BUSHFIRES, GUNS AND COMMUNICATIONS

All these bushfire images were taken after the 2013 blaze at Currency Creek, in the Murray River estuary on the Southern Fleurieu Peninsula ... photo Philip White

 

Where there's smoke there's fire

Winemakers and the gun lobby

A week of heat and destruction

by PHILIP WHITE

What a sick old week for wine industry, er, communications, and I don't even refer to the savage Dry vs Wet Wars, whose main engagement lines are in King's Cross, Sydney.

So far, the wine business has managed to stay out of dispatches from that unwinnable horror.

Let's go inland, to the big irrigators of the Murray Basin.  In the midst of all this aggravated talk of alcohol and violence, the last thing any winemaker needed was a link to firearms.  Like, what has wine to do with shooting in New South Wales National Parks?  

There are calls to boycott the products of those international champions of the Critter Label, Casella Wines. They make Yellowtail Wines at Griffith.  Since news broke of them being the major sponsors of the Sporting Shooters Association (SSA), the drivers of parks hunting, things have gone all fizzy.

I'll admit to a previous life of hunting goats in the Flinders Ranges, and wild pigs out on the flats. Destructive vermin.  When I was a kid, we'd shoot rabbits for the pot.  Underground mutton.  After dormant decades in the trigger finger division, I shot a clay pigeon last year, and I boast like a hunter - one shot: one hit. Not bad fun for some, having the odd clean shot.

Other than intense rivalry, this has not much to do with Griffith or Casella, but Wolf Blass has always been an enthusiastic pistol shooter ... and since the start he's had a Bundesadler critter on his label

Sydney Morning Herald state politics editor, Kirsty Needham, unstitched a yarn no wine writer had dared touch when she reported that "the Casella brothers are all keen shooters," and Marcello Casella had converted part of the old McWilliams winery at Yenda to a factory for the Terminator ammo brand. Needham wrote further about the soaring popularity of shooting in the Griffith region, with its burgeoning gun clubs and ammunition manufactories, and its handy proximity to the Cocoparra National Park and the Binya State Forest.

Needham finished with a savoury twist by quoting local SSA treasurer, Trevor Allen, who complained about "The 'Mexicans' coming up from Sydney and Melbourne with their guns".

"They don't have respect for anyone's property or live stock," Allen said. "They threaten the farmers."

Range wars.

This news coincided with Griffith grapegrower Rod Gribble telling the same newspaper's Environment writer, Peter Munro, on video, about the heatwave's devastating blitz of his wine grape crop. Gribble talked frankly of how frosts had damaged his vineyards before the heatwave, which combination has left his 2014 vintage in penury. He explained the nature of 'hen-and-chicken', where grapes develop unevenly within each bunch, so you have some small sour, bitter, pea-sized berries amongst other fatter sugary ones.

No good.

Whether they were frosted or not, this ailment is common this year in vineyards right through the Mount Lofty Ranges, from the Fleurieu to Clare.  As well as other parts of the entire south-east corner of this big dry baking/blazing chip of a country.

  

Heatwaved, sunburnt hen-and-chicken Shiraz in McLaren Vale, January 2014 ... this bunch is more the exception than the rule in the better Vales vineyards ... the vineyards with the better-managed leaf canopies have little of it ... photo James Hook

As occurred all over south-east Australia, that week-long heatwave was severe and long enough to stop the vines taking in water - they shut down, get sulky and go dormant around 32-35⁰C - so while the pea and lentil-sized berries simply toughened, tightened and shrank, the fatter, sweeter berries go to raisins through evaporation in the heat, giving discomfiting sweet-and-sour flavours when the whole caboodle goes through the crusher.

Ethyl alcohol, sure, but finesse?  Nah.

Back to the annual problem of communications.  Marketing.  There stood poor Gribble, in 45⁰C heat, an excavator uprooting his worthless Semillon behind him, his Chardonnay vineyard a parched and bleak slab of industrial monoculture, bare earth reflecting destructive heat up into the vine canopies from below.  While he held badly damaged bunches in his hands for the camera, he had the local propaganda division to deal with once his clip went to air.  So he just had to say, in obvious contradiction to everything else, that "the grapes will make excellent quality wine ... there's no doubt about that."

