Thirty Thousand Bottles of Wine and a Pig Called Helga

by Todd Alexander

  Every time I saw Uncle Rod’s name on my phone, I steeled myself for more bad news from him, but then in August there came a call I’d never expected.

  ‘Todd, mate, we’ve got it!’ he exclaimed with glee one Thursday morning and I could not believe what I was hearing.

  ‘Uncle Rod, you told me to believe in the impossible but I couldn’t and you proved me wrong,’ I said, sounding very much like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz waking from her dream. ‘Thank you so much for not giving up, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate all that you have done for us.’ And you were there. And you were there . . .

  ‘My pleasure, Pet. Your Aunty Anne and I want to see you guys successful.’ They’d been at both prune-offs with Pet and felt very much a part of our journey.

  ‘How much wine do you want? You name it, Uncle Rod, it’s yours . . .’

  He thought a minute. ‘Actually, Pet mentioned you were thinking of getting a pig. I think it’s only fair that it’s named after me.’

  The refinance on the loan would be enough – just – to finish building our first villa whose budget had spiralled way beyond our initial estimate.

  I got home from the city that evening to Jeff having finally mastered boeuf bourguignon (man, we went through quite a few bowls of dry salty dead cow to get to that outcome) opening a bottle of local Shiraz to go with it.

  ‘Here’s to the loan,’ I said, raising my glass to his.

  Running one hundred acres is hard work, particularly when you’re both employed part-time elsewhere. Hour after sweaty hour is applied to the tasks at hand. The scale of everything can do anyone’s head in – but somehow with each other for support we never lost sight of the dream, knowing that blood, sweat and tears would be mandatory payment to get us there.

  Welcome to Unemployment

  By early September 2014 we were edging closer to opening our first villa – the converted side of the shed. We had very high expectations: we’d spent a lot of money on the conversion and still more on designing the interior and furnishing it. Jeff would disappear for hours on end then come home and painstakingly reveal every single item he’d bought, expecting me to comprehend his grand vision. Oh, that’s nice. Oh . . . right. Okay . . . I’d say all the right things but really had no appreciation for how one thing would work alongside another. To me, nothing appeared to match. But I should never have doubted him.

  Now, Jeff may not have known how to drive a tractor or where our water came from when we first came here, but the gay sure knows how to design an interior space! We had an opening date of late October 2014 for the converted shed, which we named Orchard View for its sweeping views over the citrus grove, and it felt as if we were finally achieving what we’d moved to Block Eight to do.

  At the same time, things at work didn’t feel right and, during a review with my boss in early September, we agreed that I would accept a voluntary redundancy package. In no time, the wheels were in motion: by 11 September I would be unemployed for the first time since I was seventeen.

  I’d never been more scared in my life. (Okay, maybe aside from the time when I was four and the bogeyman character my cousins had created, Heart, came to get me when we were on holidays. My Uncle John crept outside and tapped on my window: ‘Toddy . . . Toddy . . . Toddy Ally-ander . . .. It’s Heart . . .’ Scaring the bejesus out of each other must be a bit of a family trait.) But once I could rationalise some of that fear, I knew deep down I was also relieved to have been set free and brimming with excitement at the prospect of being at Block Eight full time. This, after all, had been the plan all along.

  Redundancy packages from any US-based company tend to be better than those based in Australia but Jeff had spent the money before it even landed in our account. Old Mr Sensible Finance Guy wasn’t about to let Dreamy Airy Fairy Spendthrift get his mitts on it, so there were no fancy holidays, no new sports cars and none of the plastic surgery I’d been longing for most of my adult life. (Just a suck here and a tuck there, nothing too drastic.) Instead, Jeff pre-paid one year of our mortgage, and the rest was earmarked for the completion of the second villa and the bottling of our next wine, the Estate Semillon. With me out of work and Jeff’s award wage being part-time, we were now desperate for the accommodation to generate as much income as possible.

