“Sod the wine, I want to suck on the writing. This man White is an instinctive writer, bloody rare to find one who actually pulls it off, as in still gets a meaning across with concision. Sharp arbitrage of speed and risk, closest thing I can think of to Cicero’s ‘motus continuum animi.’

Probably takes a drink or two to connect like that: he literally paints his senses on the page.”


DBC Pierre (Vernon God Little, Ludmila’s Broken English, Lights Out In Wonderland ... Winner: Booker prize; Whitbread prize; Bollinger Wodehouse Everyman prize; James Joyce Award from the Literary & Historical Society of University College Dublin)


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14 July 2017

ARRAS PINK: BEST IN AUSTRALIA?


Arras Tasmania Methode Traditionelle Rosé 2006  
($80; 12.5% alcohol; cork) 

This won't be a long review. I'm in the pink. Or it's probly a bit more pheasant eye, toward the brown onion skin, which is risky territory for a colourblind lad. 

Remi Krug had a theory about the wave-like popularity of pink champagne relying on the odd significant royal taking a fondness, but that was back when Princess Diana was on it. This wine reminds me of his. It's not as fine - missing out by by a few microns - and a tiny bit sweeter methinks, not having the Big K at hand for a compo. But I remember. One doesn't forget. Maybe the Austral CO2, and I mean the gas itself, is sweeter than the stuff they get in the bubbles in Old Yurp, as George W Bush called France, Italy, Germany and probably Britain. 

This Arras has that wheatfield-after-drizzle pastorale feeling about it, well-whipped in with the white pulp of forest strawberries. It's ravishing. Best Australian rosé fizz I know. By miles. It's swoony more than prickly; moody more than bright, although if you mean IQ by bright, it's very very that. But it's not like aggro or smartypants in your face. You can simply put this in your mouth and swallow it. And it will make you happy. All its hyper-intelligent focus is on you, and how it can pleasure you. How it can warm your soul and help you think everything's much better than it is. Fuck sense of place. What we have here is sense of purpose. 

Don't go out there. Pawn the big screen. Get one of these and stay inside with it. Play some Nancy Wilson. Get some inside of you. Spend a few hours together. In moderation.

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