Category Archives: Stuff!

Australian Wine: The story is in the bottle

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A good bottle of Australian wine is about more than just what’s in the bottle. It’s about the people who made it, the vineyard itself, the wine region, often the family behind it, and often the stories we, as drinkers, bring to the wine. 

In a non-academic sense, this was the basis of my PhD, where I looked at what lay behind the wine, particularly the emotional connection that Australian wine families had with their land, their winery, and the wine they produced. I could bore you with a detailed academic explanation of socioemotional wealth, but instead here is a link to my PhD.

My research showed that for these families there was so much more to the wine than its economic value. There was a deep emotional connection to the land itself, a sense of place and so much more.  Often these family members reflected that their own family’s story was being told through the bottle. They saw the wine as a continuation of their own family story.

The story is in the bottle

A couple of anecdotes always spring to mind for me here.

One is of a family member who loved bringing out a bottle of the family wine at dinner. Their branch of the family was quite distant from the family members who ran the winery, but the wine was their connection to a family story that had a more than 100-year history.  Their story was in the bottle, as a member of the family working in the wine business said.

Another is a family member who works overseas and is delighted that the family’s wine is often used at Board Room events. That bottle of wine lets them enjoy the family’s story, even though they are thousands of kilometres from the winery. Continue reading →

The red on my spreadsheet- what our renovation taught me about renovation budgets

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It’s a year since practical completion of the renovation of our beach house. It’s just the garden to go now.

To use a much-overused term, it was quite a journey. What started as musing about ways to sort out our dreaded spiral staircase over a steak in the Penola is now the finished article.

Our architect’s plans were put through the mill by my favourite person and me. While costs were relevant, they were not the driving factor through the design phase. The focus was on getting rid of the spiral staircase and coming up with a design that compensated for the loss of space that would result. However, it didn’t stop there! We quickly moved on to a new kitchen, relocation of the laundry, necessary because of the stairs, an update of the mezzanine to give us more space and extra decking. And I wonder why the costs blew out!

The mezzanine

It was about two years from when we first met our architect until the builder started on our renovation. We waxed and waned over her design, but as each decision was made we very much followed her lead. Her attention to detail in putting my favourite person’s ideas into place served us well. Our builder commented more than once that there was so much detail in her plans. Continue reading →

Our renovation – My home gym

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Updating my home gym at our beach house was an important aspect of our renovation. In recent years fitness has become in my life. It wasn’t something I originally set out to make a major part of my routine. I’ve always done some form of excercise, but I don’t think it was truly part of my life, I just fitted it in.

That all changed  with a rather unflattering realisation while changing a car tyre. I went to get up from the footpath and struggled to keep my balance.

Something  wasn’t right. I was too young for this and something needed to change. I’d ridden bikes for years and, as I said earlier, I always considered myself reasonably active, but I wasn’t actually getting any fitter. In fact, my weight was gradually going up. This was even after I retired and I was no longer entertaining a few times a week. I was however not really watching my diet and I was having a glass of wine most nights. I was also struggling to keep up with my riding group.

Eventually my doctor made the fairly obvious observation that I could probably afford to shed a few kilos.

It was time to do something about it.

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A reflection – Barry McGuire’s Eve of Destruction

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Eve of Destruction (song) - Wikipedia

I was driving home recently when Barry McGuire’s Eve of Destruction came up on my playlist. I hadn’t heard it for quite a while, but as I listened, I was struck by how familiar it sounded. Not because the world it described was the same as the one we live in today (the song was released in 1965), but because the anxiety behind it was. 

Eve of Destruction became one of the anthems of the 60s. 

It’s a song about war, nuclear weapons, racial tension, political violence and a generation wondering where the world was heading. I recall talking to my grandpa, a First World War veteran, about the end of the world. I can only imagine what he thought of the rantings of this grade 6 child, having experienced what must have felt like the end of the world while serving.

Listening to Eve of Destruction in 2026, I found myself thinking that although the circumstances have changed enormously, the feeling that the world is somehow on the brink of disaster hasn’t changed very much at all. In fact, as my favourite person said when I discussed it with her, we are always ‘dancing on a pin ’, and that really we are only a step away from some form of disaster, whether it’s man-made or natural.

Maralinga | National Museum of Australia

In 1965, the Cold War was at its height. The United States and the Soviet Union had enough nuclear weapons to destroy each other and all of us many times over. The Vietnam War was escalating; we had the draft, thankfully I was too young, but my favourite person’s brothers weren’t!  On the other side of the world, the civil rights struggle was exposing deep divisions within American society. The assassination of President Kennedy was still fresh in people’s minds, and all of this was being presented in our living rooms via television. 

Even as a pre-teenager, it felt quite literally as if we were on the eve of destruction, but we survived. The world didn’t end, and in fact we went through a period of peace and greater harmony.

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So where am I

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One of my favourite non-mainstream media reads is The Free Press. While much of it is focused on politics, more and more articles are appearing on softer topics.

I was really taken by The Surprising Pleasures of Widowhood by Elinor Lipman. At the outset, I am not a female, so I am not faced with being a widow, and thankfully, my favourite person is still going strong. However, we have watched our mothers go through widowhood. Both had different reactions, but as I listened to Elinor, I was taken by the term ‘grie-lief’, which I think applied to my mother, who cared for Dad as he suffered cancer and then dementia. Mum did so much of her grieving before he died, and with his passing came a release of sorts. It didn’t mean she was pleased he was gone. He still featured in conversations, and there were photos on the mantel shelves, but Mum got on with her life. Her next few years were ones she got a lot from, and I’m thrilled for her. I miss her and Dad still.

There is much to take out of Elinor Lipman’s article and accompanying interview with Suzy Weiss. I wanted to focus on the final piece of the interview, where she considered some questions Continue reading →