Field Trip with Curtis Stone

This is the Centennial Cellar

in the heart of the Barossa Valley.

And welcome everybody.

Thank you all for coming.

It'll all be perfect if there was wine in the glass.

Oh, that's right. So what would you like?

This is shiraz, a hundred percent shiraz.

It has a lot of aromatics,

all the soil, all the algae characters.

Creme brulee topping, ground spices.

So bright, so tart, really dry, really,

like, laser sharp.

So it gets a little lost on Chris and I.

I didn't get the seaweed or the sand,

all the tandems.

Espresso coffee, cardamom, ginger.

It's almost a mole kind of, uh...

- Yes, yes. - ...um...

You can really smell that bit of apricot,

a bit of bacon fat, and a little bit

of blackcurrant funnily enough.

A dusty Chesterfield couch in the library

of a big old home.

And the older it gets, it seems to just not age.

And so it's the arrogance that it has.

And then you just move into a world of...

Oh, wow.

Wow.

- That is so good. - That is so good.

That is a wonderful wine.

Oh, yeah, like, we could go test

the hundred year old if you'd like out the barrel.

- Wow. - If you wanna do a comparison.

- Oh, sure. - Yeah.

- Can we? - Yeah.

- Of course we can. - Let's go.

We can do what we like.

Cuisine comes from a culture,

its characters, the attitudes, it's the soul of a place.

As I look to reinvent the menu for my flagship restaurant,

Maude in Beverly Hills,

I'm going on a journey that'll take me

and some of the team around the world,

to experience the food, wine,

and history in some of the world's

most fascinating regions.

The goal, to taste the most unusual ingredients,

to meet the most unique people and to become inspired

as each adventure serves as the basis

for a distinct menu of my restaurant.

Buckle up.

We're in for one hell of a ride.

Okay. Let's go.

That's our little weather station down there,

measuring eight parameters of weather

and interpret it into sound.

So that's what people talk about when they say

you play music to your vines?

Yeah.

So as the sound comes in, it changes,

the wind gusts changes.

So just algorithms.

But wine are made from these vines,

the first year that we played the sound to them

was the best wine I've ever made

from these vines and, uh, this vineyard

was built in 1880s.

So, there's probably something about that.

So what do we do?

You have to move from side to side

and the closer you get,

you'll see something really weird happen.

And you're really close and then oh,

there, it hits you.

Oh, wow.

So this is reverse perspective art.

As you walked in, you saw that suddenly

there's a point where the back

becomes the front, it swaps.

And you get a little bit dizzy at that point.

So not only did you look drunk when you walked in,

yet you felt drunk as well.

This is Chester Osborn.

He's a fourth generation wine maker here in McLaren Vale.

And this giant black and white cube,

yup, it was his idea.

I'm here with some of my team from back in Los Angeles.

Andrey is the wine guy at Maude and Chris he's a great chef.

When Andrey heard we were headed to South Australia,

he more or less demanded that we stop here, D'Arenberg.

We're really known for one style

that ages really well.

With old vintages, of the Dead Arm,

particularly this one here.

And we should have a try, shouldn't we?

That's a good idea.

- That's the Dead Arm? That's the Dead Arm.

This is shiraz. A hundred percent shiraz.

- That's right. Uh-huh.

It was named after a fungus in the vineyard that,

uh, that, uh, kills off half the vines.

So only half the vine is alive.

It's crazy. You're talking about a disease,

like normally you'd think that you'd hide

from something like that and you've gone ahead and named,

uh, your wine after it. And then, um...

It's a bit crazy, isn't it?

It's a little bit like all of our names.

You know, they're all... uh, yeah, this one,

The Old Bloke & Three Young Blondes.

I know.

I got in a bit of trouble for that.

What is that?

So this is old vine shiraz with, uh,

three young white grapes and so it's Old Bloke

& Three Young Blondes, you know,

it's nothing pornographic or anything.

Chester loves to have fun

with the business of making wine,

but don't be fooled.

The wine that comes out of here

is absolutely world class.

From farming to bottling, they rely a lot

on old-fashioned wine making methods.

Some of the coolest things I heard

is how you use the old-school basket press

and not anything that's more high tech.

We've very old-fashioned in everything that we do,

in, like, the vineyards, there's no cultivation,

there's no herbicides, they're organic,

they're biodynamic.

Foot trod once through the ferment,

all of them, and then basket press,

little tiny basket presses we have.

No racking, no filtering, and no fining,

so we're really lazy really.

Very, very, very lazy.

You talk about being a traditional winemaker

and how traditional the whole process is.

But I'm looking at you right now, Chester,

and traditional isn't the word that jumps out at me.

And you built this thing.

You know, uh, you can argue that I'm traditional,

this is what I was wearing in the '60s, so...

So, I haven't changed.

But the D'Arenberg Cube, yeah, that came about

because I really wanted something that people

could really learn about wine, and really understand wine,

and really understand D'Arenberg and the way we make it.

So every art piece,

every sculpture in here tells a whole story

of D'Arenberg and its wine.

This cow represents a bit of culture,

hanging a polygram.

This here represents the weighing of the risks

of making $200 wine versus potential debt.

This is artificial intelligence

and the computer just painted this for us.

This is a peep show in here of, uh, six people

having a very good session.

This could be a little bit disconcerting.

This is a, um, Silurians come out, you know,

from the center of the Earth.

And that... there...and dad says

that the real thing in life for him is fishing and, uh,

wine making actually takes up far too much time.

Stop here for wine tasting,

then be prepared to step into a multi-century

modern art wine education - you got to give yourself

over to the Chester experience.

The stairwell here, you can reflect on what,

uh, wines you've been drinking,

so you maybe had red wines from these bowls or white wines.

And just so I'm clear, this is the -

Yes, this is the -

The first of everything.

This checks out weird.

It's shearing season at the Hutton Vale Farm

in the Barossa Valley.

What do you reckon about these fellas, Benny?

Experience might've got us -

- Do you reckon? - With dogs on the lap.

Not doing too badly for city fellas.

As long as they don't run over the dog.

Yeah.

Go in. Go in.

There's an old saying about how Australia used

to make its living off the sheep's back.

And it still does to a certain extent.

Although, lately, it might be less

about the wool and a bit more what's under the fleece.

They got away, mate.

Go back.

I think the dog did more good than us.