by Martin Field
So whaddaya reckon vego wine writers do on their weekends off? In my case they round up cattle. Yeah. Sounds incongruous, whatever you want to label it – but it happens.

We’ve got friends who run a cattle property where they make a little wine on the side. They occasionally invite us up to the farm (1500 acres – a herd of three or four hundred Black Angus beasts at any one time) for the weekend. But it ain’t a lolling round the open fireplace, drinking Scotch, country house in tweeds weekend. It’s a full-on, get yer hands dirty, sweaty old Akubras, hideously dirty jeans, up to the tops of yer elastic-sided Blundstones in sheeit and don’t turn yer back on the shaggin’ bulls weekend.

Socialising cows
The boss cocky had a plan. Nine visiting, well-hung, stud bulls had been bed and breakfasting and socialising with around three hundred cows and calves, in three non-contiguous paddocks. Now it was time to move the three different mobs of cattle to the cattle yards to inoculate the calves against seven different kinds of deadly bovine ague.

This exercise involved a quiet enough ramble along a few kilometres of back roads. The country air perfumed with the smell of gumtrees and cow crap that combined into a not unlikeable fragrance. The walk is accompanied by the lowing (and highing) of the cows and the ear-splitting shrieks of hundreds of amused, sulphur-crested cockatoos who have turned out to watch the passing parade. And as you amble along, shouting such endearments as ‘Move yer stupid *%*#& arse!’ you hope that the local boy racers don’t come hoon-mobiling over the next rise in Top Gear fashion, en route to hamburger heaven.

You persuade each mob to enter the yards and then try to separate the calves from their mothers and the rather promiscuous, polygamous bulls from their lovers – none of them, it seems, wanting to say farewell. There’s much yelling and effing and blinding and not a little dangerous excitement before the calves are channelled, wild-eyed and reluctant, into the race.

Self-inoculation
This is where our Farmer Giles administers the aforesaid, multi-functional inoculation from a backpack, via a mean-looking hypodermic into the hide above each calf’s neck. The calves have other priorities. They’re practising for the next calf Olympics. Apparently their events will include reverse parking, leap-frogging, piggy-backing, playing dead, and self-throttling through the steel bars on a cattle race. Consequently Farmer ‘this won’t hurt a bit!’ Giles not infrequently shoots the vaccine (ironic that) into his thumb. As a result it can be safely said that he won’t ever suffer from certain unspeakable cattle diseases in his allotted life span.

Raging Bulls
Eventually, the on-loan, not quite shagged out bulls have to be moved into separate pens to be picked up and returned to their home the next day. This is when the fun begins. Picture it, there are three yappin’ dogs whose aspirations in the cattle herding arena far outweigh their capabilities. Us two city folk are driving an old Subaru 4×4 ute; gentleman Farmer Giles is in a big Toyota ute leaving his partner quite unprotected riding a none too stable, all-terrain vehicle. All of us are in a large paddock where we’ve cornered nine huge, lascivious, red-eyed, rampaging, rootin’, tootin’, fightin’, we’d rather be shaggin’, dustin’ and pawin’ the ground, angry bulls.

All we had to do was push them through rather narrow gates then separate them into individual pens.

They had other ideas…

Much later, congratulating ourselves on our survival as wranglers, we eat a huge dinner accompanied by a few bottles of fine red and then loll around in front of the open fire sipping a few shots of Laphroaig as a night cap.

Then Farmer Giles suddenly remembers that there’s another mob that has to be done early the next morning.