In praise of Intoxicating …
‘Break out the adjectives. A book about grog that’s not only an appealing, invigorating, exhilarating and heady brew but a valuable and uniquely informative national history.’
—Robert Drewe
‘Max Allen sucks you into this book by promising lots of grog stories but what he does, the sly dog, is teach you about your country.’
—Bruce Pascoe
‘A history as potent as the devil’s own firewater, and writing as beautiful as that final drop of Grange Hermitage. Pour a few chapters out for yourself.’
—John Birmingham
‘The natives had also a method, at the proper season, of grinding holes in the tree, from which the sweet juice flowed plentifully … When allowed to remain any length of time, it ferments and settles into a coarse sort of wine or cider, rather intoxicating if drank to excess.’
—Daniel Bunce, Australasiatic Reminiscences of Twenty-Three Years’ Wanderings in Tasmania and the Australias, 1857
Contents
1 Way-a-linah: Indigenous drinks
2 Firewater: Rum and other ardent spirits
A drink to try at home: Blow My Skull
4 The Salthouse champagne: A taste of luxury
A drink to try at home: Sherry Cobbler
5 Seppelt Angaston Bitters: When drinking was good for you
6 1930 Dalwood cabernet: Two centuries of wine
A drink to try at home: White Lady
7 Victoria Bitter: A big cold beer
8 A flagon of McWilliam’s Port: Breaking the rules
A drink to try at home: Japanese Slipper
9 Kanga Rouge: Vineyard of the Empire
10 Wine from native grapes? Drinking in the future
A drink to try at home: All-Australian Negroni
My introduction
The wine looked like liquid sunshine in the glass. Golden, glinting, beautiful. It smelled and tasted even better. Sweet, grapey, like honey on my tongue. I gulped it down greedily.
It was the mid-1980s. I was fifteen or sixteen. Maybe a little older. All these years later, I can still remember what that wine tasted like, what the bottle felt like in my hand, the sensations of smell and flavour and vision fused in the memory. I can see the buttercup-yellow label: Brown Brothers Spatlese Lexia.
It came in a mixed case of Brown Brothers wines that a family friend had given us for Christmas. Mum wasn’t that interested in the red wines or sweeter wines, and my little sister was too young to drink, so I got to try them instead. Like most teenagers, I had been experimenting enthusiastically with alcohol for years. Furtive tastes of my grandparents’ sherry. A sip of Mum’s vermouth from the fridge. Cans of beer or quarter-bottles of vodka shared with mates in the park, bought by the oldest-looking one of us from the wine shop where we knew they didn’t care we were underage.
But this Spatlese Lexia was different. It was delicious. It made me stop, it made me pay attention, it made me think about what I was drinking. And it made me curious to see what the other wines in the Brown Brothers box tasted like.
I was already fascinated by flavour. Always had been, since I was a kid. A couple of years earlier, I’d even conducted my own lemonade taste test. I’d seen one of those newspaper articles where they assemble a group of chefs and get them to taste and rate different brands of baked beans, or chocolate, or hot cross buns. It inspired me to go out and buy all the different kinds of lemonade I could find – I really liked lemonade – and taste them to see which one I preferred.*
This perhaps helps explain why, a decade later, I would start writing about wine and other drinks. And why still, today, every day, I’m driven by the same impulse to ask the same questions. What does this drink taste like? Why does it taste that way? And what’s the story behind it?
‘Have you ever tried an older one?’ asked Ross Brown. ‘They age remarkably well. I’ve got bottles going back at least thirty years in the cellar. Let’s have lunch and I’ll bring a couple to try. I might even have a bottle of the same wine you tasted in the 80s.’
I had phoned the executive director of Brown Brothers to talk to him about the history of Spatlese Lexia. Here was a chance to revisit my epiphany wine, more than thirty-five years later. We agreed to meet at Jimmy Watson’s, one of Melbourne’s – Australia’s – most historic wine bars.
Jimmy Watson started selling wine from his bar in Lygon Street, Carlton, in 1935. My father-in-law remembers going there in the late 1950s. He and a mate used to con Jimmy into letting them stay after six o’clock closing. ‘We’d say, “We don’t know anything about wine, Mr Watson – can you teach us?” He’d pour us two glasses of red and tell us: that one’s younger, that one’s two years older, can you taste the difference? We got away with it a couple of times before he rumbled us.’
When I first went to Watson’s in the mid-1990s, Jimmy’s grandsons Simon and Nigel had started working in the bar. The day my daughter was born in 1995 at the Royal Women’s Hospital around the corner, I slipped out for a quick celebratory drink: Simon poured me a sherry. I’ve spent many hours there since. And now here I was at Watson’s again, tucking into a plate of chicken schnitzel, chips and salad as Ross Brown gently eased the cork from a bottle of 1981 Spatlese Lexia and poured us both a glass.
Ross was right. The wine had aged remarkably well. It was still fresh and luscious. Not bad for a wine that originally sold for around $2.50. Brown Brothers started making this wine in 1974, using a grape variety called muscat of Alexandria, grown in the big irrigated vineyards along the Murray River in Victoria’s north-west. For most of the 20th century, the grapes were used to make sweet sherry. Ross explained that ‘lexia’ is a uniquely Australian name for the variety – a bastardisation, probably, of ‘Alexandria’: it’s easy to imagine an old, weather-beaten Aussie grower delivering a truckload to the