I escaped Hamilton and embarked on a Science degree at Melbourne University, paid for by the Victorian Education Department in return for a promise to teach for at least three years on successful completion of the course.
My first drinking experience at University was a disaster! Orientation week sherry-parties were the rage in 1964; in trying to get my money’s worth, I over-indulged and slept for quite a while in the middle of St Kilda Rd after being thrown off a tram. The worst part was that I had organised to meet a lovely girl I’d met a few days before, she never did forgive me. I still can’t cope with more than a sip or two of a good sherry.
From there it was beer, and at Balls, parties etc, beer and/or Leibfraumilch, sweet sparklings like Rinegolde and Pink Porphory Pearl; drinking what the girls liked: I (very) briefly dated a gorgeous Lithuanian blonde who could drink me under the table. I managed to concentrate long enough to get a B.Sc. (chemistry and maths) and a Dip Ed, and ended up teaching snotty-nosed kids in the Latrobe Valley (eastern Victoria) in 1969. I visited Rutherglen a few times, and as well as the fortifieds, I was just starting to get into red wine. I married in December 1969 (another teacher) and taught senior maths and chemistry at Moe High.I gave up teaching after only 2 years and moved to Melbourne. The Commonwealth Government offered me 12 months full-time training in the emerging computing technologies, at just a little less then I was getting as a senior teacher, with guaranteed promotion if I passed the course. Best move I ever made! I topped the course and thoroughly enjoyed the move into information technology. This was a period of Rough Rutherglen Reds, Tahbilk and Brown Brothers, flagons of Muscat and Tokay, home-bottling reds from SA. I also browsed the back rooms of newly sold/bought licensed grocers to dig out the mature reds; wines like Orlando Barossa Cabernet and Yalumba Signature Cab-Shiraz were snapped up at bargain basement prices, before the new owners woke up to what they had. Memorable times: wines like Bullers Calliope Shiraz 1962 set me on the path to red bigotry, as did the 44-gallon drums of Tollana Cabernet, possibly made by Wolf Blass in his early days.
With some friends, we went to a wine-appreciation course sponsored by the Australian Wine and Brandy Association; a course apparently designed by Len Evans. I still have the “waiter’s friend” corkscrew presented on completion of the course.
In late 1973 I moved to Canberra; my daughter was born in early 1974, and more home bottling of red wine took place when I joined the Australian Customs “Bottling Group”. I moved on from Customs to the Department of Health in 1975. I joined the “Health Monday” wine-tasting group in 1977 (it actually started a year or two earlier); it is still going and meets nearly every Monday, some Public Holidays excepted. This was the era of dinner and fondue parties, we still drank bit of white as it was the “accepted thing to do”.
We did a bit of winery tourism: SA - camping at Nuriootpa with 35C minimum overnight; Hunter Valley - overnight camping by the Wollombi with ten bottles lined up by the campfire in the morning for two couples. We were drinking mostly reds, with still the occasional Tahbilk marsanne and a few Hunter Semillons. I finally made it to Coonawarra in the late 70’s, just before the lean, green reds were starting to be delivered.More SA and Vic Reds, dabbled a little more with the Hunter (Tyrrells and Rothbury Estate), and quickly stopped once I realised I didn’t like the style. I was separated and divorced in 81/82 and lost half of the cellar of about 50 dozen (most of the small proportion of whites went, thankfully). With a great stroke of good luck I somehow convinced Andrea to join up with me (amongst other things she’s an RB too). We took a 3-month trip around the world in 1985, amongst other places we visited and tasted were Napa, Champagne, Loire, Chablis, Burgundy, Beaujolais, Rhone, Languedoc, Bordeaux, Provence, the Northern half of Italy and lots in between. We found and enjoyed an amazing variety of wines and wine styles.
After another couple of inter-departmental moves, in 1985 I left the public service to become an independent IT contractor/consultant. (I was still doing it and generally loving it until I “retired” in April 2005.)
