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| ISBN-13: | 9781925266320 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Allen & Unwin Pty., Limited |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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Passing Clouds
A Winemaker's Journey
By Graeme Leith
Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 2015 Graeme LeithAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-925266-32-0
CHAPTER 1
A vintner's boyhood
Grape juice in a goat skin
I don't know exactly when the winemaking bug bit me. I think it was in 1961, in Perugia in Italy where I was doing a three-month course in Italian language. However, I had shown some interest in the fermentation process at a much earlier age when, in contravention of the teachings of the church to which I belonged, I claimed that the wine Jesus drank must have been alcoholic wine and not the preserved grape juice given out at communion at our church.
My proposition was that without the use of preservatives any grape juice bunged into a goat skin was inevitably going to turn into wine. This idea was not supported by my Sunday School teacher who sent me home, after the collection plate had been passed around, to explain my transgression to my teetotal mother.
This teacher had sent me home on a previous occasion when I asked him who had made God. He replied (rather ingenuously, I thought) with a question: 'What came first, the chicken or the egg?'
I had replied: 'That's easy. The chicken, because the book of Genesis tells us that the Lord made the fowls to fly and the fish to swim.'
So I suppose it's not surprising that I grew up to become an atheistic, wine-drinking smartarse.
Years later, when I had concluded that God had not made man in his own image, but rather that man had made God in his own image, I would presumably have got myself into more trouble, but I'd ceased going to Sunday School by then.
How it was, though, that I presumed that the desert tribes had not learned from the Romans that the addition of elemental sulphur to grape juice could delay or prevent fermentation, I have no idea. For although I'd read quite a lot of the Bible, I had not read any treatises on winemaking and would have been unlikely to find any in our Presbyterian home.
At any rate, our mother was of that church, although to my recollection she never attended. Our father, if he had any religion, never spoke of it. But there was never any alcoholic beverage in the house and I never spoke to him about it as he died of a work-related lung cancer in 1953, at the age of forty-three, when I, aged thirteen, was too young to have heart-to-heart chats with him. But my brother Robin had heard stories of very old whisky bottles being dug up in the vegetable garden, so maybe there had been some excessive drinking in a previous generation of which Dad was aware.
As children, we were opposed to the consumption of alcohol, and if reason needed to be found for that opposition then one had to go no further than the local hotel at six o'clock on a Saturday afternoon and observe the rowdy, drunken, beer-swilling, urinating and occasionally vomiting mess of patrons as they poured as much as possible into themselves before they were kicked out at ten past. Once, emboldened by their apparent inability to pursue us, we gave cheek to some of them from the doorway, and when they came after us, threw wheat on the floor to make them slip, but it was a close shave and we never did it again.
Born in an earlier age
My father's family had come from Scotland and at some stage must have possessed some style and money because once, in a locked storage shed in the backyard among the framed photographs of deceased relatives and the musty mounted antlers of long-dead deer, we found trunks filled with fine and elegant female apparel. There were dresses in silk and satin, silk-covered shoes and silken scarves, much of which was eagerly seized by one of the sons of my parents' visitors. The rest of us boys, destined for a life of heterosexuality, left him to his dressing up and used the silk parasols we had found as parachutes to assist us in landing as we jumped from the shed roof, to the detriment of the parasols and — when our whoops of delight attracted the attention of the elders at the house — ourselves.
I doubt that it ever occurred to us that those gorgeous clothes probably belonged to the wizened old creature slowly dying in the front room — my father's mother, cared for by our mother whose destiny it was to look after five children and a succession of dying family members, her end reward to be a shared ward in a mental institution when dementia prematurely overcame her in her late sixties. She'd given birth to five children — Ian, Graeme (me), Robin and Carolyn in fairly rapid succession then, after a spell of a few years, Gregory. Four boys and one girl — poor Carolyn!
My father's business had been motor body repairs, panel-beating and spray-painting. It was the spray-painting that got him in the end because 'real men' didn't wear protective masks in those days. I clearly remember a mask hanging on a hook above the paint bench, unused over the years, and enveloped in the same crusted patina of paint that ended up killing our dad from the inside.
My father had been born in an earlier age — for him, a time of roaring flaming forges, of bellows and coke, of red-hot horseshoes and the blows of the mighty sledgehammer as it tamed the once adamantine but now malleable metal upon the anvil, for, as a boy, he had been a blacksmith. In later life, one of his greatest joys was to fire up the forge and, with the aid of the tongs, the hammer and the hissing cauldron of water, turn raw pieces of iron into useful things.
During his apprenticeship to his father, Dad had learned coach-building at Melbourne Technical College, a course that embraced blacksmithing, wheelwrighting, woodwork, marbling and graining, signwriting, upholstering and even the application of gold leaf. Thus he could build you a coach and adorn it, for that was the family's work. As their letterhead proclaimed, they were J.B. Leith and Sons, Coachbuilders, located at 231 High Street in Preston, an outer northern suburb of Melbourne.
