Now enjoying their twilight years together, Hobart's Claudio Alcorso and Dr Don Martin enjoy an enduring relationship. Born barely two years apart on different continents, these venerable octogenarians will tell you they are brothers nonetheless. Brothers in wine.
Sydney's recent expo Wine Australia '96 certainly lived up to the superlatives it used in its promotional literature. Billed as the largest wine and food showcase ever held in the Southern Hemisphere, the event drew vast crowds to Darling Harbour's Convention and Exhibition Centre over its four-day program.
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.
It can take years and years of backbreaking effort to bring a small vineyard to fruition. Its undoing can take a single night. Frost is a killer of young vineyards. Even in well-established sites, it can cause major vine damage and result in the loss of an entire vintage.
Thirty years on from the first release of Nino Culotta's observations, it's hard to deny that we Aussies are still a weird mob. How else can you explain our steadfast adherence to a 'meat-n-three-veg' approach to wine selection when we consume so many dishes from so many remote parts of the planet?
Small is beautiful. OK, that may have been the anthem of the switched-on 70s, but its relevance to the production of fine wines in the era of economic rationalism is no less important than it was 20 years ago. If your goal is the production of world-class premium wines, you have to be prepared to sacrifice quantity for quality.
In the quest to produce classic bottle-aged Riesling, time is of the essence. It takes time for a vigneron to discover a site ideally suited to the production of premium quality wine grapes. Time to unravel a complex web of relationships between variety, viticulture and winemaking. Time for the finished wine to evolve and mature in its bottle.
When you consider the thought and care that goes into growing and making quality wines from Pinot Noir, there must be plenty of times when your average Tasmanian producer simply feels like throwing their arms in the air and crying, "Enough!"
When Rob and Anthea Patterson took up residence in the picturesque Channel region of southern Tasmania 20 years ago, the hey-days of the district's famous apple industry had become the bygone days of another era. Doomsayers reckoned the best thing coming out of the region was the road to Hobart.
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.
