Len Evans – Not my memoirs - Stunning Wines & Amazing Deals

Not a book review

In a way, the title of this book is spot on. By that I mean that I didn’t feel I knew Len any better when I finished reading it, and that applies to the fascinating people he met on his travels. Len has been called a colossus towering over all others on the Australian wine landscape, and as a man who has had a profound influence on Australian wine becoming what it is today.

Len Evans has been described as ebullient, forthright, brilliant and competitive, as autocratic, didactic and caustic, as unpretentious, unfailingly enthusiastic and uproariously entertaining. He has been called a pugnacious hedonist, a great teacher, a wonderful raconteur and a man of immense generosity. Len was short and stocky and enjoyed being compared to Napoleon.

photo courtesy of Philip White

Detail, the life blood of great storytelling

As a master of wine, Len had few peers. He was quite a raconteur as well, so it comes as a surprise to find that he wasn’t much of a writer. Most of his writing is in summary form: it was decided that … or: it was agreed that we would … Detail is reserved for wines, it seems, not people. All the great characters Len talks about might as well be stick figures – they say interesting, often funny things, but we never get close to them.

We’re talking about the great characters that shaped Australian wine. People like Rudi Komon, Murray Tyrrell, Max Lake, Peter Lehmann, Max Schubert, John Beeston, Tony Albert, James Halliday … Reading the chapters in this book is like reading a children’s colouring-in book before the kids got their hands and their crayons on them. It seems no one ever had the courage to tell Napoleon that he needed to work on his writing.

Max Lake

In a galaxy far, far away

People who came into Len’s orbit succumbed to his charms, almost without exception. Len made many more friends than most of us will ever have, and they remained fiercely loyal to him even after his death. The Len Evans Tutorial is as much erudition for young wine judges as it is a celebration of the grand master by adoring fans.

Looking back, Evans always seemed to live in a different galaxy from the one I inhabited. If I’d been five or ten years older, I might’ve caught some of those fabled Bulletin Place lunches and dinners, if not the dinners in the great cask hall at Rothbury. The pomp and ceremony that went with those always seemed a tad overdone.

I made do with reading Len’s columns in the weekend Australian, but I soon tired of the endless descriptions of wines that were either unprocurable or unaffordable or both. Len might’ve had the common touch but, when it came to wine, it was the great wines from France that really got him going – elusive vintages of la Domaine Romanee-Conti and Chateau Mouton Rothschild et al.

The Gadfly

One man who didn’t fall to Len Evans’ charms is Philip White, the persistent splinter in the rump of Australia’s wine industry. White says Len Evans was ‘a tireless and ebullient rogue … who pushed his way into the wine biz, lived through a career of wild booms and slumps with other people’s money in his own erratic wine businesses, and basically ran the wine show system from the seventies through ’til his death in 2006.’

That’s a pretty blunt summary of the great man’s achievements, but I suspect it contains an ounce of truth. Like all great visionaries, Len had an ability to fire people up, and never seemed to have any trouble finding backers for his ventures. One of these was Peter Fox, a tax lawyer turned entrepreneur who seemed happy to fund Len’s grand vision which by the late seventies included chateaux in France and California.

Ch. Rahoul, Graves, photo courtsey of Peter Marlow

The Survivor

After Peter Fox died at the wheel of his Ferrari in 1981, his company Adelaide Holdings went into receivership. Len’s memoirs provide little detail on what must’ve been a period of great pain and stress for him. We know he got more investors on board of the Rothbury group, which by then owned part of Petaluma and had acquired a Chardonnay vineyard in Cowra. A few years later it acquired Denman Estate in the Upper Hunter.

In the nineties, Rothbury Estate became a public company and Mildara Blass became a major shareholder. In 1996 MB launched a hostile takeover bid that succeeded. Again, we get few details from Len on how that happened, or how painful it must have been for him – Rothbury was his own big baby after all.

Mind you, Rothbury Estate had changed a lot over the years: It now owned Baileys at Glenrowan and St Huberts in the Yarra Valley, while the Hunter Valley plantings had shrunk to 63 hectares producing just 10% of the group’s crush. Rothbury had been built on Shiraz and Semillon, which never really caught on with the broader public.

The pesky bushfly

The Blass-Rothbury connection is a curious one even if Wolf sold his company to Mildara in 1991. According to himself, Wolf Blass came out here from Germany in the early sixties and taught our wine companies to make table wine. That may explain why Wolfie doesn’t have a lot of friends in the Barossa or the broader wine trade, but he doesn’t seem to care.

Philip White wrote that the PLO – Penfolds, Lindemans, and Orlando – ‘hated that pesky bushfly, Wolf Blass, whose cabinet was full of show gold, whose Yellow Label Riesling hovered around the number one slot as far as national bottled wine sales went …’ He also wrote that ‘Len Evans was running around the country saying Chardonnay would be “the vanilla of the Australian wine industry”.’

