Tuesday, 5 October 2010
It may not necessarily have anything to do with Townsville, North Queensland or the early days of James Cook University, but I'm regularly surprised where people I'd run across back in the day have turned up.
Long term Pacific correspondent for the ABC, ABC art critic, University Vice-chancellor, and bass players with iconic Sydney new wave /punk bands are a couple of examples that spring to mind, and I can now add a five-star wine maker to the list.
As I said, it may not necessarily have anything to do with a particular place and time, but I suspect that the line from an old Elvin Bishop track Well it's a long way to where I come from/ and it's a good place to be away from has something to do with the post-seventies Townsville/JCUNQ Diaspora.
When I get to have a yarn to Stephen and Rhonda Doyle I might be able to fill in the details that explain how the bloke I remember as the writer of a couple of songs about Soul Singer Sammy, Ned the Kangaroo and Bill the Porcupine (with the latter as a significant forty-year ear-worm) ended up making wine in Orange. I know the story’s more or less there on their website, but you can’t ask a website questions, can you?
It's a small world and it continues to shrink.
These things turn up often enough to ensure that when I spot a name that looks familiar I'll do a quick spot check (the inevitable Google search) just to be sure.
But the trail that connected me to Bloodwood involves more than a little bit of coincidence. I didn't sign up for the electronic version of Halliday's Australian Wine Companion so I could get a free copy of the hard-back Australian Wine Encyclopaedia. It was a major shock when the Merry Frockster delivered the mail he'd collected while we were away in W.A. and I found that I was now the bemused owner of this handy reference volume..
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.