The new career paid well enough to support fairly rapid Cellar building, I got a real air-conditioned cellar at last in 1994, filled it with lots of good 90, 91, 96, 98 reds and a few in between, from all over Oz. I decided to stick mainly to Australian reds as I couldn’t afford to buy (even if I could get them) the French/Italian wines I liked and still drink wine with the frequency I desired. Part of my long-term retirement planning was to have about 10 years supply of good reds in my cellar when I retired.
I thought I was a wine geek until I discovered the Auswine forum and the denizens that frequent same. My predilection for reds was so entrenched by then that expressing my preferences quickly had me being labelled a “red bigot” (thanks Martin E) and I instantly adopted that as my “tag”, with Ric being relegated to “The Other Red Bigot” some nanoseconds later J
I can’t quite remember when I adapted the famous Len Evans line “Life’s too short to drink bad wine” to my own version “Life’s too short to drink white wine”. In truth, there are some white wines that are interesting enough to tempt me to forgo a red, but in almost all cases they cost more than I want to pay. I thoroughly support the Len Evans “Theory of Capacity” described by Ric above, a few (untainted) wines go down the sink because they just aren’t interesting enough to qualify for one of the ever-diminishing number of good wines I will be able to drink.
My regular tasting schedule was now (and still is) the regular Monday weekly group, a Thursday-fortnightly group, a Wednesday monthly tasting, plus dinners and commercial tastings. Interestingly, the Monday group tastes whites about twice a year; seldom does Pinots, and has all-red dinners. The Thursday-fortnightly group tastes whites about four times a year and some members still drink whites at wine-group dinners. The Monthly tasting group typically has a bracket of four whites followed by two flights of four reds. There is general cheering when the first bracket is sparkling red or Pinot.I developed my first cellaring database using Visual Basic 3 sometime in the early 90’s and converted it to MS Access when the first decent version (2.0) arrived in about 1994. After I met up with Ric, he collaborated with me on a new version of the program using Access 97 and I decided to make it available for free, as I was too lazy to expend the extra effort to refine it and package it as shareware. There have been numerous enhancements since that time and it’s still free (but you need MS Access from 2000 or later); there are now about 370 users world-wide.
Mission accomplished, the cellar is full (actually over-full) of good cellaring reds, mainly Australian, retirement was possible and taken as soon as the numbers came together.
Following on from my personal buying research (to get case discounts, I buy wine for others as well as myself,) I decided to publish the good deals on quality red wines that I found. I had already set up my personal web site as to allow requests for the RB Cellar Master Program, and the Buyers Guide was added as an extension. The RBG page formally started in January 2004 and will continue as long as I’m buying wine and people let me know they find it useful.
The plan is to “Drink (a little) less, drink better”, stabilise the cellar contents and stay fit enough to travel and drink regularly to ensure a slow decline in the currently excessive number of bottles, enjoy retirement (and try not to break a leg again).
Andrea has a few more years to retirement, then we will decide whether to stay in Canberra or move to the “red wine centre of the Universe/Australia” ie Adelaide. We had better be fairly successful in reducing the cellar contents by then or the move will be prima facie impractical!
The cellar is at ground level, it opens directly off the dining room, it used to be the front courtyard, that moved upstairs. The straight walls are about 5m, outer curved wall is double brick, roof is a concrete slab insulated underneath with 75mm polystyrene, standard domestic split unit aircon, design capacity is about 3300 bottles, it's well over that at present (August 2005).
The rectangular shelving units in the fan arrangement are back-to-back wooden bookcases with braced shelving, mostly in 18 bottle configurations as pictured. The racks around the wall are either larger bookcases with 46-58 bottle shelves or other shelving holding boxes/cartons.
Storage units are identified alphabetically and shelves numbered from the bottom up, so storage locations for wines are coded like E2R or P3L, which makes finding the wine pretty easy if I keep the RB Cellar Master database up to date.