Blass said Chardonnay would never work here, but Chardonnay became the PLO’s means to take Wolfie down a few pegs. So says White. And Len Evans needed the PLO’s support for his wine show ambitions, so says Whitey who thrives on confrontation.

‘Neither was there love lost between the Evans/Croser axis and the Wynns,’ Whitey tells us. David and his son Adam had planted one of the first Chardonnay vineyards in this country high in the Eden Valley, and made great wines here in the white Burgundy style. White says the Wynns and Brian Croser never entered their Chardonnays in the wine shows, presumably because they’d get lost there among the oceans of PLO entries.

The Chairman

At Len Evans’ send-off, James Halliday said at that ‘he helped build the Australian wine industry into the international force it is today,’ and that ‘he contributed more than anyone else to its transformation from a sleepy provincial backwater to one of Australia’s major export earners. His refusal to accept second best permeated everything he did: he reshaped the wine show system, and educated and encouraged its judges.’

James said this in 2006, the year Len died and our export boom collapsed. As my post Chateau Chunder beats Burgundy at its own game shows, that boom was led by industrial plonk which won the price wars in the supermarkets of the UK and the US. Quality wasn’t part of our marketing and, as soon as the Chileans and Argentines moved in with cheaper plonk, Australia was finished. So much for ‘the international force it the Australian wine industry is today.’

James says Len made our wine show system what it is today, and those who are part of it say it’s a system run to the highest standards that continuously improves the breed. Once again, I have to disagree: From my end of the food chain, it looks nothing like that. I see a gravy train of 100 wine shows a year in Australia. At the Sydney Show alone, 35 trophies were awarded last year. Even a regional show like the Hunter Valley Show hands out 25 trophies. Our wine shows shower winemakers with roughly 1,000 trophies every year. Gold medals? Thousands. It’s a gigantic love-in.

The mug punter

For all of those shows, and all of the judging and awarding of bling, I can see no evidence of consistent development in either the style or quality of our wines over the decades. I said CONSISTENT. Our wines are technically better made, but character has suffered. Consistent development of styles has been missing. The proof is in the drinking, and the trophy-winning wines I’ve drunk over the last 4 decades have been all over the shop.

In the seventies, Wolf Blass showed how easy it was to fool the judges with his ripe fruit and sweet oak concoctions, winning the Jimmy Watson three years in a row. In the eighties, Rosemount won trophies at will with its Jane Mansfield Chardonnays while Lindemans won the judges over with its Coonawarra stewed prune reds. In the Robert-Parker-led red boom of the nineties, the judges fell for Arnold Schwarzenegger reds dressed in toasted coconut oak. In the new millennium, the pendulum with Chardonnays has swung way over to the Twiggy side of the spectrum.

Simply put, the influence Len had on the show system did not trickle through to the end of the food chain where punters like me keep shaking their heads in dismay.

The Judges

One of the few candid moments in the book comes in the last chapter on the Len Evans Tutorials. Here we find a reflective Len a few years before his death, thinking about the future of Australian wine shows. ‘Frankly,’ he writes, ‘at no time in my career did I think there were more than, say 20 judges that were really competent.’

That statement floored me. These days, we have many times that number of judges at all the shows around the country. There’s more: ‘Others were quite good but had weaknesses in certain areas; some well-known names proved to be quite alarmingly inadequate. Of the twenty I don’t think there were ever more than a dozen I would recommend without reservation.’ A dozen.

That was when the Len Evans Tutorial was born, the most exclusive wine school in the world according to James Halliday. The LET masters train a dozen selected young wine ‘scholars’ for five days every year, and Brian Croser says the school generates ‘a dynamic young breed of highly qualified, passionate and even obsessive young people who will change the face of the judging system.’

From the LET website: Students and teachers including James Halliday

We as an industry constantly talk to each other and no one else

I’d rest my case at this point except for one thing: The 2012 LET which was followed by a weekend session where everybody who is anybody in Australian wine discussed what is wrong with our wine show system. They talked about the need for more representation of media, buyers, sommeliers, retailers and the general wine trade, and a closer connection with consumers.

They talked about lots of things, from the overwhelming number of wines at the shows to the rush of judging that leads to ‘safe’ wines winning the gongs. There was lots more, but let’s cut to the chase. One of the participants summed up the problem in one short sentence: ‘We as an industry constantly talk to each other and no one else.’

The End

You don’t get to know Len Evans through this book. Like the key players Len doesn’t really colour in, he too remains an outline. We never get close to the private Len, we never see his pain or anguish, we never see him suffer. He doesn’t let us in, and I suspect he doesn’t want to. He is the consummate showman who doesn’t dwell on things because the show must go on, and let’s be frank: everybody who was part of the Len Evans show clearly loved every minute of it.

Reading this book, you get the strong feeling that the only way to know Len was to be there. I got more insights into Len Evans through a handful of friends, and I listed their contributions in a post I called Len Evans, Anders Ousback & Les Années de Pèlerinage – Stories from the Bulletin Place front line, with apologies to Franz Liszt. It’ tells us a whole lot more about the great man.

Len Evans’ many awards include