Thirty Thousand Bottles of Wine and a Pig Called Helga

by Todd Alexander

  *

  In March, finances were on my mind again: we were slapped with a $70,000 personal tax bill we hadn’t been expecting and for the first time ever in our relationship Jeff and I had no spare cash. Thank Christ we’d already paid for the villa shells and at least using an accountant meant we’d lodged our tax return almost a year past the end of the financial year it was due.

  I’d lie in bed wide-eyed at night listening to Jeff snore as I went over Meryl Streep films in my mind. Deciding sleep was impossible I’d get up and watch Crossing Over re-runs until early morning; sobbing as distraught loved ones believed they were talking to the spirit of their family member. (‘Something in the stomach region, I see blood, older father figure beginning with S . . .’ it was all just so accurate!) It began to look like I’d applied a permanent layer of black eye shadow beneath my eyes, which were also delightfully puffy.

  Tired and petrified about losing it all, it was easy for my mind to be distracted. I was on edge, irritable and moody.

  While it’s true that Jeff and I never really argue, that is mostly because I always take the moral high ground and simply walk off whenever he gets on one of his soapboxes. For the record, I am never annoying. Whatever he’d done to annoy me on this particular day I don’t recall, but as he was making lunch for Millie (who was on another of her visits) and me, I thought to myself, there’s no way I’m going to sit across from you at the lunch table without screaming my head off, so I decided instead to go and mow some grass, which meant attaching the slasher to the tractor.

  ‘You’d better be careful with that tractor,’ my Aunty Marie had said shortly after we got it, ‘those things have a habit of rolling over and it’ll kill you! People die on them things all the friggin’ time!’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ I said dismissively. Like she would know.

  But the tractor is a very big, very heavy machine. With the benefit of hindsight, it probably wasn’t a sensible thing to do, the day I decided to go mowing on an empty stomach and tired and overly emotional then annoyed by some silly thing Jeff had said without thinking. It was so unlike me to overreact, after all.

  In order to get the slasher on the back of the tractor I first needed to remove the counterweight – basically a big metal cube that weighs something like seven hundred kilograms. I’d done it scores of times by now; I didn’t even need to really think about what I was doing – and so I didn’t think at all.

  One bolt removed, connecting arm disengaged . . . it all happened so quickly. Without any warning, the weight crashed suddenly to the ground, breaking through the wooden pallet I’d rested it so carefully on. My hand was somewhere in the process of removing the second and final bolt from the arm when that seven hundred kilograms came down with an almighty crash. At the sound, I’d instinctively moved my hand, but not fast enough or perhaps not in the right direction so the back of my palm bore the brunt of that dead weight as I pulled it clear of the tractor arm. Had I not, it would have been wedged there.

  ‘That smarts,’ I said aloud, before the real pain took hold.

  Hot diggity if that wasn’t the worst pain in the whole entire world! I felt the blood drain from my face, I couldn’t move my fingers and then my legs began to tremble and weaken. I had to get out of the shed before I fainted. I clutched my right wrist with my left hand and carried what felt like a dead thing back to the house. I channelled Hugh Grant in Four Weddings and a Funeral – Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuckety fuck, I kept muttering under my breath.

  I walked as casually as I could into the house, past Jeff and Millie who were just sitting down to eat and went straight to the bedroom where I threw myself down on the mattress (face up, there was no way I was going to put any pressure on my hand). I held my hand bolt upright in the air; I just had no idea what else to do. The pain was so intense it could only mean every single bone in my hand had been shattered. Despite my little spat of a few minutes before, Jeff rushed into the room. He must have sensed something was up by the way I walked past white as a sheet and without making any eye contact or saying a word.

  ‘Toddy, what have you done?’

  No ‘please don’t hate me’ this time: ‘I just crushed my hand in the counterweight.’

  Within minutes we were on our way to sit in the grim interiors of Cessnock Hospital, where there wasn’t a cushion in sight.

