Apart from a round-the-world trip in 1976 and two weeks in California in 1984, most of my working life had been spent in Australia and New Zealand until my first visit to the international wine exhibition, Vinexpo, in Bordeaux in 1991. Having been something of a Francophobe until then, mainly because of their arrogant political approach to the rest of the world, my views were transformed overnight. The world of wine was huge, Bordeaux was a beautiful city of history and restaurants, and the individual French people were welcoming and hospitable. I even forgave the sole arrogant Frenchman who sniffed my last sample of award-winning Chardonnay and disdainfully emptied the glass into an ice bucket!
After that brief visit, I became a regular visitor to France and Europe, attending all the Vinexpos (that were held every second year) and visiting the winery that my employer owned in the south of France every six months, as well as liaising with our UK office who sold most of their wine production. The winery was just northeast of Béziers and we provided Australian winemakers to work with them during their harvest, as well as to a local co-operative group whom we contracted to produce parcels of wine for us. Co-operatives dominated wine production in the south of France and working with them was challenging in the extreme. Their owners, the grape growers, considered the work of the business was done once they had delivered their grapes. Consequently, little attention was paid to making or marketing the wine that they produced. As a result, much of the wine was of ordinary quality and sold in bulk as vin de table. We made some ground with the quality of the wine they produced, but really only with that produced specifically for us. They were a likeable lot but seemed rooted in their old ways and were extremely difficult to change.
As the years passed, I visited many other parts of France in my working capacity, as well as Sicily and other areas of Italy and Spain, mainly around Barcelona and Rioja. Eventually, my family purchased a house in the middle of a small village near Béziers and I then used it as a base for both work and holidays. It was also from this house that we made forays into other parts of France, the Massif Centrale, the Côte de Rhône, Châteauneuf-du-Pape and Burgundy, and even down to Spain, where we had a two-week driving tour in 2007. We had a joint venture in Sicily with a local winemaker, not far from Palermo, which was also adjacent to and worked with a co-operative (but not the “communist co-operative” according to my Sicilian colleague) and we put in winemakers from Australia to help with their harvest as well. Visiting them was always a treat, as they were so generous of spirit, Palermo had the most challenging traffic in the world, and the history of the island was so fascinating. Having been ruled by the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs and the Normans over the centuries, and having only recently reduced the power of the Mafia significantly, it was an economically poor but culturally rich part of Italy and a joy to visit.
It was also from the house in southern France that we made the jump off to Istanbul, for the start of a bus tour through Eastern Europe in 2005. It was fascinating to see the old communist countries struggling to find their way in the new market-driven world, even more than a decade after the break-up of the Soviet Union. Bulgaria, which had been a bread-basket for the USSR, was struggling to feed itself. Because of the uncertainties of land ownership, less than 20% of the arable land was being farmed – and donkeys outnumbered tractors by a factor of 20 to 1! At the border with Macedonia, we were questioned as to why we wanted to visit their country – all the locals just wanted to leave! But Albania was the real eye-opener. I shall never forget the thousands of pill boxes facing outwards at the border, to keep potential intruders out; nor the electric power lines draped around the trees throughout Tirane, the capital city; nor the potholes in the main street of Tirane into which we almost lost the bus; nor the calf having its throat cut into the gutter outside the butcher shop, also in the main street of Tirane. Albania had gone bankrupt through a Central Bank recommended pyramid or Ponzi scheme soon after the disintegration of the communist government in 1992 and had still not recovered.
On the other hand, sections of the countries on the Adriatic north of Albania, and especially north and south of Dubrovnik, had maintained their connection with the outside world through tourism and had managed to preserve their economies and their culture throughout the decades of communism and the Balkan wars that followed its collapse. While the bombardment by the Serbs of the city of Dubrovnik was atrocious in its own right, and although both the Croatians and the Serbs blame the others for causing the conflict, the antagonism, in fact, stretches back for centuries. Based partly on religion, partly on maritime access, and partly on good, old-fashioned feudal greed, Dubrovnik had enjoyed poor relations with its southern neighbours in Monte Negro and Albania and with the Serbs in the hinterland east of the city almost since it was established in the 10th century. In spite of all this, however, Dubrovnik continues as a beautiful reminder of past history, architecture and culture.
