A Winning Wine
What would you name your greyhound if you were in the wine industry? After a wine you produced might be a good choice. A greyhound with the name of Arneis, a bit of a rare white wine variety in Australia, was successful at Gawler on Tuesday.
Running in the Adelaide Plains Veterinary Services Stake, Arneis out of box 3 was best away from Eddy Monsoon (8). Both greyhounds are not usually out that well and they took advantage of the opportunity to scoot away. Eddy Monsoon crossed to the rails to sit behind Arneis as they went through the catching pen the first time.
Tex Walker (5) got going to run into second position down the back straight, but still over a length behind the leader. As they turned into the home straight, Arneis was not challenged further, with Long Gully Flip (2) running on into the placings. Arneis ran a handy 31.27 secs to win by 5 lengths over Long Gully Flip trained by Paula Hearnden of Angaston. Eddy Monsoon ran a consistent race throughout to finish third for Jan Jones of Eden Valley.
Arneis is trained by Mick Giniotis at Two Wells for John Retsas. John is the winemaker for First Drop Wines and Arneis is his first his first venture into greyhounds. Mick had bred the litter which contained “Rosie” for trainer friend Richard Stasiak, but moved some over to trainer Chris Cotton when they were pups. Chris, who was the original trainer of Arneis, has since retired from the industry and moved to the country, so it was back to Mick.
Mick said the litter had been bred to produce strong 700m types. This was the first time Rosie had drawn near the fence, and had been able to get to the front and keep going. He said that a run at the straight track coursing at Virginia had sharpened her up and got her to be competitive. That had also seemed to have done the trick for Red Hot Cherry, another of Mick’s runners that had won earlier in the day.
Mick says Rosie is “sweet as” and a beautiful greyhound to train. He was pleased with the win for John, whom he said wants to get more greyhounds. There are plenty of greyhounds running around with “shiraz” in their name, but there are plenty of other varieties that would make for a good name.
With the Gawler show coming up at the end of the month, racing is restricted at Gawler, but we will be racing on Friday afternoon 23rd August and a Sunday twilight on the 25th. Racing will then resume again into it’s normal schedule on Friday 6th September.