Tasmania's Claudio Alcorso and Don Martin enjoy an enduring relationship. Born barely two years apart on different continents, these venerable octogenarians are nonetheless brothers. 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!"
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.
