hey opened the last bottle of wine in the world at midnight on 31 December 2099.
At the Republican
Albert Hall, before an invited audience of 1500 guests and a world-wide audience
online, 14 ageing wine lovers waited to taste this rarity with glistening eyes
and hyperactive salivary glands. A doddering sommelier reverently dusted the bottle
of 2042 Penfolds Grange. He removed the screwcap and trickled the ruby liquid
into an antique (all decanters were antique by then) Baccarat crystal decanter
which he placed gently on the table. Suddenly there was a hush as a single spotlight
pinpointed the crystal and gleamed and sparkled on the wine's crimson hues.
Grapevines across the world had begun to wither and die in the year 2045. Analysts hypothesised that the extinction of grapes resulted from the combined effects of the nuclear autumn of 2043, an ensuing climatic phenomenon known as El Neutrino and a vine plague triggered by the inadvertent release of a transgenic hybrid, the Glassy-winged Sap-sucking Phyllo-locust, created by a teetotal yet designer-drug-crazed biologist who wanted to rid mankind of the demon drink. (Disappointed at not winning the Nobel Prize for Weird Science for his research, he was last seen, hatless, single-footedly pedalling a tandem bicycle across the Nullarbor Plain whilst engaged in an animated conversation with an invisible companion.)
Where were we? By 2050 the grape was no more. The wine trade had ceased to be. Cork and barrel manufacturers were bankrupted. Those wine writers that weren't already on the dole signed up. Winemakers became brewers and distillers, growing barley and corn in their former vineyards with a view to whiskey production.
Superannuated vignerons concocted ersatz red and white wines from fruits, sugar, flavours and fragrances (some had previous experience in this) but they fooled nobody and the products never got off the ground. Wine lovers went on the rampage. They bought madly, they hoarded, and when their hoards were gone they pillaged wine merchants and commercial cellars and went on a worldwide wine bender. For a short while auction houses made a killing. Bidders offered astronomical prices for even the lowliest cask wines. But by 2060 the only stores of wine known to exist were locked in heavily guarded government cellars, reserved for the exclusive use of politicians.
Soon even those meagre supplies were exhausted and in 2081 the Gates Trust offered a reward of 15 billion Eurozzies (worth $39.75 at 2004 rates) to anyone who could locate one genuine bottle of table wine - but there were no takers.
Until one day in 2098, when a child rummaging through an old trunk he'd found hidden in a dark corner of his late grandfather's basement made an amazing discovery, the one and the only surviving bottle of Penfolds Grange, from the great vintage of 2042.
As it happened, Penfold's chief winemaker had, in 2057, assessed this very bottle of Grange at the final Penfolds Wine Clinic. She was the one who removed the cork, decanted the wine into a screwcapped bottle, topped it up and signed and attached a label of certification. The elderly owner had proudly taken his treasure home, stashed it away, and shortly thereafter, during his somewhat reluctant move (though with enthusiastic encouragement from his loved ones) to the We're Only Here For A Short Time Hostel of Contentment, had promptly forgotten its existence.
So it came to pass that in the year 2099, in the Albert Hall, Penfolds ex-chief winemaker was the first to taste the rarest nectar in world. She swirled the Riedel Ale glass (nobody made wine glasses anymore). She peered. She brought the glass to her newly waxed nostrils. She inhaled. "AAAhhh!" The crowd sighed with her. She sipped. She frowned (Botox was no longer in fashion) and said, "This bloody wine's corked!" and spat it into a nearby container – her neighbour's glass as it turned out.
The crowd moaned. The MC asked, "How can it be corked?" "You certified it as sound; you transferred it into the screwcapped bottle. What went wrong?"
"I think I had a cold that day." she replied. "Yes, that's right, I distinctly remember. My nose was all blocked up. Couldn't smell a thing. We were going live to TV at the time and I could hardly say that, could I? Would somebody please get me a cold beer?"
Yarra Valley history rewrite
Most people with a passing interest in Australian wine history know that the
vine louse Phylloxera was
first discovered in Geelong in 1877 and subsequently devastated the young Victorian
wine industry. Historians and other authoritative writers have generally agreed
that Phylloxera never made it to the Yarra
Valley.
Well, I would like to argue that they are wrong and that at least one early Yarra Valley vineyard was destroyed by Phylloxera.
I found reference to this in an article, "Early Victorian Wine-Growing" by François de Castella in the Victorian Historical Magazine. de Castella read it to the Victorian Historical Society on 5 September 1942.
He said (page 153), "Another interesting vineyard was Nillumbik, at Kangaroo Ground, planted by Robert Stevenson at an early date, certainly before 1861. It succumbed to phylloxera about 1916,..." This is presumably the same Robert Stevenson who was listed as a Victorian vine grower, circa May 1962, with "10 acres [at] Nillumbik, Kangaroo Gr[oun]d, Queenstown." Cited in the appendix of winegrowers in David Dunstan's Better Than Pommard! A History of Wine in Victoria - Australian Scholarly Publishing.
Then a Google search popped up with the Stevenson family history site. The site informs us that the vineyard referred to was planted by Joseph Stevenson in 1857 at his Kangaroo Ground property 'Bank Head'. His son Robert "was to carry on this wine-making tradition... Phylloxera (or blue mould) would end the 65-year venture in 1922..."
Admittedly the dates of Phylloxera causing the destruction are different. de Castella says 1916 and the Stevenson site says 1922, and we don't know their sources. The term "blue mould" raises other questions. Was blue mould a synonym for phylloxera at the time? Was it Phylloxera and/or blue mould? Who diagnosed the disease? How accurate are family histories?
But on the face of it I reckon there is enough here to suggest that Phylloxera
was responsible for the elimination of at least one vineyard in the Yarra
Valley.