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Big Brother is watching us

Oct 14, 2014
It's no secret that spies have their favourite tipples.

It's no secret that spies have their favourite tipples.

If you don’t like any of this, please presume ASIO used its new law to change the contents of my computer without me knowing. Which is what the new snoop law permits. National security, see.

Thank you Mister Shirtfronter.

And thanks, too, to that bloke – can’t remember his name – who went to a mine in Tassie once where a couple of heroes were stuck underground and he got on TV for looking concerned at the pithead  and in return gets to sit over the other side and scowl across the big table. He voted for the law, too.

There’s been a new frisson of contention around the cobweb and other media about the ethics and nature of wine writing. This happens in cycles: the first example I recall was a Bulletin piece discussing Len Evans and James Halliday about 30 years ago.

I reckon the cycles are roughly 10 years long. That’s the maximum length of your average editor’s working life. New one comes in, hires savage aspirant critic, agrees, yes, go ahead, let’s attack the opposition hack.

Max Allen, James’s publisher and a few other wine writers – they’re never called critics – even got half an hour on Michael Mackenzie’s Radio Gnash show recently, in a sort of panel thing where they made lots of insinuation about wine writers.

They postulated around the reality of just who’s on the take as far as payola goes, without mentioning any names or making one single reference to the real threat: ASIO.

ASIO agents still drink, perhaps more than other people – it’s stress-driven. So like every other person on the street they’re really very jealous of those of us lucky enough to consider wine for a living, however thin a living it may be. I mean, free drinks is one thing, but your actual money?

Paranoia alone’s enough to set guilty hacks who weren’t invited imagining that they’d set that whole wireless panel thing up to discredit everybody who wasn’t there, but I don’t think it’s that simple. That would have wrecked the racket for everybody. Including ASIO.

Anyway, paranoia never means they’re not getting you. It’s not a carapace.

Spooks have favourite tipples. In the old days, when some of them even dressed up as journalists, they’d track us into bars and engage us in conversation and try to influence us or even remember bits of our drunken discourse so they could go back and write a report without realising we knew who they were, usually on account of the haircut.

Since we can’t smoke in bars anymore, we all drink alone at home with a cat on Spam or something and they really needed this new Act so they could get into our computers and change our shit around from their desks in Canberra, presuming we’re too tanked to notice.

There’s so many of them now who really enjoy seeing their favourite wines get 100 points or five stars, that they can cover nearly every wine by slinking through the digital ether to change our scores.

It must be a game among them, trying to get their personal faves higher points. I can hear the cheers from here.

Like, when I started in this racket, there were only 260 wineries in Australia and about 260 ASIO spooks and most of them drank whisky so it didn’t seem to matter much about wine.

Us young sharps could tool into the Menzies whisky bar or the mezzanine at Kinselas or somewhere else in Sydney and nudge the rubbing strakes with great international correspondents like Phillip Knightley, Murray Sayle or Kevin Hilferty, to bathe in their wisdom and aura and wonder whether they were really spooks and it wouldn’t have any influence at all on our wine scores.

Knightley, who sure could drink whisky, challenged me once about a score I’d given his favourite 18-year-old Macallan malt, but he’s the only one of that gun school alive so he couldn’t possibly have been a spook of any sort.

As I say, there’s so many of these secret gubmint agents now that they can virtually look after one winery each and there’s nearly 3000 of those with say five to 50 wines each, so the faceless folks are busy.

It’s obvious to me, looking back at it, that one of them got into my Penfolds reviews the other day. I refer in particular to my opinions on the new Bin 707 Cabernet, which appeared here with no score. Where the score should have been there was a feeble excuse about me not being able to handle the high level of sappy American oak in the wine, but while I could appreciate that some people, and I mentioned John Spalvins, really like wines like that I shouldn’t cack on it or them and so withheld an actual pointing.

I’m sure I pointed it, and litigiously low, because my opinion is my opinion. That’s beside the points.

What I find really interesting is how the piece that was published fits in the black propaganda template. The spook, who obviously loves 707, and is therefore probably old and right wing, must have wanted me to look like a dangerous lefty terroirist by manipulating my notes, therefore discrediting me in the eyes of those in the know. Those old-style sappy AmOak Pennies’ 707s are right-wing wines. Black propaganda is the sort where the recipient thinks the message comes from you when it really does not. It comes from the enemy.

This agent obviously tried to discredit me and tarnish my reputation by making it look like I didn’t like the wine, which would make people usually contrary to my views think they’d love it, so sales to the right-wingers addicted to such stuff would then increase, ingratiating the agent to Penfolds, if indeed they have yet made contact in the park. Freebies, see?

They musta took the score away to avoid discrediting the wine too severely.

Of course, wine writers are sent wines to write about. Just like political hacks get free politics, and car reviewers get cars full of petrol to drive. Most of us, well this writer anyway, see little point in tasting the wines on the “blind” as in the cunning sophistry of the wine shows. Even if a writer does taste blind, there comes a point somewhere past the end of the bottle where it must come out of the bag so the details and price and alcohol and whatever can be recorded and published at the top of the review.

Why worry about the bag when it always ends like that?

Imagining a really sharp critic would fail to recognise the style of a masked wine is a bit like giving the car reviewer a new Jag with all the Jag badges taken off, expecting them to drive the bloody thing around for a week and then write a critique without realising it was a Jag.

Which is not to say some wine writers don’t charge for reviews, or visits, or time, as Max Allen and Michael Mackenzie suggested. Some of them seem to make inordinate amounts of money. You can tell by the wheels, the hotels, the haircuts, the mansions, the international travel …

This makes me wonder whether they are, in fact, on the ASIO payroll in a sort of scores-for-a-slice-of-the-spoils type of thing, or whether they simply inherited their motza, and don’t notice it when ASIO gets into their Jesus Box and gives everything perfect points.

If I’m not here next week, you know where I’ve gone.

drinkster.blogspot.com

 

 

 

 

 

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