It wasn't the perfunctory sign-off at the foot of my final Australian Financial Review Life & Leisure column – ‘This is Tim White's last column’ – which irritated me. I mean, like even with Life & Leisure’s significant horologically-generated advertising revenue, I wasn’t expecting a gold watch or anything.

No: the thing that heaped even more than the usual amount of shit on my alcohol dehydrogenase depleted liver, when I got around to reading the print edition of the Australian Financial Review New Year ‘Bumper’ Life and Leisure on the morning of the 31st December 2016, occurred a bit further up the page in my opening paragraph. This was the incomprehensible subbing decision to replace the word “deployed” with “doled out”. But to this I’ll return shortly.

Once I’d learned – on November 9th – that I’d been dropped by the Australian Financial Review I immediately decided that my final AFR column was not going to pursue some self-referential you-wouldn’t-believe-the-things-I’ve-seen-and-tasted-and-how-the-world-of-wine-has-changed type tack. Or look back to past columns and issues of yore.

It seemed so much more necessary to devote my final significant chunk of space in a well-regarded national print publication to things of importance. Which is why I elected to sign-off with a piece about the late Emily Trott, The Wheaty and Wirra Wirra (You can find the full-length, filed version of my column here).

Matters of Principles

The world lost many fine creative people before their time in 2016 and Emily Trott, ‘Trotty’ as she was known to many of those closest to her, was one. But the singular culture that she, Jade Flavell, and Liz O’Dea have nurtured at The Wheaty continues to flourish.

Portrait of Jade, Liz and Emily at The Wheaty. Pic by Tim White.

Witness the ‘container bar’ which I first happened upon when collecting a Jade Flavell-compiled selection of beers for all saisons and other fine things just prior to Christmas. The container bar, which will almost certainly be dubbed with a snappier sobriquet in due course, sits in The Wheaty’s beer garden only metres from the band shed and the pub’s immaculately equipped micro-brewery, where Flavell presides over the many stimulating Wheaty Brewing Corps compositions.

The container bar is not yet fully fitted-out as it still awaits the installation of a custom-designed font. In the meantime The Wheaty’s six-tap mobile unit dispenses the pints, fancies, schooners, and butchers requested or suggested, and is open Friday to Sunday.

The mobile tap unit, incidentally, was commissioned for a Citroën H panel van which Trotty, Flavell and O’Dea located in England and shipped to Australia. Liz O’Dea told me that Emily was instrumental in its acquisition and that the idea was originally to have it serve as the outdoor bar in the beer garden.

The Wheaty’s H van, which Trotty did get the pleasure of experiencing before she died, is currently having its engine replaced and is being converted to a right-hand drive. It will be decked out in Wheaty Brewing Corps colours when it’s up and running.

The detail of this I only learned of not that many days ago and weeks after I filed my ‘last column’, which you can find in unexpurgated form here. The original filed version has a lot more detail about Wirra Wirra, the producers of one of my wines of last year – the 2014 ‘The Absconder’ Grenache – as well as a story about a cat in a freezer.

I’ve also applied a tweak or two to the last couple of pars as I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the outro when I submitted it. However, I was quite content with the intro of my last column for the Australian Financial Review which ran (runs):

‘The “Trotty Special” is composed of Tanqueray, Pompelmo, fresh lime juice. It’s a mix often deployed at The Wheatsheaf Hotel – a.k.a. The Wheaty (Thebarton, Adelaide, South Australia) – to a patron in need of a restorative beverage that might be capable of righting the wrongs of the night or morning before.’

Words (and deeds) matter

Inexplicably on the AFR website ‘Pompelmo’, by which I mean San Pellegrino Pompelmo is replaced simply by ‘grapefruit’, a substitution which would yield an altogether different drink. It did at least run as sparkling grapefruit in print, while the footnote to the AFR’s online version does at least accurately read, ‘This is Tim White's last column for Life & Leisure.’

Both editions, however, feature the – er – amendment which set off the mini thunderclap in my brain: the replacement of “deployed” with “doled out”.

Now I pondered this ‘last column’ for a considerable time and I chose ‘deployed’ in this context quite deliberately; to indicate the specificity of how the ‘Trotty Special’ is strategically selected and dispensed according to need by the highly considered folk behind the bar at The Wheaty. ‘Doled out’ implies that the drink is poured randomly, arbitrarily: without any care or attention.

It would appear that care in this instance of subbing was absent, but given the respectful way my copy has been treated under my last editor’s watch (and that of many editors past), and the fact that I’m no longer writing for the Australian Financial Review, there’s not much point me banging on about it further is there?

Although you know what? It would have been nice if the final intro par to my ‘…last column’, for the Australian Financial Review, after twenty-three years of loyal service, accurately conveyed what I’ve long observed: they don’t ‘dole out’ the Trotty Special at The Wheaty.

Important footnote: I’d like to thank all those who encouraged, assisted, corrected and berated me at the Australian Financial Review over the past twenty-three years. These include, although the list is obviously not exhaustive: Sam Bennett, Stephen Clark, William Fraser, Stewart Hawkins, Katarina Kroslakova, John Newton, Shane Nichols, Peter O’Neil, Charis Perkins.

But I’d like to express particular gratitude to Roger Johnstone, the editor who commissioned my first piece (thanks to the commendation of chef and author Steve Manfredi), which then led to a weekly column. So it’s these two you have to blame.

That first story, titled Terroirism, was followed by a request for a second with just one week’s notice – Terroirism had taken me a month! – and this caused a reasonable amount of anxiety on my part: ideas have always come easy, execution sometimes less so.

But Roger talked me through it; instructed me how to knock it out in reasonable time. It was pretty ordinary in the writing, but the content was provocative and pertinent to the white wine times. It dealt with awarding of many top gongs at the Royal Sydney Wine Show to an over-the-top (nee. Chateau) Tahbilk chardonnay as I recall it. It didn’t win me many admirers among the judges.

It was the hardest piece I’ve ever had to write: Apart from my ‘last column’.