The next iterations of the letterhead saw the business as 'motor body builders', and later, 'panel beaters and spray painters'. And so the intricate web of pulleys and belts in the rafters above the workshop that drove all the machines below that sawed and stitched, and even the mighty forge, fell mostly into quietude, replaced with the throbbing of the compressor, the banging of the hammers against the metal dollies, and the hiss of the spray guns that were to take our father's life.
Dad had been raised in the old and substantial house over the road from the forge and workshops. The area around Preston was mostly given over to small farms at that time and one of his after-school jobs was to ride any horse that had been left for shoeing back to the farm to which it belonged, and he would then hike home across the paddocks.
My mother had come from her family home in Geelong to Melbourne where, as a seamstress, she reached the pinnacle of her working career, securing the dream job of making costumes for His Majesty's Theatre. As a teenager she had excelled at gymnastics — there were more of her trophies for gymnastics in the crystal cabinet than there were of Dad's for cricket. (In fact, Dad only had one that I recall, which I now have — a silver teapot presented to S.J. Leith, Best Fieldsman 1944. As a twelve-year-old I teased him about it, cynically suggesting that he mustn't have been much good at batting and bowling.)
Mum was an attractive woman, with a lovely face, a good figure and cornflower blue eyes. I had an old photograph of her in her gymslip, which I carried with me in my wallet during my European peregrinations. She and Dad had met at a dance at the Northcote Town Hall. Dad told me that he and his mates would often walk home from Northcote to Preston, having overspent buying milkshakes and chocolates for the girls and lacking the fare for the cable car.
Some memories of my father
My memories of my father are sparse but fond. He loved angling but never had much time to indulge that passion due to the demands of a young family and a small business.
But I have one joyous memory of this. We had driven to a not-too-distant stream, the King Parrot Creek at Flowerdale, about 15 miles north-east of Melbourne. An uncle was included in the trip and he and Dad had contrived to allow Dad to precede us upstream, so that we could unload and erect the tent and not tear ahead of him and frighten the fish as young boys inevitably do. When our onerous task was completed, we raced upstream to the pool where Dad was fishing and above the streamside shrubbery could see the beautiful glistening arc of the split cane rod as it bucked to the weight of a trout. As we approached closer we could see the trout in the clear water, its speckled form wondrously camouflaged above the pebbled creek bed, almost exhausted now. My father's face had a look of unforgettable rapture — a look I never saw before or have ever seen again on the face of any man. It will stay in my memory forever.
Sometimes we would go rabbit shooting, too. Our family had a car but in my early years petrol was rationed and the 'gas producers', which were bolted onto the back of the car and burned charcoal to produce gas that was then fed into the carburettor, were ingenious, although not very efficient. Two or three times we took the 'milk train' up to Whittlesea in the early mornings and walked around the paddock of a friendly farmer, having a few shots and bagging a few bunnies for the table at home where they were known as 'underground mutton'.
The train line was decommissioned in the 1950s and the track torn up in the 1970s; now they're re-laying it and putting the stations back. Back then, no doubt, somebody, or somebody's brother-in-law, made some money from the scrap metal.
Some time after our father's death, one of his mates told me a strange story, probably because he saw it as being to Dad's credit. He and Dad were shooting rabbits one day and as they crested a hill they came upon a strange and disturbing tableau. Two men were laughing at the antics of a rabbit that was running around in circles, clearly distressed and half mad, for it had been skinned alive and was released for the entertainment of these sadists. Dad established which one of them had done it and, with his strong blacksmith's arms, removed the man's weapon and broke it against the nearest tree. He then ordered the man to strip himself naked and run after the rabbit until he caught it and put it out of its misery. My father was redheaded and had the temper to go with it; his temper must have been fiery hot that day in the sunburned sheep paddocks of Whittlesea.
Dad himself related a story to me once, concerning his early school days during the Depression when there were plenty of men 'on the wallabyy' (on the road) with swag on back in the hope of finding work. Some of the school bullies had decided to torment Dad because of his red hair and were pursuing him through the bush, throwing sticks and stones at him. Suddenly, before him, the dishevelled figure of a swagman arose from the leaves and bark beside the track and seized him by the shoulders, halting him abruptly and causing his tormentors to turn tail and disappear back into the bush. 'Why are you running away, son?'
'Aw, well, sometimes they decide to tease me 'cos I've got red hair.'
The swagman drew himself up to his full unkempt height and thrust out his chest beneath his tattered shirt. 'Well, boy, when I was your age I had red hair, and look at me now!'