  In late September we’d received the first bottle of Estate Semillon. If tasting our first ever wine had been momentous, the fact that this was our second certainly didn’t reduce our excitement or sense of achievement. Dan had created a beautifully balanced wine, sweeter certainly but well-rounded and smooth on the palate. At the time I definitely preferred the Estate (this time with a yabby on the label!), but that was possibly because it was new and fresh and we’d definitely grown accustomed to drinking the Reserve (and eating into our profits, though, as we saw it, drinking our own was always cheaper than buying someone else’s). But eventually the wines became like our offspring, or perhaps works of art – it was impossible to choose a favourite and you learnt to love each equally.

  *

  Orchard View opened for bookings in mid-October on several online sites and I sat back and waited for the cash register to start ringing. We expected it to be as popular as the main house, given we knew that the Hunter is a magnet for romantic getaways and in Orchard View we’d created the ultimate love nest for couples. It had a king-sized bed, private little outdoor verandah, fully equipped kitchen, heated flooring in the bathroom – every mod con. We’d really spared no expense and had assumed that the bookings would come thick and fast. So we waited for those bookings. We waited some more. But after four or so weeks there was not a single booking for November. Then no one came in early December. I was beside myself with worry so Jeff surprised me by taking me for a drive in the Barina into the Barrington Tops National Park.

  The Barina, needless to say, is not four-wheel drive, is automatic, and does not have improved suspension or extra width tyres. It’s about as Annandale as any car can get. Originally we’d gone shopping for four-wheel drives but I’d found my one and only second-hand-car-buying experience too stressful and had settled on the cheapest new sedan we could find. We walked onto the lot in Rosebery and said, ‘we’ll take that Barina there, thanks’ without so much as a test drive or opening a single door. It was without doubt the fastest lot sale in history, as the salesman exclaimed once we had signed the relevant papers. It went on to be a lemon of the tallest order – the speedometer didn’t work so you had to guess your speed and month after month after month Holden failed to fix the problem, then the blinkers didn’t work, and then once they were, the odometer didn’t work and then once that was fixed, the speedometer stopped working again. She has managed to transport a Noah’s Ark’s worth of animals and building materials during her employ, however, so we got our money’s worth in the end.

  The Barrington Tops trip was a spur of the moment thing, so Jeff hadn’t thought it necessary to pack water, lunch or any snacks at all, let alone check that the car was up for the three-hour long and (as it turned out very) rough drive. Hell, Jeff hadn’t even worked out a route, assuming Siri could get us there without any internet connection in the boondocks.

  After three hours of driving (it sure was purty) – the last thirty minutes over very bumpy rocky roads – our car got a flat tyre. No sweat, we may have been idiots but we still knew how to change a tyre – we were bona fide blokes, after all. But then when I lowered the jack and the car sat on the newly changed spare tyre, it too went down very quickly. There was as much air in that tyre as there was in one of my profiteroles (the only thing I haven’t quite mastered in the kitchen . . . along with angel hair pasta). We asked for help around the entrance to the national park but no one had a pump, not even the park rangers, who sniggered at our stupid car.

  Our only option was to drive back into the nearest town, about forty minutes or so on the flat tyre, and along the way we kept a constant look out for a local who might be able to help us.

  ‘Jeez, look at these places,�
� I said to Jeff. ‘Jeffrey Dahmer would feel right at home on one of these farms.’

  ‘They just look Australian to me.’

  ‘Do they? Do they Jeff? Do they really Jeff?’ I asked drolly, like Homer Simpson often asked Lisa. ‘So you’d be happy to drive up to one and ask for help?’

  ‘No way!’

  ‘Good, because I wouldn’t let you. You’d be shot within a few seconds and then I’d be held captive in the basement and forced to do all the washing and cooking for some toothless hick.’

  ‘Sounds right up your alley if you ask me.’

  ‘Yes, but at least you have all your teeth.’

  As luck would have it, we came across a man and woman (a woman! A nice, safe, human of the female variety) working on their tractor. We pulled our car into their driveway and I told Jeff he needed to do all of the talking but as soon as we got out of the car, instinct kicked in. I figured it was better coming from my ocker self than in Jeff’s still potent Brummy.

  ‘How ya goin’?’ I asked. (All gs were dropped from any -ing word in the following conversation because g is for gay, after all.) ‘Sorry to bother you but we were drivin’ down the road and we got a flat tyre. We were wonderin’ if youse had a pump to help us blow it up?’

