ANGOSTURA EXTRA BITTER IN BANK CRASH

THE STATION HOTEL, KUALA LUMPUR, TODAY

Cocktail Shakers Tremble Horrors Securing Stocks Tiny Trinidad Saves World
by PHILIP WHITE - A version of this appeared in The Independent Weekly

A ripple of horror recently swept the cocktail bars of Earth. The sudden disappearance of all the money had one unforseen effect: the Angostura Bitters company went bust. Sharp sommeliers and betuxed shakers everywhere suddenly struggled to secure the last stocks of an ingredient which they’d always taken for granted.

Johann Siegert, Bolivar’s surgeon-general in Angostura, on the Orinoco in Venezuela, invented this efficacious and astringent tonic in 1824. All too aware of the savagery jungle diseases

SIMON BOLIVAR ADDRESSES THE CONFERENCE OF ANGOSTURA, 1819




wrought to wounded troops, he worked desperately to find a blend of local herbs and plants that would ease the pain of nearly everything. His rum-based aromatic bitters was the result. His sons eventually took the factory to Trinidad, which was more politically stable. But, like the Australian wine business, it was entrepreneurs’ greed, and not rogue dictators that eventually brought the company to its knees.

Appropriately, your correspondent first collided with Angostura in the tropics. During a stay in the Station Hotel, Kuala Lumpur, in 1970, he revered the bamboo Lounge on the first floor, where corpulent Englishmen with linen safari suits and tobacco-stained moustaches sat in the gloom, reading six week old copies of The Times, drinking Pink Gins. This is a simple concoction to build: simply swirl a short glass with a few dashes of Angostura and tip in two shots of Plymouth gin. Some add water; if one adds an ice block it becomes a Coaster Cocktail.

The Bamboo Lounge was an astonishing room from a past era: the furniture was of course bamboo; punkah wallahs stirred the air, circulating the cigar smoke; an unwatched black and white television broadcast snow and white noise through three layers of sub-titles, and if, betwixt bouts of snoring, one engaged another in conversation, it became apparent that none of the said gentlemen had ever set foot in England.

RAILWAY STATION, KL, TODAY; IN 1970 IT WAS TRAINS BELOW; BEDS AND BAMBOO LOUNGE UPSTAIRS


Weather like we’re enduring tends to sway the thirsty ginwards, and this writer finds intense pleasure playing with cocktails based on the savoury juniper-steeped spirit. There are countless gin-based cocktails in the two true mixmaster bibles: The Savoy Cocktail Book, compiled in London in 1930 by Harry Craddock, the Savoy Hotel’s cocktailor, and Harry’s ABC of Mixing Cocktails, by Harry MacElhone, in Ciro’s Club in London in 1919. Harry went on to take over Clancey’s New York Bar at 5 rou Danou in the Opera district of Paris, eventually renaming it Harry’s New York Bar.

This tiny cathedral to the maintenance and destruction of thirst is as evocative and atmospheric as the long-gone Bamboo Bar. A battered red pair of what purport to Hemingway’s boxing gloves hang above France’s first hot dog machine; downstairs resides the battered piano at which Gershwin wrote American in Paris; the air is steep and dark with the ghosts of regulars like the Duke of Windsor, Jack Dempsey, Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott and Zelda, Dietrich, Coward, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Prevert, and other great brains like Janet Flanner, who famously wrote of Hotboy Hemingway “what stands out in my memory is the fact that his heroes, like Ernest himself, were of outsized masculinity even in small matters”.

ERNIE ENGAGES IN THE SMALL MATTER OF BOXING HIMSELF

The Bloody Mary, the Sidecar, the Blue Lagoon and the White Lady were all invented in Harry’s Bar. And one pertinent to our vicious summer: the Champagne Cocktail. This is a wine glass into which is put a sugar cube saturated in Angostura Bitters. Add five dashes of Cognac and an ice block, fill it with champagne, and squeeze some lemon zest over the top.