And then, tellingly, honestly, he added "but the quantity - you know, we get paid more on the quantity than the quality - and the quantity is really going to be reduced.  And that is going to affect us dramatically."

Communications, see?  After the fires in the ranges east of the Barossa, I was reticent to ask mates there about vineyard damage.  I ask the honest, reliable folks for vintage reports each year, because in this business, truth is my currency.  Liars and spindoctoring Goebbels Division rocket-polishers are a direct threat to my credibility.  These determined ethanol-mongers will happily chew up anyone who reliably tells me that things are not quite perfect.

Currency Creek 2013 ... photo Philip White

If I were to believe the Country Fire Service (CFS) reports during the eastern ranges blaze, I would have thought the entire region from Flaxman's and Springton, north through Keyneton and Hill of Grace to Truro, and across to Angaston, was cactus.  All those beautiful vineyards.  But apart from a few rows of vines in Flaxman Valley, which was almost a separate fire, it seems that very few vineyards were damaged.  The fire went mainly up the Mallee side of the ranges, in the gorges where they meet the eastern flats, and scorched north toward Truro.

Contrary to popular goss, vineyards do burn.  On Ash Wednesday, which I cannot believe was thirty years ago, old vines, particularly bush vines, burnt in Clare.  Last vintage, modern irrigated vineyards burnt at Currency Creek.  In a twisted piece of reality, the plastic dripper lines there worked like cordite fuses in some places, burning along beneath the vines once the power went off, the pumps stopped, and the water dried out.

Currency Creek, 2013 ... photo Philip White

Regardless of the poisonous residuals left in the ground from cindered Perma-pine posts and plastic, those vines seem largely to have revived.

A buzzword feared by winemakers is 'smoke taint'.  From my enquiries, the winds that fanned those fires up the east side of the Barossa ranges dispersed the smoke so efficiently that many folks weren't even aware that the fires were close.  So, fingers crossed, growers hope that barbecue-flavoured ailment will not be noticable.

Because I have mates who grow grapes all through that region, I sat up all night listening to the CFS reports and watching their website.  In such a conflagration, one doesn't ring people to ask whether they're burning down as it happens.

But I must say that the CFS reports are more chaotic than accurate.  They are often hours out of date.  Listening all night to CFS reports on local ABC 891 during the peak of the blaze, I should have been forgiven for believing that all of Eden Valley, from Springton right up through Hill of Grace, was ash.

Not so.

If the local ABC stays on air, and refrains from feeding us cricket or broadcasts from Sydney or Brisbane, and instead leaves a good broadcaster on air with the phone lines open, immediate reports from farmers or folks on site are much more reliable and accurate than whatever the CFS has the time or ability to patch together.

Currency Creek 2013 ...photo Philip White

ABC 891 did a good job during the eastern Barossa Ranges fire, keeping the lines open all night.

The CFS volunteers are heroes.  They were fast into the Barossa Ranges, dousing big River Red Gums with retardant even before the blaze reached them. As the fire chewed up the country at speeds of up to fifty kilometres an hour, these fireys saved countless homes and humans.

And many big trees and vineyards.

As in the particularly tricky - too wet; too mouldy - 2011 vintage, there will be good wines made from 2014, although much of the crop is already toasted.  These finer wines will invariably come from the better winemakers and growers.  The sorts I generally recommend in these epistles will have the best chance.

So.  That's my first go at summarising the 2014 year.  Who knows what Mother Nature, who's obviously very pissed off at us, holds in store as the remnants of the year's wine grape crop struggles through to harvest.  There's a long way to go.

In the meantime, it'll be interesting to see whether Casella's love of guns helps it regain its grasp of the USA Critter Label market.  Armaments are very popular in that big free country.  If Casella became famous as a sort of vinous Shooter's Party, perhaps its USA sales could outweigh any loss of domestic sales.

They could even run competitions there, where the winners get a free ride to shoot critters in the National Park at Griffith, using trusty local ammo.

  

It's all a matter of communication.

Currency Creek 2013 ... photo Philip White