Wine On the Trail
AUTHOR ANUJA CHAUHAN AND PHOTOGRAPHER ROHIT CHAWLA TRAVELLED TO WINE COUNTRY DOWN UNDER TO SWIRL AND SIP THE HEADY SPIRIT FROM BAROSSA VALLEY
Iam foolish enough, on my first day amongst a gathering of Australia’s finest wine sophisticates, to reveal that I was once cast to play Eliza Dolittle in an amateur theatre production of My Fair Lady. People immediately zoom in to the obvious parallel – as somebody who thinks Old-Monk-Thums Up-and-seekh kebabs are the height of gastronomical excellence, I am clearly an epicurean Eliza in urgent need of education and course correction. And Pernod-Ricard is full of Professor Higginses well up to the challenge of reforming me.
“All I know about wine is that it can be red or white or pink.” I tell my politely appalled audience. “And that sometimes it’s fizzy and sometimes it’s flat. And also that I don’t like the one which sounds like one of Hitler’s Generals.”
“Um, yes, Reisling is quite a polarising taste,” one of the Higgenses replies carefully. “I think you should start with something simpler first. Sauvignon Blanc perhaps?”
As he looks exactly like Harrison Ford in the first Indiana Jones movie, I am happy to go along with almost anything he says. But a furtive Google search has revealed to me that Sauvignon means ‘savage’ in regular English. Hmmm, is Indy being sarcastic?
But let me start at the beginning. I am being hosted by Pernod Ricard’s Jacob’s Creek brand of wines at their vineyards in the Barossa valley and at Kangaroo island in South Australia, and then in the city of Adelaide, for the five day long Savour Australia Food and Wine festival. It’s September, the first month of spring down under, and the weather is grey and rainy one moment and sunny and momentous with promise the next.
A tall, lean, lady-chauffeur, sporting black sunglasses, an all-black pantsuit and black leather gloves scoops me up and drives me down to the rolling, sun-dappled, golf-course-green vineyards of the Barossa valley in style. She makes me listen to the debut album of Harrison Craig, the newly anointed winner of hit reality show The Voice, who sounds very much like a young Engelbert Humperdink. This aussi-fication of the classic, is pretty much the motif of the entire trip.
“Your wines have become a hit because you didn’t try too hard and just had fun,” says a famous American wine blogger at one of the sessions at Savour Australia. “Now please don’t stuff it up by becoming all snooty and French!”
They atmosphere certainly seems very French at the winemaking basics session I attend in the barrels rooms in the Barossa Valley vineyard. There is a long table, laid out with rows and rows of impossibly polished wineglasses, all half-full of either ruby reds or golden whites. As we swirl, sip and savour, we’re given wine appreciation course 101.
As I am deeply committed to coming across knowledgeable to the next snooty sommelier I encounter while dining out, I ask about dryness verses sweetness. What make a wine dry? Or sweet? I have heard something about wine being sweeter if the grapes are left to ripen upon the vine longer. Is this true?
Not really. I am told. Later in the afternoon, we take a walk through the vineyards. We see wallabies (pygmy kangaroos) hopping about amongst the vines, and are warned of lurking bull ants (which look just like Indian ants but have a much more fearsome bite.) There is an avenue of leafy Cork trees, massive and dignified but also strangely naked looking, as they are shaved of bark till about 12 feet in height, revealing a brick red underbark below. This bark is harvested about once in ten years to make corks for Jacob Creek wines.
Even though we’ve just learned that corks are way more impractical than screwtops, it must be admitted that there is a certain romance to uncorking wine. That particular pokkkkk! sound. The opening of a screw-top doesn’t just signal the arrival of a baby, or the winning of a world cup in quite the same way, does it?
We then come upon the real, actual Jacob’s Creek, which is named thus because little Jacob Gramp, the son of the founder of this brand of wines used to paddle in this creek when he was a child. It’s a pretty spot - sunkissed and
sparkling and peaceful. Perfect place to sip a glass of chilled chardonnay. Which is exactly what we proceed to do.
Life is slowly morphing into an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. It’s getting so bad that the entire group starts getting withdrawal symptoms if we’re deprived of wine for more than two hours. But I can’t get too carried away, because to keep me firmly anchored, there is the doughty, supremely-unimpressed-by-everything presence of Rohit Chawla. Rohit is a snooty big-noise photographer who shoots only with supermodels or political and sports celebrities and on this particular assignment is unlucky enough to be lumped with me.
And every now and then, he will pause, put down his heavy camera and say, with the whatever resignation British people always display when they talk about Camilla Parker Bowles, “I suppose that will have to do.”
On the third day, we board an extremely tiny plane to visit Kangaroo Island. All planes look like metal toothpaste tubes of course, but this one is the original Colgate- ka-chota- packet. It is tiny. Nobody can stand upright in it. And since Rohit keeps me primping and posing in front of the propellers till everybody else boards, I end up with the only seat not yet taken – right at the bottom of the colgate tube. Which means that in case the damn thing goes down, I will be furthest from the exits and end up as ocean foam.
