Imbibing a little of that human touch
The maker of some of Australia’s finest pinot noir joins a chorus of thousands declaring themselves tramps.
With a full moon softly illuminating the hunk of rock that stole Miranda and her cohorts, the maker of some of Australia’s finest pinot noir joins a chorus of thousands declaring themselves tramps.
Beside him the polymath who grows grapes, imports wine and just published the definitive tome on grower champagnes breaks through his usually reserved facade with a fist in the air.
And I’m standing beside them wondering why so many wine people love Bruce Springsteen.
My various social media feeds are disproportionately populated by people whose lives are drenched in wine and on any given day I’m inundated with pictures of great bottles consumed and the unwritten message that comes with them,
“Look what I drank and you didn’t.”
But when Springsteen’s on tour the bottled monotony is broken up with a steady stream of shots of The Boss that gives the impression at least a third of the audience at any given show must be winemakers.
I’ve thought long and hard about why this is so.
There’s no doubt a few blokes in the Barossa can relate to the opening lines of The River,
I come from down in the valley
where mister when you’re young
They bring you up to do like your daddy done
And there’s a lyric in Thunder Road that could well be written specifically for most of the winemakers I know,
You ain’t a beauty, but hey, you’re alright
But it’s even a bit deeper than that. It goes beyond Bruce.
There’s a disproportionate number of music obsessives in the wine business and I think it’s connected to the old cliche about winemaking being a combination of science and art.
Good training and careful application will take care of the science side of things but I can’t escape the suspicion music is very useful when it comes time to elevate the art.
The preparation of a playlist to get a cellar crew through the round-the-clock rigours of vintage will take as much, if not more, planning than working out when to pick the fruit.
I sometimes wonder if I can hear the music in the wines.
Have the brooding, complex wines that build and build to a clattering finish been spawned in a shed rumbling to the sounds of Mogwai?
Do lively, edgy wines race across the palate the way they do because they’ve absorbed the fast and furious energy of The Ramones?
And have the wines that taste like utter crap been cruelly subjected to too much Coldplay?
In a recent university study conducted in Scotland, researchers found that those drinking a particular wine while listening to Carl Orff’s bombastic Carmina Burana were more inclined to describe the wine as “powerful and heavy” while those listening to a bossa nova styled cover of Depeche Mode’s Just Can’t Get Enough, were more likely to assess the wine as “zingy and refreshing”.
Perhaps we need to broaden our sensory scope when it comes to tasting wine. Instead of letting our noses and palates do all the work, we should be opening up our ears as well.
Try This
2016 Ochota Barrels ‘Sense of Compression’ Grenache, McLaren Vale. $85
Just about every piece ever written on Taras Ochota describes him as a “rock star winemaker”, in an attempt to link his unquestionably exciting wines with his misspent youth playing in punk bands. All this tells you is the hack responsible has tasted the wines but never saw his old band Kranktus play.
I did, and that’s why I’m more likely to apply the rock star tag to Maynard Keenan, frontman for US heavy rockers Tool and Ochota’s collaborator in this strikingly good grenache.
The wine is piano-wire tight, like every extraneous thing has been chiselled away leaving a wine of beautiful, red-fruited purity, an energy that hums like a guitar leant against an amp and tannins that feel like they’ve been pressed by layers of shale and slate to form fine sheets.