It’s that time of the year for me when days and nights are occupied either tasting wine or writing tasting notes. I even end up talking in tasting note format to friends and acquaintances: ‘Saw Portugal kick seven last night – silky teamwork and finishing, solid team structure in the middle of the park and a lingering impression they might go further in the tournament. 18.5 out of twenty.’
One of the wines I always look forward to tasting is Giaconda’s pinot noir, the latest release of which (from 2008) is largely sourced from the Yarra Valley, topped up by some local Beechworth material. I was the first writer to rave about this wine, back in the late 1980s, prior to the recent spate of climate change/global warming that has seen its owner/winemaker Rick Kinzbrunner concede that Beechworth’s now significantly warmer climate is just too hot for this grape. The best of the lot was from 1992, a stellar wine, which I always use as the winery’s benchmark. And whenever I think of the 1992 vintage of Giaconda Pinot Noir my thoughts always turn to Len Evans, and a particular situation I baited him into.
Quite some years ago, the English Burgundy specialist, Anthony Hanson, was in Australia. I wanted to speak to him for a few moments to complete a story I was writing about the state of the art of Australian pinot noir, and I knew he was having lunch with Len Evans at Catalina Restaurant, Sydney. So I called Evans on the phone, requesting a brief audience with Hanson at a time after their lunch, perhaps when they had begun to take coffee.
‘That is the cheapest effort I have ever experienced in all my entire life by anyone trying to invite himself to lunch!’ barked Evans, to which I did my level best to inform him that no such thing had been on my mind. ‘I refute that charge absolutely’, I said, trying my level best to sound offended. ‘You can’t do that to me. All I want is a moment of your coffee’, I insisted.
‘Unbelievable! How much front do you have?’ barked Evans again, working himself up into a Welsh crescendo. ‘Your price of admission to lunch with me and Anthony Hanson at Catalina is a bottle of great Australian wine.’
‘Excellent. I shall bring a Giaconda Pinot Noir 1992.’
‘That’s not a great Australian wine’, snapped Evans. ‘That’s an interesting Australian wine. A great Australian wine is an old Grange from a great vintage, a mature Penfolds Special Bin Number red, or perhaps a great year of a mature Henschke single vineyard red.’
So I rang my friend John Newton from Vintage Cellars, procured from him what proved to be an outstanding bottle of 1967 Penfolds Bin 7 and arrived at Catalina, with my Giaconda in the other pocket.
We began with champagne, Grand Marque, and far too many of them. My Bin 7 looked stupendous, but by then I was in decline. My Giaconda looked wonderful too. Hanson loved it; Evans tried desperately not to, finally pronouncing that it tasted too plummy to resemble top-drawer Burgundy. By then, it didn’t matter. Nothing really mattered at all to me apart from getting to my 3.30 pm appointment with a Sydney-based financial honcho who had expressed an interest in buying monogrammed copies of my book.
Evans said he’d take care of that. It was bucketing rain as only Sydney can, so Evans piled me into his chauffeur-driven limo, and in the midst of a torrent that could truly be described as Biblical, dumped me in the middle of Sydney without a clue as to where I was or where I was going. I got there eventually, somehow, dripping water from every pore and doubtless breathing like a distillery, only to discover that my financier associate was singly determined to vent his distaste at having to secure his new vintage of Giaconda by buying it over the Internet.
‘It’s a blatant form of prostitution’, he spat out at me, ‘which is something I simply can’t condone!’ It was then that I reminded my appointee that he was the major shareholder in one of Sydney’s most profitable houses of ill repute.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is precisely what goes through my mind in about a millisecond immediately after my first sip of any new Giaconda pinot noir. And still some people wonder why others make such a fuss over pinot noir!