I do the only thing I can do. I shut my eyes and go determinedly to sleep.
We are at Kangaroo Island for some ‘rural’ Australian flavour. Our large jeep-like vehicles, thoughtfully provided with bug repellent and sunscreen, stop every now and then and everybody is marched out to dutifully click the slothful, dumpy koala bears snoozing high up in the forks of the grey gum trees.
It’s beautiful though, the island. There are acres upon acres of canola fields, which look exactly like our desi sarson ke khet. It’s also the original home of the Gramp Family – the founders of Jacob’s Creek. This is where they lived before they packed up and moved out to the Barossa valley on the mainland.
Watching a school of over-eager dolphins give our boat a VIP motorcycle-cop-type escort the next morning, I start to understand a little of what the Prof. Higgenses have been going on about for the last three days. Grapes are grapes. A grape like Cabernet Sauvignon for example, is the commonest, most generic black grape in the world. But what can make it unique is the region where it is grown. The heat, the earth, the breeze, the mist. Maybe this all just so much hot air, and there is no way one can taste dolphins or the tang of the gum trees or the hot Aussie sun in a glass of Jacob’s Creek, but with the sun setting over a mountain vineyard and the soft ding of the bells on the woolly grey sheep sounding in the distance, it’s a claim that seems amazingly legit.
And then there is the wine. It is always there - on this insanely decadent assignment. We are served sparkling muscato with breakfast, Shirazes and Pinot Noirs and Sauvignon Blancs with lunch and St. Hugos and Belle Epoche champagne with dinner. It eases up the conversation, loosens tongues and inhibitions. A thin young lad from Bangkok who doesn’t speak a word of English takes the dance floor by storm, limbs flying out in every direction, silver tambourine jingling faultlessly to the beat. A gorgeous girl with long shiny black hair does a giddyspin and a Russian split. People play games of True Confessions. Loud cheers of
yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaam se! rise from the al fresco tables to the surprised Australian skies.
The next morning we take the tiny toothpaste tube back to Adelaide and are given the afternoon off. A sunshiny walk by the riverside, a quiet afternoon and then it is the opening dinner of Savour Australia. The Adelaide Central market has been converted into a massive gay country fair with the finest food and wine stalls laid out for us to sample. Rohit and I decide to take this responsibility extremely seriously.
Oysters with blood-limes and tabasco, are followed with skewers of barbequed Kangaroo meat, smelly cheeses decorated with purple pansies named after Renaissance masters like Monet and Manet, duck liver pate, white chocolate with lemon relish and dark chocolate with red chillies. And of course, there is a recommended wine to go with everything.
I’m starting to rebel against this recommended wine pairing though – to me it seems to be a little too simplistic and matching-matching. White wine with white meat, red wine with red meat, white wine with white chocolate and so on and so forth, it’s all too strait-jacketed. I decide to break out a little. Of course, by now I am rather…err…high.
The first session the next day features a senior writer from a travel magazine who poses the tough question, “What is classic Australian cuisine?” The world has no clue apparently. I realise I have no clue either. (And this is when eighty percent of my family has been living in Australia for the last twenty years.) “It’s probably beer and barbecue on the beach,” I want to say but don’t. The atmosphere feels too posh.
The next session is about terroir. This is a fancy French word (pronounced terra-woo-ah, if you want to use it on the party circuit) for flavour of the terrain. If you’ve been paying attention, this is the stuff the guys at Jacob’s Creek have been telling us about right through the trip.
Terroior gives wines their uniqueness. Lifts them out from the generic and makes them special. It is revered, special, magical, mystical. Except that the panel is trying to de-mystify it and break it down into soil, sunshine, water, fertiliser.
‘I feel like I’m stuck in an Australian episode of Krishi Darshan.’ Rohit mutters, shifting about grumpily in his seat. ‘All this talk of kheti-baadi. When are we getting some more wine?’
We sneak out, he makes for the wine and I make for my hotel room. It’s time to get ready for the big event of the night. A six course sitdown meal at Government House, the official residence of the Governor of the state of South Australia. Everybody cleans up for this event – the ladies chuck aside their bushwalking clothes and emerge in pretty cocktail dresses.
The last five days have been quite an education. I mean, I know what’s hot with the sommeliers now. I know my old bane Reisling isn’t ‘yuccckkk, sour’ but ‘bracingly acidic.’ I can even tell my Chianti from my Shiraz. (Which is extremely tough—it’s like people from Delhi being able to tell, purely on the basis of an audio recording, if somebody is speaking Malayali or Kannada.) I now know what adjectives to spew. Fruit-of-the-forest, varietal, spicy, method ancestrale. I know the cutting edge new varieties —cloudy wine, natural wine, ice wine, growers champagne. I can read a wine list almost as well as I can read a logarithm table (err, not too well.) I still think the whole match your wine with your food thing is a bit overrated. But would a cockney flower girl like me ever exchange the rush of Old-Monk-and-Thums-Up for the slow, smooth high of a glass of sunshiny Jacob’s Creek Reserva Chardonnay? Well, on a snobbish day, she definitely would.