The sight of Tim Kirk plaintively calling after a receding car of filmmakers ''But I'm winemaker of the year'' is one you won't see often from a winemaker more used to being venerated than mocked. But when Chris Taylor from The Chaser team is involved, you take it as it comes.
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Kirk isn't the only one on the sharp end of this good-natured mockumentary, to be launched at 7am on Monday.
Nick Spencer at Eden Road is unceremoniously spat on as Taylor tries to master the niceties of cellar-door swirling and spitting. Ken Helm loses a load of red wine through the bungling of a member of the film crew. And Four Winds winemaker Jaime Crowe is filmed as one of a busload of women at a hen's party in this lighthearted takeoff of the mores of the wine world.
Taylor fronts the online-only five-part series called Plonk, which kicks off with an episode on the Murrumbateman area, where the film crew is ostensibly in search of a female winemaker.
The mockumentary is the project of Nathan Earl, who has worked on television comedies such as The Chaser and Gruen Planet. He said he had been thinking since film school about ways to make a wine show with a difference, given his own background among wineries in the Hunter Valley - his father, mother and brother all work in cellar door operations. Eventually he settled on the format of making a wine show about making a wine show, and it became possible through funding from Destination NSW.
It was surprisingly easy, he insisted, to persuade winemakers to join the game. ''They all said yes straight away, I don't know why.'' But it probably has much to do with trusting in the promise that ''the joke is always on our sheer inability to produce a basic lifestyle program''.
Ken Helm didn't hesitate when the team came calling. ''I take people at face value, why not?'' he said. ''I thought [it would be] fantastic for the Canberra area. They asked me could they do something outrageous, and we said, yeah, why not? So we wandered around the winery trying to think of something outrageous.''
Plonk aims to be a wine show for an audience under 50, and to reflect the winemaking world which, Earl said, was full of down-to-earth, funny people.
Why kick off in Canberra? Because, Earl said, it was still underappreciated and a little bit unexpected. The Plonk crew also visited the Hunter Valley, Mudgee and Orange, with an episode released each day this week.
- Watch the episodes here.
