Winemakers' Cavalier Approach to Procreation

The Economist recently (23rd November) ran a front cover headline which read: "China: who's in, Hu's out".

I laughed myself silly at such a bad and insensitive play on words.

And so subject lines like the following one from the Winemakers' Federation of Australia's self-same email are to be encouraged:

"Winemakers already moving on pregnancy warnings"

One can only wonder where these winemakers are all moving to?

My uncle lost an old mate to Alice Springs once, when the latter's romantic life became a little hectic, but I can't think what winemakers would do in such a town.

$2 Milk and $750 Wine

The Wall Street Journal reports that a Barossan shiraz is now Australia’s most expensive wine, at about $750 a bottle, or $1 per millilitre. Torbreck’s The Laird, 2005 vintage. Apparently all 400 cases have sold out. Quite a lot of it went to Hong Kong, where the wine’s importer commented “All the big collectors in Hong Kong, they’re not idiots, they know what they’re drinking, they know what they’re buying, and they love wine.” Or commodities.

Everyone – and maybe even the Wall Street Journal – reports that supermarket-branded milk is now $2 per three litre container, or $0.00067 a millilitre. Using this information one can clearly demonstrate the agricultural and economic differences between a cow in a paddock and a shiraz vine in a vineyard: volumetrically it’s 99.93 cents per millilitre, to the cow’s disadvantage. Thank goodness therefore for the two over-arching truisms of economics: markets correct themselves, and competition is good. But you don’t see a lot of milking cows in economics lectures, do you…

Yet these are piffling matters when one considers the crimes against humanity being committed by other arms of the supermarket gods. A chain of wine stores bought quite a lot of Penfold’s Bin 389 – or ‘Baby Grange’ as it is known, thanks to the fact it is only a tenth as awful as Grange proper. They then proceeded to sell it below the wholesale price they bought it for. This loss-leader mechanism is designed to increase foot traffic in one’s store, thus capitalizing on impulse purchases of products with more positively geared profit margins. Yet the man from Penfold's who runs the Bin 389 spreadsheet was not amused. He thought that this discounting would damage the integrity of Bin 389's brand. (What effect it might have on the integrity of Bin 389's quality as wine is all together another, less important matter.) He immediately instructed his staff to stop updating their facebook pages and go forth charged with company credit cards and buy up all the loss-leader Bin 389. What a decision it must have been for the staff: ‘Do I stop facebooking myself, or do I use the company credit card?’ Well they used the credit cards and bought back about a tenth of their stock at a price lower than they’d sold the stock to the wine store chain in the first place. Admittedly the economics are revolutionary, but this is cleary a win for the wine store chain.

It is not an original idea, however. This outstandingly innovative business concept mirrors that of many of Mr. Penfold’s grape suppliers, who, of course, are only to happy to sell Mr. Penfold and his friend Mr. Foster wine grapes at below-cost-of-production prices. It is the future of business and through it we might all yet be saved. There’s such romance and moral purity found in wine.

Where The Flavour Is

Volume 49 of the Chamber's Winery newsletter has just landed. It contains sad news for sherry connoisseurs:

Our sincere apologies, particularly for our long time customers, if you missed this in our last edition but our Dry Flor Sherry is now only available in 750ml bottles. We no longer supply either flagons or containers. We fully understand the impact of this decision…

On the other hand the newsletter lifted any true gourmet’s heart with this recipe:

Cross cut a whole Camembert Cheese and soak in our Mt Carmel Port overnight in the fridge. Return to room temperature then add 125g of butter, beat then pat back into the original circle shape and encrust with flaked almonds. Serve with drinks.

Forget the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival Hydra, and forget little half bottles of Manzanilla, and forget Fair-Trade wafers topped with an artisinal anchovy fillet and a dob of tomato concasse, Chambers is where the flavour is.

Making Proper Use Of Sommeliers

The new year started extremely well, with the following advice about sommelier use coming from the 1st of January's edition of my favourite piece of right-wing fruit-cakery, The Spectator.

My wife would like to get angry and throw a glass of wine over me; what would you recommend?

We can now all return to restaurants with confidence. What fools we have been in 2010 and further back, asking sommeliers moronic questions about food and wine matching.

The Ultimate Flavoured Vodka, and just in time for Xmas...

SPUTNIK VODKA GLOBAL BRAND AMBASSADOR TO VISIT AUSTRALIA BY SPACE SHUTTLE

Sputnik Vodka's Global Brand Ambassador, Yuri Kalashnikov, will make a flying visit to Australia this Christmas – by Space Shuttle – to personally launch the new and exciting Hi-Carb, Full-Isotope, Onion-Flavored Vodka - Sputnik Cossack Maxi+ ™.

