Thirty Thousand Bottles of Wine and a Pig Called Helga Page 5

  ‘Get us this property, Toddy,’ Jeff said suddenly, without a trace of It’s too expensive stop doing this to yourself. ‘Whatever you need to do, negotiate your arse off and get it for us. I want to go to here.’

  And we hadn’t even placed a foot on it.

  Olives and Grapes and Dams, Oh My!

  Once Shelly’s business partner Cain had agreed to meet us at the property, we cancelled all three of the afternoon’s other viewings. We’d known all along they weren’t the right ones for us and there’s nothing quite like popping all your yet-to-be-purchased chickens’ eggs into your already-filled-with-cushions basket.

  As if we hadn’t been excited enough waiting for Cain to unlock the gate, the completely awesome view at the crest of the olive grove totally blew us away. We had stopped at the top of the hill to get into Cain’s four-wheel drive, pretending we hadn’t noticed his chuckle at our very un-country and totally useless Barina that hadn’t coped very well with the rough driveway and certainly wouldn’t have made it cross-country through the vineyard. As far as we could see, there was not a single man-made structure. It was a far cry from the stinky bins lining our cramped one-way alley in Annandale. Vast fields of grazing land and dense bushland gave way to the simple, breathtaking beauty of the Barrington Tops. Over to the left lay the Great Dividing Range, with the Brokenback Range behind us on its eastern tip. Large black dots on the landscape revealed themselves as big fat heifers grazing on the long dry grass.

  As we silently took in this magnificence, I didn’t dare look at Jeff: I feared a little bit of wee would come out or I would burst into uncontrollable fits of schoolgirl giggles. Instead, I was concentrating on making Cain feel we were lukewarm about the property, all the better for negotiation.

  A mob of kangaroos lay relaxing in the shade of the olive groves and bounded out of our way to allow the four-wheel drive to pass.

  ‘I ordered those in especially,’ Cain said.

  He drove us up into the vineyard first, fifteen acres of vines, about 150 rows. Vines stretched out in both directions as we drove down the central aisle. If either of us was feeling daunted by the idea of running a vineyard, we didn’t let on. In my mind I was thinking, Holy shit, there’s a tonne of work to do here and I never wanted to be a grapegrower but we don’t need to keep them; we could use the land for something else. No, this is too big for us, it’s beautiful but too big. This is crazy, there’s no way in hell we can manage all of this. There must be a million snakes in that long grass. Bushfires! Bushfires! What about the bushfires? Normal people would have shat their pants at the thought of managing or even clearing out the vines (Terribly sorry, Cain . . . I’ve just sullied myself), but with my blinkers on, all I cared about was how perfect the rest of the property felt. One enormous dam commanded the centre of the property at the base of where two hills met – on one was the house, on the other were the grapes. Next to it was another large dam, home to a beautiful selection of ghost gums, scores of native ducks and a clump of casuarinas that whispered in the softly blowing wind. Cain also told us there was a third dam between the two olive groves. The olive trees were a beautiful silvery hue, lush and well established and the house looked out at them. There was just so much openness compared to our tiny little plot in Annandale and the air was noticeably clearer, but the most awesome thing was the sky – the vast never ending sky that swamped us completely. We barely caught glimpses of it out of our windows at Annandale. The whole scene gave me an enormous feeling of relief and relaxation. Could it really become ours?

  The house itself was nothing special. In fact, that was severely over-selling it. It was adequate at best, with three bedrooms and an open-plan living and dining room with big views out over the property and mountains beyond. Cain had also organised for another couple to view the property at the same time as us; Chinese investors interested in the vineyard side of things. We knew Chinese dollars were buying up large chunks of the Hunter Valley wine region and feared our comparatively measly budget would be easily trumped. Apparently the house was not grand enough for them and they left after only a few minutes, but for me it had a few of the items on my ‘nice to have’ list: views, verandahs, walk-in pantry, en suite, walk-in robe. It was in desperate need of a clean and refresh; it was tired and grubby, having served as the family’s weekend working farmhouse for many years – no one was here to clean when they visited Block Eight. This should have been a reminder of how much backbreaking work was in front of us but I was still too busy stifling giggles to worry about things like the bare-naked facts. I also knew the house was the least of our issues as I happened to know a guy who was an excellent painter and had a keen eye for transforming properties for next to nix. He was cheaper than cheap and brought with him an arsenal of lovely cushions.

