Thirty Thousand Bottles of Wine and a Pig Called Helga

by Todd Alexander

  ‘Next time, we do the gin,’ he said, and he left, promising us there would be many more nights like this in the future. And there were. Dan and Natalie were the first friends we made in the Hunter, and once Jeff proved to be a willing, obedient and more than capable student, Jenny soon took us under her wing and our relationship quickly morphed from business into one of genuine mutual affection.

  So our plans for the grapes were set. Once the fruit had all fallen off, been eaten by the birds, or just plain left to shrivel up, we would consult again with Jenny and from March onwards, Jeff would focus on bringing them back to health. By 2014 we would have fruit as perfect as possible to put into Dan’s more than capable hands. It felt as if we’d taken a step closer to becoming real farmers. But there were also a thousand olive trees to consider.

  *

  So a week later Peter, who owned the local olive-processing plant, and his offsider came to talk to us about our olives. We all trooped into the groves to inspect the trees. They looked incredibly healthy to me – trunks as thick as watermelons, silvery leaves that looked strong and vibrant – and amazingly the irrigation looked to be completely intact.

  There is a serenity inside an olive grove. Their mass casts wide shadows yet still allows you to see the big full sky overhead. Strolling among them is humbling, as if they are proud of their strength and vigour and unashamed of their unconventional beauty. They have insignificant flowers and their colours are not vibrant or particularly remarkable, yet the sun creates so many hues you find yourself marvelling every few steps.

  Peter told us the top grove consisted of Frantoio olives for oil and the bottom was Manzanilla for pickling – who knew there were different types of olives? And who knew all olives went from green to purple to black as they ripened?

  Then Peter got down to practicalities: it was a similar story to the grapes: the olives needed pruning, de-suckering, watering, fertilising and spraying for bugs.

  ‘Do all of that,’ we were told, ‘and in the future you might get a crop, but without putting in the work you’ll get nothing.’ And then the pair went on to give us some extra, unsolicited advice, like: ‘You’re being very optimistic about those deckchairs, you two,’ and: ‘That vegetable garden fence you’ve built won’t keep kangaroos out. They’re going to destroy the lot.’ (But in time it turned out they were wrong on both counts.)

  Vines plus groves plus unkempt fields meant yet another expense to add to the growing list: we needed a tractor.

  After the sale of the Annandale house we had every intention of keeping aside a chunk of the profits to build the accommodation that would give us an income from Block Eight. But when we started pricing up tractors we quickly realised that money was not going to stretch very far. We didn’t want the problems that might lurk in second-hand machinery and new tractors could cost anything up to $200,000 for the most complex models – and besides, we had already spent $2000 repairing the irrigation in the vineyard, another $2000 repairing the irrigation pump and $30,000 renovating the house. Based on Jeff’s research, we knew we needed a minimum of $100,000 to build the three villas. On a property of our size, the scale of every single expense and repair was tenfold what we thought it was going to be and all of that added up to one simple thing: we had run out of cash. We had become Shelley and Tom.

  Building for Our Future

  We still needed a tractor, so late January saw us shopping for that most macho of farm machinery. Of all the makes available, I’m ashamed to admit that I chose the most expensive, John Deere, because it was the only tractor brand I had ever heard of. But I didn’t know it in the ‘I know my tractors’ sense; I knew it thanks to my years managing the Collectables classification at eBay. John Deere caps and replicas were quite the collectors’ items – so surely, I reasoned, their machines were worth the money! We explained to the salesman exactly what we needed a tractor for and attachment after attachment was added to our order. Salesmen must dream of days that boys like Jeff and me walk onto the lot.

  ‘Why do you insist on talking like that to them?’ Jeff asked when we were safely back inside the car.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘All blokey and Australian!’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Oh come on, you know you do!’

  ‘Oh Jeff, so much to learn. In these parts, there are three kinds of pricing. You’ve got your retail – that’s for just any loser who walks in off the street. Then you’ve got your lo-tail. That’s a special price for locals. Then finally you’ve got your gay-tail. That’s the premium price poofters like us have to pay.’

