Having done the winery bit in W.A. and having a regular roster of places I buy from already, it's not as if I was actively looking for new places that could supply wine to the Little House of Concrete, so when I was flicking through that Encyclopaedia one Sunday afternoon I wasn't sure what it was about the entry on page 28 that caught my eye.
Something did, and the mention of the health advisory (Caution: May contain nuts) on the label of a wine called Big Men In Tights and the reference to Stephen and Rhonda Doyle had thinking that, yes, this could well be seen as consistent with someone who'd lived in a house with a sign advising visitors to leave their guns and holsters at the door.
There wasn't anything immediately obvious to confirm my suspicions, but the recent photographs looked reasonably consistent with the way people may have changed over forty years. Then, looking through the Short History of Bloodwood, the front photo and the photos here were starting to show increasingly familiar faces.
But it was the one with the basket press that sealed the matter, along with the accompanying Randy Newman quote.
These things still, however, needed to be confirmed. An exchange of emails produced a Well, maybe, and I was tossing up whether to call Bloodwood or make that long-threatened purchase from Pikes when an email inquiring whether I had anything to do with a clapped out kombi van parked at the bottom of Knapp Street because the road up was too steep? arrived in the in-box. After that it was, to coin a phrase, academic.
A lengthy phone call subsequently resulted in the arrival of half a dozen Big Men In Tights, three bottles of Riesling and three assorted reds on Hughesy's doorstep. They need a couple of days to recover from transit trauma, but the interested reader will be able to find tasting notes here.
There was, however, one thing I noticed as I held the glass up to the light.
I recently bought an album called Gift, by mother and daughter combination Norma Waterson and Eliza Carthy, two generations of one of England’s leading folk music families. Somewhere over the past fortnight or so I sighted a publicity photo of the two of them, and was particularly struck by the colour of young Ms Carthy’s lipstick.
Not that I’m into lipstick, mind you, but I noted that the colour wasn’t exactly what you’d be expecting from a folk singer, if you catch my drift, and the colour bore a remarkable resemblance to what I sighted in the aforementioned glass.