I often pondered that simple story in bed at night, speaking as it does not only of intolerance and discrimination, but also of poverty, of dignity in adversity, of compassion, all wrapped in a glorious envelope of absurdity.
Warrandyte Flip
The suburbs of my boyhood in the early 1950s — at any rate, Preston, the one we lived in — were little hotbeds of religious intolerance, with the Protestants hating the Catholics and vice versa, the enmities doubtless remnants of the English–Irish disagreements from the old countries. Any encounter between the warring parties of boys was an excuse for verbal abuse at best and, at worst, physical confrontation.
I had joined the Boy Scouts before Dad died. It was a Salvation Army troop, so it was Protestant. The leaders were very good to me at the time of his death and helped me through that. To my astonishment, at the funeral for my ex-wife more than twenty years later, a man emerged from the group of mourners, shook my hand using the 'scouts' grip', reminded me that he was my old scoutmaster from the early 1950s, told me he had read the death and funeral notice in the paper, and had come along to show support — a great and selfless gesture which left me dumbstruck. To my discredit I never contacted Jack Bott to thank him. It would have been easy, too, as there wouldn't have been many by that name in the Melbourne phone book.
Scouting was good for us boys; it provided physical exercise, mental stimulation, a sense of camaraderie, and responsibility as part of a team and as individuals. We had many great adventures. The leaders had bought an old tray truck, a 1929 Chevrolet with a canvas canopy over the tray, and into that we shoved as many wooden benches as were required for the number of scouts to be accommodated. Included were all the canvas tents, the big oval Dixie billies for cooking, the food, and then our personal backpacks for the hiking to come. The old truck would wheeze its way to our projected camping destination, as far away as the Grampians or, one year, Wilsons Promontory — a long enough drive today, but it must have taken eight or nine hours in that old Chevy, with a top speed of 50 miles an hour, stopping before the largest hills so that all of us boys could get out and push.
At our camping sites we'd construct rope bridges, flying foxes, even a Roman catapult, then use these things in mock combat. It's quite possible that scouting has been dumbed down a bit these days; maybe they're not even allowed to cook anymore in case they burn themselves on the campfire!
Back then we shared cooking duties and if anybody showed the skills required, mainly those of campfire management and timing, then they got the chef's job and the other kids got to peel things and scour out the Dixies. I'd had some experience at cooking when Mum was occasionally confined to bed — usually preceding childbirth — and I would trot up and down our long dark hallway between the kitchen and the bedroom with further instructions for the ginger, the chocolate or, the ultimate culinary challenge, the steamed fruit pudding! Steamed cape cod with mashed potato and peas, scrambled eggs, French toast fried in dripping, pancakes, dumplings with golden syrup, jellies and even homemade ice-cream, were produced in this manner by our mother–son partnership; a strong bond was forged between us which remained for the rest of our time together.
It must have been due to the skills I'd acquired and the associated hubris that led me to produce the pancake that later entered the lore of the scout troop and was referred to reverently as the 'Warrandyte Flip'. We were camped on a cool creek there, for it was a hot few days, and we had some supplies left over at the end of the trip. There was an excess of butter, self-raising flour, condensed milk, eggs, sugar, quite a lot of cocoa and some sultanas. I was quartermaster cook on the day of departure and so was able to allow myself the indulgence of experimentation and observe the 'waste not, want not' philosophy instilled into us by parents who'd lived through the Depression. So I combined the lot into a Dixie, except the butter, which was used liberally to fry the pancakes in the huge pans. They were a spectacular success and the memory of the cocoa — chocolate flavour, the gentle yielding texture of the sultanas and the buttery velvety mouthfeel is as alive to me today as is the later love of experimenting with different blends of grape varieties, fruit from different vineyards, all the variables that make winemaking so fascinating.
The art of selling newspapers
We were living in the old family house in Preston. The house was an anachronism even then, surrounded as it was by old ironbark trees and the remnants of an orchard. It was Dad's turn now to die in the front room, and Mum's unhappy duty to pave his way to the next life. He didn't know what was wrong with him until a fortnight before his dreadful death but he had tried every form of treatment he thought might help — massage, Chinese herbs, acupuncture ... I was certainly aware of the deterioration of his health and there's a small but vivid illustration of the severity of his illness that's stuck in my mind ever since.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Passing Clouds by Graeme Leith. Copyright © 2015 Graeme Leith. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction,1 A vintner's boyhood,
2 Rev heads,
3 England and Italy,
4 Return to Australia,
5 The vision splendid,
6 Living life to the lees,
7 Ondine, my daughter,
8 Life goes on,
9 Musk and more,
10 Making wine,
Kingower Vintage 2004: Diary of a typical year,
Musk Vintage 2013: Diary of an exceptional year,
Winery dogs,
Glossary of terms,