Vale, Dr John.

The words ‘legend’, ‘inspiration’ and ‘leader’ are bandied about so much these days they appear to have lost much of their meaning. In reflection, the recent passing of Dr John Middleton – for three decades the heartbeat and self-appointed moral guardian of the Yarra Valley’s wine industry – does much to restore substance to these terms.

After years spent nursing his dear wife, Marli, John finally succumbed to a number of physical complications that grew ever more serious. It says everything about his redoubtable spirit and constitution that it was only a few days prior to his death that anyone really considered his passing a genuine likelihood. My thoughts, along with John’s literally thousands of friends and admirers, extend now to his family, and of course to Marli.

John Middleton was a long-established legend by the time I first met him. As one of the key founders of the Yarra Valley’s modern wine industry if not the key founder, Middleton had already acquired an international reputation for his relentless pursuit of quality, his fastidious attention to detail, and for knocking the wind out of the sails of any young pup wine writer foolish enough to ask him a dumb question.

‘Call yourself a professional?’ he would occasionally challenge me whenever I couldn’t honestly claim to recognise in a wine the 2,4,6-tri-benzo-octo-phenol or whatever it might be that was buzzing around John’s bonnet on any given day. ‘Did any of you ever get any training?’ Honestly, I reckon he began to make up some of these compounds just to get a rise out of the likes of me. It was all part of a complex game that involved equal parts of intellectual pursuit, one-up-manship, humour and ego. I was happy to be taken seriously enough to get a place in the game itself.

It is a classic understatement to suggest that John was a complex personality. Luckily, I mainly got him on his best days, when his enthusiasm for wine and how he was crafting it would bubble and ooze from him with the infectious fervour of a committed prophet. With a whispering voice whose intensity and authority nevertheless bordered on the Episcopal, John would delight in delivering his latest fusion of medical and oenological knowledge, or in mercilessly verbally castrating some industry figurehead or politician whose endeavours failed, as they usually did, to meet with his exacting expectations.

Like most wine writers, I receive thousands of winery emails each year. Some people, like Julian Castagna, expect you to read every word they contain. In reality, they all end up in the circular file because even to flick through them would take up way too much time – except Mount Mary’s. I never once asked John how he wrote his newsletter. Did he wind himself into a frenzy by watching the parliament on TV? Did he down a few extra glasses of an old Mount Mary Quintet although I have never heard of any occasion at which he might have been described as under the weather? Or did he just sit down in front of the typewriter with a few quiet hours to kill, before satisfyingly pinning down his adversaries with assassin-like efficiency?

John would usually leave it until perhaps the fourth sentence for his first shot of invective, and by then it was on for young and old. Taking no prisoners, and treating any politician, industry leader, intellectual, government department and wine critic although he was moderate enough not to mention them by name with uniform contempt and disdain, he somehow contrived to address the majority of important issues facing the global wine industry plus anything else that came to mind in and around the loose context of introducing his loyal band of buyers to Mount Mary’s forthcoming wine release.

It was riveting stuff; never dull, always intelligent and never failing to overlook any technical or political reality that might have weakened his case. John’s intensity, focus and the strength of his self-belief will long remain in the consciousness of everyone who knew him. When you’re around people like this, it doesn’t matter whether or not you agree with everything or indeed anything they say. Like most others who loved him, I just enjoyed the man’s strength and his commitment, and his preparedness to do or die on the strength of his own convictions.

You were either in with John, or you were out. While much of the time I knew him I felt I was ‘in’, it’s a clear fact that at various times throughout our relationship, I was certainly not. Once, while helping me compile an edition of my annual wine guide and entirely unbeknown to me, my brother Antony managed to ring Mount Mary, requesting that they hurry up and send me some samples. ‘Why should I send that b*stard anything?’ bellowed the reply from Dr John. ‘He’s trying to send me broke!’

At the time, I believe, I had rated two of Mount Mary’s wines at ‘2’ ranking, ie the second-top tier possible, with one the Quintet as a ‘1’. Following some disappointing vintages and a phase that John later recognised that he needed to move away from, I had downgraded the Chardonnay to a ‘3’, which still kept it right in a top percentile of all Australian wine. But to suggest that John was merely unhappy with me at the time was not even close to the mark!

We had experienced another such occasion after the release of the 1989 Quintet, a wine that James Halliday was, in my opinion, quite correct to dismiss as under-ripe and ordinary. Until his death, Middleton would hear no evil of this wine, of which he was inordinately proud. The reason? In the circumstances presented to him by the appalling weather of the 1989 season, he felt he had done a most commendable job with the wine, and it should therefore be appreciated for the sterling piece of winemaking that it was. That it wasn’t a particularly good drink, the only real angle an honest critic can follow, escaped him entirely. I can’t honestly say how we managed to patch up that disagreement, because I have always caned the wine.

The American wine writer, Robert Parker, gave Mount Mary the mother of all canings last year. Without going into the reasons why I believe Parker to have been entirely wrong in what he did and how he did it, it was only a matter of time before I heard rumblings from the other side of Lillydale. ‘I’ll sue the b*stard! How can I get hold of him?’ demanded an irate John Middleton over the phone. Eventually I think I helped to cool his heels, firstly reminding him that it was never a good idea to sue a lawyer. It was only when I suggested that genuine admirers of Mount Mary would actually prefer that Parker had bagged his wine that John finally settled down.

