Thirty Thousand Bottles of Wine and a Pig Called Helga

by Todd Alexander

  ‘I reckon you need to leave the trap in longer. A few hours at least.’

  ‘Oh, that’s what you reckon, is it?’ Vicky resisted anyone else’s input.

  Later that day as the sun went down, Vicky and I took a beer and went to check the nets. We were miffed that Charlie and Lucy had lost all interest in what had become the greatest challenge of the twenty-first century. And don’t you know, she’d bloody well gone and caught some. Not just any yabby; like Henry Fonda and his fish in On Golden Pond, among her catch she’d clearly caught Walter, the daddy of all yabbies.

  ‘I’d like you to measure and weigh him, thank you!’ she said.

  Vicky was pronounced World Yabby Champion. For the rest of their holidays we took Charlie and Lucy on adventure walks around the property and gave them little patches of land so they felt they too had ownership in our tree change. We discovered a hidden casuarina grove leading down to a deep creek bed on the far north-west of the property and all agreed we would never tell anyone where to find it. They loved collecting fresh chicken eggs each morning from the five chooks we’d recently purchased from a local hatchery, having named the birds for us via a mail ballot system we’d sent them for fun.

  I took the kids up into the vineyard and we picked bucket after bucket of Semillon and Shiraz grapes. They helped me crush them all with bare feet then I boiled the fruit up with sugar – I was going to make my very own cheese pastes. The kitchen was a sugary war zone, my skin was stained, Charlie and Lucy were bored witless once the novelty of squashing grapes had worn off and the boiled, seed-filled fruity sludge that resulted never set. I threw away all the Semillon ‘paste’ and proudly bottled my first Shiraz ‘sauce’ but really it was just pink liquid sugar.

  ‘So maybe we’d better make wine with all that fruit next year instead?’ Jeff joked.

  After our Brisbane family returned home, I’d assumed the yabby challenge had come to a close. But for some who couldn’t be bothered fishing, the story continued. Like my lovely friend Ming, who visited one day and brought with him some fresh Balmain bugs.

  ‘I asked at every shop in the fish markets and this is the closest they had,’ he said.

  Then a few days after Vicky’s crowning, our friends Kieran and Bec came to set up a tent and stay on the property with their young sons, Connor and Lucas. Kieran and Vicky share a lot of common traits (read: there was no way on earth he was going to be outdone).

  Using his mother-in-law’s kefte as bait, Kieran had also brought his own yabby traps. By nightfall his haul was in and it contained a few impressive-looking samples – could Vicky’s reign be very short? The following evening we had a yabby feast with lashings of garlicky butter and I isolated the largest yabby and sent a photo to Vicky.

  Against a ruler please. And please advise weight. Vicky texted back.

  Vicky’s whopper was declared the winner.

  ‘They shrink when they’re cooked,’ Kieran complained and so the jury was still out, unless you were Vicky.

  Over the following years, it was parents like Vicky and Jane, Bec and Kieran, and Mel and Jesus (not to mention Jeff and me) who went all-out to show our children everything Block Eight could be, providing exciting adventures born from the kids’ imaginations with the aid of an enthusiastic adult. White-water rafting, fishing, fire building, melting marshmallows, the world’s longest slip and slide, building a phenomenal shelter in the bush, learning how to drive, making dolmades out of our grape leaves, foraging for the makings of Christmas tree ornaments, making horror films, school-holiday Olympics . . . the list went on. That so many kids will continue to have incredibly fond memories fills both Jeff and me with joy.

  *

  But the kids weren’t the only ones who enjoyed Block Eight to the full. Many of our friends visited for a relaxing break.

  One of our mates, Keith, visited from Sydney and asked if he could take photos down by the dam. Sure, no problem was the reply.

  ‘I’ve always wanted a photo of me from behind, naked in front of a dam wearing only these boots,’ he said. But of course he did. An hour or so later he came back and excitedly showed Jeff the photos his boyfriend had taken. ‘Oh skip over that one,’ he flicked his iPhone screen, ‘you can see my balls in that one.’