  Cain explained that the name Block Eight came about when the Hardie family subdivided the original fourteen hundred acres of Sweetwater Ridge. They’d subsequently built their Tuscan-inspired mansion completed with materials imported directly from Italy, as you do when you’re the Hardie family. We were told the original purchasers of each of the new plots had been given the opportunity to name their properties (Sunset Hill, The Old Vineyard, The Meadows, etc.) but when it came to get a name in by the deadline, the owners of the eighth block in Sweetwater Ridge did not, and Block Eight stuck.

  At the property inspection, Cain left Jeff and me to explore the house alone and in one of the bedrooms we mouthed excitedly to each other so Cain wouldn’t overhear. We could not believe how completely perfect Block Eight was for our vision of the future. Job done: we’d become Maggie and Colin.

  ‘It needs a lot of work,’ I said seriously to Cain, stating the obvious. ‘And the house isn’t as big as what we’re used to so we’ll have to think about that . . .’ and then I went on to ask him a series of questions to make it sound like we were having severe doubts, or at least as if we thought the asking price was too high. Having got to know Cain well over subsequent years I have no doubt he could see through my facile negotiation tactics – and besides, it was Shelly who would be handling any sale, not him. But I knew he’d be informing her of everything we said and did so she would be in the best position to negotiate for the vendors.

  As we drove away that afternoon, our years-long mood of hopelessness had melted away and in its place was a lightness and buoyancy we hadn’t felt since we were in the Barossa on that perfect weekend getaway with Mel and Jesus. I was plain silly with giddiness. I just had to work out how I was going to negotiate for the best price, because even though we had no idea what we were in for, we did at least know that every single dollar would make a difference in helping us achieve our dream.

  Over the following days we finalised our plan. We were so in love with Block Eight that we decided we would shut down our Sydney life altogether. This meant we decided to sell the Annandale property after all, Jeff would ask to work remotely and while I would commute for the time being, when the time was right I would ask to do the same. Once our new business was established we would both finally quit. We got all our finances in order with the bank. In those situations it helps to have contacts. On paper Block Eight is a commercial property – it is large, rural and has about twenty-five acres of crops on it. But the contact we had in the bank helped us pitch it internally and the fact that neither crop had produced significant income in recent years (and let’s face it, the vineyard was rundown and looked like shit) and there was only one dwelling on the property meant the powers-that-be agreed to give us residential loan approval which meant a better interest rate and a longer term to pay it off so our repayments would be manageable. Of course, the fact that a behemoth like a bank would dismiss the crops as useless because there was no recent evidence of income should have raised a few alarm bells, but by that stage I was tone-deaf. Ringing? What ringing? Then it came time to negotiate.

  I called Shelly to say we liked the property but we needed to hold back a chunk of cash for renovations. My initial offer was $915,000.
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  ‘There’s no way they’re going to go for that,’ ever-the-optimist Jeff said, ‘that’s almost half what they originally wanted for it.’

  ‘We’ll see . . .’

  We were in the middle of a meeting with a real estate agent in the Annandale house, getting everything in line for its sale, just in case we got Block Eight, when my phone rang. I was shitting my pants. The vendors rejected the offer but said they would sell for $950,000. It was unusual to get a counteroffer and it felt like we were getting close. I asked Shelly to leave it with me. After an hour or so I called her back and said we would meet them near the middle and I offered $935,000, a figure Shelly didn’t sound confident about but said she’d discuss with the vendors. It was, after all, roughly the same amount you would have paid for a smallish two-bedroom apartment in the stylish beachside suburb of Bondi at the time. This all happened without me telling Jeff. In my heart I knew we were going to get it and while he didn’t really enjoy receiving surprises, I thought I’d make an exception for this one.

