by Graeme Leith
First published in 2015
Copyright © Graeme Leith 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.allenandunwin.com
Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia
www.trove.nla.gov.au
ISBN 978 1 76011 120 5
eISBN 978 1 92526 632 0
Typeset by Post Pre-press Group, Australia
Contents
Introduction
1 A vintner’s boyhood
Grape juice in a goat skin
Born in an earlier age
Some memories of my father
Warrandyte Flip
The art of selling newspapers
2 Rev heads
Victory enow for me
I become a tradesman
Old cars, fast bikes and good mates
Shooting for England
Beloved Alvis
3 England and Italy
Castel Felice, the Castle of Happiness
On the payroll in London
Landladies
Turning twenty-one!
Compromise or cowardice?
Riding to Italy
From Preston to Perugia
An ethereal wine
Joining up with Vosje
4 Return to Australia
The Little Fox hits Melbourne
Retreat to Tasmania
Bass Strait deckhand
Bloody workplace
Carlton Dark and meeting Sue Mackinnon
5 The vision splendid
‘Coming out’ in ’73
The lie of the land
The Kingower project begins
A simple blend
Marking out, planting, weeding
How easily things grew then
The birth of Passing Clouds
6 Living life to the lees
Acquiring ancient skills
Creative pursuits
Family relations
Our first vintage—Easter 1980
Birth of the tasting room
The ‘boutique bubble’
Rats in the rafters
Denouement of the dunny
Triumph
Another ending, another beginning
7 Ondine, my daughter
8 Life goes on
The climb back from Hell
Good friends and loyal helpers
Le viticulteur Australien
Vintages and farewells
Angel Blend
Daylesford and domestic changes
9 Musk and more
A sprig of cherry blossom
Good times, hard times
New vineyard at Musk
Bed and breakfast
Expanding production
The perils of pinot
A changing of the guard
Mohammed to the mountain
Family matters
Why do we do it?
10 Making wine
Vintage
Our friends, the fermenters
From berry to bottle
Corks—Portuguese roulette!
Bottles and labels
Pitfalls and pleasures
What the critics are saying
Kingower Vintage 2004: Diary of a typical year
Musk Vintage 2013: Diary of an exceptional year
Winery dogs
Glossary of terms
INTRODUCTION
When I started writing this book, my intention had been to recount my forty-year involvement in the business of making wine, and the knowledge I had accumulated as a grower, maker and seller of wine. This, I hope, has been realised.
However, as my recollections began taking shape for the book, I became aware that so closely aligned were my experiences of life with those of winemaking, it was becoming increasingly difficult to separate the two. In fact, as I proceeded with the memoir, I discovered that there were not two strands of experience at all, but experiences so inextricably entwined that the business and the personal were actually one. So simple, really, and so obvious, when the penny drops.
Confirming my rethinking of the book’s shape and purpose, various friends who read early drafts would frequently want to know more about my other experiences: for instance, what drew me to owning a vineyard in the first place, and what my relationships were with the family and friends, the loves and acquaintances, the kindred (and un-kindred) spirits, the neighbours and strangers, who have populated my seventy-three years of life.
And so the memoir grew to accommodate some of the people, occasions, events and highlights—both catastrophic and joyful—of my life before and during the wine days, which continue on.
Eldest son Sebastian is not involved in the winery but enjoys good wine so we often share a glass together when we meet. Nowadays my second son Cameron is Passing Clouds’ winemaker, and my third and youngest son Jesse handles sales and cellar door. However, we needed a Superwoman to keep things running smoothly and we found one, a mother of three who owns a property not all that far from our vineyard and winery. Her name is Andrea Brabham and she works with us part-time, doing the books, sharing cellar door sales duties and doing many things that Sue Mackinnon, my then partner, used to do at Kingower—that is, things that the boys can’t or won’t do, and she does those things calmly and gracefully. There are other various good people contributing to the end result, and my own enthusiasm remains undiminished—the old stock horse still snuffing the battle with delight! We all work together, and I expect to be part of the team until I am removed by whatever it is that the gods have in store for me.
Until then I will look forward to each new vintage with a sense of excitement and the anticipation of another new wine to taste, to savour, to drink, to enjoy, to talk about, and to share with friends—the best thing one can do with a bottle of wine!
Graeme Leith
1
A vintner’s boyhood
Grape juice in a goat skin
I don’t know exactly when the winemaking bug bit me. I think it was in 1961, in Perugia in Italy where I was doing a three-month course in Italian language. However, I had shown some interest in the fermentation process at a much earlier age when, in contravention of the teachings of the church to which I belonged, I claimed that the wine Jesus drank must have been alcoholic wine and not the preserved grape juice given out at communion at our church.
