Real Freedom News still offline and obvious to see why….

www.theage.com.au/politics/victoria/senior-liberals-ordered-to-produce-documents-to-unmask-mystery-blogger-20230228-p5co67.html

I find Real Freedom News highly entertaining and am disappointed that it remains offline. But you can understand why.

If the identity of its author becomes known then I expect that their piggy bank will be rather pinched.

Treasury Wine Estates: Devourer of Brands

Red wine has been my poison of choice since my mid 20s. And I have considered myself fairly well informed about red wine since my early 30s.

And since my early 30s, I have also frequently been an investor in publicly listed Australian wine companies. That started with BRL Hardy (now the privately owned Accolade) in 2000, followed shortly afterwards by Southcorp and Fosters Group (whose combined wine interests now form Treasury Wine Estate).

I chuckle now at the idea that 1000 shares in Southcorp at about $5 per share comprised a large part of my then share portfolio. Right now, I have 1000 shares at about $14 in Treasury Wine Estates, and 25000 shares at about $0.60 in the much smaller Australian Vintage Group.

I don’t own those shares anymore because I think they are a good investment – I own them because I believe in Australian ownership of important companies which produce things which matter to me, and because I feel better about my high expenditure in and consumption of wine through being an investor.

But I am not really interested in talking today about whether there is a point in continuing to invest in the remnant of what, 20 years ago, was a very promising sector of the Australian sharemarket.

What I want to talk about is the disappearance of quite a few once ubiquitous wine brands, which I just realised this past week.

Treasury Wines appears, from its website, to be devoting itself to only 18 or so wine brands. Several others which it owns appear to have suddenly and unceremoniously disappeared. This is a bit of a panegyric for three of them.

Let’s start with Ingoldby’s. Foster’s Group’s wine arm, Mildara Blass, took them over around 1995 or so. I remember a friend (whose brother worked in a pub) giving me a tip to buy some of the bottles if I found them as they were a bargain at the price after the takeover. Ingoldby’s has always been a respected but low key brand. It no longer appears to exist, although Google diverts you to the Treasury website.

Then we have Jamison’s Run. Who can remember drinking red wine in the mid 1990s without encountering it at lunchtime? It was a quaffable $15 or so (when $15 did mean more than it does now) dry red, made of either Cabernet or a Cabernet based blend, with a distinctive purple hued painting on the label. Jamison’s Run was pretty popular in its day, and then became a brand featuring a lot of other blends and varietals from which you might choose. Gone.

And there’s Rosemount Estate. I will save the narrative about its reverse takeover of Southcorp (which valued it at over a billion dollars) and the disaster which followed for another time. What I remember is the wine. I occasionally drank their premium flagship, the Balmoral Syrah, but I usually stuck (I was only 30 then after all and not as well off as I am now) to their cheap and cheerful diamond label series- particularly their Shiraz Cabernet blend.

I remember as a sign of their upcoming demise when they launched a diamond label Sangiovese. There were posters all over bus shelters featuring a raven haired beauty with very pale skin raising a glass to her luscious red lips. It really made you want to go out there and buy a bottle of the varietal. But you could not find it anywhere.

Right now, that does not matter. Rosemount Estate does not seem to exist as a separate wine brand anymore, whereas in the year 2000 it was the second most best selling wine brand in Australia.

And that does make me rather sad – I remember many happy evenings in a Chinese restaurant in Canberra in the winter of 1999 with the Rosemount Shiraz Cab blend, just as I remember sipping the classic original Jamison Run version over lunch circa 1995.

Along with my youth, these wines too appear to have gone. Treasury Wine Estate has abandoned them.

But I will remember them, with fondness and nostalgia. Possibly more than they deserved.

In Case Disney Are Really Listening….

The other day, a colleague who is really into all the Star Wars derivative shows on Disney+ asked me if I was up to date with The Bad Batch and had finished watching Andor yet.

I told him that I was not even up to date on the rebooted How I Met Your Father (a rip off of the hugely successful How I Met Your Mother) which Disney is currently flogging.

Then I said to him that perhaps there could be a Star Wars version of How I Met Your Father.

It would be an animated series (like Clone Wars or Bad Batch) with the force ghost of Padme retelling the prequel trilogy to Luke and Leia.

My colleague replied: Ssssh. Disney is listening and they might do it.