  Part way through our chat with our old estate agent, Nick, in Annandale (yes, we got an Eastern Suburbs agent to sell our Inner West home even though we had a great relationship with several local agents who probably had thousands of interested buyers on their books), my phone rang again. I excused myself from the kitchen table and went outside to take the call.

  ‘Congratulations,’ Shelly began . . . and the rest of the conversation was lost on me. I just couldn’t believe it: we’d got a $1.9 million dollar property for less than half price!

  Whether it was because no one else was stupid enough to buy it, or because it was worth far less than what we’d paid, I didn’t care. I have to admit to myself that I’m a stickler for stability, a nice predictable ride over smooth ground with no bumps or sudden turns. So when it dawned on me that we’d just bought a farm almost three hours out of Sydney, I had a brief moment of complete terror. What the fuck was I doing? This shit was about to get real! I’d lived in the city for nearly twenty years.

  Strangely, once the bile subsided, I felt elated. It was only then that I realised perhaps I had wanted this move my whole life, long before Jeff and the property purchases and my serious corporate roles. I remembered that in my hermit-like twenties before I came out and discovered what real friendships were, I’d written a crappy novel about a hermit-like twenty year old with no real friends who drops out of society and goes to live self-sufficiently on a farm. Maybe there was a bit of Nostradamus in me; though, thankfully (unlike the book), I wouldn’t need to wait for the handsome masculine farmhand to wander onto the farm – that role had already been filled by Jeff. (Come to think of it, there was also a scene where a woman takes some of the main character’s sperm and becomes pregnant with his child – now that’s spookily prophetic!)

  The meeting with Nick went on for another forty-five minutes. Some might accuse me of never wanting it to end . . . Another cup of tea, Nick? Glass of wine? One more tour of the house? No? Did I point out the moth-motif lightshade over the dining room table? Oh, have I shown you my cookbook collection? It was nearly an hour of me bursting at the seams to tell Jeff but also revelling in the fact that I had this secret and I was going to have some fun getting it out.

  ‘So they rejected our offer of $915,000,’ I said, after Nick had vacated the premises. ‘Shelly sounded unimpressed and made me feel like we were a million miles off the mark. Actually, she sounded like I was a million dollars off what the vendors really wanted to sell for.’

  ‘Damn,’ he said, dejected.

  I was loving every minute of this!

  ‘What do you think we should do? I’m over it,’ I said. ‘I just don’t think I could be bothered playing this stupid price-guessing game when the property’s never gonna be ours.’ Though I was the only boy who took drama in Year 11, I’m not much of an actor unless the atmosphere is just right.

  ‘Well we have to offer more,’ Jeff almost pleaded, ‘Just one more offer and see what they say. And as your dad always says “what’s meant for you won’t go past you”.’

  ‘How about I offer $935,000? Would you want it if it cost that much?’

  ‘Hell, yeah . . .’

  ‘I don’t know if we can afford that much though,’ I toyed some more. ‘I reckon maybe we should just forget about it, as much as that gives me the shits.’

  ‘No, make another offer, it can’t hurt! Whatever happened to your “there’s no harm in asking” philosophy?’

  ‘What about 950? As our absolute top offer, not a cent more?’

  ‘Yeah okay, let’s give that a shot.’

  I could have played like that all day.

  ‘Hmm, what about 935? As a middle point, just to test the water?’

  ‘Whatever you think,’ Jeff said impatiently. ‘You’re the negotiation expert.’

  ‘So you’d pay 935?’

  ‘Man, it would be such a bargain if we could get it for that . . .’

  ‘935? You think?’

  ‘Yeah, don’t you?’

  ‘Well that’s exactly what we’ve paid for it!’

  ‘What?’

  I went on to explain and we jumped for joy, arms around each other’s shoulders, bounding around the kitchen like a pair of lunatics.

  ‘I can’t believe you kept it a secret from me!’ he grinned.

