How Laithwaites happened - part eighteen

An even bigger passion for me was my 'Flying Winemakers'. (A trademark we invented one boozy night in L'Envers du Decor wine bar, St Emilion.) Looked at with hindsight - always the best view - it looks like having done all the wine discovering there was to do, I started back at the beginning of the trail again, in Bordeaux, but this time looking not for good wines but for good vineyards that could be making good wines, but weren't. If I could arrange for good wine to be made in places written off by everyone else I could get fantastic value for money.

That's hindsight for you.

In reality what happened was that late one day, during the '86 vintage at La Clariere when I was stirring a tub of yeast and wondering why it wouldn't go, this Australian walked in. In that charming way Aussies - and some Yorkshiremen - have, he said I was doing it all completely wrong.

So he showed me, it worked, and he said he'd be back next year to sort me out properly. His name was Dr. Tony Jordan - to wine people everywhere; 'The Doctor'. Did I, he asked, also know a white wine property where he could show me how to make a decent dry Semillon because he hadn't found even one on his holidays.

Upshot was he couldn't come back in '87 as Moët et Chandon had hired him to build and run them their great fizz winery (Green Point) in the Yarra. So he sent a young Nigel Sneyd in his place and ran the vintage by phone from Australia. They made just one terrific wine in a village called St Vivien just up the Dordogne, fermented, finished and bottled in six weeks. Fresh, zingy, crisp Sauvignon Blanc-style white, and so cheap! Went down very well with customers.

Next year he sent the great Martin Shaw and then John Belsham from New Zealand. Their wine was so good it won the White Wine trophy in the big Concours National in Burgundy.

We put 'Flyers' into the Midi, Rhone, Ardeche, Provence, Spain, Slovenia, and Chile.

With other projects we arrived at a point in the early '90's where we were making almost a quarter of the wines we sold.

And keeping winemakers from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Chile and France out of trouble by giving them something to do during their winter seasons.

Later on we also got interested in what some of them did when they went home. The Australian wine industry had embarked on an unwise course of what might be called extreme 'rationalisation' which ended up – after innumerable takeovers – with almost all Australian wine being made by just four Companies! Any surprise people complain it tastes 'samey’.

We struggled to find enough of the good old family Companies we'd always dealt with. Many of our Flyers also struggled to find winemaking jobs that satisfied their creativity. Some were making a few barrels of wine in their garages. It was very good. We set up a very basic shed-winery in an old building that had been a restaurant called Red Heads. Wine makers and wine growers met there, played loud music, drank beer, fooled around and still made amazingly good wines. We called it a studio winery. We struggled to keep them under control - that's artists for you - but it became a real fount of creativity.