The Real, Honest Truth about Sparkling Burgundy

Sparkling Burgundy is unquestionably the truly unique and indigenous wine of Australia. There’s much said about it today – most of it favourable, much of it monosyllabic and from time to time, some of it intelligible. Most of it is opinion, much is speculative, little is fact. The truth is, however regrettable, that none of us really know very much about sparkling burgundy or how it began.

Some of the explanations concerning the origins of this remarkable wine do very little credit to those giving them, and could even represent an actionable slander towards the wine itself.

For instance, contrary to the views of a certain well-known Melbourne wine retailer whose surname begins with the letter ‘M’, sparkling burgundy is not the result of a clandestine trip to the Barossa Valley in 1873 taken by a colour-blind nephew of Dom Perignon.

Neither, a high-profile Federal politician might be interested to learn, did the first sparkling burgundy begin as a perfume created expressly by Cartier for the Queen of Tonga.

One of our most famous yachtsmen was heard to express the view that sparkling burgundy was brought out from the Americas by Sir Walter Raleigh in the early seventeenth century, while it was once recorded in The Argus that a former Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne claimed to have invented it himself by experimenting with a batch of diocesan altar wine in order to increase the size of Catholic congregations on Sundays.

There may at first glance appear to be sound academic reason behind each of these theories. However, any speculation that sparkling burgundy originated last century at a Hunter Valley winery when the Sheppards tanker ordered in from the Barossa turned out to contain shiraz rather than semillon – and that it began to re-ferment on the trip over – or that sparkling burgundy was in fact developed by Australia’s indigenous peoples as the world’s first morning-after birth control agent, would in fact lead the speculator down a long and expensive path of litigation.

The real, honest truth behind sparkling burgundy is in fact really quite simple.

1861 was not a good year for the truffle-growing community of Great Western, located in the western districts of Victoria, near the bauxite mining centre of Stawell. The rains were good, the truffles were large, pungent and readily marketable, but nobody knew where they were.

Trouble was, the last of the herd of trained truffle-detecting pigs imported from the Perigord region of France had succumbed to the influenza, hay fever and sinus difficulties frequently encountered by this sensitive breed when travelling abroad.

Keenly aware that the invention of penicillin and the twentieth century’s great advances in immuno-system biochemistry were still three generations away, the lad responsible for bovine welfare at Great Western, a certain Hans Q. Irvine, figured that if you couldn’t get the pigs to go to the truffles, you had better make the truffles come to you.

When they set it up, the founders of the Great Western truffle industry had really done their homework. Truffles had to grow under a plant, they knew, and true Perigord swine needed plenty to eat and drink. So they planted rows and rows of the pigs’ favourite delicacy, the shiraz grape, and encouraged the truffles to grow beneath them.

Irvine’s brainwave was to dig miles and miles of underground tunnels beneath the vineyard. His reasoning was brilliantly simple. The truffles would grow at about the same depth as the tunnels, so to get hold of them all you had to do was to pluck them from the walls. You can still visit these tunnels at Great Western today.

Once gathered, the truffles would be preserved in tall glass bottles for storage and sale. The bottles were kept on their sides for around three years before the scents and flavours of the truffles had developed to a suitable standard for export.

As every reader will doubtless recall, 1868 was a heatwave year. Hans figured the only way to protect his herd of ageing swine from the heat, all of which were still uselessly congested with hay-fever anyway, was to lock them inside the tunnels with the truffles.

You can imagine the claustrophobic effect this had on the Perigord pigs. Mayhem broke out, bottles of truffles were shattered in the frenzy and the pigs went quite berserk. Beyond all human control, they broke through a wall and into an area where young Irvine had been keeping some shiraz juice cool as well.

It was a gastronomic orgy on a scale unrepeated until Robert Morley starred in ‘Who’s Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?’. Barrels were shattered and juice went everywhere, intermingling with the pigs, the truffles and the dirt on the floors.

Thinking on his feet, Irvine mopped up and bottled everything that remained. Working day and night, he herded the pigs outside, cleared up the mess and stacked away the remaining bottles and their improbable contents.

Arithmetic was not a strong subject at Great Western and for years nobody even suspected what had occurred.

Five years later, after the truffle industry had been wiped out by trulloxera, the fatal American truffle-disease, Hans Irvine was visited by a strange and mysterious individual from Melbourne – a certain Ebenezer Loftus – a big wheel in marketing and public relations.

Since he didn’t have any truffles left for Loftus to taste, Irvine took a punt and found a bottle of the accidental mixture. It took a while to open, but when it did, the entire room was covered from floor to ceiling in a frothing, foaming, sea of black which seethed out from the bottle like a genie from a lamp.

Loftus was first to taste it, braver by far than the first man to taste the oyster. It was rich, fruity, gamey, aphrodisiac and incredibly different. Five minutes later he and Irvine were in partnership and sparkling burgundy was born.

Since then the property has passed into the hands of Seppelt, who today continue the tradition at Great Western, the spiritual home of sparkling burgundy. And in a strange quirk of fate, the truffles have come back. Ask anyone what’s actually growing on the walls of the drives at Great Western and they’ll tell you it’s just some old fungus.

Pour three bottles of sparkling burgundy into a Seppelt winemaker and he might even tell the truth. It’s truffles. Please login to post comment