The forerunner to this fizzy wickedness was Harry Craddock’s Champagne Cup. In a big jug, mix a tablespoon of confectioner’s sugar, one glass of Cognac, two liqueur glasses of Curacao, one liqueur glass of maraschino, one liqueur glass of Grand Marnier with a quart of champagne. Add big ice, slices of orange and pineapple, a slice or two of cucumber peel and three or four sprigs of mint: glug glug.

Craddock’s Essence of Claret Punch is a long recipe which commences with “5 gallons of Claret; 2 ½ gallons Spirits ... ”, and goes on into a hole which best explored in the chill of winter. But, having been highly impressed by the new Lobo Adelaide Hills Apple Cider, I have discovered it perfectly suits Craddock’s Cider Cup No. 1. Into a jug, pour one liqueur glass of maraschino; one of curacao; one of cognac; three stubbies of Lobo cider; one of soda water; big ice and slices of apple, pear and orange; stir gently and serve.

Sangria is also good in summer: a bottle of red, maybe half a bottle of sauvignon blanc, a cup of brandy, a bottle of soda, half a cup of confectioner’s sugar, slices of orange, cucumber, apple, maybe fresh ginger, and big ice.

If any of these induce hiccups, MacElhone’s cure never fails: souse a slice of lime in Angostura and suck.

As if to show Barak Obama some financial perspective, the Trinidad government bailed out the bitters company. Whew.




















MODERN VERSION OF THE OLD-FASHIONED COCKTAIL - HARRY MacELHONE ORIGINALLY SATURATED A LUMP OF SUGAR WITH BITTERS, CRUSHED THAT IN A SPOONFUL OF WATER, ADDED BIG ICE AND A DOUBLE SHOT OF BOURBON, GARNISHED WITH LEMON PEEL

HIGH COURT HEADKICKS PROHO DRIES

THE AUTHOR AT THE EXETER ON A TYPICAL SATURDAY NIGHT: FAR TOO SMART FOR A VEHICLE WITH AN ENGINE

Judges Side With Publicans Shaft Of Welcome Wisdom How Much Is Not Enough?
by PHILIP WHITE - a version of this appeared in The Independent Weekly

When Nicholas Binns steered that bespoke East End drink emporium, The Exeter, he once refused a friend of mine more alcohol, for annoying other patrons with his eccentric conversation and behaviour. A hyper-intelligent gent of some years, my friend has a penchant for intriguing and unusual conversation, which he is quite capable of conducting when there are no listeners. He took his orders well, and strolled purposefully to the Crown and Anchor, just up the lane, where he drank until closing. Then he drank all night, completing a full twenty-four hour shift, before confidently re-entering The Exeter, where he ordered a malt whisky with a Coopers Stout chaser, which was promptly served to him. He had, he explained, drunk off the full head of steam which has caused the earlier, er, inconvenience. There would be no more trouble.

Publican Binns was never one for deciding how much anybody should drink. He refused to serve customers only when their behaviour irritated or concerned others, quite fairly including himself and his staff. Peace in the tills; peace in the valley. Upon his retirement, Binns was celebrated by Pat Conlon in the parliamentary grievance debate, and called “a river to his people” in a reverent piece by the great John McGrath.

I thought this line was taken from the lubricious character played by Ustinov in Spartacus, but it’s Roman in another way.

The Exeter is named after Exeter Hall in London, where the South Australian Company was set up. This hall was the home to the anti-slavery movement and housed hearty meetings of temperance activists, Protestants, and remarkable musical performances. Exeter, on the Exe River, takes its name from isca, the Roman mispronunciation and spelling of the Gaelic and Erse uisge, which means flowing water. And whisky.

EXETER HALL, THE STRAND, LONDON, 1905. THE HALL WAS DEM,OLISHED TWO YEARS LATER TO MAKE WAY FOR THE STRAND PALACE HOTEL..

