The wine world may be a curious mix of noble ideals and competing egos but it's a remarkable fraternity nonetheless. The loss of talented Moorilla Estate winemaker Jason Winter during the recent Port Arthur tragedy has provided plenty of hope to believe that we are indeed all brothers in wine, as the saying goes.
Mention the name Steve Lubiana in your next wine conversation and it's fairly likely you'll receive the standard response, "Steve who?" That's hardly surprising. Your average Tasmanian wine consumer would barely know of Lubiana's existence.
"Every man's work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself." Toss in a 1990s reference to wine - and a more enlightened reference to the female gender - and Samuel Butler's Victorian observations on life and art are as relevant today as they were a century ago.
Vineyards take time to bear fruit. It's not like planting cabbages. Or money trees. Just ask your local vigneron. You have to wait a good few years before your investment bears its first fruit. You wait even longer before it shows a profit on a balance sheet.
So far as we can tell, Tasmania's first vineyard was planted in 1823 by one Bartholomew Broughton, in what is now the Hobart suburb of New Town. History notes the wines of his Prospect Farm were especially successful, receiving accolades both here and abroad. Evidently they were deemed worthy of comparison with the finest from Europe's vineyards.
Anyone who visited a Tasmanian vineyard this time last year will remember all too clearly the wringing of hands and the gnashing of teeth that accompanied local grower assessments of vintage 1994. For many producers, only the last minute arrival of an Indian summer ensuring excellent fruit quality averted a potential disaster.
When a mainland writer earlier this year described local winemaker Andrew Hood as being as "busy as a Beirut brickie" his words may not have been politically correct, but they certainly captured the spirit of what it's like to be the State's fourth largest wine producer.
Wine has long been recognised for its therapeutic qualities. Its prescription in today's medicine might be a little less common than in Hippocrates' day, but a strong connection between wine and doctors still exists nevertheless. Proof is not hard to find.
Gone are the days when historic Richmond and the surrounding Coal River Valley were known for little more than low-intensity farming and their rich convict heritage. Janet and Bill Casimaty have helped to change all that.
Size is no guarantee of performance. The Biblical story of David and Goliath provided proof of that. It's pretty much the same in the wine world. Tasmania's emerging wine industry might well be a small one - with many producers having tiny land holdings - but already there are labels with big reputations.
