chips and salad as Ross Brown gently eased the cork from a bottle of 1981 Spatlese Lexia and poured us both a glass.
Ross was right. The wine had aged remarkably well. It was still fresh and luscious. Not bad for a wine that originally sold for around $2.50. Brown Brothers started making this wine in 1974, using a grape variety called muscat of Alexandria, grown in the big irrigated vineyards along the Murray River in Victoria’s north-west. For most of the 20th century, the grapes were used to make sweet sherry. Ross explained that ‘lexia’ is a uniquely Australian name for the variety – a bastardisation, probably, of ‘Alexandria’: it’s easy to imagine an old, weather-beaten Aussie grower delivering a truckload to the winery on a hot day and describing the grapes as ‘bloody lexias’. And the other word on the label, ‘spatlese’, is German for ‘late-harvest’, a legacy of colonial Australian wine history, when white wines were often labelled generically using names of German origin such as ‘hock’ and ‘moselle’.
As he pulled the corks from a couple of other old wines from the cellar – including a remarkable sweet muscat made in 1973 – Ross told me how the Spatlese Lexia was very much a product of its time. Innovations in viticulture and winemaking in the early 1970s – irrigation and machine-harvesting in the vineyard, cold-fermentation and sterile filtration in the winery – meant that fresh, clean, sweet white wines could be made cheaply and consistently. Consumers, particularly female drinkers, embraced the style: Brown Brothers was soon producing more than half a million bottles of Spatlese Lexia each vintage to satisfy demand. It became by far the company’s biggest-selling brand. And it wasn’t the only one to profit from ‘lexia’ in the 70s and 80s. This was the era of many other popular sweet white wines based on the grape, such as Berri Estates’ Fruity Gordo Moselle – in 2-litre glass flagon and 4-litre bag-inbox – and Kaiser Stuhl’s sparkling Summer Wine.
Like me, a lot of Australian drinkers look back on these now-unfashionable wines with great affection – in the same way younger drinkers will no doubt be similarly nostalgic one day about a currently fashionable wine made from the same grape: Brown Brothers Moscato.
Brown Brothers produced its first Moscato in 2000, using the same grape variety grown in the vineyards that had supplied fruit for the Spatlese Lexia, but picked earlier, lower in alcohol and residual sugar, fresh, spritzy, zesty. The wine was exactly the right style at exactly the right time: people were increasingly interested in Italian food and drink and were looking for lighter, less sugary, more sophisticated wines. Ross showed me a graph charting the decline in sales of Spatlese Lexia and the growth of Moscato. They cross over around the year 2005. The production of the former has since dwindled to almost nothing; the production of Moscato continues to grow, exceeding even Lexia in its heyday.
As Ross and I were finishing our schnitzels, an elderly gentleman who had been having lunch with his wife at a nearby table got up and came over, curious about all the dusty bottles.
‘Ah,’ he said, smiling, when he saw the Spatlese Lexia label. ‘That was my mother’s favourite drink. Twenty-five years ago. Can I just say it’s been a pleasure to watch you blokes obviously enjoying those wines so much.’
There’s something I haven’t mentioned. It changes the story a bit. My first taste of Brown Brothers wine took place in the mid-1980s in London. I’m not from Australia.
I was born in England and lived there until 1992, when I moved to Melbourne and got married. But my family did have lots of connections to Australia. My English mum, Trixie, had lived and worked in Melbourne for a few years in the mid-1960s, and my stepfather, Bob, was Australian, so when I was growing up we took family holidays to Australia. In 1977, I spent a couple of months at a primary school in Sydney. I have clear flavour memories from that time; food and drink that was so different to what I was used to at home. Meat pies and tinned pineapple juice under a gum tree in the playground at lunchtime. Lime icy poles on Coogee beach. McDonald’s fries after seeing Star Wars at the Hoyts on George Street. This is one of the reasons, I think, that the Spatlese Lexia made such an impression when I drank it on a cold London Christmas Day: it tasted like Australia.
Except it wasn’t labelled Spatlese Lexia in England. When Brown Brothers started shipping the wine overseas in the early 80s, they sensibly decided that using a German word and a made-up Australian word for a wine destined for sale in Europe probably wasn’t a good idea, so called it Late Picked Muscat Blanc instead.
I was quite lucky to even come across a bottle. Throughout the 70s hardly any Australian winemakers bothered sending wine to the UK because English people thought Australian wine was a joke – like the Chateau Chunder and Hobart Muddy in Monty Python’s 1972 ‘Australian Table Wines’ sketch. Brown Brothers was one of only a handful of Australian companies braving the English market in the early 80s. Not only that, but there were also European trade restrictions at the time on selling sweet wines over a certain alcohol level. Luckily, the Late Picked Muscat Blanc, with an alcohol content of only 10 per cent, just scraped under, giving the Australians an opportunity to compete.
Exports of Australian wine to the UK and around the world have boomed since then. But the market today is not an easy one: most of the Australian wine sold in the UK now is in the form of cheap, generic supermarket brands made by giant multinational companies – not high-quality, high-value wine made by smaller family-owned companies. The market has become so difficult in recent years that a month after my lunch with Ross Brown at Jimmy Watson’s, his company announced it was pulling out of the UK and would stop selling wine there.
All these stories, all this history, from just one bottle.
After I moved to Melbourne I married Sophie, whom I’d known all my life as a family friend. Soph’s parents, Jim and Philippa, had worked with my mum in the 1960s: Mum appears in super-8 film of their wedding, clutching a bottle of Yalumba ‘champagne’; Jim is the man who sent us that case of Brown Brothers wine in the 1980s. I worked in bottle shops across Melbourne and wineries in the Yarra Valley, picked grapes, lugged hoses, started writing about drinks for a small start-up magazine called Divine and had my first article published in The Age in 1993. Since then I have made a living writing about booze, travelling and tasting across Australia, visiting wineries, breweries and distilleries, restaurants, hotels and bars, from Darwin to Hobart, from Byron Bay to Margaret River.
I’ve had many more life-changing drinking experiences since that first taste of Spatlese Lexia. My first glass of Penfolds Grange in a restaurant overlooking the Sydney Opera House. Watching my first batch of homemade cider start to ferment. My first sip of dark, brooding medicinal bitters bottled a century ago. All of these moments have altered how I see Australia and my place in it. I have also met many of the people who have helped shape Australia’s complex web of drinking cultures, through what they’ve made or what they’ve sold or what they’ve written. One of the most important was the late Len Evans, who emerged in the 1960s as a champion of Australian wine and influenced the drinking habits of a nation.
One of the ways Evans convinced people to put down their pots of beer and glasses of sherry and try a nice riesling or claret instead was to take the pomposity and mystery and jargon out of wine. His oft-repeated mantra, delivered with a cheeky smile and glass in hand, was ‘Don’t forget that wine is just a drink. It’s just a bloody drink.’
And it worked. People lapped up Evans’s no-bullshit, democratising approach. They embraced wine and have loved it ever since.
But the more I’ve travelled and the more I’ve tasted, and the more I’ve learned about the history of drinking in this country, the more I’ve come to disagree profoundly with Evans’s statement. Whether it’s wine
