by Graeme Leith
At that time in late 1985 I knew that I desperately needed a break so I gratefully agreed to visit for their vintage in October. Julien was recovered and back at Kingower so I left her holding the twin babies—our infant son Cameron and the vineyard. And I went to France for an unforgettable four weeks.
I caught an aeroplane to France at about the speed of sound, then the TGV Fast Train (Train à Grande Vitesse) across country to Lyon at the incredible speed of 250 kilometres per hour, then a slower train to Dijon, and finally a very slow antique bus to Chagny, where Fernand collected me and took me to Cheilly-lès-Maranges—and an earlier era. Apart from electric wires, vehicles and the occasional glimpse of a sparkling new wine press in an ancient shed behind an ancient wall, we could have been in the eighteenth century. For the picking, done by hand, we sped in the van from small block to smaller block owned by Fernand and Cathy, scattered as they were by Napoleonic decree, which meant that parcels of land continued to be divided among beneficiaries with the death of the father.
I was given a few days’ picking and then put into the winery where they had to add tartaric acid for the first time and, being familiar with the procedure, I was asked to demonstrate. In fact, I was nicknamed le viticulteur Australien. There were winemaking consultants, newly appointed by the government, who would come over to the winery to take samples and make firm recommendations on what should be done, all in the interests of improving the quality of Burgundy, which had fallen to a low standard in some instances.
Apart from winemaking duties I did other jobs such as ferrying the old ladies (Fernand’s mother and aunt) to the cemetery for the fête des morts, Day of the Dead, and taking pots of chrysanthemums to the various graves, or driving into town to collect parcels of food or winemaking equipment.
The first job of my day always involved the use of the little Renault 4, and invariably I would open the door and get in the right-hand side, close the door and find myself looking at the glove box.
‘See le viticulteur Australien, he gets in the passenger door, sits down and closes the door; he then opens the door and gets out. He walks around to the driver’s side, he gets in, he closes the door and he drives off. Why do you think he does this, Jean Paul, is it Australian tradition?’
‘I don’t know, Claude, it seems very strange to me, also!’
Because I lived in the house with the Chevrots, I would leave them to themselves for a while between work and dinner and go to the local bar for a pastis or a beer. A group of locals, clearly suspicious, used to look at me and mutter until they finally elected a spokesman to approach me. They wanted to know, if I was a viticulteur, how I could be in France when vintage was on? Who was looking after my vineyard then, eh?
They thought they had me. I explained as best I could in my schoolboy French about the Southern Hemisphere having the opposite season but they clearly didn’t believe me. However, they must have checked later with somebody because they never baited me again on that score.
But they weren’t yet finished with me, and a few nights later the spokesman approached and asked if it was true that we harvested at night in Australia. I said, yes, sometimes we did. He reported back to his group and they sent him back to ask why. I said it was to preserve the fruit flavour. After animated discussion with his panel he returned triumphant: ‘If you want fruit flavour, why don’t you drink 7-Up?’ He had me there. France 1, Australia 1.
I loved my time in Cheilly-lès-Maranges; it was exciting, energising and educational, and it occasionally dulled the pain of the loss of Ondine. I met characters who will never occur in the next generation. Cathy and Fernand’s sons Pablo and Vincent have a great deal to do with the winery and vineyard now, but I haven’t seen them since they were children. Sebastian and Cameron have both been there, and Cathy and Fernand visited us in Australia a second time, but I’ve yet to return to Burgundy and would love to go again.
Sue joined us all for the last two weeks of my stay. Then she and I drove to Holland where I wanted to meet up with my ex-mother-in-law, Vosje’s mother, Oma, whom I hadn’t seen since she’d stayed with us at Sue’s house about ten years earlier. Oma had found us a nice little place to stay for the night and we were made most welcome at her flat, where a meal, prepared by a girl she had hired for the occasion, awaited us. We reminisced about her time in Melbourne and at Kingower, where she used to sit on a chair in the sun; after a few days she’d be as brown as a berry, a legacy of her father’s Italian blood. It was of course late autumn or early winter in Holland then, the leaves had mostly fallen from the trees and she proudly pointed out that she could see the windows of the palace from her flat and urged us to look, in the hope that we’d see the Queen walking around inside her ‘house’.
