Saturday, 11 April 2009
Idiosyncratic? You Bet!
If there are two related words that are overused at the moment they’d be icon and its cousin/brother iconic. Of course, when someone throws either one of them into a sentence we know what they mean; something from a list of synonyms that include idol, paragon, hero/heroine, celebrity, superstar, favourite, and darling.
Take whichever sense you want and substitute icon instead. One size fits all, no tricky thinking or decision-making involved and every child player wins a prize.
When I started researching the Barossa leg of our trip to South Australia last November, there it was again, being used by none other than James Halliday, who has no doubt attracted the same descriptor himself. He was, as the astute reader may have gathered, talking about Rockford, and now, having visited the establishment in question there’s no way I’m going to be lured into using the same label.
You want a label for Rockford? Go with idiosyncratic and consider the following synonyms drawn from the lengthy list supplied by the iMac’s dictionary: individualistic, special, one-of-a-kind, unconventional, quirky, offbeat, distinctive.
Yep, idiosyncratic for mine.
Maybe that goes back to my first awareness of Rockford, well before the Little House of Concrete had even been thought of as a possibility. It was back when Ernie Kurtz had the lease to Bowen’s Grand View Hotel. Ernie returned from a stay on Hamilton Island with the news that he’d run across (quote) the best red wine I’ve ever tasted. The fun started when he tried to track down a dozen. Bearing in mind we’re looking back fourteen or fifteen years some of the actual details are rather hazy but I seem to recall that the first avenue of inquiry was greeted with a rebuff along the lines of we don’t ship orders to hotels.
In the long run, persistence paid off and he ended up with a dozen. After the saga that brought them there I was determined to have a taste. Persistence on my part eventually paid off, and very nice it was. Nice enough to have Rockford filed away as a label to look for when I found myself in one of the more upmarket bottle shops in a capital city. Since there are, according to Halliday, only five retail outlets nation-wide it’s hardly surprising that the sighting count remained at a firm zero.
Fine, I thought. We’re off to the Barossa. I’m going to Rockford, and on a Friday afternoon in early November 2008 there we were.
First impressions were of a building that fitted remarkably with Hughesy’s mental image of a couple of Belgian farm houses that featured prominently in the Battle of Waterloo, and when we walked into the tasting room we found the sort of cobwebbed charm that you can’t manufacture unless you outlay vast quantities of money.
The actual details of the visit are already over in the Barossa section of the relevant travelogue, but after a very pleasant tasting session we were about to head off when I asked about the mailing list.
I shouldn’t have been surprised to learn that there isn’t one. Or at least there isn’t one in the usual sense of give us your mailing address and we’ll send you a newsletter. I mean I’d already been to http://www.rockfordwines.com.au/, so I shouldn’t have be surprised to learn that you place an order and then you go on the mailing list.
So, the day after we’d returned to base, I was on the phone looking for a dozen bottles of the Alicante Bouchet, which will undoubtedly be a significant element in our summer lunchtime drinking here in the Little House of Concrete.