October 15

Source: Mail On Sunday - Night & Day Live Magazine

October 15, 2006

Mellower Maximus
By Martyn Palmer

Russell Crowe stars in an evocative homage to Provence - in this exclusive interview, he tells how a complex relationship with the grape has taken him from angry young man to discerning wine buff.

As Russell Crowe perused the wine list at London's fashionable Mirabelle restaurant, a rather special vintage caught his eye. He was dining with Danish actress Connie Nielsen, the co-star in his next movie, 2000's Gladiator, and the pair were celebrating the start of filming.

It was a £3,500 Penfold's Grange Hermitage from the year of my birth and the year Connie was born too,' he says. 'Connie loves a good glass of wine, so it was a toast to the success of the film. And don't forget one of Maximus' lines from Gladiator is, "Two weeks from now I shall be harvesting my grapes".'

The wine arrived with the usual ceremony and was left to breathe before Crowe sampled the first taste of this special, and very expensive, vintage. It wasn't what he expected. "It was definitely corked," he laughs. The sommelier kept trying to convince me that what I could taste was undertones of black currant and I said, 'You know, I've been drinking Penfolds for a long time and that's not the undertone I'm used to.'"

"I remember the moment well because that was the most expensive bottle of wine I'd ever bought. The cork itself was completely gone. It was OK on top but the rest of it was a slimy mess. The sommelier still wouldn't accept that it was corked, and those guys can be intimidating - they have immense knowledge and you have to stand your ground.

"Think about it. It's 1999, nobody knows me from a bar of soap and this guy is absolutely determined that I'm going to pay for that £3,500 bottle. In fairness, he did eventually replace it with another Penfold's from the early Seventies. And very nice it was too."

Crowe, 42, smiles at the memory. It's early evening and we're sitting on the porch of his rented house in Nyack, the charming, picturesque town in upstate New York that has been his temporary home for the past four months while working on new film projects.

He's sipping a glass of white wine - New Zealand Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc - and relaxing. He has spent most of his day playing with his two-year-old son, Charlie, in the garden. He confesses to feeling a little tired, but looks fit with his brown hair flopping around his eyes.

His wife, the actress and singer Danielle Spencer, is inside settling their new baby, Tennyson, who was born in July. The discussion has turned to fine wine because of Crowe's latest role in the charming comedy A Good Year, an adaptation of Peter Mayle's book, also directed by Scott. In it he plays Englishman Max Skinner, a City trader who is only interested in making money until he inherits his uncle's vineyard in Provence and is slowly seduced by the beauty of his surroundings, and learns that life, like a good bottle of wine, should be savoured.

For Crowe, the film was a labour of love. He spent three months in the Luberon region of Provence with his family, working with a director he admires and considers a close friend, and combining two of the great loves of his life: acting and wine.

"One of the fun things about wine is that it's volatile so it feels like it's alive. It's not an exact science and it's completely individual. I like finding out about wine, discovering something new. That's the exciting part of it - it's unpredictable and full of surprises."

Crowe learned about wine from his parents, his mother Jocelyn and father Alex, a publican who ran pubs and restaurants in New Zealand, where Crowe and his older brother Terry were born, and in Sydney where they spent much of their childhood. "I had that as part of my background and I was never afraid to order a bottle of wine. I knew what the person was doing when they poured a little bit in the glass. I never had to worry about that stuff, it was all part of the knowledge of growing up."

A Good Year is the complete opposite of Gladiator, which is part of the reason why Crowe reunited with Scott to make it. "Everybody expected us to do a film with buckets of blood but we weren't interested in that,' says Crowe."Gladiator is about death - Maximus' son and wife are murdered and he wants to join them in the afterlife. A Good Year is about re-discovering life. It's about reincarnation in a way. Max used to stay at the vineyard with his uncle Henry [Albert Finney] when he was a boy and it was the best time of his life. But he's grown into a man who has forgotten the life lessons that Henry taught him. He's too wound up in making money and can't see the beauty of life any more.

When Henry dies, Max's first thought is that he'll just sell the vineyard and make some more money, because that's what he does. But once he returns there he begins to realise what he's lost in his life. And his heart is reawakened.'

Crowe, too, has come to that very same conclusion that life should be relished, and that time with those you love should be treasured. After years of making epics such as Gladiator, Master and Commander and Cinderella Man, which have taken a huge physical toll on his body, his priorities have changed. The recent death of crocodile hunter Steve Irwin has also affected him deeply. "That was a terrible blow,"says Crowe. "I'd known Steve and his family for years and they are close friends. He was a lovely guy and I'm going to miss him terribly. When life shows itself in such a way it's very difficult to take anything else seriously other than the needs of your family and your friends. Obviously, I don't mean you lose empathy or care for what is going on in the wider world, because I do. I guess it's about perspective and realising what are the important things in life. Getting on a private plane and going around the other side of the world used to be a thrill but now it's just a pain because it takes me away from where I want to be."

Crowe first met Danielle in 1989 when she co-starred in his first film. The Crossing. He remembers their first date - and the wine they drank. "Wine is an essential part of romance," he says. "On that first date we went to an Italian restaurant called Darcy's in Sydney and had a bottle of Houghton Burgundy - a classic dry white. The thing is we knew each other as kids. We met in 1989 and we were workmates first, then friends and then, quite a long time later, lovers. I proposed to her in that same restaurant [in 2002] and that night we drank a lovely bottle of Sauvignon Blanc."

