The Bathurst 1000: You can’t take the Blue Oval out of me

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As the laps ticked away toward 161 in yesterday’s Bathurst 1000, I felt confident Anton De Pasquale would claim his first Bathurst crown in a Chevrolet Camaro. There were some rumblings about fuel that the commentators picked up on, but the team engineer played it cool, and the radio comms broadcast on TV were initially quite low-key about fuel saving, though they ramped up as the laps ticked by. A safety car late in the race seemed to alleviate the concerns, or so it seemed. Then, with victory all but guaranteed, disaster struck. De Pasquale’s car ran out of fuel on the final lap, and Brodie Kostecki swept past in his Dick Johnson Ford Mustang to take one of Bathurst’s most unlikely wins.

I was euphoric.

It reminded me of something the late Geoff Polites, a previous head of Ford Australia, said many years ago. Those of us of a certain age were born with either a Blue Oval for Ford or a Lion for General Motors Holden metaphorically tattooed on our backsides.

For me, it was always the Blue Oval. Continue reading →

Australian Wine: The story is in the bottle

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A good bottle of Australian wine is about more than just what’s in the bottle. It’s about the people who made it, the vineyard itself, the wine region, often the family behind it, and often the stories we, as drinkers, bring to the wine. 

In a non-academic sense, this was the basis of my PhD, where I looked at what lay behind the wine, particularly the emotional connection that Australian wine families had with their land, their winery, and the wine they produced. I could bore you with a detailed academic explanation of socioemotional wealth, but instead here is a link to my PhD.

My research showed that for these families there was so much more to the wine than its economic value. There was a deep emotional connection to the land itself, a sense of place and so much more.  Often these family members reflected that their own family’s story was being told through the bottle. They saw the wine as a continuation of their own family story.

The story is in the bottle

A couple of anecdotes always spring to mind for me here.

One is of a family member who loved bringing out a bottle of the family wine at dinner. Their branch of the family was quite distant from the family members who ran the winery, but the wine was their connection to a family story that had a more than 100-year history.  Their story was in the bottle, as a member of the family working in the wine business said.

Another is a family member who works overseas and is delighted that the family’s wine is often used at Board Room events. That bottle of wine lets them enjoy the family’s story, even though they are thousands of kilometres from the winery. Continue reading →

The red on my spreadsheet- what our renovation taught me about renovation budgets

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It’s a year since practical completion of the renovation of our beach house. It’s just the garden to go now.

To use a much-overused term, it was quite a journey. What started as musing about ways to sort out our dreaded spiral staircase over a steak in the Penola is now the finished article.

Our architect’s plans were put through the mill by my favourite person and me. While costs were relevant, they were not the driving factor through the design phase. The focus was on getting rid of the spiral staircase and coming up with a design that compensated for the loss of space that would result. However, it didn’t stop there! We quickly moved on to a new kitchen, relocation of the laundry, necessary because of the stairs, an update of the mezzanine to give us more space and extra decking. And I wonder why the costs blew out!

The mezzanine

It was about two years from when we first met our architect until the builder started on our renovation. We waxed and waned over her design, but as each decision was made we very much followed her lead. Her attention to detail in putting my favourite person’s ideas into place served us well. Our builder commented more than once that there was so much detail in her plans. Continue reading →

Our renovation – My home gym

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Updating my home gym at our beach house was an important aspect of our renovation. In recent years fitness has become in my life. It wasn’t something I originally set out to make a major part of my routine. I’ve always done some form of excercise, but I don’t think it was truly part of my life, I just fitted it in.

That all changed  with a rather unflattering realisation while changing a car tyre. I went to get up from the footpath and struggled to keep my balance.

Something  wasn’t right. I was too young for this and something needed to change. I’d ridden bikes for years and, as I said earlier, I always considered myself reasonably active, but I wasn’t actually getting any fitter. In fact, my weight was gradually going up. This was even after I retired and I was no longer entertaining a few times a week. I was however not really watching my diet and I was having a glass of wine most nights. I was also struggling to keep up with my riding group.

Eventually my doctor made the fairly obvious observation that I could probably afford to shed a few kilos.

It was time to do something about it.

Continue reading →