by Graeme Leith
Thus I stayed at Kingower, working for the whole vintage, going to Musk only to net the vineyard and repair and maintain it as necessary, which was a continual burden. But grapes came thick and fast at Kingower; the quality was good, we had a good team, and we went for it. Who knew, we thought we might even turn a profit down the track in 2006 when the wine—after its one year in barrel and one year in bottle—was ready to sell.
That vintage we were to make sauvignon blanc from Zonnebeke and pinot grigio from Franklinford, as well as chardonnay from Wedderburn and our own vineyard. All these batches had to be fermented separately, all picked and crushed at the appropriate ripeness which, being dependent on the weather, was a matter of speculation. Sometimes rain would dilute the juice in the berries, particularly with pinot and chardonnay, which have a shallower root system than shiraz and cabernet, and at Kingower were showing more stress than the other varieties. Phil and Ann at Zonnebeke had some water available from their very large dam; it was beginning to lower now, but there was enough to keep the vines healthy, for they are planted on heavy granitic sand and need water. The Axedale fruit is also lightly irrigated and dedicated people, Brian and Sally, with whom we have cooperated for some years, keep the vines in perfect condition. They had some testing times when the drought broke in 2011 and some of their vineyard was swept away in the ensuing flood. They didn’t need any irrigation that year!
A changing of the guard
In the years 2007–08 my ageing body was showing signs of deterioration; my knees had to be replaced with titanium ones, and various other bits and pieces needed repair. So it was decided that I should attend to these things and that my second son Cameron who, perhaps to his surprise, had caught the winemaking bug, would take a significant winemaking role. He was accepted into the Melbourne University oenology course at the Dookie Campus and showed an enthusiasm for learning that had been largely absent during his days at Ballarat Grammar School. Thus Passing Clouds was to continue and I was to pass the baton.
Tess Graham, the daughter of Geoff and Jan up the road a bit, was keen to work in the winery. Over the years she had been picking grapes on her family’s vineyard for us, and had been a member of the (nearly) All-Girl After-School Pinot Noir Foot-Stomping Team. Tess was employed in the winery, and so another Leith male with a female assistant became the Passing Clouds winemaking duo.
I was fortunate enough to be cared for by my friend Jane Buck—she who had married my old mate Michael in England all those years ago. I lived with her at her house in Castlemaine, more or less between Musk and Kingower. So as well as having a friend in need and an expanded group of friends in Castlemaine, I could work at either place after the various recuperations.
Most of the work at Musk involved the tractor, so that when I was able to climb aboard the faithful Ferguson it wasn’t too onerous, although attaching the various implements was often challenging. Cam and Tessa were going great guns with the winemaking at Kingower and I was only an hour’s drive or a phone call away when I was occasionally required for advice or help. So we muddled along pretty well, the wines showing the traditional and desirable Passing Clouds characteristics.
As Sue Mackinnon’s house was only 100 metres or so from the winery, we winery people were always toing and froing from there, and Cameron was learning more and more from Sue about the running of the business, for she did much of that from her home ‘headquarters’. Sue’s muscular condition had been declining over the years and she had taken to using an electric tricycle to get about. She would occasionally come over to the winery on her trike to be part of the winemaking. She loved being there and we always treated her like royalty.
This trike was becoming more complicated as Sue aged and her muscular atrophy insidiously stole her physical capacity. So that was another thing Cameron had to learn—Zen and the art of electric tricycle maintenance, which was becoming more demanding as time went by. The tricycle had been added to and modified to such an extent that it was like a sort of agricultural Ferrari, capable of great things but as temperamental as anything. If it wouldn’t go up or down or sideways or backwards or forwards, then Cameron or I had to be summoned from the winery, or else Ray Smith, an electronics whiz from down the road. Sue referred to we three assistants collectively as the Dodgy Brothers. We lived in dread of the phone call to tell us that the trike was misbehaving and prayed that we could fix it, particularly if Sue was on it at the time, giving panicked and generally unhelpful suggestions. Launch time at Cape Canaveral was probably less stressful.
