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BOOZE NEWS

The most common four-letter word being bandied around this year is Iraq and, with the world seemingly going to hell in a hand basket, I thought I’d take time out and this week write on a much lighter note than usual.

(And not even mention the great radio ratings for 3aw Drive in the first survey of 2003).

I want to write about booze, hooch, firewater, giggle juice, lunatic soup. Call it what you will.

I was going to say I have had a forty-year association with alcohol – and haven’t always been a victor. But, if I were being honest, I would admit the connection goes back more than fifty years.

My first memory of alcohol is as a youngster in short pants sitting around the Formica-topped table on a Sunday as Mum cooked, and Dad waited to carve, the Sunday roast leg of lamb.

Dad would be having a beer and we would be allowed a shandy -- a Vegemite jar containing a mixture of very little beer and heaps of lemonade.

Unlike in many European families wine was never served at the Hinch table and I was nearly twenty before I tasted it.

Sure, we had stealthily sampled other exotic concoctions by stealing liqueurs from the parents’ glass-fronted, walnut-veneered “ cocktail cabinet”.

There was the obligatory frosted glass decanter with a scene of hunters and hounds etched into the glass and thimble-sized glasses.

There was crème de menthe for Mum which, from memory, tasted like minty mouthwash, and a yellow, custardy, drink called advocaat which the grown-ups mixed with Cherry Brandy and we irreverently referred to as Blood and Pus. As yucky kids would.

The Hinches couldn’t afford Scotch or gin or cognac. Dads drank beer. Sometimes to excess. The deadline of the early closing six o’clock swill sent them home sometimes the worse for wear. And the walls reverberated with alcohol-fuelled parental arguments especially when times were tough and the pay envelope exceedingly slim.

In a funny way illicit booze had a strong connection with my entry into journalism. And bars and journos seem to have been inextricably linked forever.

As a teenager about to leave high school in New Plymouth, New Zealand,

I used to live next door to Clem Cave, the News Editor of the local afternoon paper. I used to mow his lawns for pocket money and steal ghastly, cloudy, home brewed beer from his basement while he was entertaining friends upstairs.

The connection got me a cadetship on the Taranaki Herald and a career was born.

The relationship between words and booze has continued almost uninterrupted for more than forty years although I have stopped drinking several times for a month for a bet and several years ago gave up alcohol from Sunday to Friday.

Once, after reading a doctor’s opinion that anybody who drank even two glasses of wine a day was an alcoholic, I rashly told a TV journalist that I guessed I was technically an alcoholic. The quoter was buried in the text of the glossy magazine story. The editor sniffed a better story and the headline read: “ Hinch Confesses. I’m an alcoholic.”

It is true, and I cannot fudge or deny it, that at the height of my first 3AW career, when I was being paid a million dollars a year in the 1980s, I was drinking bottles and bottles of white wine a day. A counsellor would reject my explanation but I still got up at 5.17 a.m. every morning, was in the office by six, on air at 8.30 or three and a half hours and never called in sick.

In fact my favourite story from that time is when Prime Minister Fraser and I broke a two and a half year period of “ no speakies”. He denied me and so I banned him.

In preparation for the momentous interview I had an abstemious lunch and dinner and an early night. For the interview I had none of that hungover edge or angst and he walked all over me.

My best booze storey from that period was when I went on air and impetuously declared I was giving up red wine. En passant I said I thought the histamines were knocking me around.

An instant, irate call, from Bob Mayne with the Wine and Brandy Corporation demanded equal time because I was full of s---.

He played his trump card. Said that there were no more histamines in red wine than there was in a banana. I pointed out that I didn’t eat 47 bananas in one hit.

Anyway, flash forward a couple of decades. I have owned a vineyard producing red and white wines and I now drink red wine almost exclusively. I love high country Victorian wines (my Macedon Ridge vineyard was at 700 metres) and have a burgeoning love affair with the reds of Coonawarra.

But I have also rediscovered how couthful spirits can be. I have found not only the gin martini which was the American national anthem when I lived there 35 years ago. But the “ Dirty Martini” now served at places like the Westin’s Martini Bar, Lotus in South Yarra and the Watergrill.

It’s a very dry martini with only a hint of vermouth and a couple of olives on a toothpick. What makes it different is the splash of brine from the bottle that the olives are stored in. Dirty, deadly, and as smooth as you could dream.

The other spirit I have re-embraced – eons down the track – is another American staple: Bourbon on the rocks with a splash of water.

In America I would only drink Jack Daniels Black Label. Green Label at a pinch. Flirted with Jim Beam and in this country the bourbon on the top shelf in recent years has been Maker’s Mark with its distinctive flow of red candle wax down the bottle.

Well, after some top shelf research, I hate to say it but: John Laws, the man with the golden tonsils, is right. The best bourbon is Wild Turkey.

As smooth as a ride on a Kentucky Derby champion.

And a postscript on the aforementioned liquor. I think it was Dorothy Parker who once said:

One martini is not enough, two martinis is enough, three martinis is not enough….

March 2, 2003

Hinch can be heard on Drive 4-6p.m weekdays 1278 3AW

Derryn Hinch
www.hinch.net

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2002