Halliday's 15,000 bottles

Holiday reading for the wine lover (and drinker) ... Wine correspondent G.D. Wendler gets his nose into James Halliday's autobiography A Life in Wine ... A great journey from Clayton Utz to viticultirist, vigneron and vintner 

Halliday: drained La Pyramide

THE holidays are an excellent opportunity for lawyers to do some reading, purely for pleasure, rather than remuneration.

For those interested in wine I could not recommend more highly James Halliday's recently published autobiography A Life in Wine (Hardie Grant Books 2012). 

The book explains how and why Halliday discovered "a life in wine". The preface includes a succinct valedictory to his dear friend of 35 years, Len Evans, who died in August 2006.

"Len was a man of extraordinary generosity, never counting the cost, which was for many years beyond his financial capacity. He was highly intelligent, fiercely loyal to his friends  contemptuous of sycophants. His sense of humour was second to none; he was a great MC and a fearsome auctioneer when raising money for charities." 

In the modern history of Australian wine Len Evans was a colossus.

Halliday was born in 1938, and to his eternal chagrin the year was an unsatisfactory vintage in France, compared to 1937 - which was the best since 1929.

His father, a physician, whom he barely knew "until the conclusion of the war", maintained a cellar at their Bellevue Hill home mostly stocked with bottles of Lindeman's.

This  precipitated Halliday's early curiosity about wine. Halliday's interest accelerated during six years of undergraduate residency at St Pauls College, University of Sydney. He recalls:

"In those days black academic gowns were required to be worn on week night evenings and we were allowed to have wine on Wednesday evening and Sunday lunch." 

Episodic wine excursions with college chums to the Hunter Valley to visit Tullochs, Elliots, Lindeman's, Drayton's and McWilliams stimulated Halliday's appetite for further knowledge about wine.

In 1963 Halliday began as a solicitor at Clayton Utz. By then, Len Evans, the food and beverage manager at the Chevron Hotel  in Kings Cross, was writing a popular wine appreciation column for The Bulletin.

In 1967 Evans published a periodical dedicated to wine tasting notes and informed advice about wine. Halliday records that in one particular edition Evans wrote:

"The 1962 Grange is also fairly high priced, yet is very much worth the money. At $2.40 it is extremely good value though I dislike seeing some hotels charging as much as $4 in their bottle departments." 

Halliday confesses that by the year of his first marriage, "I had mini cellars stretching from Sydney to Moss Vale".  Later he reveals he has had as much as 15,000 bottles in one of his cellars. 

Between 1970 and 1983, owing to a confederacy between fellow lawyers Tony Albert and John Beeston, he became viticulturist, vigneron and vintner.

The partnership acquired a 10 acre plot of land on McDonalds Road, Pokolbin, which became known as Brokenwood.

Halliday ultimately sold his interest in the estate to become a managing partner at Clayton Utz's Melbourne office.

He recalls numerous Single Bottle Club dinners, including one in 1977 organised by Len Evans in honour of Christies wine auctioneer Michael Broadbent.

These voluptuous dinners mandated guests contribute a single special bottle to the occasion. Halliday describes an Aladdin's cave of wine that was consumed, including many from famous nineteenth century vintages in France, Germany, Portugal and Australia. 

Diners consumed much DRC Burgundy and first growth Bordeaux from auspicious vintages such as 1900, 1928, 1937, 1945, 1947 and 1949.

There is a photograph of the author opening a double magnum of 1865 Chateau Lafite.

Halliday's "European sojourns" were taken in France during sabbatical leave from Clayton Utz.

He participated in vintage at Len Evan's two Chateaux in Bordeaux - Chateau Rahoul and Chateau Padouen.

At Domaine Dujac in Morey St Denis he met Geelong winemaker Garry Farr.

He also discovered La Pyramide, a hotel restaurant in Vienne, on the Rhone River in south eastern France and doesn't mind telling us:

"Over the next two years I returned several times to La Pyramide methodically draining the cellar first of Romanee-Conti, then of La Tache and making a determined assault on the Domaine's  Richbourg before the collapse of the Australian dollar." 

There is a chapter about the odyssey of Coldstream Hills and his quest for the golden fleece of winemaking - creation of a magnificent wine from the taciturn pinot noir grape.

A significant portion of the book is devoted to the social and economic history of Australian wine, with many evocative photographs.

Halliday is, of course, recognised as one of the world's most reliable and knowledgeable wine critics. He is now 74 years of age and, astonishingly, continues to manage an indefatigable work schedule.

Chief winemaker at Penfolds, Peter Gago, once described himself as: "a wine lover first, a wine collector second and a winemaker third." 

This fits Halliday's scheme of "a life in wine". At the end of his autobiography he asks himself: 

"Would I change anything? No. Are thgere still mountains to climb? I hope so, particularly idf they are not too large." 

As G.B. Shaw said: 

"Everything in moderation including excess."  

James Halliday: A Life in Wine 
Hardie Grant Books 2012
$45 hardback