Musing on wine and cricket, and where they might lead you…

One of the cricket clubs I play with, the Melbourne Cricket Club’s XXIX Club, has as its logo a very satisfied cricketer falling asleep with his head resting against a barrel. It says much for the way that Australian life has advanced since the XXIX Club was formed fifty years ago that the barrel in question is actually or at least partially replete with beer. For if that logo were to be designed anew, it would most certainly be with wine.

As far as I am concerned, wine is the drink of cricket and cricket is the sport of wine. The fascination and mystique that enables wine to transcend all other beverages equate precisely to cricket’s ability to develop complexity and intrigue over a five-day period, capturing within that time more plot and sub-plot than most prize-wining novelists could cram into 450 pages of prose.

Test cricket might suggest a mature and complex cabernet that gradually unfolds layers of flavour and texture. One-day cricket, which a Sri Lankan friend of mine once described as being akin to sex without foreplay, might suit itself to the less intellectual but more immediate satisfaction possible from a young sauvignon blanc. Figure out where your preferences lie, and choose accordingly.

Cricket is in large part responsible for what I do for a living. Having worked in Coonawarra throughout 1983, firstly for Lindemans and secondly for Katnook Estate, I received a distress call from Dan Murphy to help out at his Chapel St store in Melbourne over the last few days prior to Christmas. With nothing else on the dance-card, I turned up on a Saturday morning, only to hear from my brother David, who was also working at the store, that somebody was listening to the ABC rather too loudly in the tasting room.

I arrived there to witness the spectacle of the BBC cricket commentator Henry Blofeld of the bespectacled Henry Blofly stand fame loudly and confidently proclaiming the merits of Louis Roederer champagne over the house of Mumm, something with which I entirely agreed. So much, in fact, that it was the work of a moment to introduce myself and sell him four cases of said fizz. It would be delivered to his hotel room, I declared, before the day was out.

All of which proved impossible given the strain on the Dan Murphy delivery system immediately prior to Christmas. But I had made a deal, so I took it myself. So, several hours later, I found myself knocking on Mr Blofeld’s door with rather a fully trolley of Roederer’s finest.

‘Hhmmmmggrrgghh!’ was the initital response I received, to which I responded that I was Jeremy Oliver from Dan Murphy’s and that I was accompanied by a trolley of his favourite champagne. ‘My dear old thing, just a sec’, trilled a significantly more enthusiastic Blofeld, who shortly thereafter opened the door having just pulled on a pair of football shorts and wiped sleep out of his eye.

‘Do come in – that’s provided you’re prepared to open at least two of these to celebrate – and welcome! ‘, whereupon he went to the mini-bar and pulled out another bottle. Trouble was, it was anything but chilled. Blofeld quickly assessed that his mini-bar had been turned off, so onto the house phone he went. ‘It’s Henry Blofeld here’, he said. ‘I’ve just had this dear old friend of mine drop in for a drink only to find that some imbecile has turned off the bar fridge. So my Roederer is as warm as toast and I’m sitting here ticking like a time bomb!’

This prompted a succession of porters to arrive, wondering where they should deposit their buckets of ice. ‘Into the bathtub, if you don’t mind’, said Blofeld, who busied himself by standing up a growing forest of champagne bottles amid the ominously spreading deluge of ice.

Several bottles later, Blofeld showed me some proofs of a book he was shortly to release, a sort of autobiographical depiction of some of the funniest and more extreme aspects of his life called Wine, Women and Wickets, which revealed an unexpectedly dangerous aspect to the vicissitudes of life as a cricket writer. It was illustrated with some first rate cartoons by Rigby, I think. Then, having consumed the better part of three bottles of Roederer, I confess that I lied.

I told Blofeld that I was in fact in the middle of writing a wine book, which was also to be filled with humorous cartoons of an Australian nature. ‘Excellent’, he said. ‘My publisher is in Melbourne on Tuesday and you can show him your manuscript. But if he publishes it, you have to dedicate it to me.’

Having sobered up more quickly than medical science could ever explain, I made my apologies, went home and called my would-be cartoonist, Tim Lindsey, who invented a Bacchanalian koala character that became progressively more debauched and throughout the book. I managed to crib together an introduction and two chapters inside twenty-four hours. Meantime, Blofeld, being already something of a debauched Bacchanalian koala character, thought of the title.

So, about ten months later, Thirst for Knowledge was published and my career as a wine writer was launched. The book was dedicated to Blofeld’s liver and kidneys, three organs of his that even today are still functioning perfectly, however inexplicable that may be. Funnily enough, several years later Blofeld himself wrote a wine column in England, for a magazine called The Oldie.

So, let the wine and cricket continue all summer long. You never know where they might lead you. Please login to post comment