Our friends over at the Spectator Australia have finally gotten around to putting up a link to my recent jeremiad against New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg and all the local busybodies who, if they had their way, would turn us into the boringest country on Earth.
More Mudgee: Red Wines and Blue Wrens
Of course, it wasn’t all skittles and tits in Mudgee. The country is beautiful. Many of the wines are excellent – and by my reckoning, the tight shot grouping of vineyards on the map around Mudgee fall more consistently on the happy side of the quality bell curve than their more numerous cousins down the road in Orange. After breakfast at Elton’s Saturday morning we kicked off with a visit to David Lowe’s shed north of town to taste his wares – especially his iconic zinfandel, all generous, velvety fruits held in check by some lovely dirt road terroir and tannins, the closest thing to a great California zin I’ve had out here. The shiraz was another winner, and the ’07 a far earthier beast than it’s ’09 (if I recall correctly) counterpart we’d had the night before at Roth’s. It came as no surprise that David, who hosted us generously for a good hour – quizzing our party about the Sydney market and what brought us to Mudgee all the while – had done some time in Sonoma.
Our host takes a call while we enjoy his wines – and the view.
Also a revelation was David’s riesling: I’d thought Mudgee was pretty much red country, but we’ve got several bottles now sitting hidden in a wine fridge, waiting for next summer and any opportunity to go for a sail on a bright summer’s day and wash down some oysters or freshly-sliced slabs of hamachi. Forget tasting notes about citrus or lychees, this is all you need to know about how this goes down.
We spent a bit of time at Bunnamagoo Estate – we had dropped in on their stall at the NSW wine show at Hyde Park a few months earlier, and before our trip had found a brochure from the day on which I’d scrawled “lush, sexy shiraz” – but the cellar door was a bit of a madhouse, and being served by a slattern with star tattoos up her arm was a big comedown from a big in-depth session with the owner. Likewise di Lusso, which is doing great things with Italian varietals, but releasing them far too young: they were pouring 2011 (!!!) Barberas, which need a good couple of years to sort themselves out.
But forget all that: Robert Stein got us back on the pace in their tiny tasting room managed with brisk yet friendly efficiency, and some awesome cab savs. My advice is don’t mess around with the cheap stuff, go straight to the reserves and back vintages. The current release – 2009, if memory serves, but buggered if I can be bothered going down to the cellar to check – reserve cab sav is already drinking brilliantly, all blackberry and black pepper and just screaming out for a hunk of good beef fillet, finished on grain and with just some simple starch and inky bordelaise to go with.
Rick Stein: Food Heroes. Robert Stein: Wine Hero!
If there was to be a disappointment, it would be our lunch at Blue Wren: part winery, part restaurant, all just a big ol’ barn where they don’t know what to do with folk who come for either. I may be being uncharitable, but the senior citizens short-buses in the car park should have been a warning to us. Being hungry, we bypassed the tastings. Being really bad at his job, our waiter (a grumpy old sort with massive horn-rim glasses and the air of an art gallery owner who’d lost everything in some bad investments and was still really sore about his perceived dimunition in status) bypassed us as much as he could, and it was all we could do to get a few plates of pasta and a bowl of soup that would have been third runner-up on Come Dine With Me.
“Meh.”
Nevermind. The day would soon be looking up. In the next instalment of Prick With A Fork’s Mudgee Madness, hanging with the rednecks at the Lue Hotel, and a hilarious misunderstanding at Sajo’s!
The Links Effect
More Mudgee madness in the pipeline, but in the meantime a few links to whet the whistle:
- Smiley Bill Granger is frowning over his publisher’s repurposing of a bunch of his recipes. Both sides have lawyered up, but it begs the question, if cooks can copyright recipes, do they also have the obligation to ensure they’re accurate? This is a favourite topic around here.
- Over on News Ltd. outrage site The Punch, freelance flak Kate Dorrell falls for the old health=morality canard and proves that part-time veggos are just as obnoxious as the full-time ones. Good retort to the meat-causes-cancer claims here.
- Finally, commenter Ross points out that the Herald‘s Terry Durack has visited another Newtown hipster dive and awarded it (surprise!) 14/20. Between that and their Melbourne-centric faintly disguised advertorial cover story, the folks at Good Living are really phoning it in.
Posted in Uncategorized
2 Comments
Mudgee Review: Roth’s Wine Bar
“What … do you mean … it’s CORKED!?”
Here’s a little-known but interesting fact. Fans of The Godfather series will of course remember the character of the old Jewish mobster, Hyman Roth, played so brilliantly by Lee Strasberg (“This … is the business … we’ve chosen!”). In the film, after a series of crosses and double-crosses, Roth returns to America after an Assange-like quest for asylum first in Israel than in Latin America, only to be shot by a Corleone button-man before he can give testimony to the Senate about organised crime. End of story? Not by a long shot. The footage may have wound up on the cutting room floor, but in the original screenplay Roth survived the assassination attempt and was spirited out to country NSW, where he settled down and used his savings to set up a little wine bar in the town of Mudgee. Roth’s Wine Bar, to be exact.