  ‘Please can we not fight ever again,’ I said through tears. ‘Oh my god, this hurts so fucking much!’

  The triage nurse gave me an aspirin (a fucking aspirin!) and told me to wait for the doctor. After what felt like hours, I was seen by a guy who didn’t feel all that worried about the plight of what I thought was my very important right hand, and then I was given an X-ray. As it turned out, I was extremely fortunate – I had only caused tissue damage, there were no broken bones.

  Once I’d recovered, I could again concentrate on our financial plight. I hated having no money and worse still, none was due to come in from the property or the wine for quite some time. We had only one choice and that was to go into more joyous debt by refinancing our close-to-maxed-out mortgage; thereby taking another huge step back from independence.

  I called every single financial institution and talked through our situation. Hours and hours on the phone, but the story was always the same: ‘We won’t refinance your mortgage without forcing you onto commercial terms’. Banks had tightened their lending rules in the eighteen months we’d been on the property and it now seemed that with one hundred acres and two crops there was no way we were getting residential refinance, and we almost certainly didn’t have enough equity in the property to satisfy the even tighter controls of a commercial loan. If I mentioned the fact that we wanted money to build a villa for accommodation I was immediately put through to the commercial lending team, at which point I’d hang up the phone in defeat. All of this meant not only were we unlikely to get refinance on a residential loan, if any application were made and we were forced to be seen as commercial clients we would be precluded from any loan at all. Even if we could afford commercial repayments, we only had my part-time income (though it was still better than average). We were labelled risky business. No, we were labelled risky – our business was non-existent. We were inching ever closer to failure and we hadn’t even started building accommodation; we hadn’t sold a single grape or bottle of wine and yet there we were with an astronomical winemaking bill breathing down our necks.

  Jeff and I actually toyed with the idea of abandoning the plan to open villas. We figured that if we were able to pay all of the bills to make it and then sell all our wine at a thirty-dollar retail price we would have a healthy little income (in an optimum year) of close to a million dollars. But the more winemaking professionals we spoke to, the more it became obvious that pipedream would not be handed to us on a silver platter: considerable marketing and promotion expense was required, the opening of a cellar door (a costly exercise in itself with endless red tape from the local council), free tasting giveaways and even then a huge chunk of our stock would have to be sold at knockdown prices to wholesale buyers and foreign importers. We just didn’t have the money to promote our wine or build a cellar door to realise sales at full retail price.

  We briefly considered asking my family to invest in the business but we also knew what that double-edged sword looked like: Maybe you should furnish the next villa from Fantastic Furniture to save a bit of money? Do you really need a fireplace in every villa? Why not give guests Coon cheese instead of locally made stuff? Crowdfunding sites were just starting to get traction but we knew the amount of money we needed wouldn’t be raised as fast as we needed it.

  ‘Hey guess what?’ Jeff asked one Thursday evening in late March as I drove us home from the Tuggerah train station. I shrugged. ‘I’ve started sleeping with the blinds open!’

  I quickly looked at him in disbelief before turning back to the road. ‘You aren’t scared?’

  ‘Nah, of what? We’ll do it tonight. You’ll see, it’s beautiful looking out there
into the darkness and then being woken up by the sun.’

  ‘Well if you’re already doing it then I’m happy to do it too.’

  ‘So, you know, I’ve been thinking . . .’

  ‘Uh-oh,’ I responded the way I always did to one of Jeff’s I’ve been thinking lines.

  ‘We’re sitting on a little goldmine here and I think we’d be stupid not to cash in on it.’

  ‘It’s prostitution, isn’t it?’ I sighed.

  ‘What? No? Don’t be stupid! I said we needed to make money, not pay people to have sex with you.’

  ‘Sorry, my mistake. What’s the big idea then?’

  ‘This house. Pete the builder suggested it to me. I’ve been doing some research and I reckon we could easily get a thousand dollars a weekend renting it out,’ he said.