  ‘Could you actually see his dangle berries?’ I asked Jeff later.

  ‘Trust me, Toddy, that was not exactly on my bucket list.’

  Another time, a mate of Jeff’s was visiting from the UK while I was in Sydney working.

  ‘Can I take a swim in your dam?’ he asked Jeff. Sure, no problem was the reply.

  Jeff had forgotten that he was a naturist and he stripped off right in front of a blushing, bashful host.

  ‘Trust me, Toddy,’ Jeff said later, ‘seeing my mate’s bald yabby is not exactly on my bucket list.’

  Other friends were visiting from out of state.

  ‘Can we take a walk in the olive grove?’ they asked Jeff. Sure, no problem was the reply.

  An hour later they returned all flushed. ‘Oh my god, you two did it in the olive grove, didn’t you?’ Jeff joked.

  They just laughed awkwardly.

  ‘Trust me, Toddy,’ Jeff said later, ‘picturing my mates humping on that patch of grass I mow every few weeks isn’t exactly on my bucket list.’

  Which begged the question, really – wasn’t there even one naked friend on Jeff’s list?

  We loved filling the place with friends. In those early months, our property’s seclusion remained a bit confronting for a pair of city slickers like us. It felt is if we were completely isolated, so each night we religiously went down the driveway to ensure that front gate was firmly locked, then we’d close all the new blinds in the house so no axe-wielding maniac could look at us from a distance.

  We shared a passion for 1980s horror films with my oldest friend Nicole (we had a mutual pet name for each other – ‘Pet’). In our vernacular they were called ‘gew’ nights because in the movies, any woman getting stabbed to death produces in the throes of terror a shocking sound of panic that goes a little something like Gew! Gew!

  Quite alone on the pitch-black property, we thought it the perfect atmosphere for introducing Pet to one of the scariest modern films we’d seen, The Strangers. All the lights were turned off, the blinds were raised to invite axe murderers, and we were soon all scared shitless.

  ‘Pause!’ I said. ‘I just need to use the loo.’

  I walked down the dark hallway and closed the toilet door, then silently opened the back door in the laundry. I crept to the back deck of the house then once at the living room window I hammered my fists on the glass, yelling in a deep voice to seal the deal.

  And that, my friends, was one of the most memorable gew nights ever!

  Getting My Maggie On

  Another thing I wanted to do – getting my Maggie well and truly on – was create a signature dish to serve friends when they visited. I wanted it to be representative of the Hunter, and of Block Eight specifically. I settled on a one-pot chicken dish using locally sourced organic birds. It was butterflied and served on a bed of vegetables – creamy potatoes, leeks, mushrooms, whole green olives and lemon slices topped with a whole bunch of thyme and two half bulbs of garlic. It was then smothered with a whole bottle of Semillon, lemon juice and some chicken stock and in less than two hours guests’ mouths were well and truly watering. In time we would grow or make most of the ingredients . . . except the bird.

  I loved nothing better than strolling out into my vegie patch and picking fresh produce. The radishes were the first things to ripen and we ate them fresh out of the ground with a little salt, and used them in every salad we made. Enormous bushes of herbs were regularly pillaged and I made jar after jar of mint jelly, mint sauce, chilli paste, harissa, my own version of Tabasco – herbs went bananas.

  Week by week the vegetables developed and it filled me with so much satisfaction to watch those tiny seeds sprout, then grow into strong seedlings before I transplanted them into
our garden beds. The first purple flowers of the eggplants were a revelation, I picked and pickled green tomatoes into a relish and baby beetroots were plucked from the earth to be eaten ‘carpaccio’, roasted with other vegetables or pickled and turned into relishes and sliced salad ingredients. Every mouthful was so brimming with vitality and flavour that eating store-bought vegetables by contrast was completely disappointing. To think we’d been missing out on this freshness and intensity of taste all our lives!

  We were fortunate that the previous owners had planted fig, lime and orange trees right near the house and with the vegetable patch proving bounteous, my dream of becoming the Hunter’s version of Maggie was in full swing. It was a whole new way of cooking, learning to deal with large quantities of one ingredient and finding ways to use as much as possible.

