Q&A: James Halliday

"I've lived parallel lives since I was 25. For 40 years, I was both a lawyer and a wine person. But then I stopped being a lawyer, so now I have been a full-time wine person for 10 years. My father was a cardiologist and he always had wine in our house when I was young. It was in the late 1940s and I used to have to go down to the cellar and he would tell me what bottle of wine I should bring up for the evening meal. Then at university, between 1955 and 1961, we had a residential college, like Oxford and Cambridge, except it was in Sydney, and we had a wine club and a wine cellar. We were allowed to have wine on Sunday lunch and Monday night. It was also then that I made my first trips to the Hunter Valley to see the only two wineries you could visit. I started my first winery, Brokenwood, with two other lawyers, in the 70s, in the Hunter Valley. But, in 1983, I moved to Melbourne and, in 1985, started a winery that's now part of the Treasury [Wine Estates] called Coldstream Hills. Our house is on the property and the vineyards are immediately in front of the house."

"I do a number of things that I've developed over the years. One is I rinse my mouth with soda water after tasting every five or 10 wines. Soda water is slightly alkaline and wine is quite acid, so it neutralises the mouth. I'm constantly having to move from white to red to white again [so] the thing I do increasingly is taste 10 white wines and then taste 10 reds. Red wine has tannin and white wines don't. One of the problems of tasting a lot of reds is that tannin gets glued up in your mouth. And white wine can become very acidic, so you get acid build up. Another thing I do is to have green olives. I'll just have a very small bite when I'm tasting red wines - it's another thing that gets rid of the tannin, so you get balance back. With white wine, a very tiny amount of hard cheese like parmigiano helps combat acidity. I used to taste 160 to 180 wines a day, then I reduced it to 120 and now I've reduced it further to 100. You get older and it takes longer to do something. It takes me longer now to taste than it used to."

"Probably back in the late 60s, when Len Evans - the most famous Australian wine person, who died in 2006 - gave me a glass to taste. I couldn't believe how wonderful the wine was. It turned out to be a 1962 Domaine de la Romanee-Conti La Tache. It was one of my very greatest burgundy experiences."

"The two wines I drink more of than anything else are German riesling from the Mosel Valley and pinot noir from Burgundy [France]. I like Chinese food a lot and I always take riesling and pinot noir [to drink with it]. I love pinot noir; it's governed a lot of my life since the late 70s, when I really seriously discovered it."