Kidnapping AJ Holmes

We steal AJ Holmes away from the city for a day

feature (adelaide) | Read in About 2 minutes
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AJ Holmes
Published 17 Feb 2020
Destination: d’Arenberg Wines for a Blending Bench experience
Playlist
  • Highroad – Sir Woman

  • Can’t Hold Me – Emily King

  • Claudia Lewis – M83

  • Hardly Ever Rains – Theo Katzman

AJ Holmes is not a stranger to Australia, having performed in Melbourne and Sydney in The Book of Mormon over a number of years. This is Holmes’ first trip to Adelaide and in celebration, we travelled down to the d’Arenberg Cube for a Blending Bench experience.

The Cube itself is an architect’s dream and a builder’s nightmare. Inside, a fever dream of art and interactive display cases fills the warren-like ground floor in the Alternate Realities Museum. We lose quite a few minutes in the 360 degree viewing room watching hypnotic cats fade into grinning gnomes.

Then we are able to start the real fun – the Blending Bench experience. Situated on the top level of the Cube, we sit up to a scientific worksheet, three base wines and a glass of what we are attempting to replicate. As soon as we sit down, our host James recognises Holmes from The Book of Mormon in Melbourne. 

We start by understanding each base wine – tasting notes and perfume – before doing some quick maths to begin blending our ideal wine. Using glass pipettes and good old fashioned suction, we measure our three bases into our first blend. Not a bad start, but we agree we can improve.

By the time we get to our fourth and final blend, we have a good feeling about our prowess and convince James to have a taste. We do some more percentage conversions and translate our favourite blend into a bottle to take home. The final step is to name her. After a slight argument, we settle on “Sex Tape or Tinder Bio?”

We spend some time tasting from their selection of wines, before wandering through the Salvador Dali Exhibition featuring sculptures from the most famous surrealist.

Thank you to Heidi Setschnoy, James and the team at d'Arenberg for hosting us.