Mattinson - Thin skins: why the French hate Australian wine

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Originally Published in 2007 by THE WINE FRONT
in conjunction with Hardie Grant Books
85 High Street

Prahran, Victoria 3181, Australia

www.hardiegrant.com.au

2007 by Campbell Mattinson

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ISBN 978-1-4027-9093-5 (ebook)

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For Thalia

I TS NOT MY PARENTS FAULT THAT THE FRENCH HATE usthough they played a part in it mattering to me. For starters, they never got me used to wine. Never let the black-purple wines with the rattle and shake of flavor pass my lips until I was way too old to be sensible about them. If they had, I might have been able to let all this Gallic, Eurocentric, snob-injected claptrap slide. Instead, I got worked up about it. I let it get into my heart and wound itand the pains of my heart have always been irresistible to me. Like a drought-scorched snake in need of a feed, then, I made finding the real story my lifes work.

Back to my parents: they didnt get me accustomed to wine because wine was not part of our lifein the way that wine in the life of most lower middle-class Australian families in the 1970s and 80s, and before, was mostly as foreign as methodical good sense on the Gallipoli battlefield. It was there, but chaotically and infrequently applied. We had Rutherglen tokays and muscats on ice cream; Brown Brothers Crouchen Riesling on summer special occasions; something, in the 1980s, we referred to as Chablis when we had visitors whom we thought it might impress. We lived in the western suburbs of Melbourne and the emphasis in lower middle class was most definitely on the lower. My brother and I went to the local state primary school and the local state high school, both places where the teachers seemed to throw as many punches as the students. If youd asked us our religion wed have said Methodist: though we were nothing. Methodist was just an easy way of saying void of glamour.

Through all my childhood the best bottle of wine my family almost had was a Christmas gift from my moms boss. It was so good that we never drank itits still in the bottom of a cupboard somewhere, alongside stale bottles of Madeira and Baileys Irish Cream and Club Port. I havent looked in that cupboard for some time, but Ill bet that if I did Id find one of the oldest bottles of Great Western Champagne known to humankind. After all these years, its probably now realized the value it never had.

Of course, there was no such thing as foodwine matching in this upbringing, though, realistically, its not easy matching wine to the dish we ate the mosta dish made of mincemeat, curry powder, cabbage, soy sauce, a packet of chicken noodle soup, and lots and lots of celerycalled, depending on the night of the week, kai see ming or, perhaps less exotically, chow mein.

I have a sneaking suspicion that this background means that Ill never fit into some circles of winebut also, more importantly, that Im unusually sensitive to the faux warmth of those who loathe me or, more particularly, those who loathe the Australian wine that Ive somehow come, in a small way, to represent. Faux warmth? Congenial disdain? Whatever you want to call it: in my own mind I refer to it as snobby bullshit. I had an English teacher once who noticed my competitive spirit with my classmates. She took me aside after class one day and said: Your classmates arent your competition. The thousands of rich kids who hate the fact that a kid from the bad side of town, from a bad kind of school, actually has a talent with Englishthey are the ones you have to compete with. Your classmates are your band of brothersyou have real enemies out there.

The chip on her shoulder was a different flavor to minebut it was just as big. I digressbut there is a point here.

Australian wine is the kid from the bad side of town, who went to all the wrong schools. The rich, traditional, old-school wine nations hate itand increasingly so.

I knew none of this when wine first hit meand it did hit me. I liked wine before I liked beer, but I drank and enjoyed all kinds of funny, sweet, tropical wines for many years before the night when it all ramped up into a kind of obsession. Truth is, wine hit me like a ton of bricks and damaged me forever. Ask my wife, who has sat through thousands of the most boring wine discussions imaginable, and shed perhaps describe it like this: it hit me like a magnum to the back of the head (whether my common sense, or the magnum, shattered is still up for contention).

The roll of lifes dice. Of all places, the night when wine hit me happened at the newly made casino in Melbourne. I was at a work functionone of the first times in my life that it wasnt me picking up the bill. It was a night when the alcohol flowed like stupidity at a football club and something in me changed, forever, at the sip and the taste and the sensation of one particular wine. I drank it, and as I did so it was like I was being bitten by Dracula or a werewolf or, more appropriately, by a malaria-carrying mosquito. Something went funny in me. My heart got an erection. From that moment, I may have looked the same, but I was changed. I had become a mad wine hunter. I suddenly wanted to be on intimate, personal, intense terms with all the most beautiful wines that I could affordor could wangle to drink. Looking at what that journey has cost meGod, I wish I was a lawyer. That employer has cost me a fortune. I should sue the bastard.

Butthat fateful wine.

I drank it. I drank some more. It was dark in the restaurant and the wine was dark, too, and Id been drinking casually until this wine was servednonchalant raise of the glass, hardly even look at it, sip, stop, drink moreand BOOM!

Kapow.

I held the glass (it wouldve taken a crowbar to wrench it from my grip) and looked out the big glass window, out toward the Yarra River. I swear it: I took those first couple of sips, and then saw a mass of fire. I was in a restaurant in Melbournes glitteringly ugly, palace-like casinoa place where money floated like confidence and great blazing fuel-fed fireballs exploded outside the windows. Booze, good booze, really good booze came and came like the bar was a wave machine of wine. Swig. Swallow. Another kaboom. Fire and fine wine.

Id been a journalist, that night, for ten years, and a wine, wine cooler, or scotch-and-cola drinker for the lot of them. But that night something switched over, turning me from a wine drinker to wine crazed. It was my fresh-oyster-plucked-and-shucked-in-a-French-bay moment. My white-truffles-in-a-Florence-trattoria revelation. I sipped, I swigged, and I was hooked. It was like losing my innocence, and starting a war, at once.