“I’m multi-faceted”
,
Samantha O’Keefe jokingly responded when I
wrote to her, with some trepidation as to what
to say, asking for an interview. So much has
already been said in the press – of herself, of
Lismore, of the story which brought her here,
and left her here with her two sons on the most
beautiful farm, to make wine. I hadn’t been
sure I could add to it meaningfully. Yet I felt
compelled that I should.
What drew me back was a memory of a first
visit to the farm, more than a year ago.
Driving up the bumpy trail with a friend to
her home, I was horrified at our wheels
crushing hundreds of what I took to be
crickets, jumping in the road. Later I
saw they were frogs – tiny black ones,
in their thousands. What brought me
back now, so much later, was as
much a sense of these frogs as of the
burned but unmoved mountains, of a
white dress in a box seen through
a basement window as a sentence
remembered: “love is supposed to be
simple”. But mostly of a wine I’d had,
and the person who made it.