In their 10 November ruling that publicans have no general duty of care to protect patrons from the consequences of drunkenness, High Court justices French, Gummow, Hayne, Heydon and Crennan have struck a Christlike blow at generations of interferist wowsers who struggle to control humankind’s eternal propensity to self-medicate. Our drug policy is written by drug companies and people who don’t take drugs; our liquor laws are written by boozemongers and wowsers. No humans.

“Expressions like 'intoxication', 'inebriation' and 'drunkenness' are difficult to both define and to apply”, asserted justices Gummow, Heydon and Crennan. “The fact that legislation compels publicans not to serve customers who are apparently drunk does not make the introduction of a civil duty of care defined by reference to those expressions any more workable or attractive ... It is difficult for an observer to assess whether a drinker has reached the point denoted by those expressions. Some people do so faster than others. Some show the signs of intoxication earlier than others. In some the signs of intoxication are not readily apparent. With some there is the risk of confusing excitement, liveliness and high spirits with inebriation. With others, silence conceals an almost complete incapacity to speak or move.”

This is some of the most exquisite sense I have heard from above for a long, long time. The ruling is a beautifully-written analysis of a terrible event, and a sparse, crisp piece of logic it is. Look it up.

Of course the inebriated should take some responsibility for their state. My friend in The Ex realised this, and, having been confronted by a good publican, dealt with it in his own way. He broke no law.

SOBRIETY TEST FOR EXETER DRINKERS: IF YOU SEE TWO PAIRS OF LEGS SITTING ON THIS FENCE, YOU'VE HAD ENOUGH

Being a thirsty type who found it impossible to drive slowly, I removed my driver’s license from myself twenty years ago. Just sat there and watched it expire, before anything terrible happened, and somebody else had to take it away from me. This has made life difficult, and could be a cop out, as I cast the responsibility upon others. But other motorists should be relieved that I have become an expert at public transport systems, hyper-aware of how many empty cars travel in every direction at almost any time of the day or night.

Which is not to say I can wash my hands of transport accidents. I was recently hit by an unmanned car parked outside a pub. I was on foot. It was stationary. Having expertly rolled off its bonnet and presented myself at the bar for a very strong drink, I was refused by a polite young fellow who suggested I might like to try a glass of water, which he presented.

After a conciliatory pint on the veranda, I digested the responsibility for my prang, and withdrew from society.

I suspect the justices of our High Court are reasonably appreciative of the notion that publicans should be rivers to their people. That is the nature of public houses. Which our Lord understood when they said of him “Behold a man gluttonous, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners.”

http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/HCA/2009/47.html

CLASSIC SOUTH AUSTRALIAN CAR OUTSIDE A CLASSIC SOUTH AUSTRALIAN PUB. GOD DRIVES A VAL. THE DEVILS DRINK IN THE EX.

JIM INGOLDBY, JEAN PAXTON DO A RUNNER

JEAN PAXTON IN HARRY WHO AT HER 100th BIRTHDAY PARTY, AT WHICH SHE ARRIVED BY BLACK HELICOPTER TO ANNOUNCE "I'VE TRAVELLED HERE IN ONE OF THOSE SELF-FLYING CRAFT". JEAN IS THE ONLY WOMAN EVER TO ASK FOR PHILIP WHITE'S HAND IN MARRIAGE! photo KATE ELMES, The Independent Weekly





Mighty Wine Characters Die
Missing Mates At Christmas
Much Else Has Gone Forever
by PHILIP WHITE - a version of this appeared in The INDEPENDENT WEEKLY.


“Do you know anything about finance?” Jim Ingoldby glowered.

“No,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “Now we can talk.”

I’d known Jim for twenty-five years. But this was a different day: I was suddenly there in his home as his fair daughter Jane’s partner. His wry opener was an indicator of his intention to hang on to the family coffers as much as his disbelief at what was happening to the wine industry.

Jim died of long life a few months back, one of the last of the great post-war winemakers. He had stacked many a gift beneath the Christmas trees, allegorical or real, of his friends, family and employees through his amazingly creative life, and as I contemplate whether indeed to bother with a baubled fir on the occasion of Jesus’ 2009th birthday, I know Jim would ridicule my sentiment, but love playing with the wires and lights.

