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Watch for the Sparkling Jimmy Watson Winner
Friday, 27th August, 2004
- Chris Shanahan
The Jimmy Watson trophy gets everyone excited. Long may it live. But is it really in the best interests of the Melbourne Show, the Watson family, the industry or consumers to continue awarding Australia’s most important wine Trophy to an unfinished wine?
In 1962 Jimmy Watson, wine merchant, died. At his funeral, a hat passed amongst Watson's loyal followers, raising funds to sponsor an annual 'Jimmy Watson Memorial Trophy' for the best one-year-old red wine at Melbourne's Wine Show.
There are those who still remember Jimmy with fondness -- none more so than his son Alan as he presides over the Jimmy Watson Wine Bar founded by his father all those years ago.
But somewhere along the way, the trophy took on a life of its own -- a farcical, commercial life far removed from the world Jimmy Watson inhabited during his lifetime.
Alan Watson remembers his father as a wine pioneer -- a man who cheerfully weathered the sneers of some fellow Australians for nothing more than encouraging the consumption of table wine with food. In those days wine was just plonk.
Bill Chambers, maker of superb Rutherglen fortifieds and long-term Chair of judges at the Melbourne wine show, once told me that he recalled Watson's Wine bar in the late 1950s. There were bottles everywhere as a leather-apronned Jimmy, a great showman, worked with two rubber tubes to bottle a hogshead of red before lunch -- an enviable feat in Chamber's view, and one Jimmy Watson was proud of.
In those days Bill Chambers worked up in the Clare Valley with the Stanley Wine Company. He remembers Melbourne Wine Merchant, Doug Seabrook, buying hogsheads of raw young Clare Valley reds, many of which were sold on to Watson. By all accounts it was these vigorous young reds, and not only those from Clare, that interested him most of all.
In an interview some years back, Alan Watson told me that his father's business was not originally a watering hole as it is today, but a bottle shop where the owner selected and bottled everything himself. But Watson's great enthusiasm attracted a ring of disciples who soon began bringing food to the shop and adopting a liberal interpretation of licensing laws that permitted patrons to taste wine before purchasing.
The clientele, enthralled by Watson, showman and extrovert, came from all walks of life. But with Melbourne University just up the road from Watson's Lygon Street premises, academics and students swelled his ranks of followers. Eagerly they swallowed his message.
"Dad tried to move the trade into another era," reminisced Alan Watson. "He wanted wine to be seen as an everyday occurrence, something to be consumed with meals." He also urged patience, encouraging customers to cellar the immature, purple, one-year-old reds that were the bulk of his trade.
Jimmy Watson was an educator of old and young alike according to Bill Chambers. "Students, professors, everyone brought their tucker down the road before heading up to Watson's to drink wine. But he was a showman and I can't remember him drinking much himself."
Watson's senior disciples, mostly academics and business men, gravitated to an upstairs room, eventually dubbed 'The House of Lords' by him. It was these most ardent and articulate followers who passed the hat at Jimmy Watson's funeral, thus perpetuating his name in the Jimmy Watson Memorial Trophy to be awarded to the robust, year-old reds he so loved.
For the next ten years the Jimmy Watson Trophy -- now a household word amongst wine drinkers -- was unknown to wine consumers and of only minor interest to wine companies.
Bill Chambers judged in Melbourne from the early 1960's. He recalls little fuss over the Watson Trophy until the Berri Co-operative won it in 1973. Then recalls Chambers, an overwhelmed, tired and emotional Brian Barry, needed help boarding the plane with the Murray River's first major trophy in hand.
Perhaps we can link the Trophy's rise to fame more with Wolf Blass's hat trick. He won it in 1974, 1975 and 1976 with his 1973, 1974 and 1975 Black Label. Wolf trumpeted his success loudly -- even mentioning it on the neck label of his sparkling wine at the time.
Increasingly since then, to win the trophy is to harvest a windfall. For the hype surrounding each year's winner virtually guarantees the wine's commercial success.
While no amount of hosing down seems to quell trade or public clamouring for the winner, the fact is that the winning wine is not the finished product.
Even the most meticulously honest winery blending a 'representative' sample across a range of barrels can't say with certainty that what the judges tasted and what goes into bottle are the same wine.
Perhaps some day a wine maker with Jimmy Watson's sense of humour might win the trophy, convert the wine to sparkling burgundy and offer it as the Trophy winner. That may sound absurd, but it's very little different in principle to what happens now.
chris.shanahan@ozemail.com.au
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