415 - Surrealism In Wine And Life With Chester Osborn

When a winemaker builds a giant Rubik’s cube in McLaren Vale, fills it with Salvador Dali sculptures and art, and creates wines that pair with songs and poems, you know you’re about to discover something extraordinary. Chester Osborn has constructed what shouldn’t work but absolutely does – a surrealist manifesto planted in the heart of South Australian wine country that would make André Breton proud and the Márek Brothers, those Czech surrealist pioneers who shocked Adelaide in 1948, absolutely delighted.

Our SA Drink of the Week flows directly from the architect of this impossible vision, as Chester pours his Vociferous Dipsomaniac 2010 – a wine that transforms before our very palate, revealing violet gardens and a scattering of spices whilst teaching us that great winemaking is really just the elegant management of faults. Like the Cube itself, this shiraz demonstrates that the most revolutionary act might simply be saying “yes, and” to the impossible.

The Musical Pilgrimage takes an unprecedented turn as we hear both Chester’s stream-of-consciousness theory connecting wine to quantum physics and time dilation, followed by Steve Davis’ original piece called “Folded Clocks” – a meditation on Salvador Dali’s persistence of memory, created in response to his visit to the Cube where he experienced its artistic revelations firsthand.

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Running Sheet: Surrealism In Wine And Life With Chester Osborn

00:00:00 Intro

Introduction

00:01:56 SA Drink Of The Week

The South Australian Drink Of The Week is d’Arenberg‘s 2010 The Vociferate Dipsomaniac, which Steve tastes with winemaker, Chester Osborn at the Duke Of Brunswick, which has a full suite of these intrepid wines.

The name alone suggests Chester Osborn’s approach to wine nomenclature – dreamt up, he cheerfully admits, during morning toilet contemplation whilst reading the dictionary for “really interesting words.” This particular shiraz demands vigorous pursuit because it’s so compelling you’ll vigorously drink it, potentially earning the archaic designation of “dipsomaniac” – an alcoholic, for those unfamiliar with the term’s English parlance.

What unfolds in the glass defies every expectation of a fifteen-year-old wine. Where vintage wines typically announce their age with that slightly pruny, sweaty character, this Vociferous Dipsomaniac reveals itself like a perfectly adjusted doona on a winter’s night – balanced, enveloping, with tannins that recline gently into your tongue like a tired person settling into an armchair. The secret lies in Chester’s philosophy of elegant fault management: picking at relatively low sugar levels to avoid shrivel, eschewing nitrogen fertilisation since the nineties, and using super-light toast French oak that lets the 34-to-56-million-year-old limestone terroir speak its chocolatey, bloody truth.

As the wine breathes – and Chester insists it breathes better in the bottle than in the glass, for complex reasons involving condensation and molecular romance – it evolves from subtle violet gard