When a winemaker builds a giant Rubik’s cube in McLaren Vale, fills it with Salvador Dali sculptures and art, and creates wines that pair with songs and poems, you know you’re about to discover something extraordinary. Chester Osborn has constructed what shouldn’t work but absolutely does – a surrealist manifesto planted in the heart of South Australian wine country that would make André Breton proud and the Márek Brothers, those Czech surrealist pioneers who shocked Adelaide in 1948, absolutely delighted.

Our SA Drink of the Week flows directly from the architect of this impossible vision, as Chester pours his Vociferous Dipsomaniac 2010 – a wine that transforms before our very palate, revealing violet gardens and a scattering of spices whilst teaching us that great winemaking is really just the elegant management of faults. Like the Cube itself, this shiraz demonstrates that the most revolutionary act might simply be saying “yes, and” to the impossible.

The Musical Pilgrimage takes an unprecedented turn as we hear both Chester’s stream-of-consciousness theory connecting wine to quantum physics and time dilation, followed by Steve Davis’ original piece called “Folded Clocks” – a meditation on Salvador Dali’s persistence of memory, created in response to his visit to the Cube where he experienced its artistic revelations firsthand.

You can navigate episodes using chapter markers in your podcast app. Not a fan of one segment? You can click next to jump to the next chapter in the show. We’re here to serve!

The Adelaide Show Podcast: Awarded Silver for Best Interview Podcast in Australia at the 2021 Australian Podcast Awards and named as Finalist for Best News and Current Affairs Podcast in the 2018 Australian Podcast Awards.

And please consider becoming part of our podcast by joining our Inner Circle. It’s an email list. Join it and you might get an email on a Sunday or Monday seeking question ideas, guest ideas and requests for other bits of feedback about YOUR podcast, The Adelaide Show. Email us directly and we’ll add you to the list: [email protected]

If you enjoy the show, please leave us a 5-star review in iTunes or other podcast sites, or buy some great merch from our Red Bubble store – The Adelaide Show Shop. We’d greatly appreciate it.

And please talk about us and share our episodes on social media, it really helps build our community. Oh, and here’s our index of all episode in one concise
page.

Running Sheet: Surrealism In Wine And Life With Chester Osborn

00:00:00 Intro

Introduction

00:01:56 SA Drink Of The Week

The South Australian Drink Of The Week is d’Arenberg‘s 2010 The Vociferate Dipsomaniac, which Steve tastes with winemaker, Chester Osborn at the Duke Of Brunswick, which has a full suite of these intrepid wines.

The name alone suggests Chester Osborn’s approach to wine nomenclature – dreamt up, he cheerfully admits, during morning toilet contemplation whilst reading the dictionary for “really interesting words.” This particular shiraz demands vigorous pursuit because it’s so compelling you’ll vigorously drink it, potentially earning the archaic designation of “dipsomaniac” – an alcoholic, for those unfamiliar with the term’s English parlance.

What unfolds in the glass defies every expectation of a fifteen-year-old wine. Where vintage wines typically announce their age with that slightly pruny, sweaty character, this Vociferous Dipsomaniac reveals itself like a perfectly adjusted doona on a winter’s night – balanced, enveloping, with tannins that recline gently into your tongue like a tired person settling into an armchair. The secret lies in Chester’s philosophy of elegant fault management: picking at relatively low sugar levels to avoid shrivel, eschewing nitrogen fertilisation since the nineties, and using super-light toast French oak that lets the 34-to-56-million-year-old limestone terroir speak its chocolatey, bloody truth.

As the wine breathes – and Chester insists it breathes better in the bottle than in the glass, for complex reasons involving condensation and molecular romance – it evolves from subtle violet gardens to dark chocolate and beyond, revealing why this particular vineyard, nestled beside the d’Arenberg Cube, consistently produces the only wine in their 23 single-vineyard collection that always carries a whisper of violet. After our toast to Queen Adelaide and an hour of conversation, the wine has transformed into something resembling an IMAX cinema experience for the palate – bigger, bolder, more ornate, yet somehow more at home with itself.