  ‘And what would we do? Go stay at Mum and Dad’s? Come to think of it, couch surfing two nights a week is nowhere near enough for me, I’d love to do more of it,’ I said facetiously.

  ‘No, we can move into the first villa as soon as the walls are up inside. We’d just have to crash there Friday and Saturday nights but I reckon that’s worth it for fifty grand a year, don’t you?’

  It was hard to argue against Jeff. So once agreed, he set me to work weaving my masterful marketing spiel. After listing the house on a couple of travel websites, our first booking, for Easter, came in very fast, a precursor to suggest that Jeff was once again right, though of course I never said that aloud to him.

  We had a few weeks to depersonalise our home – removing all photographs, clothes and other personal or valuable belongings along with any risqué art and my favourite cookbooks. That one’s going into storage! That one too! That one too! Yes, and that one. Almost immediately our home ceased evoking any feeling of belonging to us – it was merely a place we lived in between guest bookings.

  Our first guests were an Indian family based in Sydney who’d never been to the Hunter Valley before. When we met them shortly after they’d checked in they could not stop raving about how beautiful our property was and how amazing it was that so many kangaroos lazed in our olive groves, and they thanked us for all the personal touches in the house like the breakfast hamper, local wines, freshly baked cookies we’d left as well as the impressive collection of novels and cookbooks. They asked us a lot about our story – how we ended up here, why we chose the Hunter, what our plans were for the future – and after their stay they left us the most beautiful, gracious note thanking us for one of the most memorable holidays of their lives. It humbled us to know that we’d given them such a happy experience and we genuinely looked forward to doing the same again and again.

  Of course, we’d left the gate unlocked for our guests so they’d feel more welcome on the property. The evening of their departure, I sat bolt upright in bed.

  ‘What?’ Jeff sat upright too, woken by my sudden movement.

  ‘Did you lock the gate tonight?’

  ‘No . . . did you?’

  ‘No.’ I sighed. ‘Should we just leave it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Jeff said and lay back down. We never did lock that gate again and within a few weeks we removed the padlock altogether.

  On the weekends when the house was rented, we moved into the side of the shed where the new villa was to be. We shoved an old mattress on top of one of the tables Jeff had made for my fortieth birthday party so the crawly critters couldn’t get us, and we had a tent flyscreen as our only protection from spiders and flying bugs. It was hot and dusty – and I don’t mean that in a sexy cowboy kind of way; there wasn’t anything remotely comfortable or enticing about it. We did our best to make it bearable but really it was basic camping. Leroy was not a massive fan, regularly pawing at the zip in the screen to be let in, then out, then in again so most of the night was spent tending to his needs, not in something as useless as human sleep.

  Still, that first payday from holiday rental was a memorable one and those guests gave us a glowing review, so at last we felt we were on the right track. Before long, available weekends were scarce and the almost-weekly income allowed us to clear some of the backlog of bills.

  To celebrate our first booking, Jesus had created some stunning key rings that we would eventually use in every villa as well as the house. Reminiscent of those he made us for the Annandale house, but of bronze, there’s a B on one side, an E on the other and our business name etched along the edge of the letters. They’re heavy, stylish and impressive, and his creativity heralded the end of our address as just our home, and the beginning of our business.

  *

  I wasn’t ashamed of talking about our financial situation so most of our social circle knew how desperate it had become. Pet suggested I reach out to her dad, my ‘Uncle’ Rod, a mortgage broker. After yet another lender had turned us down I called Uncle Rod and explained the situation, how much money we needed to get out of trouble and which lenders I’d called and been refused by. All we wanted was enough cash to get the first villa open by October, then hopefully income would start coming in to pay for the ongoing costs of running a property as large as Block Eight and help meet some of those impending wine-making bills. We’d at least managed to pay the pickers for harvest and Dan’s monthly bill was just being covered, but within two or so months bottling would need to take place and this meant much more expense.

  ‘Don’t give up hope, Pet,’ Uncle Rod said encouragingly, ‘there will be a way out of this.’