Don’t believe me? Well, you shouldn’t, though the idea of a notorious, ancient American gangster settling into the obscurity of the mid-20th century Australian bush is an amusing one. But you should, if and when 
you have the chance to hit Mudgee, drop in on Roth’s, as we did Friday night after driving up from Sydney. Backstory: Mrs Prick and I drove out in celebration of the Prick’s birthday – an event I’d usually let slide, but which others insist on marking – joined by the outlaws, who are perfect travelling companions for this sort of mission.
Roth’s is just the ticket to revive the weary driver. We pulled in pretty much straight from the office and the staff had us pegged as city types right off the bat, which accounted for an initial standoffish-ness: Later we saw a table of eastern suburbs princesses berate a staffer and storm out for not serving food after 10pm, and I thought, well, under the circumstances, I’d hate us as soon as we walked in the door as well. (We had a laugh and apologised to the barmaid on behalf of Sydney, and suddenly we were best friends with everyone in the joint.)
They’ve got a small but comprehensive, mostly-Mudgee wine list (we tucked into a rich Lowe Shiraz, a lush but restrained Montrose Barbera, and a really dry and dirty – in the best senses of the word – Rosby Cab Sav), and not much of a menu (pizza and tapas), but what they do, they do right. Arancini balls, light and bright, stood in contrast to the heavy golf balls of starch one too often encounters. Little skewers of lamb gave a protein hit. And the pizzas … well, I think we wound up ordering three of the prosciutto and anchovy number. Roth’s also has a back yard where they play music; Friday a weedy kid with Justin Bieber hair and stovepipe jeans was hacking out tunes on a guitar, but I am led to believe they have other offerings as well. Best check ahead, or sit in the front room, as we did.
And… We’re Back!
Great, great weekend in Mudgee, and thanks to Mrs Prick for organising it. More reports and reviews to come, but was sad to return to the news that Berowra Waters Inn and Pier are both shutting down:
ALREADY tracking as one of the worst seasons on record for upmarket dining, Sydney’s winter of restaurant discontent has claimed another high-profile scalp with Berowra Waters Inn serving its last lunch tomorrow.
The news came as Greg Doyle, the owner and chef at Pier, at Rose Bay, announced that restaurant would close. He will step away from the restaurant, which will become a more casual diner.
There’s still enough money kicking around Sydney to support a decent restaurant culture. I’m working on a longer piece about this, but I think the problem comes down to Sydneysiders being a bunch of restaurant sluts — happy to go have a series of hot first dates but unwilling to settle down in the sort of long-term relationships food businesses need to survive.
Posted in Uncategorized
1 Comment
Blue Mountains Review: Shitfight at the Leura Garage
Fresh-laid pasta
So we decided that beating the traffic was the better part of valour and beat a semi-hasty retreat from Mudgee after a late – and very, very satisfying – breakfast at the Butcher Shop Café. (Short précis: The coffee is really first rate, with a pleasing bitterness, they cook their eggs properly, thye served me a burger at 10am which I was, for some bizarre reason, gnawing my arm off for, and most importantly, it’s a joint for the locals. Which is not to say the place is unfriendly or cliquish; just the opposite, in fact. But rather, this is where Mudgeans meet and greet, and it turns out to be a favourite of local wine identity David Lowe, again, more about whom later).
We decided to go the long way around, through Lue and redneck Rylstone (“Come for the pig shooting, stay for the pig shooting!), then jagging across the Blue Mountains for a late lunch at Leura. Leura, Sydneysiders know, is a local arts-and-crafts town right out of central casting, replete with galleries, cute cafes, and shops that specialise in those awful tin-and-wire scrap sculptures of nodding cows and men in whirlybirds which one never sees anywhere else but arts-and-crafts towns. Certainly never in a private house. Eating is difficult as the main drag is dominated by gimmicks such as the “flowerpot scone” dispensary, the Wayzgoose Café. Thank God we found the Leura Garage.
Not that it was easy to get a meal there, mind you. Now I have every sympathy for Blue Mountains business owners. Their trade is all weekend, and the heavy rains of the past year have surely dampened trade. The only way to stay afloat is to wring every last dollar out of a good weekend day (such as this bright and brisk Sunday) to see one through the slow bits. But good Lord, what a shambles. Snagging a table for four was a confusion. When we sat down and tried to order at 2:45, they almost wouldn’t let us pick from the lunch menu, which is served until 3, until the harried but ultimately helpful manager sorted out instanter. A waitress brought the wrong wine (yes, dear, there is more than one Barbera on the wine list, but we finally got our requested bottle of di Lusso). We had to work for our meal, and not just in the show-up-at-work-nine-to-five-to-pay-for-this-palaver sense of the term.