JIM INGOLDBY

Baubles are scant in the wine business firs this year. But if you could grant me just the one, another bottle of scotch with Jim would do nicely. We’d reflect on the staggering hubris of a business that had absolutely everything going for it fifteen years ago. I would suggest, as I do, that if it were the wool business, or the Australian Wheat Board, that had greedily overgrown itself by at least a third, and was now rotting in its own havoc and destruction, there’d be a Royal Commission into who was to blame. They’d be stood up, cross-examined, and locked in the stocks.

I’d recall asking Ian Sutton, Chief Executive of the Winemakers’ Federation of Australia, Wine Australia Pty. Ltd., Australian Wine Foundation and the Australian Wine and Brandy Producers' Association, which bits of the wine industry he’d consulted about his determined putsch to use $40 or 50 million of the taxpayers’ money to build the National Wine Centre in the Botanic Gardens. Sutton snarled "My job's not to consult the wine industry -- my job is to represent the wine industry". Great.


NATIONAL WINE CENTRE: AN UNFINISHED GRANDSTAND WITH ITS BACK TO THE PEOPLE? ADELAIDE UNIVERSITY NOW RENTS THIS FOR $1 A WEEK ...

That ugly pile in the Gardens is the perfect allegory for the way the whole business has gone crook. Those who put it there should be drawn to account, if not drawn and quartered. They should never be let near the levers of wine industry power, ever again. But still they hover. “This tax-payer-funded Xanadu will have little purpose beyond housing the bureaucrats who will be responsible for the next taxpayer-funded Vine-pull Scheme,” I wrote at the time. Touché?

I would recall with Jim his early days at McLaren Flat, where at Rycroft, in the seventies, he radically marketed McLaren Vale wines in bottles labelled according to the vineyards and growers whose wine glowered within – something that is finally, sensibly becoming vogue. I would recall his early adoption of the screw cap, and the ingenious machine he built to apply them. I would revel in his exquisite watercolours: always a new’un on the easel at the end of his bed. And we would roar with derisive laughter and rage at the squirming idiots who, until just a year and a half ago, were urging growers to plant more chardonnay, lay more irrigation pipes, and guarantee an endless supply of fruit at prices so low whole communities would inevitably collapse, along with the river that nurtured them.

If you could squeeze another gift beneath my tree, it should be one more bottle of shiraz with the amazing Jean Paxton, who also left us this year, at the grand old knock of 102. Jean, Mum of David, had watched their family business march bravely out of almond-growing and into viticulture. She saw her son move from an aggressive developer of inspired, but industrial vineyards, to become one of the first converts to biodynamic principles and sustainable natural practices, and eventually marry Ang, formally entwining “Them Paxtons” with the vinous blood of the great Tolley and Penfold families.

When she was a hundred, Jean proposed marriage to me: the only lass to ever do so. She mischievously joked that David would be annoyed at me “getting all the money”, and reassured me “ - but don’t worry – you wouldn’t have to put up with me for long.”

At 101 years, this mighty woman triggered a frisson of panic when she was found face down on the floor of her unit, looking all the world like she’d had a big stroke. There were ambulances, and drips and whatnot, and the usual jittery concerns. But when her family arrived at casualty, a good nurse relieved their fears. It wasn’t so bad. They’d just checked her blood alcohol: 0.13. Jean had been enjoying a bottle or two of the sublime Paxton Jean Shiraz, the pinnacle of her son’s endeavour, which had been named after her. She couldn’t understand the fuss.

I could go on with my festive cheer. But about forty per cent of the wine business won’t. It’s finished.

