“At one stage in the ’70s, every third bottle of wine sold in Australia was Ben Ean Moselle,” writes nostalgic wine columnist RICHARD CALVER. 

It was a few days before a mate’s birthday and we decided to get together with another friend for drinks.

The temperature outside was just over 40C, so we decided to meet at Eastlake Football Club, in Kingston, where the air-conditioning would soothe and the beer would be cold.

After a beer each, we decided to have a glass of riesling with a snack. I went to the bar to inquire what wines of this variety they had. There was only one on the list. It was not a Canberra District wine. It was a Leo Buring, vintage undisclosed, and when I asked I was told it was a 2024. 

I asked for a taste before I ordered and the barman kindly complied. It was pretty innocuous, no hint of citrus but with an okay balance of fruit and acid, light bodied for a hot day, extremely pale in colour.

It is a picnic wine that you’d expect to pay around $20 for so the club mark up to $33.30 for members seemed acceptable.

But also I was intrigued that this wine was still marketed under the Leo Buring name, as it had been years since I tried this brand, now owned by Treasury Estate, a brand redolent of my youth.

Back at the table, there was an almost palpable return to the memories of coming into manhood with a Leo Buring: one of our number said that he consumed many bottles of the Lindeman’s Ben Ean Moselle in his youth, a brand that had absorbed Leo Buring and had merged in focus. 

“Ah, yes,” I said. “In fact, in my novel Blinded, during a love scene, the hero reaches under his bed for a bottle of Ben Ean, where he keeps the wine stored. That is one of the few places in the book where the hero’s habits emulated mine! 

“Ben Ean was a wine that was incredibly popular in the 1970s, with the Little River Band featuring in the advertising for this slightly sweet wine that was, at one stage, the wine of choice for a heck of a lot of Australians.” 

There were sage nods as these three balding men remembered the times of long hair and much wilder behaviour than we’d even admit to today.

At that moment, we didn’t feel old, we felt retro. Later, we discussed via an email exchange that Lindemans acquired the Leo Buring brand in 1962, which was shortly after the death of Leo Buring, an icon of Australian winemaking, the year before.

Later, looking up the history of Ben Ean Moselle (the sweetness giving a nod to the sweet riesling wines of the Mosel Valley in Germany) one website tells me that at one stage in the ’70s every third bottle of wine sold in Australia was Ben Ean Moselle.

I recall drinking it regularly with fish and chips, the crispness of the batter and the slightly oily taste in the mouth cut back by gulps of this sweetish wine that also sparked a popularity in drinking wine for younger Aussie women.

This trend had started in the 1960s following the marketing of some memorable sparkling table wines, including Orlando Barossa Pearl and Leo Buring’s own Rhinegold. I served these wines to enthusiastic New Zealand patrons at a number of venues in Auckland where I worked as a waiter in the early ’70s. 

We raised a glass of the Leo Buring 2024 in celebration of making it to our seventies and still having enough brain cells to remember (well, almost) the ’70s. We tasted nostalgia in every sip. 

“Why is nostalgia like grammar? We find the present tense and the past perfect.” –Anon