Everybody, it seemed to me, ate very well in Burgundy, although often simply. I remember one day Fernand was away and there was just Cathy and me for lunch. The really frantic part of vintage was over—I’d been amazed at the short window of opportunity they have to pick there, between declaring the grapes ripe and the first cold winds blowing in from Switzerland, bringing with them the problems of mildew. We had a leisurely lunch and I was thinking how elegant and complete it was when I realised how simply we had actually eaten. The presentation, the plates, the glassware, had made it seem like a mini banquet. But it was a soup, two cheeses, bread and a small green salad, a taste of chardonnay, a taste of pinot and a coffee—but elegance indeed.
Cathy, taking advantage of Fernand’s absence and wanting to know if there was anything she could learn from me, anything that could improve their winemaking skills, interrogated me as to what I thought they could improve. Hesitantly, I suggested that the gaps between the large concrete fermenters were breeding places for the drosophile, the wine fly, and that they could be sealed with mortar or silicone. Also, I ventured, they could strain the newly fermented wine from the concrete fermenters through a stainless-steel mesh screen instead of a bunch of troublesome vine prunings, les fagots, the traditional method. After further prompting from Cathy, I suggested also that if you were pumping wine and lunchtime snuck up on you, then you didn’t just turn the pump off and go to lunch, but rather finished the job, then cleaned the hose with water. These things were relevant to me, having come from a warm climate, but probably not so important in Burgundy where it’s quite cold at vintage. However, I gained the impression that Fernand would have embraced Cathy’s suggestions if he wanted to continue to enjoy Cathy’s embraces!
I had brought a bottle of my ’81 pinot with me and Fernand had a Brown Brothers and a Balgownie pinot, so a degustation was arranged, to be attended by some local vignerons and a couple of wine merchants, one of whom had brought along a South African wine to add to the mix. All wines were tasted blind and were scored according to tradition, the only difference being we were to put an F or A in front of the wine to indicate our opinion of its nationality. I told Fernand I wouldn’t repeat this story, but twenty years have passed, so . . . All the French tasters considered the Australian wines to be French and vice versa. Also, they rated the Australian wines higher than the French, with the South African one leading the pack! After the wines were unmasked it was a very subdued little group of Burgundians who left the degustation to ponder the wonders and injustices of the world.
Towards the end of vintage, before Cathy and Fernand left for their holiday in Aix-en-Provence, leaving me to deal with the intricacies of cellar door sales, we ate at two restaurants some way from Cheilly, one specialising in steak tartare, of which I was a fan, and another in pork, particularly the offal. I noticed Cathy and Fernand looking expectantly at me as I ate the last sausage. When I’d finished they leaned back, relieved and gleeful. ‘Now,’ said Fernand, his eyes sparkling, ‘now you can say you have eaten every single part of the pig!’ No, I didn’t ask!
As a short aside, I think I got my own back. Some years later, when Cathy and Fernand came to stay with us at Kingower, I played a trick on them, for I felt I owed them for the ‘pig sausage’. It was
their first night and I explained that I had some nets set for the yabbies we were to eat for dinner. I then drove them to a lonely dam in the bush and from the clay-coloured water I retrieved the yabby ‘opera house’ traps, which I had set earlier, and placed their clawing contents in the hessian sugar bag I’d brought along. ‘Would you like a drink?’ I asked my guests and, bemused, they answered yes. I then led them to a little clearing in the scrubby bush and there was a fully set table with a candelabra and a small brass bell upon it, surrounded by four chairs. I rang the bell and some seconds later a man (my employee, John Hopwood) appeared through the scrub dressed in formal waiter’s livery, bearing a silver tray with a printed menu and a notebook. He presented the menu and lit the candles with a flourish while I scanned the menu. ‘I think the Veuve Cliquot.’ He wrote the order down on his pad, bowed and disappeared. Straight-faced, I then expounded on the differences between marron and the Australian yabby until our waiter returned with glasses and the Champagne (for which I had saved) in a silver ice bucket.
