The Wine Bluffs

Damian Callinan and Paul Calleja are the newest big wigs in the wine world, or so they say. Their wine master class will take the audience through the cellar door experience, but with a comedic twist.

Milk Bar Mag spoke to Calleja about what makes these Wine Bluffs tick.

Could you tell me a bit about Wine Bluffs – what’s the concept?

My friend Damian and I play faux wine experts. We brag about our bona fides and pump ourselves up, we have jackets and badges to make us look legitimate. It’s a really interactive and fun show, we get the audience involved. We take them through the tasting process, teach them about the right ways to hold a glass and how to swirl the wine.

I do a bit where I get the audience to suggest a wine and I’ll match food to it. Often people like to test us wine buffs out and see how much we really know. I’ll start throwing out silly ideas like fairy bread or Chiko rolls, and it takes everyone off guard and lightens the mood. It’s all a bit silly and we take the piss out of ourselves.

We have a competition to find the biggest Wine Wanker in the room, which gets pretty crazy. People love it, it’s a chance to get up and talk about what they own. We get everyone to stand up and then we ask questions and people sit down as it goes along. It gets pretty crazy, people yell across the room. One night two guys refused to sit down, they were both yelling out what’s the oldest or most expensive wine they own. They had a wine off basically, until one of them got tired of it. Another night a guy told us he’d bought a disused train tunnel in the side of a mountain and converted it into a wine cellar.

What inspired you to create the show?

Three years ago I was going to the Yarra Valley a lot, when my interest in wine was peaking. Maddens Rise winery were having a grape festival in the wool shed, and they asked us to do a performance. Damian and I wrote The Wine Bluffs over a bottle of shiraz and pizza. Lucky he recorded the whole conversation so we could remember it the next day. We assumed it to be a one-off show, but ended up doing another one at a restaurant at Red Hill.  We then did the Melbourne Fringe Festival two years ago and kept going. Adelaide Fringe in 2016 was crazy.

This year we went to Western Australia and performed in Perth, Bunbury and Margaret River. We’ve been visiting all the major wine regions. The joy of this show is it takes us around the country, travelling to all these beautiful areas.

How do you and Damian work together? What’s the creative process like?

We met doing stand up years ago, and we’ve worked on a few TV shows together. When writing for The Wine Bluffs, we both suggest ideas and they don’t go in the show unless we both like it. It’s a collaborative process.

The first five or ten minutes of the show are about the local area where we’re performing, so it changes every time. We don’t have a fixed script. When we were in the wheatbelt town of Merredin in WA [Western Australia], we drove around for an hour before the show and wrote it in ten minutes. The clock on the town clock tower was stuck on 9:35, so we kept making jokes about having plenty of time left because it’s only 9:35. The library we drove past was empty and had a turned over chair, so we quipped that the audience must be very well read or at least everyone in the town has a lot of late fines.

When we fly interstate, we sit next to each other on the plane and write for the event or place. It’s such a fun show to write and perform. We have a great time bouncing ideas off each other and the audience.

The Wine Bluffs
Malthouse Theatre, 113 Sturt Street, Southbank
Tuesday, 11 to Saturday, 22 April
malthousetheatre.com.au/whats-on/the-wine-bluffs