James Halliday AM Part 1
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INTERVIEW WITH A LIVING LEGEND
He’s been a successful corporate lawyer, merchant banker and business entrepreneur; a prodigious writer, pioneering winemaker, astute wine judge and celebrated critic. Astonishingly, he performed most of these roles more or less contemporaneously.
For those of us in the industry, his pronouncements are gospel; his approbation, coveted. Much like his old friend, the late and great Len Evans, he declines to suffer fools; and, like most octogenarians I know, he’s leery of timewasters. All the more extraordinary then, that – on a soggy springtime afternoon in Yarra Valley – James Halliday graciously submitted to 90 minutes of gentle interrogation from WineDown.
WD: Mr Halliday... May I call you Mr Halliday?
JH: You may, but I’d prefer James.
WD: OK, Mr James... Actually, that feels a bit weird.
JH: Who are you?
WD: WineDown.
JH: Ah, yes... WineDown...
In Sydney, WineDown can feel a slight draft. Probably the arch of a Halliday eyebrow.
WD: Let’s start at the beginning. You’re famously associated with Coldstream Hills, but you were born in Sydney, weren’t you?
JH: Yes, in Bellevue Hill in 1938. I was born in a little Private Hospital in the same street that we lived on – in fact, the same street where I went to boarding school, too.
WD: That’s an unusual combination of events.
JH: Yes, it was quite the trifecta.
WD: Were you an only child?
JH: No, but I was an afterthought. I was 10 years younger than my sister and 12 years younger than my brother.
WD: Just what every 10-year-old girl wants – a baby brother to boss around!
JH: Yes, well she did seem inordinately interested in whether I’d cleaned my teeth or brushed my hair.
WD: That was her job. Speaking from experience.
JH: She did it well.
WD: Then, let’s move on from childhood. It was your father who piqued your interest in wine, wasn’t it?
JH: Yes, Dad was a cardiologist. He’d spent time in London in the 1930s, doing his post-grad degree, and discovered a liking for wine over there. When he came home, a mutual acquaintance introduced him as a Private Customer to Lindeman’s – who shared premises with Penfolds in the lower ground floor of the Queen Victoria Building in Sydney’s CBD. Of course, in those days, 90 percent of the wine consumed in Australia was fortified. So, when my father would go in and order four to five dozen bottles of table wine, he was, I think, a rare beast and a treasured customer. He wasn’t going there every day of the week, but often enough to keep them excited.
WD: Not every Aussie household would be able to accommodate that many bottles of wine...
JH: Ah, well he had the house altered you see. He had half of the house raised to create a lower ground floor, and part of that was a walk-in sandstone cellar.
WD: Your mother must have been a very understanding woman.
JH: Well, she shared my father’s interest in wine. They used to enjoy a Semillon together every night – we’ve always said that my blood’s at least half Semillon.
WD: Still, remodelling the house is a significant investment for a hobby...
JH: Oh, it wasn’t just a wine cellar. There was a large bedroom and dressing room and a full bathroom. It was perfect for my older brother, who was studying medicine. I have a vivid memory of him dissecting a stingray there. I’ve smelled some unpleasant things in my life, but that was like nothing else on earth.
WD: And you with your acute sense of smell...
JH: Indeed. Horrible.
WD: With your father and brother both in medicine, was there any expectation you’d follow that path?
JH: Well, yes, I also had an uncle who was an Ear, Nose and Throat surgeon – he was actually knighted for his services to ENT – and cousins who were doctors, so it was a large medical family, and I suppose I always just assumed I’d go that way. But then one day, when I was about 10 years old, I was hanging around the kitchen – probably making a nuisance of myself – and Mum was trying to sharpen the stub of a little pencil... and she managed to slice off the ball of her thumb. Of course, no-one ever died from cutting their thumb, but it was certainly spectacular – blood everywhere – and I pretty much decided right then, that medicine wasn’t for me.
WD: Between that and the stinky stingrays...