At times, I was stunned by John’s brutal appreciation of his own wine. Recently I told him that I had bought some 1990 Quintet for a corporate dinner. ‘Did it show any brett?’ he asked, to my surprise. I hadn’t tasted it for some time prior, but my answer was that it might well have, at very low levels. John then told me that he had seen some of the character in the wine of late. It’s not every day that you hear one of the great winemakers taking a slice off one of their own great vintages.

Arriving to taste wine at Mount Mary was always a slightly nerve-wracking moment. Which Middleton personality would be there to greet you? Once I turned up, as pre-arranged, with a group comprising The Wine Spectator’s Harvey Steiman, vigneron Alec Epis, several key UK buyers and my wife, only to be told point-blank that ‘We don’t do bus tours!’ Having explained the importance of the group to John, and having told him in no uncertain terms that he simply had to stop what he was doing folding copies of his beloved newsletter into envelopes and look after the group, he then proceeded to look after the rest of the group with a modicum of grace, but to treat me as if I didn’t exist. Then, as always, he softened and became his other, generous self and opened bottles of wine left, right and centre. It was vintage Middleton, even to the extent of constantly getting Harvey’s name wrong ‘What do you think about that, Marty?’, which might and might not have been perfectly deliberate. Not unsurprisingly, Mount Mary did not rate a mention in Steiman’s feature on Australian wine in The Wine Spectator, not that I imagine John gave a fig one way or another.

John did give a fig about the future of Australian wine, and was most optimistic about the quality of young people entering it. He loved being surrounded by young and intelligent academic types, especially if they were interested in science. While I’m certain he would have tried to shape their opinions to some degree – an inevitability if ever there was one – he greatly enjoyed the presence of their intellectual energy and enthusiasm for knowledge. He never stopped reading and learning, and looked for this trait in others. For these and other reasons, he couldn’t be happier with Mount Mary’s present winery and vineyard teams, headed by Rob Hall and Jamie McGlade.

John Middleton’s legacy will be an ongoing one. In the people he has taught, inspired and influenced; in the lives that he has changed. In the great wines he made, many of which will live for many years to come. He leaves virtually three decades of excellence. I recently tasted 1977 vintage of Cabernets – a wine utterly true to the modern Mount Mary style – and a wine that event at its age still has plenty of time ahead of it.

It’s a human trait for us to dismiss as a dinosaur those of us who live long enough and speak loudly enough to remind us of the values and qualities of previous times, yet for all his outspoken bluster, John was certainly no dinosaur. His strength of character, his commitment to quality and integrity and the sharpness of his vision were as relevant today as at any time. He was a visionary – he had to be to help re-establish the Yarra Valley – and he was a man of our times.

John was a modern individual who recognised the role of science in the art of winemaking as acutely as anyone I have met. He always made the point that Mount Mary’s vineyard was a random ‘selection massale’ of clones, but that didn’t stop him along with another few young and dedicated souls from identifying all the best vines and replacing the inferior ones with the better stock. This is a modern approach, yet he remained too old-fashioned to find out what the best clones were! At least, that’s what he let on.

Countless winemakers all over Australia have been profoundly affected by the elegance and understatement of Mount Mary wine. I have met dozens of them who list John as one of their cornerstone influences in winemaking. His spirit will live on through them.

John constantly decried the use of secondary fermentation in Australian chardonnay on the basis that our wines didn’t need the de-acidification, and that its butterscotch-like side-effects would excessively dominate fruit character. Twenty years after he began pounding this message, Australian winemakers are significantly reducing the level of secondary fermentation influence in chardonnay. Clearly, his influence will live on, probably in ways we are yet to realise.

Aside from their given quality, there are several intangibles that Mount Mary’s wine has always sought to achieve. John appreciated subtlety and complexity. His wines demanded patience. They had a sense of classical style, but also a sense of their own place, their own origins. In every way, they reflected integrity, and a willingness to take the good with the bad. Today, Australian wine at large is seeking to adopt and promote these very attributes.

In recent years, John spent a great deal of money on Mount Mary’s vineyard and its winery. The cellars are no postcard, but are now equipped with large, airy spaces where wine can be nurtured in the spotlessly clean fashion he always wanted. This was a major undertaking for a man so late into his working life, but I now see clearly that he wanted to leave Mount Mary in top working order.

On several occasions, I have spoken to John about his succession plan for Mount Mary. For a long time, John found it difficult to foresee a clear pathway that involved his own family, in the particular way he wanted. To an outsider like me, it seemed genuinely possible that the business and the property would ultimately be offered to the highest bidder, a fate that John was desperate to avoid. However, the past two years have seen increasingly important management role played by his veterinarian son, David, who has now taken John’s place at the helm. Additionally, one grandson, Nick Coulthard, has been actively involved in its operations for thirteen years, while another, Sam Middleton, is presently studying wine science at Wagga.

So, much to John’s delight, Mount Mary remains under the control of his family and has a strong, clear path ahead through the generations. It’s a huge relief for those who know and love the place to see it left as John always hoped for, and it should comfort his many friends and admirers that he departed this world with that full and clear knowledge.

In a few months, Mount Mary will release its 2004 reds and 2005 whites, wines that John had much to do with. Having tasted them, I am happy to admit that they speak much more eloquently on the subject of their maker and inspiration than do I.

I was very lucky to know John Middleton. I now wish that I had made more of the opportunity to know him better. Please login to post comment