I can’t remember exactly when they got the joke but when they did we all had a good laugh and the story has apparently been told many times at Cheilly-lès-Maranges in Burgundy.
After some hard work with the cement mixer—for we poured a new concrete slab with the enthusiastic help of the Chevrots—we holidayed in Tasmania for a few days where the couple learned something about trout-fishing—which they found a little more challenging than yabby catching in the Kingower dam!
But back to my time in Burgundy. The meals the Chevrots’ pickers ate were obviously to a traditional formula. When I first arrived at Cheilly-lès-Maranges there were cages just about bursting with live rabbits, but when Sue and I left only a few breeding pairs remained; the rest had become civet de lapin. We ate all the other traditional Burgundian dishes too—coq au vin, boeuf Bourguignon and salt fish. It was obviously a matter of pride and tradition to ensure that the pickers were provided with the very best. The older women got going with the cooking very early in the morning, and as we assembled in the gloom for work, the aromas of lunch would already be wafting across the courtyard. By about 10.30 a.m. they had big pots simmering, and the women could take a break to have a coffee and chat, or a lie-down.
One day we visited an old friend of the Chevrots, Riton, a giant of a man who every second day would have a two-hour lunch at one of Beaune’s best restaurants, usually with his son—eating his inheritance, as Fernand put it. The day we visited was not a lunch day so Riton showed us around his cellars. Before the German invasion of World War II they had bricked up part of the cellar to hide their treasured old bottles, and when peace was declared in 1945 they had knocked rough doorways into the walls. The bricks were still lying there on the floor; in the event of another occupation they would save considerable time and effort.
On the way around the cellars, tasting and spitting some of his excellent wines, Riton asked me how old I was and other questions about viticulture in Australia. When we returned to his little office he took a large sausage down from a hook, took out some bread from his desk drawer and opened a bottle of wine. We had to play the Burgundian game of guessing the age of the wine and I plumped for 1975.
His face wore a satisfied grin. ‘No, no! This is the year of your birth. This is 1940!’ What a gesture! I felt humbled and privileged in equal parts. The wine was still in excellent condition after all those years—those old Burgundies hang on for a long time, due largely to their high natural acid content.
The Chevrots had another friend, François, who used to help Fernand with various jobs around the winery. He had a little hut in the forest, and a few days later we went there to collect mushrooms. We came back to the hut with our baskets full, and he sorted them in terms of taste, rejecting those that were toxic, then cooked them together slowly in a big cast-iron pot while we sat outside on the grass in the late autumn sun, smelling the magnificent odours, sipping the ubiquitous Aligote, a high-yielding grape that makes a straightforward wine, and eating cheese and bread until they were ready. We had nothing with the meal but bread and a magnum of twenty-year-old red Burgundy—a simple meal to remember forever; that velvety richness and complexity of flavour is indelible in my mind.
Vintages and farewells
In November of 1985 it was back to Kingower to spray the vines, bottle the 1985 whites and prepare for the 1986 vintage—I don’t remember much, but I must have done for I have the bottles to prove it. I know that it was very popular and sold strongly, even though my vines had suffered their first case of downy mildew. This infection occurred because I’d taken the family fishing and stayed away too long, returning to relentless rain and humidity. I spent several days in impotent frustration as the warm rain poured down and the humidity rose—perfect conditions for downy mildew.
Vosje seemed to have settled down a bit; she was still enjoying a drink and would occasionally ring me at the vineyard with some outrageous request: ‘I’ve got a place with an open fire now, do you think you could bring me down a ton of wood from the country?’ or ‘Can you take me out to lunch at that place where you used to take Ondine?’ Sue particularly liked the one that went: ‘I’ve accidentally got some rice stuck in the washing machine. Do you think Graeme could clear it out for me next time he’s in Melbourne?’ From then on, Sue and I referred to spurious and deceptive requests as ‘rice in the washing machines’.