CHARDONNAY MONGERS' MEETING

SIR ARTHUR STREETON: 'FIR'ES ON' (LAPSTONE TUNNEL) 1891 - AUSTRALIA'S MOST AROMATIC PAINTING? CLICK ON IMAGE TO READ STREETON'S LETTER TO FRED McCUBBIN











The Look Of Smell
Sexy Sexton Stuffs
The Desert Weed

by PHILIP WHITE - A VERSION OF THIS APPEARED IN THE INDEPENDENT WEEKLY

They say the difference between drunks and alcoholics is alcoholics go to meetings. The chardonnay addicts have obviously had a meeting. But bugger their meeting: here I sit drinking chardonnay, gazing at an Arthur Streeton painting.

So what’s chardonnay got to do with Sir Arthur Streeton? Well, it has to do with the look of smell.

I can tell the chardonnay addicts – and I mean those addicted to growing and making the stuff - have had a meeting because everywhere I hear the breathless news that chardonnay is coming back. My e-mail is full of this naive hope. I find this advice rather telling, if not threatening. I even heard it, for Bacchus’ sake, at the McLaren Vale wine show. (McLaren Vale grows about 6000 tonnes of ordinary chardonnay a year, which is a drop in the total 444,000 tonnes Australian bucket.)

I’ve heard it all before. Len Evans, that old rogue who ran the wine show system for thirty years, preached incessantly that ‘chardonnay will become the vanilla of the Australian wine industry’. They took this variety from the snow and chalk of Champagne and Burgundy and planted it all over the desert and prayed that it would turn into vanilla. They told us it HAD turned into vanilla. And then they put caramelised oak chips and whatnot into it so it tasted more like vanilla. But it’s a thirsty weed in our desert: never even getting vaguely close to vanilla essence; much less the true and perfect vanilla bean.

THE LATE LEONARD P EVANS: LA-LA IN VANILLALAND

Industry leaders Dick Smart, Adrian Read and Ian Kidd even planted chardonnay at Bourke. Or got some other poor bugger to plant it, as a millennium PR stunt: the first wine on Earth to be picked in the new millennium. Read: ‘Kidding’, Smartypants.

One of the reasons our wine business is on the nose is that all the punters in the world will not, cannot, drink all the terrible chardonnay that Australia grows. If, like with albarino, they suddenly discovered it was really savignin or traminer or something they’d been passing off in ignorance, and they could rename it and relaunch it, even then it wouldn’t be drunk. Not for a profit.

There are about ten true estates in Australia making good chardonnay. Cullen, Lubiana, Leeuwin, Ashton Hills, Marchand and Burch, Tarrawarra, Romney Park, Montalto, Mountadam, Tallarook ... all reliable chardonnay makers.


Fosters and Constellation can do it well with bought fruit, but they make lakes of the worst stuff, too. And as the chardonnay gets worse, fatter or thinner, so does the dodgy intellect of those who persist with it at the swill end of the market.

Who do they think we are?

Which leads me to the 24 year old Arthur Streeton, in the Blue Mountains in 1891, painting the colour of the air above the Lapstone Tunnel, an excavation the navvies were making for the new trainline. There was an explosion, and a man lost his life. So Streeton painted the faintest wisp of blue smoke over his perfectly-measured air, there in the dry eucalypt bush with the sweat and the horses and the broken hearts and stone and gunpowder. This could be Australia’s most aromatic painting.

I am tasting five successive vintages of Giant Steps Yarra Valley Sexton Vineyard Chardonnay, made by that Merlin, Steve Flamsteed, and Dave McIntosh. These are distinctive and beautiful wines to sniff, because they do not resemble vanilla. They have a range of fruity esters that spread from the smell of Kingston Black cider apples, through stewed to fresh crunchy pear, maybe quince paste, then lemon juice and ginger, to the very edge of oxalis, like the whiff of rhubarb pie, or the taste of a soursob stalk, and on almost to methoxypyrazine, the smell of a tomato leaf, or sauvignon blanc. They are lean, naturally acidic sentinels of great longevity, almost carved from stone. And each one, to varying degrees, also has the acrid, nostril-twitching aroma of Arthur Streeton’s ‘Fire’s On’, (Lapstone Tunnel) 1891, which you can disappear into at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

These wines are grown without poison sprays, and made with the yeasts of the air. They need no shovelled acid; only a drinker patient enough to realise their beauty is not always overt, like the old peach syrup/Dolly Parton chardonnays of Rosemount’s Roxburgh, a vineyard which has just been bought by BHP-Billiton, who can smell coal.