  ‘You can speak as ocker as you like, they still know we’re gay, you know? They’re not going to give you a discount because you’re a gay guy trying to sound straight.’

  ‘Tryin’? Stone the flamin’ crows, mate, if this don’t sound straight to ya, you’re as queer as a flamin’ three-dollar bill!’

  ‘You’re so ridiculous.’

  The day the tractor was dropped off to Block Eight in February, the delivery guy took us through the various buttons, levers and features . . . in about six minutes.

  ‘She’s all yours,’ he said referring to all that shiny green and yellow newness. ‘Now hop up and show me you can drive it and then I can get out of here.’

  ‘No way,’ I said pathetically. ‘I can’t even drive a manual car let alone a tractor! I mean, I once drove my cousin Barb home from squash when she was drunk but she was changing the gears for me and then one day my friend Mel wanted to teach me but after the first bunny hop I got right back out of that car and vowed never ever to drive a manual, ever again . . .’ My voice trailed off.

  But before I knew it, Jeff was up on the seat. Jeff, who’d only received his first ever driving licence five months before, was driving a tractor and he didn’t stall or bunny hop it once! The crashes into trees and vine posts came shortly after, as did the smashing off of the indicator lights, but no serious damage was done.

  Once the delivery guy left I felt brave enough to follow Jeff’s example so I too jumped up into the seat. Jeff showed me what to do – put one foot down on the brake, one on the wet clutch, turn on the ignition, move the gear stick into A1 (the slowest gear for a shy wee thing like me), move the direction lever into forward, lower the park brake, ease my foot off the brake and clutch, then slowly. . . ever so slowly, push my right foot down on the tiny accelerator pedal. And I was off! Jeff stood next to me and encouraged me to go faster, showed me how to change gears to increase my speed. See? I can do it! I felt like driving down the street after the delivery guy, Hey, I’m not such a loser after all!

  We invited Mum and Dad up from the coast and let them have a little test drive of the big green machine too. Forget the law degree, the two kids, the eight books and the high-flying corporate career, I swear my dad has never been as proud of me as the day he watched me driving that big butch farm equipment in my sparkling steel-toed boots and brand-new John Deere cap (yes, you get a free cap when you spend $70,000 on one of their machines!). Mum managed to ram it into a vineyard post but we decided to keep that a secret from Dad.

  ‘Please don’t hate me,’ I said to Jeff one day shortly after my debut on the tractor. ‘But I’ve run over three grapevines.’

  ‘Please don’t hate me,’ I said a few days later, ‘but I’ve run into one of the flame trees and it’s nearly chopped in half.’

  While I slowly grew more adept at handling the tractor, ‘Please don’t hate me’ became a kind of currency for me, a precursor to the inevitable lecture that would come from Jeff, about how to treat equipment with respect. Of course I pretended to listen but always thought I knew better myself and in time my ignorance would shine through.

  We put that tractor through its paces for most of autumn. With the shiny new slasher attachment we took turns driving it over all the open fields at Block Eight, mowing all that dry, waist-high grass. In all, it took us over eighteen hours to do the fields and suddenly the usability of our land was revealed to us.
Whole acres we’d previously thought pointless became open fields of possibility, especially the hill that led down toward the natural dam where all the ducks liked to play.

  With the ground now visible, Block Eight took on more of a park-like beauty. It was easier (and safer) to stroll to all four corners of the property and only then could we truly start to plan for the next stage of our business: where were we going to build our villas?

  For me, the most obvious choice was just in front of the olive grove, that flat parcel of land that captured a stunning view to the mountains far into the distance. After a hard day’s work, Jeff and I would often head up there, sit on the grass drinking beers and just revel in the beauty and silence, instantly transporting me back to my Golden Door epiphany – the moment, without doubt, that led us to Block Eight.