  For instance, the lime tree. That bastard of a tree just produces and produces and produces. It seems there isn’t a day that tree doesn’t have a fresh lime appearing – they’re there in summer, in winter and if you don’t pick them fast enough they fall to the ground and rot. What would Maggie do with five trillion limes? I created a treacly, toffee-like lime marmalade that friends regularly begged for. My lime cordial was a triumph, my Indian lime pickles were a personal favourite of our friend Mary-Jayne, and my lime granita made the perfect palate cleanser for a special meal. I made lime tarts, a delicious lime curd, experimented with lime-infused vodka, bought a dehydrator to make dried lime slices (but didn’t leave them in for long enough so they soon went mouldy), put sliced lime into water bottles, froze the juice, tried my hand at salt-preserved limes, gave away boxes and boxes of the things . . . and still I couldn’t stay on top of them. Cor blimey, I had citrus coming out of every pore and frankly won’t mind if I never see one of the buggers ever again.

  Of course, not everything was a success – the pickled watermelon rind was vile, the parsnip and orange marmalade vomit-inducing and the pumpkin butter so rich it instantly clogged the arteries. I still desperately wanted to create our own Shiraz or Chardonnay paste to serve with local cheeses and while we certainly had no shortage of grapes, no matter how hard I tried, I could not get it to the right thick-paste consistency. Some of my preservation attempts also failed – lids popped, food fizzed, bubbles appeared where they should never have been. (Attention all family and friends: if you have any unopened jars of Block Eight preserves from the early days it’s definitely best to dispose of them at your earliest convenience.)

  I did eventually master the arts of jam-setting and pickling, however. After spending hours sweating away in physical labour outside: shovelling chook poo, planting fruit trees in the new orchard, mowing the lawns and digging up the dying gardens around the house – to name but a few of my outdoor activities – I’d come inside, scrub up, then spend more hours chopping fruit and vegetables into tiny pieces and toiling over a hot stove, risking third-degree burns from spattering saucepans.

  It reminded me of being on school holidays with my nan: she’d have us on the linoleum floor of her kitchen shoulder-deep in white buckets full of fruit and sugar; the crystals coarse against our skin, the sugary smell a kind of heaven. As the whole house filled with the scent of boiling toffee later that night, I’d go to bed on a Willy Wonka dream cloud. Never in a million years would I have imagined that I’d end up making my own jams on a farm in the Hunter Valley! Thanks to my cousin John I even inherited two of Nan’s handwritten recipes and regularly make them from produce grown in my own garden.

  One day when I was about ten, Mum called from the office to explain she would be late for the first time ever, and would I mind making the spaghetti bolognaise for dinner? I asked her how to do it and she talked me through the steps over the phone. While it may not have been perfect, that night her appreciation fuelled me on to help her out some more. No one had ever helped Mum make dinner before so I decided to do it for her every night. I followed the recipes in the four or five cookbooks she kept in the pantry, I followed instructions on packets and I experimented. Give or take a few nights, I’ve made the evening meal ever since. They say you need ten thousand hours to attain a high level of skill. Well, let’s just say that cooking now comes fairly easily to me, but it’s never a perfect pursuit.

  The kitchen at Block Eight became a battleground: Todd versus toffee. Usually the toffee won but I did rack up a few victories. Among our friends, my burnt fig jam (not as good as Maggie’s but still delicious) was a big hit, particularly when I added vanilla seeds. Vicky and her mother, Nita, proclaimed my orange marmalade as one of the best ever.

  I pitched a television show called The Preservation Kitchen to a producer friend but it went nowhere; I created my own little cookbook of my winning recipes, which I added to by hand (just like Nan did); and I even branched out into retail with a stand inside one of the local shops.

  Poor Jeff was chief taste-tester but time and again he was cornered.

  ‘I preferred the last batch,’ he’d offer warily.

  ‘Yeah well, that means me chopping every single lime into thirty six tiny pieces so that won’t be happening again, will it?’ I’d snap. ‘What about the taste?’

