BRUCE PALLING | UNCORKED | December 30th 2007

rosso rame/Flickr

Bruce recounts the beginnings of a relationship that would take him from a casual meeting in the shack of an Australian artist to a passionate love affair in the hotels of Paris and the sale-rooms of London ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

There was no auspicious moment, no Pauline conversion, no big bang. The first time I tasted wine was on the outskirts of my home town in Australia in a shambolic studio belonging to an alcoholic artist who bought his wine by the half-gallon flagon—or, in a "bladder-can", with a vacuum-sealed interior that crumpled around the wine to stop it spoiling. This technology was truly superfluous, given that the can would be empty days before any oxidation threatened. I think that this contribution to the world of oenology was an Antipodean invention. It certainly wouldn¹t surprise me, given the history of the place.

Modern Australia's entire ethos was created and shaped by drink. The 1400 convicts and their jailers from the First Fleet pitched an orderly camp at Sydney Cove in January 1788. All was under control until several days later, when the female convicts disembarked. By nightfall, there was a tremendous thunderstorm and the Marines were given an allocation of rum and permission "to make merry with the women". What with one thing and another, soon all the male convicts joined in too until the entire colony was one big drenched drunken orgy, with sensitive chroniclers annoyingly feeling unable to divulge the full extent of the depravity. Perhaps they were suffering from memory loss rather than Stockholm syndrome. This egalitarian approach to life certainly found fertile ground. Nearly a century later, Anthony Trollope described Australia as being like "a ball given by the servants".

My own education into the mysteries and pleasures of existence owed more to my time with my artist friend Laurie Turner (and his mistress, Lynne) than from any later teacher. Laurie was a genuine bohemian, who had spent four years in Europe in the late 1950s. His stories about London, and angry young men, and the rich and famous, were dazzling to a provincial schoolboy. He introduced me to avocados, with the claim that Aristotle Onassis had them flown to him daily, wherever in the world he happened to be.

For a 16-year-old in a bush town, the only drinking question of any matter was whether you preferred Fosters to Melbourne Bitter. Neither had my attention or my loyalty, but I was in a small minority. This was the era of the "six-o'clock swill", when local citizens would line up half-a-dozen glasses along the pub bar by the stroke of 6pm, and demolish them in the 15 minutes that remained before closing time. There was even a notorious sting operation against after-hours drinkers. masterminded by a plausible rogue who won the confidence of the bar by his rendition of Marty Robbins's mawkish "A White Sports Coat (and a pink carnation)".

Still, these absurd drinking laws never really blunted the lemming-like passion of many townsfolk for self-obliteration. One popular past time outside pub opening hours was to purchase a "niner" (a pressurized keg of nine gallons of cold beer), slap it into the back of a utility truck, park it in some uninhabited bush and demolish it on a Sunday morning with a handful of mates. This constant boozing had a deleterious affect on the well being of a significant number of the male population, especially when it came to their midriff. Still, most boozers were secretly proud of the "verandah over their toyshop", as it showed they were one of the blokes.

Not that my upright family fell into this category. There was no alcohol in our house except brandy for medicinal purposes, and beer for birthdays. My parents had never then tasted fermented grape juice. The nearest they ventured was "Strawberry Nip", a sickly liqueur served in thimble-sized cups hooked on to the side of a barrel-bearing porcelain donkey and cart. (The other popular drink in my childhood was something called "port wine", but that was more associated with sprawled drunks, in grubby trousers held up by hemp twine.)

I approached Laurie's wine as if it was red beer: he had to tell me to to sip it, not gulp it down. But I was grateful for the introduction, and I followed up on it. In 1967 I bought a couple of cases of red from a Coonawarra vineyard, and stored them in what my neighbours rather optimistically called "The Brothel"—a beautiful and dilapidated sea captain's cottage in Maldon, Australia's first National Trust town, which I had bought for £150.

The Coonawarra reds proved, in their way, to be a good investment. Friends from Melbourne were staying in the house. Unprompted by me, they spruced up the garden and repaired a broken-down verandah. They paid themselves by drinking my fledgling wine cellar. I was annoyed at the time—but, looking back, we all made errors of judgement in the 1960s when it came to drink.