  They took pity on the fools and the woman drove her quad bike up to her shed and came back with a battery-powered pump.

  While the tyre was inflating I said: ‘Nice fertile land, here – what kinda cattle are you raisin’? Dairy or beef?’

  When she talked about the cattle I then went on to explain that we too were farmers and owned a hundred acres ‘just down the road. We’re growin’ grapes and olives . . .’ She didn’t really seem to give a damn.

  We were nearly out of there without being lynched when Jeff said, ‘You know, I really love the way you’ve painted your fence like that. Would you mind if I asked what colour it is?’

  The woman looked at him queerly. ‘Black.’

  As we drove off, I burst out laughing. ‘Oh my fucking god! Ooh, is that a Dulux shade?’ I mimicked him.

  ‘Oh fuck off,’ he said with a laugh, ‘Is that eatin’ beef?’ he put on his best (and by that I mean the worst) Australian accent.

  We laughed all the way to Dungog where we had really bland toasties in a run-down shithole of a café for my birthday lunch, but it is still destined to be one I will never forget. I just love what you’ve done to your fence! It was good to laugh in the face of our failed launch of Orchard View but on the drive back home I got a surprise birthday present – finally, a booking trickled in.

  The booking was for 1 January for three nights, so on New Year’s Eve, Jeff and I decided to drive into Newcastle to treat ourselves to a few beers at a local pub to watch the clock tick over. We were forty minutes from home, and ten minutes from Newcastle when I received a message from the guest asking if he could come early, in the next two hours. It meant an extra few hundred dollars for us so of course I said yes and within a minute we’d abandoned plans to celebrate, turned the car around and were headed back to Block Eight to finish cleaning and preparing the villa for the guest’s arrival.

  James was our first ever villa guest – he came without a human companion but we were so desperate for cash we even allowed him to bring his dog with him, having previously made a blanket rule that no pets would ever be allowed to be brought onto the property. To this day he is the only person we’ve ever made an exception for. James is a personal trainer in Bondi and a part-time model/actor and he was looking for the perfect escape from the mayhem of a city New Year’s Eve to carefully plan his business for the coming year. After meeting him at the door, he closed himself inside and we never saw him or his dog for the next three days. Upon leaving, James came to say goodbye and we started talking. He thanked me and said this was the most perfect escape he’d ever been on and asked how I ended up at Block Eight and within minutes we worked out that he used to date an ex-colleague of mine. James returned to us several times and always holds a special place in our hearts as the man who broke our villa-booking drought but alas, his did not begin a tsunami of bookings.

  ‘I think we’ve made a terrible mistake,’ I said to Mel on the phone one day in late January 2015 while I was up in the vines de-suckering shoots. It’s backbreaking work, bending down to pick off new shoots that appear anywhere near the base or lower trunk of the vine, and walking kilometres in the heat, stooping up to twelve thousand times, depending on how many vines have suckers. As I paused to speak to Mel, I pressed on the small of my back, trying to ease the ache.

  ‘How so?’ Mel pressed.

  ‘We’ve only had a single booking for the new villa and nothing more for the foreseeable future. I can’t believe it, but I think I’m going to have to suck it up and go crawling back to the corporate world with my tongue out ready to lick more arse. Young, Gen-Y, self-entitled arse.’ I brushed sweat out of my eyes and bent down to the next shoot with a slight groan.

  ‘You’re rushing into things,’ she said calmly. ‘You have other things to lick! You have a lot of wine to sell – how seriously have you tried to shift that? You could write more books – anything! A friend of mine teaches up there and makes a lot of money from it. Just don’t assume your only option is to head straight back into a world you no longer want to be a part of. You were so happy to get out of it, you’ll be miserable returning to it again so quickly.’

  We talked some more and she gave me some great ideas. Abandoning the de-suckering, I rushed back to the house, called up all the internet listings for the villa and breathed new life into the descriptions, just like Mel said I should. I experimented with the lead image and pricing. I listed the villa on two more sites. We invested more money in having a fireplace installed to take advantage of early bookings for the winter season. Over the following three weeks another booking came in, and then another.