  ‘It’s good,’ he’d say, backing quietly out of the kitchen.

  I presume he saw a lot of it as a poor use of time when there was so much outdoor stuff to do but letting our bountiful harvest go to waste wasn’t something I was ever going to let happen. Cooking was my release from some of the more menial and strenuous work on the property, just as cooking had always been my relief from the stresses of corporate life – I had always loved nothing more than coming home after a busy day to spend an hour or two whipping up a treat for Jeffrey.

  ‘I don’t see the point in eating out any more,’ he said to me one day. ‘Every meal I get at home is better than just about any I’ve eaten in any restaurant.’

  It felt nice to be appreciated.

  ‘Except that disgusting angel hair pasta you made that time,’ he continued.

  It also would’ve felt nice to pour a glass of wine over his head, but I would never have wasted it.

  Crop It Sweet

  I barely blinked an eye when Jeff suddenly declared his new favourite film was The Money Pit, that ’80s classic starring Tom Hanks and Shelley Long about a couple who get duped into buying a nicely presented but actually decrepit mansion with the idea of renovating it back to its former glory.

  As the title not so subtly suggests, things don’t exactly go according to plan . . . I heard the original subtitle was ‘How two gays bought a hundred acres and thought they could manage it with an electric mower and a pair of garden shears.’

  Before we moved to Block Eight, we’d been determined to bulldoze all those grapevines – but that was before we tasted that bottle of Brokenwood Semillon. Living on the property, the beauty of the vineyard also changed our minds and we knew it made sense to give guests a real taste of the Hunter – after all, they’d come to immerse themselves in all things wine – what could be more perfect than to stay amid the grapevines?

  Primed with Jenny the grape-growing expert’s advice about the vines, we decided to find a winemaker. As luck would have it, my old mate Andy was very good friends with a Hunter Valley local named Natalie, and Natalie’s husband just happened to be a contract winemaker named Daniel Binet. After my first faltering, awkward I’m not sure if you’re open to the idea call to Dan, we briefly met up at the end of January, despite Dan being in the middle of harvest. With enthusiasm and patience he agreed to become our winemaker. In time, we would have our very own Block Eight-branded wine.

  ‘I fucking love that you boys are willing to give this a go,’ Dan said over a beer after he’d walked with us through the vineyard inspecting and tasting grapes. ‘We can do some really cool stuff with your wine because you two don’t strike me as stuck up Sydney wankers who only want to win awards and show off to their mates.’

  ‘Do you reckon the wine will be any good?’ I asked. ‘Given that the vines haven’t been looked a
fter this year, I mean?’

  ‘Mate, you give me good fruit, and I’ll give you good wine. It’s not fucking rocket science, you know? But if you give me shit fruit . . . there’s nothing I can do about that. It’ll just be good for vinegar.’

  Even this piqued my excitement because I would’ve quite liked our very own wine vinegar.

  ‘We’re in,’ Jeff and I said in unison.

  ‘Good. Well, you just listen to JB [Jenny] and do what she says and I reckon you’ll be tasting your first wine in about June of next year. Mate, if anyone knows anything about grapes, it’s JB. You’re in good hands there. She’s fucking taught the whole Valley how to grow grapes. Your fruit’s not shit, not even this year, so next year it’ll be a ripper.’

  ‘Would you want to buy some of it this year?’

  ‘Mate, I said “not shit”. I didn’t say it was good.’ And we caught on to his infectious laugh.

  Dan stayed for more beers and rang Natalie to come and get him. We talked a lot about the state of the wine industry and I shamelessly bombarded him with question after question, fascinated by how much he knew and impressed by how willing he was to share that knowledge with a pair of wannabes like us.

  Natalie arrived and embraced Jeff and me with warm, genuine hugs and we shared the bottle of wine she’d brought from their own cellar door. It was an incredibly light, delicately sweet sparkling Moscato and from my very first mouthful I knew we were in good hands.

  ‘Dan, this is seriously good,’ I said, trying not to blow too much smoke up his arse.