My proposition was that without the use of preservatives any grape juice bunged into a goat skin was inevitably going to turn into wine. This idea was not supported by my Sunday School teacher who sent me home, after the collection plate had been passed around, to explain my transgression to my teetotal mother.
This teacher had sent me home on a previous occasion when I asked him who had made God. He replied (rather ingenuously, I thought) with a question: ‘What came first, the chicken or the egg?’
I had replied: ‘That’s easy. The chicken, because the book of Genesis tells us that the Lord made the fowls to fly and the fish to swim.’
/> So I suppose it’s not surprising that I grew up to become an atheistic, wine-drinking smartarse.
Years later, when I had concluded that God had not made man in his own image, but rather that man had made God in his own image, I would presumably have got myself into more trouble, but I’d ceased going to Sunday School by then.
How it was, though, that I presumed that the desert tribes had not learned from the Romans that the addition of elemental sulphur to grape juice could delay or prevent fermentation, I have no idea. For although I’d read quite a lot of the Bible, I had not read any treatises on winemaking and would have been unlikely to find any in our Presbyterian home.
At any rate, our mother was of that church, although to my recollection she never attended. Our father, if he had any religion, never spoke of it. But there was never any alcoholic beverage in the house and I never spoke to him about it as he died of a work-related lung cancer in 1953, at the age of forty-three, when I, aged thirteen, was too young to have heart-to-heart chats with him. But my brother Robin had heard stories of very old whisky bottles being dug up in the vegetable garden, so maybe there had been some excessive drinking in a previous generation of which Dad was aware.
As children, we were opposed to the consumption of alcohol, and if reason needed to be found for that opposition then one had to go no further than the local hotel at six o’clock on a Saturday afternoon and observe the rowdy, drunken, beer-swilling, urinating and occasionally vomiting mess of patrons as they poured as much as possible into themselves before they were kicked out at ten past. Once, emboldened by their apparent inability to pursue us, we gave cheek to some of them from the doorway, and when they came after us, threw wheat on the floor to make them slip, but it was a close shave and we never did it again.
Born in an earlier age
My father’s family had come from Scotland and at some stage must have possessed some style and money because once, in a locked storage shed in the backyard among the framed photographs of deceased relatives and the musty mounted antlers of long-dead deer, we found trunks filled with fine and elegant female apparel. There were dresses in silk and satin, silk-covered shoes and silken scarves, much of which was eagerly seized by one of the sons of my parents’ visitors. The rest of us boys, destined for a life of heterosexuality, left him to his dressing up and used the silk parasols we had found as parachutes to assist us in landing as we jumped from the shed roof, to the detriment of the parasols and—when our whoops of delight attracted the attention of the elders at the house—ourselves.
I doubt that it ever occurred to us that those gorgeous clothes probably belonged to the wizened old creature slowly dying in the front room—my father’s mother, cared for by our mother whose destiny it was to look after five children and a succession of dying family members, her end reward to be a shared ward in a mental institution when dementia prematurely overcame her in her late sixties. She’d given birth to five children—Ian, Graeme (me), Robin and Carolyn in fairly rapid succession then, after a spell of a few years, Gregory. Four boys and one girl—poor Carolyn!
My father’s business had been motor body repairs, panel-beating and spray-painting. It was the spray-painting that got him in the end because ‘real men’ didn’t wear protective masks in those days. I clearly remember a mask hanging on a hook above the paint bench, unused over the years, and enveloped in the same crusted patina of paint that ended up killing our dad from the inside.
My father had been born in an earlier age—for him, a time of roaring flaming forges, of bellows and coke, of red-hot horseshoes and the blows of the mighty sledgehammer as it tamed the once adamantine but now malleable metal upon the anvil, for, as a boy, he had been a blacksmith. In later life, one of his greatest joys was to fire up the forge and, with the aid of the tongs, the hammer and the hissing cauldron of water, turn raw pieces of iron into useful things.
During his apprenticeship to his father, Dad had learned coach-building at Melbourne Technical College, a course that embraced blacksmithing, wheelwrighting, woodwork, marbling and graining, signwriting, upholstering and even the application of gold leaf. Thus he could build you a coach and adorn it, for that was the family’s work. As their letterhead proclaimed, they were J.B. Leith and Sons, Coachbuilders, located at 231 High Street in Preston, an outer northern suburb of Melbourne.
The next iterations of the letterhead saw the business as ‘motor body builders’, and later, ‘panel beaters and spray painters’. And so the intricate web of pulleys and belts in the rafters above the workshop that drove all the machines below that sawed and stitched, and even the mighty forge, fell mostly into quietude, replaced with the throbbing of the compressor, the banging of the hammers against the metal dollies, and the hiss of the spray guns that were to take our father’s life.
