John Lewis: An accidental wine critic

Those words aren't mine. They were written, in fact, by John Lewis in the now defunct Newcastle Sun newspaper on September 29, 1976.

They're significant because they were the very first words Lewis wrote in his new Trencherman column which was dedicated to wine and food in Newcastle and the Hunter.

Fast forward to today: we're coming up on 40 years later and that weekly column is still going strong.

Oh, it has morphed all right. Time and newspapers wait for no man. It's no longer called Trencherman, and these days it appears in the Sun's sister paper, the Newcastle Herald, and it is dedicated purely to wine. But it is the same column, written by the same man with the very same passion for wine.

And without putting too fine a point on it, it is the longest-running weekly wine column in Australia, and probably the western world.

What the heck, let's be bold. It is the longest running wine column in the world, full stop.

And with wine writers a bit like the black rhino - not exactly extinct, but seriously endangered - it is a record that won't be surpassed.

Ironically, the John Lewis love affair with wine began with the mother of all hangovers. Creme de menthe - the green, mint-flavoured liqueur that turned from temptress to torturer in the space of a sleep.

At the time he was a rough-and-tumble breakaway for the local rugby club in Armidale where he was doing his newspaper cadetship.

As with all young men and rugby clubs, the day's action didn't end with the full-time whistle.

"No we used to have a great old time," Lewis, 82, recalled this week. "I was never much of a beer drinker, it used to give me migraines.

"So one day I saw this intriguing green bottle behind the bar - creme de menthe - and thought I'd give that a go. But I was a total wreck the next day, so I ruled that out.

"In my search for a drink I spotted another bottle - it was labelled Woodley's and they did a white wine and a rose. I tried the white and enjoyed it - and more importantly I didn't get a migraine or a hangover. That's where it all started. I couldn't even be sure what the variety was."

He has come a long way. Today he conservatively estimates he gets 3½ dozen bottles of wine samples a week to his comfortable two-storey house at The Junction, a suburb central to everything but where parking spots are harder to get than Springsteen tickets.

He estimates all up he would get about 2500 bottles a year to taste - ranging from the cheap and friendly to some of Australia's finest - and from that that he mentions about 500 wines a year in his two Herald columns, on a Wednesday and a Saturday.

But it would be unfair to talk about John Lewis the wine man without looking at John Lewis the journalist. His career was glittering - an editor-in-chief role on the Newcastle Herald, deputy editor on the Newcastle Sun, a Gold Walkley Award winner, a trip inside the Oval Office at the White House ... a lifetime of good friends and stories.

"I always wanted to be a journalist," he said. "You know, I could imagine myself in the trilby hat, wearing the newspaperman's trenchcoat and yelling out 'stop the press'."

As a young buck he applied for cadetships all over the place - The Herald, Maitland Mercury, Newcastle Sun, the ABC - all unsuccessfully, or as he puts it: "none could see the outstanding journalistic potential right before them." He breaks into a laugh.

But the cadetship finally came at the Armidale Express, and was followed by a stint at the Wagga Advertiser - "a marvellous time, playing rugby, working on the paper, bachelor and spinster balls . . . I met my wife Ruth in Wagga, and we're still together 57 years later" - then back to Newcastle where he worked his way up.

It was there that he started his Trencherman column - but I'll come back to that - and transferred across to the flagship Newcastle Herald in 1979 where he worked his way up from business writer to editor-in-chief.

Like all lifelong journos, he has stories aplenty.

Like the time in 1982 when he butted heads with the editor of the Herald over whether to put the looming Falklands War between England and Argentina on the front page.

"The editor thought it was sabre rattling and that the story didn't deserve the front page. But I argued for it as the main story."

It took him until late in the night before the editor finally agreed - "probably to shut me up" - but the splash heading the next day was that war was imminent.

History shows he was spot on.

It's not bravado or ego. It's an old-school newspaperman taking pride in his work all these years later, and it still brings a smile to his face.

And after the year he's had, he deserves no less.

In March his eldest son Guy, a nuclear physician and father of three, died from pancreatic cancer at the age of 51.

It's a pain that is still raw.

"It knocked us about a bit," Lewis says. "He had been diagnosed two years earlier. He was a good man, a good father . . . he loved his wine too. Had a wonderful palate."

His other son, Tim, is a chemical engineer, married with two kids, so there's a regular flow of grandkids through the house.

The Gold Walkley came in 1981 for a series of reports he did on the takeover battle for NBN Television. "It was like an episode of Dynasty, with all these larger-than-life characters."

Lewis was not only the first Newcastle journalist to win the coveted award - Joanne McCarthy has done it since in 2013 - but the first regional journalist to do it.

But let's get back to Trencherman.

While the column was Lewis' idea, he is in many ways an accidental wine writer. He never wanted to write it.

He had sold the idea of the column to the editor of the The Sun, saying the city needed it and that it would bring in some much needed advertising dollars. To an editor, the words "advertising dollars" are a bit like a gold ring to Gollum - of course he wanted it.

The only problem was finding someone to write it.

"We eventually had this fellow teed up who was keen to do it, knew his wine and said it was a great idea, so we started to promote it heavily in the paper ... you know, 'don't miss our super new wine and food column' sort of thing," Lewis says.

"But a couple of days before it was due to go to print I still hadn't seen the words despite chasing him up a couple of times.

"When it eventually came, it was rubbish. No good at all. I rang him back and gave him a few ideas and told him to get it back to me as soon as possible because time was a factor.

"Anyway, next day he rang up and apologised, saying he just didn't know where to start, that he couldn't do it.

"By this stage we'd been promoting it for weeks, so I agreed to write the first column and then get a replacement columnist the next week. I rang around all the next week but just couldn't find anybody to write it.

"So I did a second column and somehow I sort of inherited it.

"A short time after that I transferred to the Herald and they wanted me to continue the column, but to write only about wine rather than the food, and they dropped the Trencherman name.

"And I'm still doing it today."

The truth is, the Hunter wine fraternity in particular embraced the column, keen to get the message out about Hunter Valley wine, particularly their stunning semillon and shiraz wines.

Soon he was friends with the Hunter winemaking dynasty - people like Phil Ryan, the McGuigans and Tyrrells - they're now old mates from way back. Writing the column quickly changed from a fill-in role to something that he deeply enjoyed - and still does.

So what does the future hold for an 82-year-old wine writer?

"I'm keen to bring up 40 years, I would see that as an achievement," he says. "After that ... well, at my age you don't make any long-term plans, trust me."