In the end, it was worth it. The wine was lovely (as I knew it would be, having a bunch of it in the back of the car from yesterday’s cellar dooring) and I didn’t mind that we couldn’t get the Logan Cab-Merlot I’d originally asked for because they’d given us the wrong wine list. The spaghetti carbonara was made in the classic way, served with an egg yolk and without all that cream, and cooked just right. A ragu looked similarly yummy, and a pizza with chorizo came with a crispy crunch and more than enough heat to let you know you’re alive. Drop in when you’re through Leura, but make putting your name down for a table your first order of business.
Let Me Make One Thing Perfectly Clear
Back in 2009, I think I may have been the first person to point out Obama’s Nixonian tendencies:
Among conservatives, it has been fashionable to describe Barack Obama as the black Jimmy Carter.
Among liberals, Barack Obama is really the black FDR.
Both are wrong: Barack Obama is in fact the black Richard Nixon.
Forget the cosmetic differences of mien and marriage. A little more than a hundred days into Barack Obama’s presidency, it has become abundantly clear that the erstwhile Chicago community organiser is at heart not so much a lightworker as a political bully and standover artist, happy to make nice for the cameras but even happier to leverage the power of his office to shake down his opponents behind closed doors.
Much has been made of reports that Obama officials threatened to sic the White House Press Corps on Chrysler creditors who did not go along with the president’s plan to shaft bondholders and reward his allies in the United Autoworkers Union, and personally I believe them. Not so much because of any personal animus towards Barack Obama – unlike so many on the Left during the Bush administration, I do not want every terrible thing reported about the president to be true – but because it is part of a greater pattern. Nixon had his IRS and his plumbers; Obama has Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, and AIG bus tours. Both tools contain a not-so-subtle message: We know where you live.
Look at how Obama forced Chris Dodd – no ethical paragon himself – to insert a provision saving the bonuses of AIG executives into the bank bailout -so that Obama could then go out and attack those same bonuses.
Or the way Obama forced Rick Wagoner to resign as head of GM.
The list goes on…
And on and on, as it has turned out. Now, the denoument:
Republicans on the House oversight committee voted on Wednesday to recommend holding Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. in contempt of Congress in a dispute over internal Justice Department documents related to the botched gun trafficking operation known as “Fast and Furious.”
The 23-to-17 vote, which fell along party lines, came after President Obama invoked executive privilege to withhold the documents and communications among Justice Department officials last year as they grappled with the Congressional investigation into the case. As part of the operation, weapons bought in the United States were allowed to reach a Mexican drug cartel in an effort to build a bigger case.
You heard it here first, folks.
Posted in Uncategorized
Leave a comment
Soda Jerks, or, Prohibition Mark II
First New York, now Cambridge, Massachusetts. The home of Harvard University, Ground Zero of America’s know-better class, is thinking about banning all soda in all restaurants, with a City Council resolution having been passed asking “that the City Manager be and hereby is requested to refer the matter of a ban on soda and sugar-sweetened beverages in restaurants to the Cambridge Public Health Department for a recommendation.”
This is, in a word, insane, and we can only hope that this is laughed out of town. The whole thing reminds me of the late, great William F Buckley’s line that he would “sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.” Or, I think he would hasten to add, Harvard’s local government.
Posted in Uncategorized
1 Comment
Done Like a Dinner
There’s always a food angle, isn’t there? A full three days ago, the Guardian reported on a girl who’d gotten in trouble for blogging about school lunches:
A nine-year-old Scottish girl who attracted two million readers to a blog documenting her school lunches, consisting of unappealing and unhealthy dishes served up to pupils, has been forced to end the project after the council banned her from taking pictures of the food in school.
Martha Payne, from Argyll, started the blog at the end of April, initially as a writing project with her father. With the permission of teachers she photographed lunches as they arrived on their white plastic trays and gave the contents – generally meagre, often fried – marks out of 10 on a “Food-o-meter” scale for how healthy they were and whether or not she found any stray hairs.
Three days later, the Sydney Morning Herald discovers the story.
Coincidentally, this morning parent company Fairfax announced that 1,900 on-the-pace journalists and others would soon be out of a job due to the company’s declining fortunes.
Posted in Uncategorized
2 Comments
Soupy Sales
I love the David Jones Food Hall (working over the road, I do half my grocery shopping there), but the prepared food can be a bit hit or miss:
Lasagna soup! Yum!
It didn’t help that it required half a shaker of Saxa and no small bit of Tabasco to give it any flavour at all. I’ll keep going to pick up steaks and fish for dinner, but for lunch? No thanks.
Posted in Uncategorized
Leave a comment
Prick With A Fork 