The Giant Steps chardonnays do have a little of the chubby fatty acids that often mark the best Burgundian versions, but these simply make these staunch wines more wholesome. The 2008 version has about as much butter as the thinnest layer of flake pastry, as if all the abovementioned fruits were on a lightly-cooked tart.

Despite them regularly winning major shiny at the Royal Melbourne, these pristine, honest wines, from an honest, lovingly-tended garden, are not the sort of chardonnays those refinery managers decided to persist with at their meeting. I’ve already drunk glumly to that.

FOOTNOTE: After publishing this, the author discovered there had indeed been a meeting to stir the troops to get chardonnay back on the shelves in place of the dreaded Kiwi savvy-B. Fosters called the meeting. The wine show judges promptly obeyed!

FALL FROM GRACE WITH AN AIRLINE GIRL

GILL GORDON-SMITH AT FALL FROM GRACE: BUZZY LITTLE WINE CENTRE IN THE MAIN STREET OF MCLAREN VALE ... photograph by KATE ELMES/INDEPENDENT WEEKLY

Are You Rhonesome Tonight?
Mediterranean Hits McLaren Vale

by PHILIP WHITE - a version of this first appeared in THE INDEPENDENT WEEKLY

Those prone to guzzling pink, yellow or blue electrolytic health drinks to cure the effect of too many other drinks may have recently noticed their back label texts: the whole sweetwater industry seems suddenly to be marketing itself like wine.

Not a lot of difference in most cases, other than the electrolytes will do much less damage.

But while these products are all drinks, I bought a mop the other day, from the hardware store in McLaren Vale, branded “Oates Premium Mop Refill” on the front, and “Premium quality blend mop yarn” on the back. Premium blend, see? It included instructions of storage and application, like “to be used in conjunction with good hygiene practices”, and, just in case you felt a perverse urge, “do not use to clean aquariums”. Nothing about using whilst pregnant, mind you, and no photographs of open-heart surgery.

Which leads me to the disgusting rash of signage that has turned the main street of McLaren Vale into Parramatta Road. I’d love to get to it with a chainsaw and an angle grinder. It’s vile. There’s no porn emporia, yet, but the window of what was the lovely little fishmonger bears a note explaining that it’s about to become a tattoo parlour.

There’s a rare streak of humour at the hardware joint. “Wine barrels”, it says, “full - $49.95 - half $34.95”. Turns out a barrel not yet sawn in half to make flowerpots costs less than twice as much as half a barrel. Both lots are empty.

Which is not what you could say about the cute and comely promise behind a tiny sign beside Blessed Cheese. “Fall From Grace”, it says. “Lifting the Vale”. This promotes the most exciting new thing to hit the south since Chester Osborne went into the fashion business. Unlike Chester, who presumes we’re all ready to spend $500 on a pair of pre-stressed d’Arenberg jeans in order to look just like him, this tiny shop is there to teach people about wine.

Of course Chester does that, too, but, you know. Fall From Grace is the inspired, crazy work of an ebullient and comforting lass called Gill Gordon-Smith, a McLaren Flatster who escaped into the blue Qantas skies many vintages ago, to become what we affectionately used to call “a hostie”.

“I basically used Qantas as a tasting tour of the world’s best cellars”, she says, explaining that she generally ensured her days off were mainly in France. She was soon adding training to her cabin attendant duties, and gradually built up a formidable list of wine education qualifications, amongst other sage wisdoms. Like the warm speechette she recently delivered about how the seasoned traveller, especially when in Russia, soon learns to carry plenty of high quality toilet paper. “Quilted”, she said, without even hinting that she may have suspected I was a Delsey man. In her role as a sort of den mother for junior hosties, it seems that she spent a lot of time supplying the poor little blossoms with toilet paper behind the Iron Curtain.