We had engaged the services of a bookkeeper, Jeanette, to help Sue with the increasingly onerous and time-consuming work attached to the previously simple business of running a small winery, now mired in bureaucratic complexity. Sue was having trouble in more ways than one, and had her sister Jill not been there, sharing the house and helping her, things would have been grim, indeed.
I wondered if anything more sinister was lurking because she seemed to be losing weight and seemed distracted at times. I worried that she might be starving herself, so I went to see our friend Max, Sue’s doctor, on some pretext and while there conveyed my fears to him. He didn’t tell me what was wrong with Sue, but I left the surgery with the conviction that Sue had cancer. Our mutual friend and neighbour, Robin Hardiman, was soon to be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and in fact was to predecease Sue, but hers was terminal also. Her life had run its course—there would be another eulogy to write.
The disease overcame Sue quickly, so that when death came it was a blessed relief. She died in peace, without her wonderful mind being obscured by the darkness of dementia, or her body racked with untreated pain. On the night before she died, our dear friend Karen Sloan (née Gilmore) and I sat on her bed and talked with her for a long time. Due to her painkilling medication Sue was not completely rational, and it seemed to Karen and me that she was unnecessarily distressed about something. It was as if she had some secret that she could not divulge, some fact that tormented her and wouldn’t let her go. As gently as we could we tried repeatedly to make her see that whatever it was didn’t matter, that she should forget it and escape the torment.
I said my goodbye to Sue, and as I left Karen took my hand. ‘You just told her that it was all right to die now, didn’t you, Poon?’ I hadn’t realised that I was doing that. Karen waited there with Sue for Jill, who’d been out visiting. At 3 a.m. Jill heard her dog Ridley howl and in the morning when she went to Sue’s room, her soul had departed. She is buried in the Kingower cemetery next to her old friends John Sendy and Robin Hardiman, a stone’s throw from where lie the ashes of Ondine and David, and of Vosje and Vosje’s mother, who had requested her ashes be flown to Australia and buried beside those of her daughter and granddaughter.
An old friend of Sue’s wrote to her on 10 April 2009, nineteen days before she died:
It looks like farewell to an exemplar of courage for a great spread of friends (R.H. is going to beat you to the exit though!). How well I remember your amazing, searching eyes, and the beauty that has not left your face—for a magnitude of years of physical distress never did erase it. Thank you for all the caring and witty friendship over the years. We are losing a unique and treasured spirit. I hope that that Sweet Sister Morphine lays a cool, cool hand on you (as the Stones once sang). Goodbye, dear person, Roger Dunn.
Mohammed to the mountain
Meanwhile, in the years leading up to 2010, the drought was tightening its relentless grip on the Kingower vineyard and those of our neighbours. It seemed to be approaching the severity of the Federation drought, which lasted ten years, breaking in 1908, and I was reminded of the theory held by my late brother, the scientist Ian, that there was a seven-year cycle of drought in Australia and that seven times that cycle had produced a much worse forty-nine-year drought.
I thought back to my childhood, rabbit shooting with Dad more than fifty years before in the drought-stricken paddocks near Daylesford, where there seemed to be nothing but dust and rabbits. I had r
ead, also, of the breaking of that Federation drought when, after ten years of declining rainfall, there were ten days of intense heat followed by flooding rains of such magnitude that dams burst and the watersheds of the Campaspe and Loddon river systems were joined, something that was to be virtually repeated in 2011.
Ten years previously Sue and I had had a bore put down at Kingower in the hope of drought-proofing ourselves, but the resultant water, although clear and tasting good to our optimistic palates, proved too saline to be risked on vines. However, in desperation we flooded the vineyard with our bore water in 2004; although this initially seemed successful, later the burning of the leaf tips from salt established that we could not continue with this regime, so we kept hoping for rain. The vines at Kingower were deteriorating, trunks were splitting and the Eutypa disease, which atrophies the leaves and canes, was encroaching on our vineyard and on that of our neighbours at Blanche Barkly.
