Don't wine, just take the plunge

Mount Majura’s Frank van de Loo went to pretty extreme lengths last week to get his wine on camera, agreeing to skydive for the Wineram documentary-making team, which combines wine and adventure sports in its online documentary series.

He says the deal was done by his staff during vintage (Mount Majura pays a fee, and the slot is sponsored by Canberra Tourism) and he didn’t turn his mind to the details until just before the event – it was only then he realised he was the one supposed to be skydiving.

‘‘I was a bit anxious for a day or two while I thought about it,’’ he says, having never counted thrill sports among his passions. Did he regret saying yes? Well, for a moment after signing the disclaimer at the airport, and ‘‘certainly, while you’re sitting there in a plane and they open the door and say "stick your feet on the wheel strut and get ready to jump", there was a moment there.’’

But in the end it was challenging, exciting and beautiful, that high about the city, van de Loo, pictured with Curtis Morton, from Canberra Skydive, says. Would he do it again? Um, no.

Wineram’s owner American Colin West did the jump too, his first time skydiving, and says he felt ‘‘like a scared dog running from a growling bear ... putting my feet on the bar, still thinking nothing but there’s no way I’m doing it as its 100 per cent suicide’’.

The mood changed once he was in freefall, he says. ‘‘We were in the air – if it didn’t work we were dead anyway – so might as well love life.’’ It was an ice-breaker, van de Loo says, for the discussion back on terra firma about his wine.

Wineram appears to be a New Zealand-based documentary maker, that, aims, Van de Loo says, to present wine in a light-hearted way, not too complicated and threatening. To us, though, skydiving and the fighter-jet sessions the week before in the Hunter Valley sound a bit of both.