It’s springtime in Melbourne, the sun is low, plane trees drop hay fever bombs on passersby, and – like every spring before it for the past 14 years – the Stonier International Pinot Noir Tasting is about to start. Three wine experts, 12 Pinot Noirs from around the world and an audience of 150 wait, impatiently. Six glasses of red wine set in front of each of the 150 wait, temptingly.
James Halliday takes his place at the head of the panel. He is a commanding presence both physically and by reputation, retaining the impressive height of his youth, accompanied by the gentle stoop of age. But for a few grey wisps of stubble, he is bald with a moon face, sharp eyes and the most extraordinary – and fetching – pair of luxurious eyebrows knitted in a permanent arch, capable of signaling his changing moods well ahead of the rest of his face.
National treasure
At 76, Halliday is Australia’s pre-eminent wine critic. He’s also its oldest. Fellow wine scribes might note a tremor in his voice, a slower walk that can tend to a shuffle, hands that sometimes shake when reaching for a wine glass, but few, if any, question his stamina or productivity, whether it be in the number of wines tasted annually (estimated at more than 12,000) or words written for his The Australian newspaper column, or the annual wine guide, wine books, bespoke magazine and website.
This night the talk is all about the world of Pinot Noir, a subject dear to him. His words fall like pronouncements, or that’s the way they appear to be received. “Number seven appealed to me from the first sip,” he says. “There is some oak but it’s not over the top.” Heads nod. Of number nine: “There is the perfect ripeness of fruit in that wine.”
Many tasters pull the wine out of the line-up and take a sip. Tasting wine is highly suggestive, especially when someone of Halliday’s reputation is asking leading questions, filling minds with his impressions, however unintentional.
“Don’t pay too much attention to the colour of Pinot Noir,” he warns. “It can be deceptive.” As he speaks, it is in the measured language of the lawyer he once was: precise, knowledgeable, assured and always, succinct. “Pinot, by its nature, is an uncooperative bitch!” he says dryly, eyebrows arched.
James Halliday was born in Sydney in 1938 to a family richly endowed with physicians: a father, uncles, brother, cousins. He chose law, possibly allowing him a more relaxed university social life, one that he fully embraced, playing bridge, billiards and poker. The latter proved to be financially rewarding in the 1970s, helping to pay for a growing wine cellar. Wine was always in the background. His father was the owner of a very good cellar stocked with names the young Halliday remembers to this day: Hock, Chablis, white and red Burgundies and Claret, most sourced not from Europe, but from Lindemans based in the Hunter Valley.
By the 1960s, the wine bug was hitting hard. “For the first time in my life, I began buying wines in quantities greater than my consumption,” he writes in his 2012 memoir, A Life in Wine. He met the flamboyant Welshman Len Evans, who The Oxford Companion to Wine calls “the godfather of the Australian wine industry”. Halliday was drawn into the lawyer-rich luncheon circle of Evans’s Sydney restaurant, Bulletin Place, where they would compete in blind tastings. There were Options Games every Monday, a devilishly entertaining wine game invented by Evans, where drinkers sought the identity of a masked wine by answering questions posed by the wine’s owner. It was here that Halliday encountered French wine.
Halliday was drawn further into the wine world: in 1970 he and two other lawyers founded Brokenwood, in the Hunter Valley, where they did much of the planting work with their own hands. Next came visits to Australia’s emerging wine regions, which Halliday turned into books and newspaper articles; he established himself as a leading wine judge following, again, in the steps of Evans. His day job as a partner in major Sydney law firm, Clayton Utz, remained, but every other hour was devoted to what he came to call “his mistress”.
Halliday came to have great influence, something he wasn’t shy in wielding, whether it was instructing wine judges on what wine styles to give gold medals to or calling fellow wine writers to heel. Some recall a young Halliday – arrogant, haughty – who did not suffer fools gladly, or otherwise. His vast wine knowledge, by now global in scope, together with a strong, commanding presence was at times, truly intimidating.
Each day, when not travelling, Halliday starts at 7:00 am in a tasting room at the Coldstream Hills winery. At 12:30 pm he stops and “rushes” up to his house for a quick lunch and then “rushes” back to his office where he attends to work, finishing with more tastings between 5:00 pm and 7:00 pm. His constant – and only – tasting companion is music, classical, played on used and used again cassette tapes first recorded in the 1970s. No visitors are allowed when he is judging, no cleaners when he isn’t, indeed, no extraneous smells, ever.
