Tuesday, 5 October 2010
We‘re frequently reminded of the ever-changing world in which we live in (to quote one of the most awful bits of lyric writing in the annals of popular music). I found further evidence of that when I went on to Google to check on some of the formative influences on the development of Hughesy’s palate.
Anyone who’s familiar with the quirks of my personality would realise that once I’d acquired an interest in wine I wouldn’t be content to just drink the stuff, and, predictably, apart from whatever interesting bottles I could afford, I was also buying magazines and books about Australian wine.
How else is a bloke going to find out which bottles are likely to be interesting?
These days, of course, if you’re in a relatively sophisticated neck of the woods there are in-store tastings, and you can find articles and reviews once or twice a week in reasonable newspapers. Townsville in the 1970s was hardly a relatively sophisticated neck of the woods so it was a case of tracking down books and magazines, which weren’t exactly thick on the ground.
My emerging interest in wine coincided with the publication of Len Evans’ Complete Guide to Australian Wine in 1973 so it’s hardly surprising a certain rather hefty tome (at somewhere around 500 pages in hard cover, how else could you describe it?) became Hughesy’s starting reference for most matters to do with Australian wine.
That copy disappeared long ago, so I’m working from memory, hardly the most reliable of conveyances, but in the course of repeated re-readings I built up my own iconography of Australian wine - the terra rossa soils of Coonawarra, Tahbilk Marsanne, Bill Chambers and Rutherglen Muscat, Lake’s Folly and The Rothbury Estate, to rattle a few of the obvious ones off the top of my head. There were others, but that list gives an indication of the things that interested me.
Some were even available in the better bottle shops around town, but it took years to track the others down.
In the meantime, somewhere along the line there was the opportunity to join The Rothbury Estate Society. It was one of those buy a dozen and you’re a member deals and for the next twenty years four-bottle tasting packs turned up on the doorstep at regular intervals, though the reordering of selected bottles became rarer as other options opened up.
In the end, faced with the multiplicity of options and the disappearance of Bankcard I ended up letting the regular deliveries lapse.
So when I decided that The Wine Pages on the web-site needed a section on Wine Clubs and Mailing Lists I needed to gather up a few sources of information to fill out the gaps in the finer details of an increasingly unreliable memory.
A Google search for Rothbury Estate Society, however, failed to reveal much except from the fact that the organisation exists and produces wine. And from a mailing that arrived in the PO Box recently it’s now apparently the Rothbury Wine Society.
That’s probably not too surprising given the to-ing and fro-ing that occurs within the corporatised world of Australian wine. One suspects that recording and preserving details of the previous incarnations of the brand name aren’t at the top of the list of priorities when you’ve got something that’s sitting under a large corporate umbrella.
And it’s probably not too surprising to note, as you look at the sections further down this section of the web-site, that the wineries that interest me are, increasingly, the smaller, family owned and operated ones