Movies, Tokaji and an 18th century wine tour

Your favourite wine movie; do you have one? Let me know if you do.

To help you decide there’s a recent story about film world luminaries drawn to wine growing and Brian Miller’s tremendously entertaining piece on wine at the movies in Winestate.

I have several favourite wine movies but top of my list at present is not mentioned in either of these reports. It’s Dean Spanley, a clever and poignant meditation on fathers, sons and mortality with a subtle reference to the magic of wine.

Dean Spanley features Peter O’Toole as a witty, goggle-eyed old curmudgeon who has become increasingly rigid in his habits since the death of his eldest son at war, and then his wife from a broken heart. Jeremy Northam plays his son; increasingly exasperated with his father’s refusal to express grief and desperate to make sense of the injustice of his brother’s death. In his search for solace, son takes father to a public lecture on reincarnation by an Indian prince who is hilariously uninterested in the idea of future lives since he’s content with his present wealth. His next life could not possibly compare!

At the lecture, father and son encounter an irreverent, resourceful fixer (Bryan Brown) and Dean Spanley, an edgy, enigmatic clergyman (Sam Neill; a film world wine grower who owns Two Paddocks in New Zealand).

It’s gradually revealed that when the Dean drinks Tokaji he’s transported to a past life as a dog. I won’t say more than this about the story except that Neill’s performance is deliciously canine.

But I would like to say a little more about Tokaji.

Meet Maurice O’Shea

Meet Maurice O’Shea: a far sighted vine grower, a magician when it came to blending wines; a vigneron who could see the world in a wine glass.

Source: National Library of Australia, photographer Max Dupain. Reproduced with permission.

O’Shea died in 1956 but I met him through his love letters along with stories of him which still ripple around the wine industry, tales told by folk near where I live in Newcastle NSW, and a transcript of a talk O’Shea himself gave to food and wine connoisseurs in Sydney in 1950.

Why was I reading his love letters? They’re in the Local Studies section of Newcastle City Library. As long as you’re a responsible member of the public you can pop in and read them anytime. Or you can read impressions of the passionate way O’Shea wrote, in the early 1920s, to his future wife, Marcia Fuller, in Campbell Mattinson’s The Wine Hunter, The Man Who Changed Australian Wine (2006) or Peter McAra The Vintner’s Letters (2007).

Love is lovely, yes. But when I went searching for O’Shea what I really wanted to know about was his work with wine. I was to speak about him at an event in the Hunter Valley NSW to honour his work at McWilliam’s Mount Pleasant, Pokolbin; the unveiling of a heritage cairn; one of four in a growing series of cairns which celebrate the heritage of Hunter wine growing.

The world in a wine glass

I think about wine a lot. About how the grapes were grown, which grapes were grown, where, why, how and by whom; how the wine was sold, to whom; what it tasted like.

I explore threads of stories and events, people, places, plants, businesses, scandals, tragedies and triumphs which particularly featured wine in the past. I do this for the same reason a historian of anything takes on their particular specialisation: I want to understand how now became the present by looking at then.

Oh. And I do this because I love wine.

[Unnamed woman drinking wine, c1930] Photograph: Sam Hood, hood_07059h, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW

As I see it, wine isn’t only a source of pleasure and release, it’s a way to understand something very specific about being human: the desire to have constant access to a drink that we don’t actually require for survival but which we would absolutely prefer not to have to get along without.

More than this, wine has cultural and symbolic meaning quite apart from other forms of alcohol like beer, spirits or cider. Wine illuminates aspects of human behaviour which are not limited to a certain gender or to particular classes or cultures. It operates as a source of stories and knowledge which ranges from providing a living for early modern European peasants through to a complex culture of trade culminating in outrageous heights of luxury and excess. Wine is a drink for men and women of any social class; and it is often not considered in wine history that wine growing as opposed to wine drinking is a culture loved by children. There are many nuances such as this that we miss in wine history if we do not begin at the plant production origin of the process in the vineyard and follow threads of inquiry through harvest, fermentation and then the supply chain through to consumption; with branches of cultural meaning created along the way.