00:21:21 Chester Osborn

Chester Osborn has achieved something that should be impossible: he’s built a giant Rubik’s cube in McLaren Vale that functions as both architectural marvel and alternate reality museum, creating a space where Salvador Dali’s melting clocks teach visitors about the fluidity of time while wine ages gracefully in barrels around the sprawling property. The d’Arenberg Cube stands as testament to the “yes, and” principle of improvisational theatre – that beautiful concept of taking an idea and running with it, which Chester has literally fermenting in his cube through careful design.

When Chester woke up in the early hours and abandoned plans for another “fake heritage” homestead in favour of “something iconic, something like the Opera House,” he wasn’t just changing architectural plans – he was embarking on a surrealist manifesto. The Cube doesn’t merely showcase wine; it’s an Alternate Realities Museum where eight parameters of weather transform into real-time sound as you approach, where hundreds of Chester’s sculptures tell stories connecting rocks, flowers and fruit to wine, and where 30-second surreal videos play on loop in a 360-degree room, each one representing a different wine in their collection.

The building itself challenges conventional wisdom at every turn. Engineers, architects and builders all declared various elements impossible, leading to the invention of new glass sealing systems, wind tunnel testing in Melbourne, and the development of facade techniques that won national glass awards. “There is nothing impossible,” Chester declares, channelling his mother’s wisdom that “out of every bit of bad that happens, twice as much good happens.” This philosophy permeates not just the Cube’s construction but his entire approach to winemaking, where managing faults becomes an art form and time dilation theories merge with tannin structure.

What makes the Cube truly revolutionary isn’t just its architectural audacity but how it functions as a catalyst for unexpected conversation. Chester describes watching visitors – including tourism professionals who know each other well – suddenly following tangents, becoming more open to possibility when surrounded by surrealist art. It’s as if Dali’s telephone with a lobster on top starts conversations about what we might be when we’re talking, whether we’re boiling away like lobsters, whether some people really do chew our ears off. The Cube becomes a space where lateral thinking flourishes, where Chester’s Asperger’s brain – storing wine knowledge in imagination rather than automation – finds kindred spirits among visitors ready to embrace the extraordinary in the seemingly ordinary.

Perhaps most remarkably, Chester pairs each of his 85 wines with a specific song and poem, creating a multimedia sensory experience that will be captured in his forthcoming book. For the Vociferous Dipsomaniac, he’s chosen The Doors’ “Riders on the Storm,” paired with his own poem connecting Morrison’s soft voice to wine’s penetrating vigour. It’s this integration of art, music, literature and wine that transforms the Cube from novelty to necessity – a place where South Australians discover that their square metre of earth punches well above its weight, where time becomes malleable as Dali’s clocks, and where saying yes to the impossible becomes the most natural thing in the world.

01:03:20 Musical Pilgrimage

In the Musical Pilgrimage, we listen to Folded Clocks by Steve Davis and his Virtualosos.

The Musical Pilgrimage takes an unprecedented turn with a dual revelation of consciousness and creativity. First, Chester shares his stream-of-consciousness theory recorded whilst driving – a spontaneous exploration of how energetic wines might age slower through quantum mechanics, where tannin tension creates light-speed vibrations that literally slow the aging process. His “Energetic Wines Explained Theory” suggests that great wines contain atoms vibrating near the speed of light, creating time dilation effects that preserve the wine’s essence – a notion that would make Salvador Dali proud with its beautiful impossibility.

Following this quantum leap of imagination, we hear “Folded Clocks” – Steve’s original meditation on time, memory and surrealism created in response to experiencing Dali’s sculptures within the Cube. Using virtual tools to bring his words to musical life, the piece captures that transfixing quality of standing before art that refuses to be easily categorised, where melting timepieces suggest that our rigid relationship with chronology might be the real illusion.

Support the show: https://theadelaideshow.com.au/listen-or-download-the-podcast/adelaide-in-crowd/

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.