretend not to recognise him or play dead. Either way you must be totally convincing and not try his wine.

Ah, but there is a third alternative. At a beer tasting actor John Meillon was asked to score every beer out of ten. He gave each one the perfect score. “They’re all beer, aren’t they? So that makes them perfect”. Not an option to use every time, but one to keep up the sleeve for that most inopportune and desperate occasion.

Wine writers are automatically placed on hit lists. The people with these lists are public relations companies, some wineries themselves and Brian Miller, Fine Wines Manager for Seppelt. They send you press releases and in Brian Miller’s case, anything that comes to hand. It’s an interesting exercise to read press releases for different wine companies who use the same public relations agency. There’s often an uncanny resemblance, no matter how different the wineries or products concerned.

You end up by repeating press releases in your sleep. Words come into your head, like “This Fume Blanc represents the dawn of a new era for Chateau La Trine”, or “Now that old Mr Irongut has finally drunk himself into the next dimension his son, Ivan Irongut jnr, a former dux at Roseworthy College, has taken over the winemaking duties and now we look forward to a new age of high-tech plonk from the family’s Mt Erebus Estate”.

Then there are the occasional junkets, the free trips that you look forward to for weeks only to banish from your memory shortly after. Last year I was a member of a group taken to New Zealand by one of its largest wine companies, only to find out that no-one knew who we were or why we were there. The most important thing I learned was that if you want a half-bottle of Bollinger on an Economy flight on Air New Zealand, you must pretend to have just proposed to the person next to you, with an affirmative reply. New Zealanders being what they are, it helps if that person is of the opposite gender.

But the worst thing is that no-one takes you seriously. Could you take this article seriously? Would you take me seriously? I wouldn’t. The Victorian Police don’t. They followed me the other night and pulled up hard behind my car when I arrived home. They wanted to know if I had taken any intoxicating liquor in the last three hours, the time being 1 am.

I replied that I had just tasted fifty-seven Victorian cabernets and I thought they were all very nice. It seemed wise to add that I had spat each one out, except the Balgownie. They shrugged their shoulders and drove off. They just couldn’t take me seriously.

Wine writing is no lark. It’s a sacrifice, you see.

Only joking. Pass me that corkscrew…dammit, am I out of ink again?…Life’s hell out here! Please login to post comment