When I finally ended up working on The Age of Melbourne, I had rather foolishly imagined that the obligatory drinking might be less intense than on the provincial daily paper I escaped from. (Admittedly, the good burghers of Bendigo were pleased to see the last of me, after a cruel typo in my weekly children's letter urged them to keep a crap book for happy memories.)

Still, such was the power of conformity in 1960s Australia that I established that I could survive amongst my beer-swilling bretheren as long as I "shouted" for about five or six rounds of beer at a session.

Melbourne was where my nascent gustatory tendencies were given full flow, thanks to Mietta O'Donnell, a wonderful colleague whose family were distinguished Italian restauranteurs. We would plot our over-the-top lunches during lulls in the coroner's court, and managed to try most of the better restaurants. Mietta went on to run one of the best-loved culinary establishments in Melbourne before meeting her maker in that quintessential Australian way of death, the car crash after lunch.

In those days there were no bottles of wine, whether Australian or French, that caused me to down tools and marvel, though I recall being impressed with Seaview Riesling when I was 19. A couple of years after this, having been imprisoned twice for refusing to fight in Vietnam, I went to live in Laos. We could drink extraordinarily cheaply at the French Military Mission in Vientiane, but the wine tended to be of the kind that came in cans from Algeria. I was more interested at that stage in the bottles of Ricard you could buy for $2.

After ending up in London, I recall drinking a '62 St Emilion at a fashionable restaurant in Hampstead in the early 1970s, but I suspect the choice was guided mainly by the bin-end price of £2.50.

No, my love of wine was really prompted by my friendship with a leftist French couple in Bangkok, and a British spy in Indochina, at the tail end of the Indochina war. Patrice was the quintessential Bollinger Bolshevik: my favourite moment with him was when we drank an obscure Chateauneuf du Pape, and dined on a fresh foie gras, that had been smuggled into the country by a slightly disgusted friend of a friend who was a veteran of the '68 barricades in Paris.

"Kim" was a very different cup of Lapsang Souchong. He had recently bought a Range Rover, not for its off-road prowess but because it offered excellent acoustics in the back for enjoying taped operas at high volume. Whenever he was about to reveal to me what was commonly on the front page of the local rag, he would lean forward, turn up the volume, shield his head with a hand and preface his comment with "Er, entre nous ..."

He did however, write personal introductions for me to his favourite wine merchants in St James's, which I suppose launched me irretrievably into the world of wine rather than that of espionage.

While I was covering the collapse of the Mekong Delta and the fall of Phnom Penh, vinous events were moving along in Australia. In Canberra, the charismatic but economically inept Gough Whitlam became prime minister. He certainly liked the finer things in life, which nearly brought him to grief during the government-led embargo on French produce in protest against their nuclear tests at Mururoa Atoll in the South Pacific. At one official function, an alert trade unionist was troubled by Whitlam's behaviour. "Prime Minister, I wouldn't want to dob you in or anything, but isn't that Pulugly Montrayshit you are drinking Froggie wine? I don't think it's allowed because of the embargo." Gough deliberately downed another glass and turned on his politically correct colleague. "Comrade, after it passes my lips—it's Australian."

Around the same time, my home town, in one of the more picturesque gold-rush regions of Australia, acquired a well-stocked wine merchant. There I bought some designer-labelled wines from Central Victoria, but they failed to arouse much enthusiasm among my parents. So much so that when I paid another visit home three years later, I said I would walk down to Beckingsales and see what interesting wines they might have. "No need to go all that way, Brucie," my father announced. "We still have that bottle of Balgownie from when you were here last."

This might, in fact, have been a pleasant surprise. Stuart Anderson's reds always needed a few years to show themselves properly. Things went downhill when the bottle appeared on the dinner table. It was a quarter of the original content, still stoppered with the original cork from when I opened it three years earlier. After several years of undisturbed oxidisation, it managed to give even vinegar a bad name.

Still, the passion was now there. I even managed to introduce my bohemian mentor to some decent wines—a '62 Talbot, and, even better, a '59 Gruaud Larose that I had purchased in London. As we sat on the edge of the gully one evening polishing off these two bottles, he could not believe that they were actually wine, which I suppose is not surprising given what his constitution had been pickled in for decades. To this day, he remains convinced that the Gruaud Larose was in fact brandy, given how much depth of flavour it possessed.

In my next instalment I will reveal my first experience of Chateau Latour, in Paris—and why my wine purchases at Christies' nearly led to an international incident in Southern Rhodesia.