Cameron and I began to toy with the idea of abandoning the Kingower winery and moving the winemaking operations to Musk, a bold and challenging prospect indeed, but one that had to be addressed if we were to continue running the business. It was unlikely that Cameron could continue to live at Kingower with his girl in Melbourne, and unlikely that I could maintain the winemaking and run the business at Kingower.
So we decided to take Mohammed to the mountain, to build another winery shed at Musk and move everything there. Much money and sixteen semitrailer loads later it was done, me avoiding most of the hassle of the actual moving by going to Bali for a month on the pretence of recovering from my final knee operation. The work was left to Cameron, Bill Ricardo and the unstoppable truckie ‘Jungle Jim’ Poynton, who as a youth years before had, at the Rheola Hall, uttered Hanrahan’s immortal words, ‘We’ll all be rooned.’
But there were black clouds on the horizon, too. For many sleep-starved nights, worrying about (among other things) the disintegration of my family and the loss of my beloved Daylesford family house had a few years earlier begun to manifest themselves as the early stages of chronic depression. Some dark years followed but I managed to crawl slowly from my pit of despair and rejoin Cameron at work. I had not been completely idle in those depressed times and was still doing some winery work, and together we did some extensive building modifications to the Kingower house, a couple of times with Jesse working alongside us.
I had, for years, wanted to make some modifications to the house, putting in some French doors and changing a few doorways, but it was going to be challenging as the walls of the original were rammed earth, not an easy material to work with, and more than half a metre thick. Then one night something happened which stirred me into action.
For some weeks the pressure pump had been turning itself on at times when no water was being used. It seemed that water was escaping somewhere but no trace of a leak could be found. It was all very mysterious. On the night in question I’d had friends over for dinner. It had been a late night and I was sleeping soundly when I was rudely awoken by a sound, as if someone had tipped a gigantic wheelbarrow filled with earth and rocks through the door. Alarmed and frightened, I reached for the bedside lamp and in its light observed that the bedroom wall had turned largely to mud—and collapsed! My boots were floating in it! I turned the light off, rolled over and went back to sleep, relieved. Now I knew where the leak was.
In the morning I rang Cameron to let him know that we had another building project coming up, and asked Pete the plumber for a quote on replumbing the whole house, and started measuring up the new doorways.
The idea of my retirement vineyard at Musk had always embraced the idea of a cellar door and maybe a small cafe, so we set to after the winery was established. The first addition was a cellar door facility designed by my old friend and architect Simon Reed, and built by Simon the builder.
Simon Reed was always something of a jackdaw and knew where there were some doors available from a demolition site, doors that we would find useful for our new winery, so we took my white ute to Melbourne to collect them. We were halfway home with our load of doors on the tray when I stopped for petrol at Woodend. Simon offered to drive, as he liked driving utes and I could get on with some work on the laptop. Twenty minutes later something made me look up to see Simon asleep at the wheel and one of the largest eucalypts in the world looming up at 90 kilometres per hour. I managed to wrench the steering wheel to the right, missing the gum tree but not by much—the passenger side mirror exploded as we grazed it. Simon was apparently under medication for a heart condition and the medication, I later found, sometimes made him sleepy in the afternoons. The heart condition tragically killed him in January 2013. Had we hit the tree, the 250 kilograms of doors on the ute’s tray behind us would have sliced us both in half. Perhaps the Angel had tapped me on the shoulder.
When I got home to Jane’s place that night, I said, ‘You almost saw me on television tonight.’
She asked, ‘Was it some winemaking do?’
‘No, nothing as glamorous as that.’
Family matters
As someone once said: ‘Family is not an important thing. It’s everything.’ I know how true this is, as I am blessed with three fine sons. As I wrote earlier, the close bond I have with my eldest son, Sebastian, and with my two younger sons, Cameron and Jesse, means everything to me and now, with three grandchildren, my cup overfloweth.
We have many things in common, including a shared passion for the sport of fly-fishing for trout. I have fished with all my sons, but only once have we joined forces in a family fly-fishing expedition. A few years ago we all managed to get together and take our four-wheel drives to the Tasmanian Central Highlands, driving in on the perilous track to the remote Pillans and Julian lakes, high up in the Great Western Tiers, where we set up our base camp. Cameron, Sebastian and his partner Tania, and our friends Rod Whiteway and his daughter Tania, headed off with their packs and hike tents to explore and fish some of the remote back-country lakes, leaving Jesse and me to fish the waters near our base camp.
