I had a call from the auctioneer just as I was turning right for home into Sydney Road, on a pale sunny late Friday morning. I had been down to Carlton where the cafe I frequent permits writers to spend an hour or more over one coffee exuding words. Or not. He thanked me for the gift of wine and the signed copy of the book about the Moonee Ponds business whose story I had written a couple of years ago.
I had delivered the gift of wine and book to the Mt Alexander Rd agency a few days earlier. The book part of the gift was not an ego trip; the agency had pitched itself as an expert in the district, so I thought it might fill in a few colour-by-number spots in the patchwork of local history. The auctioneer told me he had already dipped into it and had recognised several names, locations, and events. The wine accompanying the book was a Henschke, a label I could not afford now; the owner of the hotel at which I worked in the late 1970s and early 1980s had always opened a bottle (well, I had opened it for him, being the wine waiter) of Henschke Keyneton Estate or Mt. Edelstone or even Hill of Grace when he had entertained his mates from the Carlton Football Club or the Australian Hotels Association.
It was nice to receive a thank-you by telephone and not by text. He told me he had opened the wine over a birthday dinner for his wife.
I reckon every decade since the Great Austrian Wine Scandal and our fading love for Liebfraumilch, the Blue Nun & Black Tower years, has been pronounced an overdue Riesling revival but nothing ever really came of it, until now. Like Henschke, German Rieslings have risen in price faster than Oscar Piastri in the last few years. And they’re far from alone. The top labels from pretty much everywhere around the globe are now accoutrements for the rich and famous.
ReplyDeleteYes, riesling is long overdue for its renaissance - it still seem to suffer in Australia from its bastardisation as an all-purpose party wine decades ago, which in fact was identity theft as riesling did not have to contain riesling. Makers tried to distinguish the real thing as rhine riesling but ran into the same problem as calling pinot noir burgundy.
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