Danielle knows him better than anyone, he says. And her support is a huge comfort for a man who has often found himself in the headlines for the wrong reasons. There have been stories of rows at Bafta awards and the famous phone-throwing incident at the Mercer Hotel in New York last year.

It happened in the middle of the night after an exhausted and frustrated Crowe had repeatedly tried to call Danielle back in Sydney and failed to get through. He asked night clerk Nestor Estrada to keep trying for him, says that he refused, and became incensed when the receptionist put the phone down on him after saying, "yeah, yeah, whatever..." Crowe later pleaded guilty to reduced misdemeanour charges and was fined $160 (£85).

The incident, he feels, was blown out of all proportion in the media and he's saddened that for some, he now has an image of a hell-raiser. "[The world of celebrity] becomes this strange place to live in," he says. "But marriage and kids and stuff like that have just made me less concerned with it. Less concerned with being defensive about it because I know that whatever they print my wife knows the truth about it. And that's a very comforting place to be. It's wonderful to be in a situation where your wife says, 'Look, I know you. I've seen through all of that and I trust you enough to share my life with you.' In a strange way it emboldens you to be yourself. It's like, 'Well, if I'm good enough for her, I should be good enough for you as well.'"

Crowe is proud, undeniably talented and sometimes prone to displaying that temper if the wrong buttons are pushed. But he's also kind, ferociously bright and thoughtful. His passion for wine is typical of the man. He remembers his very first taste and where he was. "I must have been about nine or ten. We used to go to a Spanish restaurant called Costa Brava in Sydney for garlic prawns. Mum liked the rose that came in a fat bottle and she let me try a sip. Over the years, my dad would say. 'What do you think of this?' and let us have a taste to develop our palates."

For a large part of his late teens, when Crowe working as a DJ in Auckland (the family moved back to New Zealand when he was 14), he didn't drink at all. "I was so worried that I wouldn't be able to operate equipment and speak clearly into the microphone that I didn't drink for at least a couple of years," he says. "It wasn't until I moved to Sydney and I was acting on stage that I drank regularly."

He now has 3,000 bottles of wine in a cellar at his 1,300 acre farm near Coffs Harbour and more at a cave in Sydney. His collection is mostly Australian but features some French wines - including some grand vins such as Petrus and Montrachet. "Sorry to name-drop, but Nicole Kidman first introduced me to Petrus," he says. "And Sting and Trudy [Styler], who are also good friends, sent me a couple of bottles to celebrate a birthday. It's a great wine."

He also has some of Francis Ford Coppola's reds from his vineyard in the Napa Valley in California. "He actually offered me some cuttings from his vineyard, which was very nice of him," says Crowe. "But the conditions aren't right for grapes on my farm."

Despite his passion for wine, Crowe still has periods of total abstinence. The longest was 210 days when he was training for Cinderella Man. "If I'm in serious training it's the first thing that goes," he says. And what was his tipple when he finally had a drink? "A glass of white wine," he laughs. "Rapidly followed by a beer."

Beer may not offer the subtleties of a good glass of wine, but Crowe knows what he likes and dislikes. "I am fussy about beer. People assume that I will drink any old rubbish but that's just wrong. I'm not into those heavier ales and bitters. I like crisp, clean lagers."

His tastes have changed over the years. Whereas once he would go out with his friends to pubs and clubs, these days it's all about a good restaurant or entertaining friends at home. "I have this thing with my friends where you sit down and have dinner together and then you 'walk the hill,' which is what I call drinking a bottle of Hill Of Grace Shiraz together. Open it up and give yourself over to the night and it really is an experience. I would say 98 per cent of the people I've ever poured that wine for have proclaimed it the finest wine that has ever passed their lips."

Hill Of Grace, made by Henschke, has taken pride of place at many special occasions in the Crowe household. It was the wine that 100 guests drank at his wedding in April 2003 and he's laid some down for his son, Charlie, and intends to do the same for Tennyson, which they will receive on their 21st birthdays.

"Dani and I only got around to properly celebrating Charlie's birth during the last few weeks of filming A Good Year he says. "It was like, 'Let's have some people round,' and in a blink we had 34 guests with us in the Luberon. So Dani's parents were there, my parents and the guys I play with in the band [The Ordinary Fear of God]. In fact three babies were conceived during that time - including Tennyson. As soon as we got around to celebrating Charlie, Dani got pregnant again."

Indeed, making A Good Year was more than just another film for Crowe - it marked the start of a change of direction in life. 'I had a great time, he says. "We were staying in this gorgeous house [an llth century chapel in the grounds of Ridley Scott's vineyard] and I was working with a man I consider a close friend and one of the best directors on the planet. It was fantastic. And that's the kind of balance I want in my life. That and a nice bottle of red and I'm very happy, thanks mate."

Russell Crowe's favourite wine is Henschke Hill Of Grace, an Australian Shiraz. Expect to pay up to £159 for a new bottle and a lot more for one that has been laid down. "And you should lay it down for about seven years," says Crowe. He also likes Petrus, a Pomerol from the Bordeaux region - "It's a great wine" - but depending on the year, costs can run from hundreds to thousands of pounds per bottle. But not every wine Crowe drinks has to cost a fortune. "If you ask me, the best value wine you can get is a New Zealand Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc [around £25]," says Crowe. "And I'd pay significantly more for it if I had to."