JH: Exactly. I still didn’t really know what I wanted to do by the time I left school. But I got a Commonwealth Scholarship for arts/architecture. It was eight years of study, which seemed intolerably long, but I managed to whittle it down to six by switching to arts/law instead.
WD: At Sydney Uni?
JH: Yes, I was at St Pauls’ College at the University of Sydney. And that was where my interest in wine began to escalate. There were two meals a week served in the Great Hall – Wednesday dinner and Sunday lunch – and we were allowed to have wine with those meals. Funny to think about it now – there we all were in full academic regalia... But there was also a wine club, which we undergraduates ran, so I managed to enjoy my fair share of wine while at uni.
WD: You took a gap year after you finished your studies?
JH: Yes, I went to London and worked there for a little while, then a mate and I took off with a car and a two-man tent, and we drove and camped through Europe for about five months. From Spain to Norway. It was extraordinary. And in that whole time, we never stepped foot inside a restaurant – not once. The camping grounds all seemed to have a little store where you could buy supplies, and of course, a bottle of wine.
WD: Very civilised.
JH: We only came unstuck once. We were in Rome, and bought one of those bulbous raffia-covered Chianti bottles to have with our meal. But the next morning we both woke up with dreadful hangovers. We thought that bloody wine last night – it must’ve been crook... Then we took a closer look at the bottle, and realised it was a magnum! We hadn’t noticed!
WD: So size does matter...?
JH: In certain instances, yes.
WD: You went straight into practice when you got back from your travels?
JH: Yes. Initially, I was hell-bent on going to the bar...
WD: We all have days like that
JH: ...becoming a Barrister. But an offer of partnership came up at my law firm, and it was too good to refuse, really. The money was good, and the conditions, too. So, even though I was incredibly busy, I was still able to pursue my other interests.
WD: Like writing?
JH: Yes, I started writing in the late 1960s for a Wine and Spirits Buying Guide, but it really took off in the 1970s, when I was writing for the National Times and then the Australian.
WD: Is that when you met Len Evans?
JH: I met Len in the late ‘60s. He was giving wine education lectures at the old Sydney Showgrounds – it was pretty basic stuff – but good grounding, and we just hit it off. It was Len who introduced me to imported wines – mainly French of course, but also German and some others – at Monday lunches at Bulletin Place.
From the very early 1970s, and into to the 80’s – when lunches were long and potentially ruinous – Len’s (in)famous wine shop and restaurant, Bulletin Place, was THE watering hole for wine fanciers and professionals.
JH: It was at Bulletin Place that Tony Albert, John Beeston and I hatched a plan to buy some land and plant a vineyard. Which we did. In 1970, we established Brokenwood in the Hunter Valley, and by 1973, we’d produced our first vintage.
WD: Weren’t you already busy enough – with corporate law and wine writing?
JH: That was the great thing – it was a wonderful pressure valve. Brokenwood demanded your attention. There was an absolute compulsion to it – so you had to go out each weekend... didn't matter whether you had a hangover, whether it was pouring rain, whether your kids were at school, or playing sports or whatever it was, you HAD to go. And it worked that way.
WD: You had some early success, didn’t you?
JH: We did have a small, loyal following, so there was some success, but there was failure too. I had planted Pinot Noir, in the hope of making something that might remotely resemble Burgundy, and failed dismally. But I wasn’t alone in that. I’d been writing a series of books on Wines and Wineries – state by state. I’d done New South Wales and South Australia – hadn’t done Victoria yet – but I had come to the conclusion that it just wasn’t possible for Australia to produce anything that resembled Burgundy.
WD: When did your opinion change?
JH: It was a Monday in 1980 – it had to be a Monday because we were at the table at Bulletin Place – and John Beeston walked in with bottles of Mount Mary and Seville Estate Pinot Noir from the Yarra Valley. We tasted them, and everything changed. In a flash, I just knew – instantly – that Yarra Valley was where I wanted to go.
Next week: Mr Halliday goes south!