For someone who didn’t write his first book until 41, James Halliday has more than made up for lost time. This former lawyer and banker turned winemaker, wine writer and wine judge tells how it all came to be.
WORDS - CAMPBELL MATTINSON
One Good Friday, when James Halliday was 41 years old, he sat down and started writing a book. He’d never written one before. In his teens and even into his 20s he’d not been particularly studious – he was the first Halliday not to graduate with honours, was the college snooker champion and once faced a law exam not having attended any lectures on the subject. But as his work responsibilities mounted, he developed an intense work ethic.
In the four days of this Easter break in 1979, James both started and finished a comprehensive book on the Hunter Valley and its winemaking history. It was these four days that began the legend: in the 32 years since, he’s written and published a staggering 65 books on wine. He published two books in 2011 and if all goes to plan, he’ll publish another three in 2012 – at the age of 74. More are expected.
James Halliday has become renowned for many things: his phenomenal body of work, his dedication (one Christmas morning his wife found him in his office, working on a book), the richness of his wine knowledge, his reliability – in over 20 years of writing for The Australian newspaper, he’s never once been late on a deadline – and his generosity. He’s also the most tireless traveller on the Australian wine media circuit. He travels so much and to so many destinations that he once had his wife meet him at the airport to deliver a fresh batch of clothes so he could continue on to the next leg of the trip.
James works in a small office at his house in Victoria’s Yarra Valley surrounded by books, and uses a simple wall calendar – the type where you lift the flap to reveal a new picture each month. A flick through the past few months revealed trips to Singapore, Cambodia, France, Margaret River, Sydney, Canberra, the Great Southern region of Western Australia, Greece, Hamilton Island, twice, London and McLaren Vale.
His travel schedule makes you wonder where on earth he finds the time to write all those books and meet all his newspaper and magazine deadlines. Facts and anecdotes help explain.
When James Halliday is not travelling, he walks into his office each morning at 7am and rarely leaves before 7pm. He once hand-wrote six newspaper articles on the outward leg of a trip from Sydney to Singapore (and asked the head steward on the plane to mail them back to his office – who duly lost them). If there’s a delay at an airport, you won’t find him lounging about, shooting the breeze, surfing the net. He’ll take pen and paper from his satchel and barely lift either his hand or his head until he hears the boarding call.
His late, great friend and fellow Australian wine legend Len Evans once noted that when James heard there’d be a delay between courses at a lunch in central Sydney, he rushed back to his office to get some work done. An excessive break between entrée and main is not an annoyance for James Halliday – it’s an opportunity.
James and Len Evans were thick as thieves. Sadly, Len passed away in 2006 and left a legacy to the Australian wine industry that James has helped continue.
“If I have any great facility, it’s that I can write things and not have to edit them,” James says. “In fact, I hate editing – if I don’t get it right the first time, then I don’t think that I ever will.”
It’s happenstance that James is a writer at all. He became a legal partner at law firm Clayton Utz in 1966 – his fields were initial public offerings (IPOs), mergers and acquisitions, and his specific expertise the leasing and purchasing of jumbo jets – and became a merchant banker for a couple of years too. At university he’d first studied Arts. His father was a heart surgeon and at school James had been forced to study chemistry, physics, and mathematics – all of which he detested. If you’d asked him as a young man what he really wanted to study, he’d have told you something else entirely: architecture.
But James has always loved wine. His parents did not have wine on the table each night but his father saw himself as a keen wine collector – interestingly, his entire cellar was made up of the wines of a single winery: Lindeman’s Hunter River. And while gin and whiskey were more common tipples in the Halliday household, it was James’s duty to act as the family butler. At dinner parties or on special nights, whenever wine to be served, James would venture into his father’s cellar to retrieve bottles for the table. The adult apple hasn’t fallen far from the boyhood tree. Ever since, James has been venturing into the cellars of the world and letting us know which ones we’d best choose to drink.
Or at least he has been since 1969, when a magazine called Epicurean asked him if he could venture a wine article for them. It was James’s start as a wine writer. It wasn’t even his idea. Forty years later James Halliday is the most commercially successful wine author Australia has ever known.
In the early 1990s, a wine magazine in the US decided the James Halliday name had become so strong that it warranted investigation. American writer Matt Kramer was hired to do the job on him. James had been a part owner of the Brokenwood winery in the Hunter Valley and got down on his hands and knees and planted and weeded his own commercial vineyard at Coldstream. At the same time, he’d been a wine judge (and more often than not, chairman of judges) at wine shows all over Australia and around the world. Throughout, of course, he’d also been a key figure in the international wine media. Matt Kramer was hired to snoop around and find the conflicts of interest, the inconsistencies, the people wronged by this juggernaut of wine. The thinking was that nobody could do all this without breaking the rules or in some way exerting bias.
First plantings at Coldstream Hills in Victoria's Yarra Valley.
Coldstream Hills today.
The way this investigation played out could easily be the defining James Halliday anecdote. Because for all of James’s knowledge and work and good judgement, his most important trait is his sense of initiative. He’s saturated with it. He found the exact site in the Yarra Valley where he wanted to live and plant vines long before the property was for sale.