  Jeff spent weeks researching what type of building would be best for accommodation. We considered pods, prefabricated builds, trucking whole Queenslanders in on the back of semi-trailers; we even thought about theming each of our buildings with a different type of garden (the Japanese room, the English country garden, the Arizonian desert). I wanted sandstone huts but was once again dreaming way beyond our means. But the idea of keeping in harmony with our environment struck a chord with each of us and when Jeff came up with the idea of constructing classic Australian sheds it felt perfect for our hot, dry, rural location. On the outside they would sit flawlessly in our landscape and on the inside Jeff would go to town designing something luxurious to take our guests’ breath away.

  Design settled, it was then time to submit plans to council. We employed a consultant to guide us through the process, having nearly gone postal several times during the council stage of our renovation in Annandale but, like all bureaucracies, our local council had its rules too. We were informed that we couldn’t build within fifty metres of any crop – which ruled out our chosen space right in front of the olives and also anywhere near the grapes. We also had to consider bushfire-risk zones, protected fauna and flora, and the natural flood zone of that creek that ran right through the middle of our property on the rare occasions it rained heavily enough. Then there was the considerable cost of getting electricity, water, sewage treatment and roads to wherever we built so after all that was weighed up we only really had one choice – overlooking our natural dam. But now that we had mowed the field that led to it, we both could see just how perfect this position was, and imagined our guests having coffee on their back decks each morning, watching the birds on the dam, those lovely ghost gums and how, on sunny days, the water sometimes danced as if its surface was sprinkled with gold dust. Our plans were drawn, our DA submitted and council pointed out that we would require an accessible villa, which had to be built first so we decided to add a fourth one by converting part of our machinery shed (my mum’s suggestion). Then we were slugged with a $14,000 development cost to council and a $25,000 bill to create internal roads . . . which meant we then had just enough money to install the shed shells and that was all. Thank god I still had my job in Sydney because it was our only source of income.

  My friends were beyond generous for letting me stay in their spare rooms, but I insisted on travelling light, so lived out of a small backpack and never left anything behind. Bodily functions became something to fear and hide, and getting ill (like the time at Andy and Ali’s after I’d eaten bad sushi for lunch) really had a way of bringing me closer than my friends had ever truly wanted. Oh it wasn’t all bad. I had delicious meals and wonderful chats in Cheryl’s Petersham home, wines and laughs with Andy and Ali, plus quality time reading books with their son, Sam (I was Aunty Todd), and way too many wines (followed by a fifteen kilometre hungover jog the next day) whenever I stayed at Pet’s. Plus the benefit of Sophia cuddles at Mel and Jesus’s.

  But work was financing our tree change so it was a necessary evil. Without that income Block Eight would have failed and we would have returned to Sydney with our tails between our legs, forced to start our careers over again and deal with those knowing, told-you-so looks from the naysayers.

  *

  Some people thought we were mad for even giving it a go; others suggested that we’d be back in Sydney within twelve months; that we’d completely underestimated the effort required to make a success of the place. I was warned about accounting, saving, spending, exhaustion, the perils of small business, a dying tourism industry, the impossibility of making good wine, the dangers of equipment, losing touch with my network, becoming seen as unemployable . . . but a handful of people did believe in us, and they know that once we put our mind to something there is no way in hell Jeff and I give up without a fight.

  In those early days most people asked me how Jeff was coping with ‘my’ decision to move to the country, assuming I’d somehow railroaded him into it. But if they knew Jeff at all, they’d know he never does anything against his will. He applied himself to learning whatever was required to get the property to optimum production, and while I continued with my necessary corporate treading of water, Jeff threw himself into every aspect of our future.

  With the plans for the villas going through the approval stage, it was time for us to get the grapevines ready for spring. Since we’d moved onto Block Eight, we’d watched them grow long green canes that overflowed into the rows, we’d eaten the plump juicy fruit to see what it tasted like and then we’d watched the birds feast on it before whatever was left shrivelled up in the last heat of summer. Then during April and May, the leaves gradually turned brown, fell to the ground (Where did they all go, we wondered? Was there a gargantuan pile of shed grape leaves in some wind-swept corner of the Valley?) and what was left behind was a tangled mess of long stubborn limbs.