At one point Jesse spotted a huge trout and expertly fished for it. It took the fly and Jesse lifted the rod, but a little too powerfully, and the trout headed off like a torpedo with the fly in its jaw but now disconnected from the line. Had Jess landed that fish I think he would have become as dedicated as the rest of us, but it was ‘the one that got away’. Instead he has recently purchased a motorcycle and gets his thrills riding it through the winding roads around Daylesford.
Sebastian, now aged forty-nine, lives with his partner Tania in Footscray, in Melbourne. Seb is not involved in the wine business, having made his career in agricultural chemicals and fertilisers. He and Tania have given me two beautiful and lively grandchildren, Mackenzie (six) and Ella (four), who love their ‘Grandpa Beard’ and delight in playing word games and ball games with him. I usually see the family when I am in Melbourne (last time we went to the zoo), and it’s good when the family visits Musk or Kingower. Mackenzie bears the same name as a creek in the Grampians where Seb and I sometimes fished for trout. I cherish a photograph of a young Ondine and Sebastian standing in front of the MacKenzie Falls.
At twenty-eight years, Cameron is now the winemaker, and Passing Clouds is in good hands. Under him, this year’s 2013 vintage is a triumph. The Musk vineyard is now fully mature after fifteen years. We have refined our vineyard management practices for this site, and we’ve enjoyed a good warm season. Cam has honed his pinot noir-making skills over the last few years and it’s a pleasure to watch him and the winery crew put them into practice. Perhaps my greatest satisfaction is to taste the wines he has made and discuss their development with him. Cam and his wife Marion live at Hepburn Springs, not far from the Musk vineyard and winery. As I write, Cameron and Marion are expecting their first child—a third grandchild for me to love and the start of a life of parenthood for them.
My youngest son Jesse is working with me and Cameron at Passing Clouds now, running the sales and cellar door, a job at which he exce
ls, for he sells wine to satisfied customers. When people leave that cellar door they are likely to know more about wine—certainly more about the wine they have purchased—than they did when they entered. Jesse, aged twenty-three, now lives at the old family house overlooking the lake at Daylesford, renting from his mother, my ex-wife Julien, who now owns it. I have been introduced to some lovely young girls by Jesse over the years and am the better for it!
So that’s a snapshot of my immediate family as of the year 2013. Our futures promise to be just as diverse and interesting. I’ll probably sell the Kingower property and build a house at Musk to be closer to the action.
Why do we do it?
The cellar door at Musk is working well, so well in fact that now, at the time of writing, in the winter of 2013, we’ve sold out of chardonnay and pinot noir and have taken a small crusher to Coldstream and taken advantage once again of those wonderful McKernan grapes. We’ll probably release them mid-2014 while we leave our cooler climate pinots and chardonnays to rest a little longer in the bottle.
Our traditional full-bodied reds are still being made to the old tried and trusted formulas: 60 per cent shiraz and 40 per cent cabernet for the Graeme’s Blend, matured mainly in American oak; 90 per cent cabernet for the Angel Blend with the addition of 5 per cent each of merlot and cab franc, matured in French oak; and the Reserve Shiraz, made from riper fruit and matured in a mix of barrels—French from different forests, or fine-grained water-bent selected American barrels. All expensive, but to make the best wine possible the best ingredients and components must be used.
Several of our traditional growers were, like us at Kingower, experiencing difficulty getting large enough quantities of perfectly ripened fruit so we have been taking increasingly large parcels of fruit, microscopic in the overall scheme of Australian viticulture, from Zonnebeke at Rheola, from Axedale near Bendigo and, more recently, from the Turner’s Crossing vineyard at nearby Serpentine, the cabernet from there showing the characters we require for the Angel Blend. Thus the adventure continues—our big reds live on, as does the name of Passing Clouds.