Beth Anthony, his assistant, sits at her computer, surrounded by piles of papers, wine boxes and printers, in a curved, long room – the entire house is moulded to the land – with the Yarra Valley spread out below. Halliday works next door with even bigger piles of papers, wine boxes, filing cabinets, and groaning bookcases closing in on him. No view.
Prodigious output
He is updating his 2004 book, Varietal Wines. He writes by hand, black pen, strong capital letters – it’s easier for long-time assistants Beth (14 years service) and Paula Grey (23 years service), to type. He has yet to fully embrace the computer age. “I can use my lap top,” he argues, “but I’m slow.”
He’s also in the middle of judging wines for his annual Top 100 for The Weekend Australian Magazine. Invitations to “tender” have been sent to his wineries that have been awarded five stars in his annual wine guide, the Wine Companion, and some 1,200 wines are rolling in. Tomorrow a line up of 38 sparkling wines awaits him.
Halliday is a prodigious taster, once tasting up to 160 wines a day. Over time the number has been trimmed, first to 120, and then 100. “Now, I’m doing 80 a day,” he says. “That’s partly because I’m slower and that is just a fact of life.
I am slower at everything I do.”
As he closes in on 80 another fact of life is imposing itself, like an unwelcome guest. His sense of smell is failing. For Australia’s most authoritative voice on wine, it’s an unwanted but not totally unexpected visitor – he says the problem has been progressive, slowly insinuating itself – giving him time to adjust or more likely, come to terms with it. “When I was in my prime and wine show judging, when I was 50 or whatever, let’s call it that, 90% of the information that I got about 90% of the wines I was judging – it was my 90-90 rule – came through the bouquet.” He says.
“Yes, I had a really good sense of smell. That has deteriorated to a distressing degree.”
He now has trouble detecting two of the most common taints or faults found in table wines. One is cork taint. It is a relief, he adds, to see that more than 90% of Australian wines are now stoppered by aluminium screw caps. The second taint is brettanomyces or brett, a bacteria born in dirty wine barrels, that at its worse smells like a barnyard baking in the full heat of summer.
Halliday must now put his faith in figuring out what it is he is tasting, focusing instead on a wine’s texture or mouth feel, structure and flavour. “I concentrate furiously,” he says, eyes intent, as if to stress his point.
There is no suggestion of retirement. There is, however, a succession plan. Campbell Mattinson, chief wine writer for the James Halliday Wine Companion magazine, will now deliver 30% of the guide’s tasting notes, and Tyson Stelzer, a specialist writer on Champagne and sparklings, will write up Aussie bubbles.
Becoming a brand
To be at the height of his influence, to be a major presence on the Australian wine scene and to be 76, vulnerable to age and capricious events of ill health, must rankle. Maybe just a little? Halliday works on, rarely pausing, too busy perhaps to allow any negative thoughts to get too close. He is, he says, not given to introspection. “The journey that I have gone through is probably one that no one in the future will ever go through because I started in the age of innocence, back in the 1960s and ‘70s.”
The journey isn’t over. But it will be different as he heads towards his 80th birthday.
Halliday is one of the wine world’s least fussy, un-florid writers. His choice of words, especially in his tasting notes, are nuts and bolts essentials, basic, everyman – and woman – friendly. When asked who he writes for, he appears genuinely stumped.
It’s not the wine industry he offers, perhaps a little too quickly. His independence as Australia’s most noted wine writer is a sensitive subject given he has owned two wineries in his lifetime and acted as consultant to the country’s biggest wine producer, Treasury Wine Estates.
There has been criticism, he is aware of it yet shows a steeliness in deflecting it.
He says he’s not a journalist so the usual response of a journalist to such a question – that he or she writes for the reader – seems redundant. Neither does he write for an editor. He has never, he stresses, asked editors for work.
They have always come to him. He pleases himself and in doing so, he pleases others. “I do have to remain relevant and that is gauged by people’s dollars,” he offers, finally.
As the biggest selling wine author in Australia it would appear he remains highly relevant. The James Halliday Australian Wine Companion (AWC), a joint venture with publisher Hardie Grant, sells 32,000 copies annually. The AWC website attracts 13,000 paying members (memberships start at AU$59.00 a year or $45.00) and another 45,000 receive a weekly newsletter. The James Halliday Wine Companion magazine is published six times a year by Hardie Grant and has an average readership of 65,000 people. It lays claim to being Australia’s biggest selling wine magazine. ‘My Wine Companion’ – a retail satellite feeding off the Halliday name – alerts drinkers to top wines judged by the author, often offering them at discount prices, while advertising supplements inside the magazine promote producers who pay to be included. Both instances could be seen as a conflict of interest.