  In June 2013 it was time for us to prune more than 12,000 grapevines (by then I’d done a more thorough count). Jenny came to show us how it was done. Basically, every vine has six main parts and each plays a crucial role in developing fruit for wine. The roots are obvious enough, then there is the trunk. The trunk rises to a crown or head and on either side of the crown are arms, or cordons. From the cordons there are a collection of spurs, spaced about a hand’s width apart. A spur is created when you cut back the cane (or limb) of each season’s growth. When you look at the spurs closely you can see tiny buds – two usually at the spur’s base, then after an internode of about an inch or so, another two. In essence, you need to ensure you cut the spur just after the buds at the top of the first internode. Each bud will more or less develop into a bunch of grapes. This way you ensure the vine puts all its energy into a controlled number of bunches so you get a concentration of flavour and quality. So simple, right?

  Jenny ran us threw a few vines then told us to have a crack. Snip, snip, snip, snip I went like Edward Scissorhands.

  ‘Jesus Christ, you’re a fast learner,’ Jenny said, sounding mightily impressed.

  She watched us do a few more vines before declaring that we had got the hang of it, and were the best students she’d ever taught.

  ‘If in doubt, cut it out,’ she reminded us before we all trudged back down the hill with her lovely border collie dog Archie and went and had a cup of tea and some of the cookies I’d baked for her.

  I put the call out to the entire staff distribution list at work: did a weekend working in a vineyard sound appealing? Jeff and I would provide all meals and alcohol and all people needed to do in return was snip a few vines and pitch their tents (we even went out and bought thirty tents in preparation).

  Thankfully my colleagues proved a ready and willing labour source, as did our friends. There was a real sense of camaraderie on the property that weekend. People were genuinely keen to help us in our new venture and share in its success. We purchased gloves and pruning shears for everyone, but those vines were old and hadn’t been pruned in a while, and their woody canes were thick and difficult to cut. Everyone complained of sore hands and fingers . . . but with the aid of those thirty or so beautiful people we managed to prune well over half the vineyard on those couple of
days.

  With the additional tireless help of our great friends Mervyn and Ron, Jeff took care of the other five thousand or so vines while I was at work. (Merv is the father of my first boss in the book industry, Meredith, and they live not too far away in Lemon Tree Passage, north of Newcastle.) Those two men have given us so much of their time over the years that they own a piece of Block Eight, along with a piece of our very grateful hearts.

  We seemed to have the pruning mastered but we still made mistakes, or got led into making them.

  When spring came and those hundreds of thousands of buds once again looked like a blanket of butterflies, it was time for Jeff to spray their delicate growth to protect them from bugs and disease. Despite telling the tractor salesman earlier in the year exactly what we needed the machine for (including the spraying of chemicals), he neglected to advise us that it would be best to purchase a tractor with an enclosed cab. Jeff was handling some fairly dangerous chemicals and while a cab would have safeguarded him against harm, once you bought a tractor without a cab, you couldn’t add one on later. So for the time being, he dressed from head to toe in Hazmat gear, a vision in white, regularly coming off the tractor smelling strongly of sulphur.

  One of the world’s greatest arachnophobes before we moved, Jeff would get up at four in the morning and drive the tractor through the dark (answering his question of why a tractor needed headlights), ducking beneath countless spider webs while snatching spiders from his face. After finishing his five-hour spray I’d welcome him inside for breakfast, when the white suit and goggles always made me think of the Oompa Loompas.

  Throughout the hot summer of 2013, water continued to be a problem for us. In October, Phil the water guy came to deliver us another few loads of his precious commodity – plus an extra load of commentary thrown in for free.

  ‘It’s no secret,’ he was saying to me this time. ‘Where do you think this water I bring ya comes from?’