Mr. Kalashnikov will be visiting with his private football team and a collection of Eastern European typists and dictationistas. He will be available for interviews and photo-essays.

Sputnik Cossack Maxi+ ® will be released solely on-premise, at $98.17 RRP, and 110% proof.

Mr. Kalashnikov says he looks forward to "meeting of Australia women, for killing your wild white shark of water, and for to be eating much of your most fearsome bear - the koala monkey. This trip is pleasure, not business."

CEO of London’s International Soft-Drink and Spirits Competition ©, Charles Rupert-Roberts, has described Sputnik Cossack Maxi+ © as “the drink of the 21st Century”. Mr. Rupert-Roberts went on to say that “the Sack” (as Sputnik Cossack Maxi+ ™ has come to be known on the American College Mixology circuit) is “refreshing, demanding, easy, complex, versatile and uncompromisingly spontaneous. It is the essence of global liquor positioning.”

Sputnik Cossack Maxi+ ® and its secret, unique blend of carbohydrates, isotopes, and onion is set to bring the coming summer Down Under to life!!! Great on its own, it is also a perfect mixer, and stunning with food-matching, as an aperitif, or just on its own.

For further information, media packs, or hi-resolution images, please contact:
Fleur Slazenger-Du Pont: ✆ 0404 040404
For interview opportunities with Mr. Kalashnikov, please contact:
Bree Stuyverstánt-Stuyverstánt: ✆ 0414 141414
Read My Lips Media & Communications
2/14a Pashmina Mews, Potts Point, Sydney, NSW

***ENJOY CONSUMING MODERATION RESPONSIBLY***

Five Things To Do With...

Lifestyle lift-outs love nothing more than a list. And I’ve certainly composed my share of such silly lists over the last decade. “Five Things To Do With a Throw Rug”. “Five Things To Do With a Vegetable Peeler”. “Five Things To Do With Pinot Gris”. Good Lord. There’s only one thing to do with pinot gris, of course, and that’s to purposefully mis-pronounce it at every opportunity: penis grease. One certainly wouldn’t drink it. Some things must separate us from the anmal kingdom, after all.

Today a colleague at my office pointed out another “Five Things” list. It concerned coffee; yet all the advice was wrong, wrong, wrong. Here’s the correct list:

Five Things To Do With Coffee

1. Put a deposit on it or ask about lay-by options.

2. Be seen with it, perhaps at the races or a charity event.

3. Keep the beans under lock and key, lest they be accidentally run through your $1500 espresso machine, thereby rendering it unphotographable.

4. Use it as a platform for such word usage as ‘barista’, ‘fair-trade’, ‘free-trade’, ‘organic’, ‘biodynamic’, and other such bits of jargon-monoxide.

5. Get it loudly and terribly wrong.

Dutch aboriginality...

Andrew Bolt - or Andronicus Van Bolt as he is for some strange reason known in my office - is in trouble. Every second person you meet in the street is angry with him over his published opinions about Aboriginality. He wondered aloud if someone who has virtually no Aboriginal blood can claim to be Aboriginal. He wondered why some writers, artists, academics and activists claim Aboriginality when they were more Caucasian, at least in terms of their DNA, hairdos, looks and surnames. He commented ''I'm not saying any of those I've named chose to be Aboriginal for anything but the most heartfelt and honest of reasons. I certainly don't accuse them of opportunism.'' Which is the nicest way I've ever heard anyone ever accuse anyone else of opportunism in my life.

Yet this - I now realize all too clearly - is just a smoke screen. The real topic here is not Aboriginality in its Australian guise, but aboriginality full stop.

Andrew Bolt, born here in Australia, is of Dutch parentage. He once said "Like most of you, I'm indigenous. I was born here and have nowhere else to go." If one is indigenous one is born or produced naturally in a land or region. The term usually applies to aboriginal inhabitants or natural products. Lower case 'a' aboriginals are people who are strictly native, if we are sticking strictly to dictionary definitions. Which makes me realize that none of the writers, artists, academics, activists or Bolts mentioned herein are either indigenous or aboriginal, in the strictest sense. They are all - more or less - recent imports.

That we live in a time when it is trendier to be Aboriginal than it is to be Dutch should not cause us so much fuss. Perhaps if Mr. Bolt only said nice things about people more of us would want to identify as Dutch, regardless of how much or how little Dutch blood we had.