  ‘Sorry, Nick was here. I just had . . . other things on my mind.’

  We raced to the computer and looked at the images of Block Eight, pinching ourselves that it would soon be ours, where we were to live! We looked at Google Maps, trying to work out just how big a hundred acres was. Jeff printed up the image and used the same scale to lay it out over a map of Annandale.

  ‘Let’s walk it out after dinner.’

  It took us nearly an hour to walk its perimeter.

  ‘This can’t be right,’ I said to Jeff not even a third of the way into our walk. ‘You’ve stuffed up the scale. There’s no way we own a property that could fit this many houses on it.’

  But it was. The land we owned in Annandale can fit over 2000 times on Block Eight. It is as big as the frigging Vatican and the smoke had gone up, people: there was a new leader in town.

  ‘How many olive trees did you say we had?’ Jeff called me one day at work a few days later. By then the contracts had been signed and the lawyers and bankers were doing their mysterious work.

  ‘I think about one or two hundred?’

  ‘Try again.’

  ‘Four hundred?’

  ‘There’s about a thousand!’

  ‘No way! How do you know that?’

  ‘I’m looking at Google Maps and I counted every single one.’

  Of course he had.

  From a four-by-four metre courtyard with about eight pot plants (that I wasn’t very good at keeping alive) to over a thousand fifteen-year-old olives trees, and with about 150 rows at about 100 metres each I guessed there were around 15,000 grapevines . . . things were beginning to get interesting.

  How Hard Can It Be?

  During the settlement period of around two months, Shelly called to ask if we were interested in buying the vendors’ farm equipment, currently stored in the shed. They wanted $100,000 for a tractor, gator (‘What’s a gator?’ I asked Jeff, who just shrugged so I googled it to find out it was a four-wheel all-terrain vehicle like a large turbo-charged golf buggy), ride-on mower, grape bins, pallet racking and a stack of other equipment. At that point we still hadn’t decided what to do with the crops and as we didn’t know the first thing about running a farm on such a large scale we told him he was dreaming! With that beautiful little thing called hindsight that decision could have saved us a bomb and, though we didn’t know it at the time, it wouldn’t take long to see we were more than a little out of our depth.

  As the settlement date of the end of September 2012 drew near I searched the internet for bottles of Brokenwood 2006 Belford Block Eight Semillon, to our knowledge the only single-vineyard wine ever produced from our (our!) grap
es. Website after website showed that it was sold out, and little wonder, given the rave reviews it’d received. Finally on about page eight of Google, I came across a site that had some for sale so I ordered three dozen, only to be told they had just nine bottles in stock.

  According to the plan, Jeff asked his employer to let him work remotely. Over the preceding months he’d created a manual for his role and set up an intranet that meant he could work from anywhere but, despite this, they refused. So after much consideration of our financial situation, he resigned. Our last remaining connection to Sydney would be my three days a week in the office.

  By late September, we’d managed to convince enough of our friends to join us to give the Annandale house her final party (Jeff’s fortieth combined with a house-cooling – we partied the day it sold at auction), and the following week we left Leroy with Jeff’s mum, Millie, who was visiting from Birmingham, to hire a truck and take the first load of our possessions to Block Eight. We stopped along the way to buy a new charcoal barbecue and ingredients to make dinner on the deck that overlooked our new domain. To celebrate, we opened one of the last remaining bottles of Brokenwood 2006 Belford Block Eight Semillon in existence, the first from our own vineyard and only our second bottle of wine in as many years. (The other was the bottle we shared when I took Jeff to Tetsuya’s for his birthday dinner.)

  Perhaps it was a combination of the excitement at finally moving in, or maybe the sight of those vines in the distance but we couldn’t help feeling this Semillon was one of the most delicious wines either of us had ever tasted. It had a smooth, buttery texture and an almost butterscotch-like taste. There was just the slightest hint of acidity at the front of my palate but at the back a touch of sweetness. Believe me when I say I’ve tasted more than a few wines over the years and nothing compared.