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The process of making a reserve wine is quite time consuming and teeth blackening.  Every barrel of wine from the vintage is tasted and ranked for various components that I am after in a wine – some barrels are quite tannic, some are quite aromatic, and others are very fruit forward but all of these components are required to make the best wine possible.  Once all the barrels have been ranked then the blending process begins with all possible combinations of various barrels put together and tasted once more.  After a few hours you locate the combination and this is then pooled and then put back into their marked barrels.  All of this tasting and re-tasting also gives me a window on the oak barrels we use and their effect on the finished wine, as well as guide me on other barrel purchases into the future.

Another job completed during the month was the undervine spraying, and this will make the vineyard look very tidy once all the rows are nicely cleaned.  The shed got a brush out once more as we lock down for winter proper, and I have had a quick run around tidying up some wires and clips etc – it is nearly impossible to be completely up to date when you run a vineyard!

Also this month we have the great honor of starting a relationship with 2 distributors based on the East Coast of Australia.  Vranken-Pommery will represent Blue Poles wines in Melbourne and Sydney, and The Wine Box will represent us in Brisbane – this is great news as it gives me more time to spend in the vineyard and winery to ensure the attention to detail is kept and the wine continues to be of the highest quality.

An indulgence …

For the past week or so I have been a bit ill with the flu – your sympathy is gratefully acknowledged – and normally when I am ill I lie in bed and moan a lot, and this week has been no exception. Apart from putting my pruning schedule out the back by 7-10 days it has given me the opportunity to read a few books that were building up and it also gave rise to a series of thoughts with regards to the similarities of wine to literature.

I have always read a lot, but never considered myself very good at English (in fact did not even take the subject in my last year of secondary schooling), as though I loved the text, I never could use words well to express what I was thinking.  Through university I must have read 1000’s of science journals and reading texts, but my writing skills were still pretty basic.  My poor old Professor, Roger Briggs, who worked with me through my Masters thesis must have just turned sick at the thought of me dropping off another chapter of poor tense and repeated words – I now remember him most fondly perhaps of this capacity to still grin (grimace?), at me even when I walked in with an A4 bundle of type.  When university was all done, off my wife and I went to the world to find work, and with that found, children came early, thus I read very little for 5 years or so until I started working away from home in the outback of Western Australia, and from this exile of mining camps I ignited my love of the well written word.

Drinking fine wine is a contemplative process, what is in the bottle is a whole world of delight wrapped in history, terroir, personality, and process.  By knowing some of these aspects of the wine in front of you, you suddenly have a greater and deeper understanding of the wine and what it represents.  This is so similar to many of the great works of literature, that to rush through them is almost blasphemous. What I would like to do in a totally self indulgent way is to provide a list of authors and relate them to the world of wine by country or region.  I will explain the connections as I go along and if you have read the author or drunk the wine I hope you can enjoy the analogies.

Günter Grass / German Wine:

The whole sweep of north eastern Germany (Polish) history is represented in the writings of the living shaman Günter Grass.  His writings are all distinctly his own as you swear half he has ever written is autobiographical, but then you think which half?  And which half of that half is the truth?  It is confusing but systematic, it is poetic but crisp, it is steeped in history but of the now – this is both the writings of Grass and German wines in a sentence. I am blowed if I can remember all the exact ratings of sweetness for all the various Rieslings, or all the varieties in Germany (why do they call Pinot Noir “Spätburgunder” for example) – but I know that there is a historic rumble within these wines.  Read Grass or drink German wine and understand you are been told a truth, a truth that comes from a deep historic consciousness.

Bruce Chatwin / Champagne:

Many people remember the day a President or musician dies – but with me I still remember the day Chatwin died.  I could not believe it, I had only just finished a few of his books and was in awe as they were some of the best books I had ever read.  And he was dead.  All the subsequent biographies have not dimmed the writings; they are genius through their brevity and insight.  Champagne has that diamond like clarity that Chatwin pared text to – the complexity is “your” reaction to the nuance, the fine bead of slimmed adjectives ensures you do not loll your head around, focus, it is there in front of you, just look!  Both are simply superb and are celebrations of a craft.

Salman Rushdie / Ribera del Duero, Spain:

To discuss Rushdie is to provide ballast to his image – but to read Rushdie is to find that an author’s view of the world sometimes will overtake his imagination and defy debate, it simply, is.  All of Rushdie’s books have in their heart the separation of colonial India into the 3 nations we see today – it was an event that has a black core.  The wines that match such a definitive event are the inky wells of Ribera de Duero where the black grape Tempranillo underpins all of these brilliant wines.  The wines and their wineries are grand gestures of taming an environment and showing the wealth of the idea – and like Rushdie’s penmanship, the gestures are embroidered with a knowledge that one day this region will be one of the most well regarded in the world.

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