One day I got a call from her phone, but it wasn’t from Vosje, it was from her current boyfriend. Vosje used to like defying traffic and would often cross a street and expect the cars to stop for her, which they always seemed to do. But this day, crossing Fitzroy Street in St Kilda, a driver hadn’t seen her and she was dead. I was very sad she’d died that way, but I was also angry with her for having caused the driver, an innocent man, to suffer for the accident which, for all I know, haunts him still.
For Vosje it was a tragic end to what had become a tragic life. But had the cards been played a little differently by her or by me, it could so easily have been a wonderful life. She tried several times over the years to reignite our love but even if that had been possible, it was never the right time. I was always in love with someone else. More sleep-starved nights lay ahead.
So another phone call had to be made to Holland. In my halting Dutch I had to explain to Oma that her daughter was also dead; probably only someone who has experienced that will know how hard it is. Another funeral had to be organised, another burial, another eulogy written. There’d be no more sparks from Vosje . . .
The year 1987 was a wet year and the wine reflected that—like most wet years, a big crop with poor concentration of fruit and colour. Ironically it is sometimes a fact that you make money from wine from a wet year: people remember the quality of the year before, which was often drier and better, so they buy the new one. They may then find it less than inspiring and don’t buy the next year, which might be terrific if it’s another drier year. This is where wine writers are invaluable, or should be, for they get to do your tasting for you.
In 1987 we made cabernet and shiraz-cabernet blend. There was more cab than I needed for the 60/40 shiraz-cab so it was either change the proportions of the blend or make a straight cabernet sauvignon, and I chose the latter path.
From a marketing point of view it would have been better to change the proportions, but of course I wanted to know what a straight cabernet would be like. As it happened the shiraz had put on more bulk, or less concentration and more water, and the cab sauv was more concentrated so a much better wine; I suspect that I also had left a little H2S in the shiraz.
At that stage I was beginning to get my sense of smell and taste back, and sometimes in the vineyard I realised that I could smell something, so I’d immediately rush to the winery and taste as many barrels as I could before I ran out of smelling capacity. For a few years, after my first encounter with H2S in 1985, Steve Goodwin and Dave Brown kindly came to the winery before bottling time and tasted all the barrels for H2S. I have been lucky w
ith my friends.
The ‘green label’ year was 1987, so 1988 became the red label. It was bigger, more solid, but lacking somehow. I thought later that summer pruning could have been the culprit. I know some of the bottled wine was heat affected; I had run out of storage space and had to take some to Bridgewater, where a friend kindly allowed me to store it in his shed. His son, however, didn’t understand about sunlight into wine, and one day I went to collect some wine and found the sun’s rays shining directly onto several pallets and very little air space left in the bottle.
During 1988 another distressing phone call came. It was from Vosje’s daughter, Abigail. Her father, Rod, had been diagnosed with a brain tumour and was not expected to live. Poor Rod! The best person in his life of course was Abi, and he would have to leave her. Poor Abi! Her sister, Ondine, and her mother, Vosje, gone in awful circumstances, and now her father doomed. Why should this lovely innocent girl’s life become a Gothic tragedy? If there is a God, he has very strange priorities.
I’d set aside some shiraz grapes to make a sparkling red, and had ripened up another patch to the maximum in order to try my hand at vintage port. This is tricky to make, requiring very ripe fruit and the addition of brandy spirit at a certain stage of the fermentation so that enough residual sugar is retained to give the wine its characteristic sweetness. My idea was to make the wine and call it Ondine in memory of her, the base wine being sweetened slightly by the addition of vintage port made by me, her father. The project worked well. When entered in the Victorian Wines Show the next year, the vintage port component achieved the same point score as the Brown Brothers and Stanton and Killeen, and they’d been making vintage port for generations. I was very pleased with myself! When judiciously added to the base wine, the result was indeed pleasing. Sue and I organised some people to help us with attractive packaging and the operation was deemed a success. (Twenty-five years later we have two bottles remaining. The wine will be all right but the corks may not.)