Mike Bennie - The Wine Front
I got up at 415am this morning to fly to Auckland to host events at a wine and food festival there. I did 10000 steps in Sydney Terminal 1 as I was flying Qantas and my beloved Virgin airlines don’t fly there, so I got my eye in for how the other half lives. I avoided expensive coffee and $18 toasted sandwiches and just kept moving around and around and around. It was my birthday yesterday and I drank too much for an early flight, with Gary alongside, and my guts were turning somewhat after a hole-in-wall Anzac Parade Indonesian feast.
I had a row to myself in the plane, thankfully, I stretched out and watched some crap movie. I landed, set up my hotel to the precision of the eternal traveller I find myself as – everything in place. I did the festival event day one with scarcely five minutes between main stage speaking roles and masterclasses, scoffed a handful of Kiwi artisan kettle chips (geez they love chips), slurped a few wines and found myself wondering what to do in CBD Auckland for dinner at 945pm.
I went to a nondescript, homogenous steak place; stainless steel, cheap, almost reflective faux-wooden floors, a grandiose bar with rote spirits, back lit and shiny. Someone shouted in a French accent about cleaning a floor. I was rapidly slotted into a seat behind a gaggle of wine crew from Escarpment wines deep in a bottle of Chablis who waved and laughed about how early we’d all started. They all wore gilets which is an almost entirely Australian and New Zealand codified thing for ‘I Am A Winemaker’. Mirth aside, an officious Swiss fellow asked what I wanted and glided onto the table, like cards at a casino, a laminated menu of steaks and sundry grilled things for me to choose in the next five seconds as Auckland has a food curfew, by and large in the CBD, at 930pm.
I ordered an ‘Aussie wagyu steak’, truffle fries, a creamed corn side. The steak was knock out, despite having to shuffle the previous diners crumbs off the table cloth. The truffle fries a strange portmanteau of crunch and funk, no truffle seen, just a suggestion somewhere there. Top five weirdest things I have eaten; the creamed corn with a bizarre almost creme brûlée casing on top of it (under it good). Prior, I looked at a wholly pedestrian wine list and bought a whole bottle of Guigal Cotes-du-Rhone Rouge with a view to have a glass or two with dinner and maybe drink the rest laying on the king size bed of the hotel. The waiter fumbled at the neck attempting to open it like a screw cap, for a minute. It was surreal, I said several times ‘sorry, perhaps a corkscrew?’, but it took longer than expected. I heard a shout from the kitchen about how there’s a lot of bats around Auckland right now.
I drank Guigal. It’s been a long time. I remembered how I learned so much from the Guigal session a million years ago at the Negociants importer/distributor-led Working With Wine seminar about Rhone from a man from Guigal at a Sydney harbour-side convention room that was formative and informative and so instructive and I have never forgotten the detail I learned that day in regionality, geography and sites.
I drank my first glass in two huge gulps and turned the wine bottle around to look at the alcohol as it felt warm. It says 15%. I ordered a 2019 but it was the 2020 on the table. Ok. I ate bits of the steak, which I don’t usually eat as I tend to vegetables and fish or seafood as my mainstays, so this is a treat. The wine was all brambly blackberries and ripe plum, booze soaked-forest berries, choc-liquorice and cloves. It sits hearty and full in the gullet. Similarly so in the belly. A bit much. The feel of eating too much chocolate. A clench in the palate from spicy, edgy tannins. In toto, lusty, rich, round, a shiver of tanginess and charry things to finish. I liked the sense of slurp but it’s fleeting, somewhat. I’m not sure it works all that well for me, in the end, but there’s always a time and place and circumstance.
