Having walked for what seemed miles after the quake, my mate and I settled into one of my favorite Tokyo bars, Buchi, in Shibuya. Glasses of sherry were chased by beer, putting us at ease. Phones were down for hours but finally, somebody’s phone rang and everyone cheered as if we had all won the lottery. I suppose in a way, we had. We were linked again to the outside world, although in that moment the bar at Buchi was imbued with a warm glow from alcohol, conversation with complete strangers and pulsing and teeming emotion, incendiary in the best sense.

I received a text from my mate and wine importer, Carl. He lives close to Shibuya and came to pick me up on his Vespa. Jettisoned from the suffocating hub of Shibuya in a daze – part drunk yet buzzing with adrenaline – I soon found myself in his living room surrounded by wine. Carl bought some crap cheese from a convenience store and we threw some pasta together. There had already been a run on food.

Bottle followed bottle as the news rattled from the television. The wine of the night was Thomas Hunter Valley ‘Braemore’ Semillon ’10, the sort of wine I had been pining for since my humiliating evacuation from a restaurant toilet when the second quake began.

The Semillon was bright, evanescent; with a hint of citrus and lanolin if one has to prescribe fruit flavors to a wine like this; but what was best was the sheer drinkability, the transparency of ‘place’ and its humming deliciousness manifest in both the Hunter and its traditional age-worthy styles and also, the streamlined layered finesse of so much of the ‘New Australia’.

I am off to Australia today. I am evacuating the family, so to speak, today. More on Australia’s riveting contemporary expressions once – if – we get there.