Sandy Grant, chief executive at Hardie Grant, disagrees. The retail connection, he says, is an agreement with e-tailer Cracka Wines to “talk to our data base” using Halliday’s tasting notes as a basis for wine offers. “It’s their decision,” says Grant. “We don’t touch it. They supply a small commission.”
Nor does James Halliday admit to dressing his writing as advertorial in his magazine. “It’s nothing to do with me really. It’s pretty clear there’s no suggestion that I have written any of that text,” he says. “There is room for differing views in all of this. I fancy that the consumer is not going to get terribly excited about it. I think it’s more something (talked about) in wine writing circles.”
That question is put to Amelia Ball, editor of the magazine that bears his name. “That’s the unique thing about James,” she says, “he is thoroughly immersed in the industry, yet it doesn’t interfere with his ability to objectively review, observe and critique from the sidelines.”
A winemaker
In 1983, Halliday transferred from Sydney to the Melbourne office of Clayton Utz. After exploring the Yarra Valley, a popular weekend getaway for Melburnians, he eventually found 16 hectares of sandy clay loam soil, with one “substantial” house but no vines. Halliday bought it for AU$240,000 – a price he considered something of a bargain, even if the cost of planting Chardonnay and Pinot Noir and the construction of a winery was anything but. In 1988, aged 50, he retired from law and devoted himself entirely to wine.
In 1987, however, he had bought a piece of adjoining land, which he funded by issuing shares. After a crash in the wine market, the corporate giant Southcorp were able to make a takeover bid in 1996, and Halliday lost Coldstream Hills. He has worked as a consultant for the group ever since and from his eyrie above the Coldstream Hills winery he keeps a keen eye on it. “Through that entire transition – it will be 30 years in 2015 – my attitude to it hasn’t changed.”
However, today it is Treasury Wine Estates, financially troubled, that finds itself the target for takeover. It has been in such a predicament for a year or so. James Halliday is clearly jumpy – not a usual thing – waiting for word from head office about the group’s potential sale and break-up. The relief when news comes through that the latest suitor has been rejected, is obvious.
James Halliday finds himself in a curious position. In what might delicately be referred to as his twilight years (a phrase bound to attract a cold Halliday glare), he has never been busier, more influential or had more demands made upon his time.
He has become far, far bigger than just one man scribbling his thoughts about a bottle of wine. He has become a brand.
And he’ll remain so in perpetuity, because the Halliday name can’t be extinguished by retirement or death. From 2006, when Halliday joined Hardie Grant publishing, partner Sandy Grant has worked to create a broad multi-media ‘James Halliday’ platform that he believes will remain the authoritative wine voice in Australia – even beyond the lifetime of James Halliday himself.
But as he enters his 77th year, smaller concerns occupy Halliday. The last two lines written for his 2012 memoir, ‘A Life In Wine’, allow a window into his feelings:
“Are there still mountains to climb? I hope so, particularly if they are not too large.”
A fight between lawyers
An often-overlooked aspect of wine-producing countries with tightly-knit industries – especially ones like Australia, historically beset by a ‘cultural cringe’, a lack of confidence in its sophistication - is the power that can be wielded by a single individual.
This was the background to the often heated battle between two wine-fixated former lawyers on opposite sides of the Pacific. Robert Parker unashamedly favoured ‘opulent’, powerful wines produced in warm regions like the Rhône and California, while Halliday and his friend Len Evans adored the classics of Europe. It was Wagner versus Brahms.
While Parker’s power lay in the way he awarded his famous points, Halliday and Evans more or less ran the regional and national wine shows (competitions) that are taken hugely seriously in Australia. The two men chaired the most important shows, appointed and promoted judges and left them in no doubt over the verdicts they considered to be correct.
Revealingly, in a 2005 speech to the Wine Press Club of New South Wales, Halliday dismissed the small number of Barossa Valley reds favoured by Robert Parker as “monstrous” unlike the wines whose “finesse” had been recognised by the trophies awarded by Australian judges.
While I, like many members of the industry within and outside Australia, applauded the way Halliday steered his country away from obviously oaky, fruity, alcoholic wines, some accountants noted the inconvenient truth that consumers in the profitable US market were more likely to buy the kinds of wines favoured by Parker than those championed by the Australian.
Today, both Parker and Halliday, along with Jancis Robinson MW in the UK, have evolved from being individual arbiters of taste into brands, employing teams of tasters who offer their opinions under the famous critics’ names. In Australia, James Halliday’s influence remains strong, even as his brand name diversifies.
Robert Joseph