If they do, Bob Iger, then remember me for show runner!

Kangaroos actually do sometimes hop down the street….

My front verandah is one of my favourite parts of my home. Provided it is not too warm, it is a great place to sit in the evening and enjoy the end of the day.

I was sitting on it last Saturday night with one of my friends, sipping some wine (red of course – I am now over the Covid impacts on my taste), when a kangaroo hopped past my house.

It was fast, and the picket fence obscured the view, but it was definitely a kangaroo.

A few minutes later when a couple of neighbours walked by and I asked them if they had seen it, they laughed and asked if I had seen it before I had opened the wine bottle.

Not long after, the joke was on them, as other people texted them with videos of the kangaroo as it advanced further into Avondale Heights.

As one of my neighbours observed, there is a mob of 6 or 8 grey kangaroos down on the valley floor near the river, not very far from my home.

And whilst I have not seen a kangaroo hop down my actual street before, I have seen them near the river three times (counting the time over a year ago when one hit my bus near the bridge).

I find it gratifying to know that there is still a lot of native fauna not far away, even though there has been a fair bit of development close to the river in recent years.

The Problem With Pell – The Passing of A Prince of the Church

I have met George, Cardinal Pell, four times. The first was when a friend of mine, one with far greater devotion to Catholicism than I, organised for him to speak at Monash University in mid 1988.

He was a newly appointed auxiliary bishop at the time, and he spoke diffidently but firmly, like someone might speak who was still new and unused to the spotlight that would from then on be part of his life.

I do recall clearly still that he said something like “Karl Marx was a pretty nasty piece of work who usually sponged off his friend Engels instead of getting an honest job.”

The last time I met Cardinal Pell was in Rome in September 2016, when I first visited Italy, and we did lunch, organised through the auspices of that same close friend in common we had.

We spoke for almost three hours, whilst eating pasta and slowly sipping wine, and talked about many different topics – literature, business, politics, economics, history, and absent friends and acquaintances.

We shared a fondness for the writings of Evelyn Waugh, although he did see much greater value in Waugh’s out of milieu biopic about the Emperor Constantine’s mother than I did (and I will say that much as I appreciate Brideshead Revisited for its theme of repentance and redemption, I much prefer the wickedly irredeemable Decline and Fall).

But as a churchman, it would not be surprising that Helena would be preferred – it is as close to a biography of that particular saint as we are likely to see.

He also did remark on his stay in a Roman hospital in relation to his heart condition. He observed that whilst health care in Australia is probably much better, health care in Italy is probably much kinder.

My mind immediately turned back to that remark this morning, when news broke of Cardinal Pell’s death in an Italian hospital following a hip replacement operation.

Pell was a Prince of the Church, as devouter Catholics than I of an earlier generation might have said. He was both archbishop of Melbourne, and then of Sydney, and Vatican treasurer, one of the senior ministers of the Church.

But his legacy is forever shadowed, in this world at least, by the elephant in the chapel, the allegations of child sex abuse. That the High Court overturned those convictions is not going to change the opinions of those who always presumed him guilty.

Most people, like me, have never really looked closely at the evidence or the circumstances of those allegations. The people who told me they were glad to see him in gaol were mostly speaking from prejudice, a willingness to believe in the worst in him, and particularly not from the belief that he had actually done anything himself, but that he deserved to be punished for being perceived as covering up the crimes of other priests.

I have not seen a need to look at the evidence. If there is another life after this, there will be a court where there is more perfect knowledge of truth than we have here, where justice cannot be escaped. If on the other hand there is no other life than this, then was the evidence presented to the jury and then examined by the learned jurists of the High Court sufficient to establish those accusations as facts?

I’m not a lawyer, nor have I been called to serve on a jury. Nor am I am active in the Church Laity and seeking exoneration or condemnation of a Church leader. Looking at the case presented, which has ultimately been found to be insufficient, would not serve me any profitable purpose of my time.

What I will say is that whilst I did not really know George Pell, we did have some close friends in common, people who I consider to be amongst the finest and most decent people that I have ever had the privilege to know and to count as my friends. I trust those friends, and I believe in them. As their belief in the innocence of George Pell never wavered, I too believe in his innocence of charges.

May we meet again for lunch one day, in the next world. And next time, let’s drink more than just one bottle of red.