A Night Out on the Grange

The last time I saw Chas Beebe was when we said goodbye after a day’s fishing for barramundi on the Fitzroy River in Queensland, Australia. She had been my fishing-guide for the session, advising and watching and chirping as I fly-casted into the wide river’s slow runs, and being somewhat surprised as this Saffer hooked and landed seven barramundi on the day, including two lunkers of over 18kgs apiece.

What impressed Chase even more, was when – as we packed up – I produced a bottle of De Wetshof Finesse Chardonnay from the ice-box. “Thought you were more of a beer bloke,” she said, “but fill me a dollop will you, wine’s my thing.”

We sipped cold Cape Chardonnay next to the river, which the setting sun had turned the colour of a sliced yellow peach, and the calls of some tropical birds rang through the silence, and the air began so smell of wet wood and mango and dry clay.

When I saw Chas this time, she was wearing an Australian rugby jersey and sitting in the Nelson’s Eye steak-house in Cape Town and lamenting the loss her home-team had suffered – just – at the hands of the Springboks.

Despite it being winter in Australia, too, Chas’s face and hands were nut-brown from the sun, her green eyes sparkling and her teeth as white as polar ice-caps. This being winter in the Cape, a fierce one, we were not going to do any fishing, but were going to get together around some beef and some wine.

Meeting her in Australia, Chas had spoken about Queensland beef in revered tones, and I told her back in South Africa we were also keen on dead cow, cooked fired-wise. Before our hook-up she’d done some wine tours, loving the Stellenbosch Cabernet Sauvignon and Pinotage and Cabernet Franc, as well as some Chardonnays that were sipped out Paul Clüver way in Elgin. Unfortunately, other commitments kept me from joining her, so here we were in the steakhouse, talking fishing and rugby, just general catching-up on life and things.

Australians do this kind of thing well, like South Africans being able to open-up about the general happenings of life with persons one scarcely knows.

However, I did not expect things to get so emotional, and so soon. And it was over a bottle of wine.

Chas, having ascertained that the Nelson’s Eye permitted the bringing of one’s own wine “unlike most of the wanker snooty joints in Brisbane” (her words), sat down in one of the restaurant’s booths donning a cream-leather bottle-bag. I’d forgotten about the bottle bag as we talked and drank cold beers, and she thumbed her phone to show me recent catches she’d made back home. Huge fish in her wrinkled hands. From the Fitzroy, as well as a few hefty game species she’d whacked on trips to the Queensland coast, off Cairns.

It was when we ordered the steaks that Chas removed the bottle from the leather holder and placed it on the table. A Grange. Penfolds Grange. Vintage 2005.

“Guiding fishermen pays well, it seems,” I said.

“Or just hook-up with a bloke who leaves bots like this lying around after he’s gone-up and left you,” she said with a peculiar sad look in her eyes.

A cork-screw was procured from the waitress and, without much fanfare, Chas opened the Grange. The cork slid out with a sensual sigh.

I have always been enchanted by the Grange, the enchantment increasing over the years to the limited opportunities of getting a mouthfeel. So, sitting here in the Nelson’s Eye steakhouse in Cape Town, with the prospect of partaking in at least a half-bottle of the stuff was, truly, surreal.

This wine had its first commercial release in 1952 and was a result of legendary Penfolds winemaker Max Schubert wishing to create an Australian wine to the grand, statuesque nature of the Bordeaux First Growths. This despite the fact that the best grapes Schubert had to work with were Barossa Valley Shiraz, with a few kernels of Cabernet Sauvignon.

Well, he did it and 73 years on, Grange is one of the world’s great red wines. Usually over 90% Shiraz, with a dose of Cabernet. And the gap between Grange and its Bordeaux inspirers gets wider when one considers that its aging is done in new American oak barrels. For 18 months.

Chas insisted on handling the pouring, and as it cascaded into the glass, Grange made its presence known. I swear I could hear an elegant roar as it splashed into the drinking vessel. The restaurant’s interior soft light made the wine’s colour appear like the blood spilling from the neck of a black-hearted dragon.

Aroma, this was transcendental. The wine wielded a perfume of deep forests scented by lilies and fallen autumnal fruit, with a slight hint of cured beef. One smells the world in all its deliciousness.

Chas was already two sips deep into her glass by the time I tasted mine, stating that the wine “was a bit of alright”. If I was going to get my half-bottle of Grange, it was time to go in.

The attack on the palate is immediate and rich, a chunk of sap-laded overripe Georgian plum. This leads to a more complex rumbling of things on the mid-palate: dried wild strawberries laced with oak-aged soya sauce; slivers of eland biltong and cooled Guatemala coffee; crunchy and seedy figs that had dried and drawn nectar, and earthly scents under a bright Mediterranean sun; a cedar Havana cigar box that had been immersed in vintage Port, leaving it soaked to a degree of pleasurable wetness.

Flavours were cloaked in layers of ripped silk, allowing a subtly perspiring fleshiness to add to the wine’s allure. The finish was unending in its dogged persistence, wishing one to interrupt it to say, yes, we know this about you, Grange, you are a truly incredible wine and this shall be known forever.