Passing Clouds: A Winemaker's Journey

Electrician Graeme Leith joined Melbourne's theater collective at Carton's famously innovative Pram Factory Theatre and said "let there be light." And there was; Graham Blundell, Jack Hibberd, Max Gillies, and many others produced over 140 new Australian plays in 10 years. The electrician, a jack of all trades, caught the acting bug and performed successfully at the nearby La Mama Theatre. But past exotic adventures in Europe had added the deadly wine bug to his afflictions and he started the fashionable vineyard, Passing Clouds, producing high quality wines almost from the beginning. From growing up in Melbourne suburbs in the 1950s, to episodes as diverse as kangaroo shooting in the Australian outback, a stint in the UK's atomic weapons industry, and falling in love in Holland, he always had thoughts of winemaking. Graeme muses on the origins of his winemaking journey—from unwelcome childhood speculations about altar wine to the young man's first taste of "ethereal" wine in Italy 15 years later. He tells of the hard work, enormous skill, as well as luck and sheer determination required to establish a vineyard and become a very successful winemaker. Graeme's upwards trek was scarred by the murder of his beautiful and talented daughter, Ondine, and her boyfriend, David. Having vanished for over a week en route to Sydney, the police search by air and ground finally ceased when their bodies were found 10 days later in their ute which had been abandoned in Kings Cross by the killers. The few hundred dollars the kids had in their wallets, further fuelled their drug addled murderers, an Australian Defence Force couple, who were soon arrested while nonchalantly sunbaking at Bondi with their 3 year old daughter. Passing Clouds tells of a life fully lived—a life embracing the experience of fatherhood, of triumph and disaster, of joy and tragedy, of ingenuity and sheer hard physical work. It is heartfelt and heartbreaking, humorous and hilarious written, with an unquenchable optimism in the face of all the vagaries of nature faced by farmers everywhere.