I've finished planting my small test vineyard, up in the distant reaches of the Southern Highlands. I am now in the process of waiting for the wild pigs, wild dogs, wild goats and tame cows to somehow work their way into the paddock and destroy the lot.
While I wait, I've been busy learning about the history of this industry of which I now, with quiet dignity, consider myself a part.
Grange Hermitage - Australia's first great wine, and only real contribution to the world of international luxury brands. Credit: Matt Turner
Jocasta says that middle-aged men planting vineyards is always a mere cover for alcoholism, but this is not the case. Turns out, the Australian wine industry is basically a temperance movement in disguise. Reading John Beeston's Concise History of Australian Wine, I discover that nearly all the early vignerons believed they were doing God's work.
When James Busby published a "how to" manual for NSW winegrowers in 1830, his aim was "to promote the morality of the lower classes of the colony". Offer the masses a few frothing beakers of shiraz and they might stop chug-a-lugging the rum and the gin: that was the idea.
This idea continued through much of the century. Trying to break down Jocasta's cynicism, I recite a passage from 1860, quoted in Beeston's book. "A wine drinking population," it says, "is never a drunken population."
Jocasta looks up distractedly from her newspaper and says: "Have they ever met you?"
Undeterred, I tell her about the Rev Dr John Ignatius Bleasdale, who lent his name to the still-prominent Bleasdale winery in South Australia. He was offered some disgusting rum by a pack of drunks in the streets of Melbourne and "from that time" turned all his attention and resources to forwarding winegrowing as "the one efficient cure for spirit drinking and drunkenness".
"So let me get this straight," says Jocasta, "The aim was to flood the colony with so much alcohol that people would become sober."
"Um, yes."
"Going well, isn't it?" she says, turning back to her newspaper.
I'm surprised she has this attitude because her own family hails from the Victorian town of Rutherglen. Before the phylloxera pest arrived in 1899, destroying everything, the area's vines were famous throughout the empire. Again I read out a quote from Beeston: the Rutherglen wines were so thick and sweet they were said to slide down the throat "like the infant Jesus in velvet trousers."
"How about that?" I say, because I know Jocasta likes a good phrase, "Jesus. As an infant. In velvet trousers." But she just shakes her head.
It's at this point I realise the nature of our difficulty. I'd assumed Jocasta was cautious about my vineyard plans due to the expense: the rolls of wire, the bags of lime, and the cheap, failed, cultivating machine I bought from Bunnings only to be left with a bad case of that psychological state known as "Bunnings Regret".
But, no, there's something else going on. I decide it must be genetic: she has some chromosomal memory of the arrival of the phylloxera pest – the blighted vineyards; the destroyed fortunes; her vine-growing relatives wailing in the streets – and can now see only disaster whenever a vineyard is mentioned.
Beeston's book offers me one last chance to convince her of the nobility of the cause. I tell her the stirring story of Max Schubert, and how he formed a plan to make a different sort of Australian red, one that would last decades, a match for the great wines of France.
Working away into the night, keeping the experiment to himself, Schubert created Grange Hermitage, Australia's first great wine. He made three vintages before news of the experiment reached the company's board of directors.
He was ordered to desist – it was deemed a project "harmful to the company's reputation" – and focus on his to day-to-day work of making drinkable products that could be rapidly sold: for example, sherry. At the time, Penfolds was doing a particularly roaring trade with cheap sherry. It looked like Grange would be Max Schubert's unfinished symphony.
But here's the thing: Schubert decided to flout his bosses, making the next three vintages in secret. An Aussie larrikin? Well, sort of. He rebelliously made the wine, but used less expensive barrels as a passing nod to the board's authority.
In 1960, to quote Schubert himself, "the prejudices were overcome" and – "after a decade of discovery, faith, doubt, humiliation and triumph" – he was officially allowed to resume production. Now, at the company's headquarters in Adelaide, a glass display unit runs the length of a large room, featuring an unbroken line of what is Australia's only real contribution to the world of international luxury brands. America has Tiffany and Co; France has Louis Vuitton; and Australia has Grange Hermitage.
"What's your point?" says Jocasta, in what I now realise is a phylloxera-induced frenzy.
I reply with an imperious sniff. "All great innovators have to overcome the prejudices of those with limited vision."
As I walk off, Jocasta calls after me. "You know that lake of wine they produced to stop people drinking?"
"Yes."
"I think I need some. Can you open a bottle?"