Dad had been raised in the old and substantial house over the road from the forge and workshops. The area around Preston was mostly given over to small farms at that time and one of his after-school jobs was to ride any horse that had been left for shoeing back to the farm to which it belonged, and he would then hike home across the paddocks.
My mother had come from her family home in Geelong to Melbourne where, as a seamstress, she reached the pinnacle of her working career, securing the dream job of making costumes for His Majesty’s Theatre. As a teenager she had excelled at gymnastics—there were more of her trophies for gymnastics in the crystal cabinet than there were of Dad’s for cricket. (In fact, Dad only had one that I recall, which I now have—a silver teapot presented to S.J. Leith, Best Fieldsman 1944. As a twelve-year-old I teased him about it, cynically suggesting that he mustn’t have been much good at batting and bowling.)
Mum was an attractive woman, with a lovely face, a good figure and cornflower blue eyes. I had an old photograph of her in her gymslip, which I carried with me in my wallet during my European peregrinations. She and Dad had met at a dance at the Northcote Town Hall. Dad told me that he and his mates would often walk home from Northcote to Preston, having overspent buying milkshakes and chocolates for the girls and lacking the fare for the cable car.
Some memories of my father
My memories of my father are sparse but fond. He loved angling but never had much time to indulge that passion due to the demands of a young family and a small business.
But I have one joyous memory of this. We had driven to a not-too-distant stream, the King Parrot Creek at Flowerdale, about 15 miles north-east of Melbourne. An uncle was included in the trip and he and Dad had contrived to allow Dad to precede us upstream, so that we could unload and erect the tent and not tear ahead of him and frighten the fish as young boys inevitably do. When our onerous task was completed, we raced upstream to the pool where Dad was fishing and above the streamside shrubbery could see the beautiful glistening arc of the split cane rod as it bucked to the weight of a trout. As we approached closer we could see the trout in the clear water, its speckled form wondrously camouflaged above the pebbled creek bed, almost exhausted now. My father’s face had a look of unforgettable rapture—a look I never saw before or have ever seen again on the face of any man. It will stay in my memory forever.
Sometimes we would go rabbit shooting, too. Our family had a car but in my early years petrol was rationed and the ‘gas producers’, which were bolted onto the back of the car and burned charcoal to produce gas that was then fed into the carburettor, were ingenious, although not very efficient. Two or three times we took the ‘milk train’ up to Whittlesea in the early mornings and walked around the paddock of a friendly farmer, having a few shots and bagging a few bunnies for the table at home where they were known as ‘underground mutton’.
The train line was decommissioned in the 1950s and the track torn up in the 1970s; now they’re re-laying it and putting the stations back. Back then, no doubt, somebody, or somebody’s brother-in-law, made some money from the scrap metal.
Some time after our father’s death, one of his mates told me a strange story, probably because h
e saw it as being to Dad’s credit. He and Dad were shooting rabbits one day and as they crested a hill they came upon a strange and disturbing tableau. Two men were laughing at the antics of a rabbit that was running around in circles, clearly distressed and half mad, for it had been skinned alive and was released for the entertainment of these sadists. Dad established which one of them had done it and, with his strong blacksmith’s arms, removed the man’s weapon and broke it against the nearest tree. He then ordered the man to strip himself naked and run after the rabbit until he caught it and put it out of its misery. My father was redheaded and had the temper to go with it; his temper must have been fiery hot that day in the sunburned sheep paddocks of Whittlesea.
Dad himself related a story to me once, concerning his early school days during the Depression when there were plenty of men ‘on the wallaby’ (on the road) with swag on back in the hope of finding work. Some of the school bullies had decided to torment Dad because of his red hair and were pursuing him through the bush, throwing sticks and stones at him. Suddenly, before him, the dishevelled figure of a swagman arose from the leaves and bark beside the track and seized him by the shoulders, halting him abruptly and causing his tormentors to turn tail and disappear back into the bush. ‘Why are you running away, son?’
‘Aw, well, sometimes they decide to tease me ’cos I’ve got red hair.’
The swagman drew himself up to his full unkempt height and thrust out his chest beneath his tattered shirt. ‘Well, boy, when I was your age I had red hair, and look at me now!’
I often pondered that simple story in bed at night, speaking as it does not only of intolerance and discrimination, but also of poverty, of dignity in adversity, of compassion, all wrapped in a glorious envelope of absurdity.
Warrandyte Flip
The suburbs of my boyhood in the early 1950s—at any rate, Preston, the one we lived in—were little hotbeds of religious intolerance, with the Protestants hating the Catholics and vice versa, the enmities doubtless remnants of the English–Irish disagreements from the old countries. Any encounter between the warring parties of boys was an excuse for verbal abuse at best and, at worst, physical confrontation.