  In late February, we received our Button Chardonnay to taste. Now back in the day, when I first started drinking wine, Chardonnay was very de rigueur and I drank it by the bucketload, but since then my palate morphed to prefer Sauvignon Blanc, then again towards Riesling and Pinot Gris, and since moving to the Hunter and making our own, Semillon. I’d distanced myself from the oakiness of Chardonnay in the intervening years so was nervous to try ours. We’d bought a new American oak barrel to mature the wine in and it adds a traditionally coarse oaky taste to the wine, hence my anxiety. When the sole pallet of wine arrived from Hunter Bottling, it struck us just how precious a drop this was. It had been made despite the odds: severely unkempt vines, just five hundred kilos of fruit that most winemakers would have mixed with something else and that our band of loyal friends working tirelessly to pick . . . its scent certainly packed an oaky punch but the taste was buttery and mellow, thick on the palate and a butterscotch aftertaste that blew my mind. I knew I wasn’t supposed to play favourites, but I had fallen in love. Knowing this wine would never be sold commercially because its small volume prevented Dan from performing all the necessary filtering only added to the sense that it was a special drop, and we shared it lovingly with our friends and former colleagues.

  Now that we had three excellent wines to sell, I followed Mel’s advice and turned to the wine to try to raise some funds. I drained my corporate network dry. I mean, I scoured LinkedIn like a junkie licking powder from the top of a toilet cistern. Anyone who had the remotest connection to the wine or hospitality industry was emailed; from my own contacts I emailed people whose names I barely recognised – perhaps I’d met them once at a speaking event or else they’d come into the office pitching one of their own ideas to me. Do you need wine? I asked every single person I knew to buy a case, and most did. The money slowly started coming in but we were far from in the clear.

  In March 2015, Shelly called me to advise we were getting new next-door neighbours at The Meadows. We knew the house and vineyard next to us was for sale, but we hadn’t expected it to be sold so quickly – in just three months (it usually takes up to twelve month
s to sell a larger Hunter property). Unlike our previous neighbours, who we’d never actually met due to their infrequent visits, Shelly said the new owners were moving in permanently so there’d be a bit more action on our street and perhaps, I thought, we mightn’t feel so alone. Shelly gave me their names and I immediately jumped onto Google, learning Natalie and Andrew were mortgage brokers and financial advisors.

  As no one had welcomed us to the neighbourhood, I was absolutely determined to reach out to Natalie and Andrew shortly after they arrived. But when you’re busy mowing, rotating vegie crops, pickling, writing (I was putting the finishing touches on a novel), well, life sort of gets in the way of your best intentions. I came home from the supermarket one day and found a brief note of introduction in the mailbox. I called her immediately.

  ‘Hi Natalie, it’s Todd from next door. I’m so sorry, I was going to call you and welcome you but you beat me to it.’

  ‘I thought we’d say hi and let you know we’ve moved in . . .’

  ‘You guys will have to come over for drinks,’ I said, excited to be speaking to people our own age, a couple who had moved from Sydney to dive headfirst into an adventure so similar to ours. We would have so much information to share with them and also have someone to bond over similar trials and tribulations. ‘How does next week sound? Friday at eight?’

  ‘I’ll check with Andrew and get back to you ASAP,’ she said. Her voice was warm and rich; I immediately liked the sound of her.

  I chose 8pm because I figured it was too soon to sit across from each other at dinner. We’d have our respective meals at home then have a few drinks, and because we’d started later, the neighbours would be under no pressure to stay longer than they wanted.

  They arrived with a bottle of Champagne and three other bottles of wine. I’d already placed four bottles of wine in the fridge. We hosted them in the house and from the second they sat down we were off – no awkward silences, no major alarm bells of differing world views, just four people chatting through their histories and their plans for the future. They had two daughters, aged three and four, and two dogs, and their plan was to eventually open a wedding venue . . . which would feed perfectly into our business plan, a funnelling of guests well in advance (as weddings were generally booked). I thought they’d stay until 10pm at the latest, but the conversation continued unabated, the wine kept being poured, and a little after 2am they said their goodbyes. A few weeks later we went to their house, met the kids, dogs and Natalie’s parents, and more or less from that day on our friendship has grown in strength and vitality.