  ‘I don’t believe in miracles,’ I said, resigned to having already lost the fight.

  ‘Well, luckily for you, I do. Leave it with me.’

  While we waited for news on the loan situation, Jeff oversaw the erection of the villas and, once that was complete, decided to search for a winter job while there wasn’t as much hands-on stuff to do at Block Eight. Pete and Cassh were left to do the build without Jeff (or Colin who’d since moved on) so progress would be slower. Despite Jeff’s considerable experience in finance, he lacked the degree that many of the advertised jobs required and even when he seemed to have the perfect skills, very few ever bothered responding to his application. It looked as though I would have to ask eBay if I could return to full-time work (what clearer sign was there that I had failed in my tree change?), and I would also have to look for a cheap room in a shared house close to the city so I could stay there four nights a week. Internally the thought of either made me want to curl into a ball and cry like a young actress winning her first Oscar but I presented a brave face to Jeff: Of course I’ll share a flea-riddled cesspit in Glebe with a bunch of bong-head Arts students, honey – anything we need for us to survive at Block Eight, I’ll do it. Did you want me to try my hand at prostitution while I’m in the city? May as well earn a few extra bucks.

  Even with the uncertainty of our financial situation, in late June we experienced one of the greatest highs imaginable. Thanks to a modest bonus from work we were able to funnel funds into bottling our first ever wine, the 2014 Reserve Semillon. Chris had designed a label shaped in an abstract number eight and it featured the silver perch from our main dam. On bottling day we raced to the factory and watched our wine fill the empty green bottles we’d chosen. They were then topped with grey metal screw caps before being shunted into another machine where our perfect new labels were applied. Suzanna handed us one of the very first bottles from the production line, knowing just how momentous an occasion this was for us.

  When you bottle wine, the enzymes are affected by the process and you’re supposed to wait four or so weeks before you drink it – as if! That very night we cracked open our debut – we were beside ourselves with pride and as usual tears welled in my eyes. Sure, we might be facing bankruptcy but look at this! Look at what these two clever little Sydneysiders have achieved in just under two years with no prior experience and armed with only passion!

  The moment the wine hit my lips I knew we were onto a winner. It had echoes of the 2006 Brokenwood wine we’d drunk on the deck our first night – citrus acidity, a fullnes
s in the mouth, a dry flinty finish and just the subtlest note of sweetness at its end. We sipped at it like it was the last bottle of wine remaining on earth and we stretched it out over dinner, pairing it with my Block Eight butterflied chicken dish.

  ‘We did it!’ Jeff raised his glass to mine.

  ‘I don’t know how, but we sure as hell did.’

  ‘It’s called determination, Toddy. There wasn’t a chance we’d be making bad wine and I can tell you now, there isn’t a chance this business is going to fail. We will find a way to make it work.’

  *

  In July 2014 we held our second annual prune-off and this time we had our very own Semillon to bribe about sixty people into helping us out. The generosity of our friends and colleagues was overwhelming, however pruning is a precise science and we had to ensure it was done properly as the quality of the workmanship could drastically impact our yield. We also had the cost of keeping everyone fed and watered and the worry of keeping them warm enough at night as they slept inside our un-insulated villa shells.

  There was another outcome, too: by the end of the second prune-off my hands were completely numb. I’d wake in the middle of the night and find the numbness had spread all the way up my arms. Carpal tunnel syndrome was diagnosed in both hands, requiring an operation that put me out of action for a few weeks. So, as wonderful as the prune-offs had been in many ways, we made the tough decision not to hold any more after that second one. From that year on, it became my carpal-tunnel-free job to prune the entire vineyard with a very expensive pair of electric shears, a feat that took around four hours each morning for sixty days.

  *

  A few calls from Uncle Rod throughout July brought the same disappointing news – no one was prepared to lend us more money against our residential mortgage. Jeff got a part-time job in Newcastle and, though it would alleviate some of the stress, there was still a huge financial gap and I was stepping ever closer to returning to full-time employment.