The day he found out it was on the market, he met the real estate agent at the house and wrote out a cheque for the deposit on the spot. Due to an earlier divorce, his estate was in negative territory at the time – the cheque account was empty. First thing Monday morning he called his bank manager and demanded, “Whatever you do, don’t bounce that cheque”.
True to form, when James accidentally got wind of Matt Kramer’s mission while in the US, he didn’t rock back onto the balls of his feet and wait. He called the writer and explained he wasn’t about to defend himself. The best thing Matt could do, James advised, was forget about interviewing him and get out and ask around. If anyone thought there was a problem, or that James was compromised, then let them come forward. A week later, Matt Kramer returned James’s call and told him the article had been canned because no one had anything negative to say about him.
“I’ve always felt free to exercise my judgements in whatever way I saw fit – there’s never been any real commercial imperative,” he says. “I could have made a lot more money if I’d stayed on as a partner at Clayton Utz – my father certainly thought I should do so – so the very fact that I spend my days writing on wine and have done for so long is a kind of proof that money isn’t my motivation. It’s always been of paramount importance that I be able to look myself in the mirror of a morning. I guess people have never had any reason to doubt my integrity.”
Interestingly, James’s father advised his son against wine writing (and making) as a full-time career. It was too risky compared with the security of being a legal partner. Quietly, James has had the last laugh. “One of the great ironies of my life is that my dad only cellared Lindeman’s Hunter River wines. And for four years, by a quirk of fate following the takeover of Coldstream Hills, I became the Southcorp group winemaker for Lindemans, Devil’s Lair and (of course) Coldstream Hills,” he says. “I bought Dad a bottle of early 1950s Grange once – one of the first vintages made – and he didn’t like it much. He was like other people at the time; he thought it tasted like a concoction.”
No one has ever doubted James’s commitment to the cause. He tastes so many wines – 10,000 annually is one estimate – that it would be easy to lose sight of why he fell for wine in the first place. “That’s not the problem you might expect,” he says. “Wine is too much a part of my life for me to ever lose the love of it. One of the great sadnesses of my life now is that I often taste a wine and think, that will be truly beautiful in 10 or 20 years. But now I can’t help but think I’ll never get the chance to drink this wine at its peak. It’s a morbid thought.”
Ever the true wine lover, James still buys wine for his personal cellar. “I don’t buy anything like the amount I used to – though I have always bought more than I can consume. I still buy five or so dozen from the Mosel each year. And specific vintages of Burgundy. And Wendouree – because I can’t help myself. And La Tache.”
The Halliday cellar is not the pristine affair you might imagine. It’s a labyrinthine treasure trove; it would be easier to categorise it by eras than years. However, the stocks of ‘great’ wine in his collection are rapidly diminishing.
A cellar to envy, full of James' much-loved wines.
“It costs me nothing to take a bottle or bottles from the cellar and share them with others who can appreciate their quality,” he says. “There is great pleasure to be gained in sharing a bottle with another or others who have never previously encountered truly great wine, and may not do so again in their lifetime. This is not grandstanding to overwhelm them with shock and awe – however others may see it. As I get older, it becomes increasingly obvious to me that it is better I open great bottles than some other so and so.”
At the elaborate wake held for Len Evans in 2006, James stood to address the crowd. He told a story of a day spent fly-fishing with Len. James was taught to fly-fish by his father and had developed an ingrained talent. Len – an icon of Australian wine, a former golf professional and a man accustomed to being better than most folks at just about everything – had received casting lessons by James in his back garden, and his first forays were with James and his fishing cronies.
On this particular trip, they trekked a long way without sight or sound of any fish – then saw a trout rising in a cool pond ahead. James – ever graceful, ever generous – stood back and left it for Len, who cast and re-cast his lure, trying valiantly but generally giving the fish one hell of a fright. Really, it was never in danger of being caught by Len.
After a while, James quietly asked Len to give him a try. He had it in his mind that, for once, he could teach Len something – Len had been teaching him things for decades, and he idolised Len as a result. James then calmly, and with the kind of expertise only great experience can bring, landed his fly softly on the water, and in precisely the right spot. It was such a masterful display that you’d have sworn the fly was real. The trout rose to the fly instantly, and James easily reeled it in. James then stood there on the bank with the fish. He was sure, after all these years, that Len was about to say something admiring. He’d earned the credit.
James as a fly-fisherman is much the same as he is as a judge of wines – steady, reliable, filled with the kind of knowledge that only great dedication over a great many years can bring. Len as a wine critic was always flashier but it’s James Halliday who has built the kind of public following all who came before and after could not help but admire. The standing of James Halliday in Australian wine is not likely to be repeated.
Len looked at his old mate, with the proof of James’s mastery dangling from his line: “You stole my fish!” he exclaimed.
More photo's from James' albums...
Tutors and scholars at the annual Len Evans Tutorial, which takes in wine's best and brightest for the week-long intensive course.
Spitting wine is a talent: James judges the Winepros spitting competition at Wine Australia 2000.
Chairman James and the judging team at the Royal National Agricultural Society National Wine Show.
James and wife Suzanne unveil the George Mackey Award for Best Exported Wine in 1992.
The one that didn't get away. James is a talented fly-fisherman.
The supurb double-magnum 1865 Chateau Lafite, which was featured at the 2001 Single Bottle Club Dinner.
James Halliday's passion for wine is as strong as ever.