Or something to that effect. Her honeyed contralto oozes straight through my filters.

Fall from Grace specialises in beautiful honest biodynamic and organic wines from the south of France. And some champagnes which my mate Roberto would call, with nothing less than admiration and amazement, Farmer's Fizz. Little guys.

The south of France bit makes perfect sense, given McLaren Vale's propensity to make wines after the Mediterranean style. It has, after all, what one spark called "the best Mediterranean climate on Earth". (I think that was the terroir master, Brian Croser.)

You ring up to arrange a berth on, say, a Friday night flight, make it to the Fall on time to pay your $20 or $30, and cruise through a tutorial on three or four delicious wines you’ve never ever heard of before, and suddenly want to drink a lot more of.

Fall From Grace is licensed to serve fourteen tasters at a time – this is intimate – and you’ll need to make your travel arrangements succinctly, or you won’t be able to squeeze in on account of the joint being full of dumbstruck winemakers oohing and aahing and searching stupidly for faults like brett, which your hydrangeas will be more likely to get if you buy their second hand barrels from the hardware store.

The cheese is always good.

Sundays Gill does a seriously giggly but educational suds day, serving champagne made by like-minded otherwise unheard-of souls. Book for that, too. Or just go and buy books: she stocks the best little selection of educational wine books, along with luxury Spiegelau wine glassware - made by Riedel but a helluva lot cheaper – of which she is the SA wholesaler. She also sells Leguiole corkscrews, which are deadly efficient works of great beauty that never wear out, and Opinel picnic and field knives from Savoie, which are compulsory kit for all Francophile wine sluts.

Gill also does brill tours of Vales wineries, or visits you for custom tastings, and, well, generally settles you down with a nice drink and a big grin, just like air hostesses used to do. And I almost forgot. Her sign sports the well-formed calves of winemaker Justin McNamee, balanced precariously on the edge of a tank full of fermenting red. Poised to fall. Which is a back label, really.

Fall From Grace is my kind of school. You’ll graduate bubbling with love and knowledge; you won’t need a blue drink or a premium blend mop to sort out any mess, and just between you and me, the lovely hostie gave me her phone number. It’s 08 8323 8089.

APPELLATION SOUTH AUSTRALIA: NUTS

CARTO GRAPHICS' CLEVER NEW TOPOGRAPHIC MAP FOR BAROSSA GRAPE AND WINE AS SEEN BY THE FIGHTER PILOT ... THE ALTITUDES HERE, HOWEVER, ARE EXAGGERATED FOR EFFECT. CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE.

Mount Lofty Ranges Regions
Wrong Borders, Wrong Names?
Who's In Charge Of Change?

by PHILIP WHITE - this story originally appeared in THE INDEPENDENT WEEKLY

The Barossa Grape and Wine Association has just released a clever, handsome and revealing topographical map of the viticulture zone called Barossa. This transverse slice of the South Mount Lofty Ranges was delineated by the local vignerons and the Geographical Indications Committee, a subsidiary of the Australian Wine And Brandy Corporation, the Government statutory authority which polices wine law.

The map was made by Carto Graphics. As it was completed, I coincidentally noticed an increase in wineries using Mount Lofty Ranges as their location. The official wine appellation doesn’t suit them.

There are two reasonably distinct ranges that run from the tip of the Fleurieu to Peterborough; South Mount Lofty Ranges from Cape Jervis to around Eudunda; North Mount Lofty Ranges further to the west, running through Clare and Burra to fizzle out in the desert around Peterborough. North and west of them run the Flinders: Southern, then Northern. These names are official topographical names for standard maps, so they can be easily located by people all over the world.

Not so for our official wine appellation boundaries. These are, well, different. There’s a huge slab of country called The Adelaide Superzone, which includes the Barossa, Fleurieu and Mount Lofty Ranges Zones. The latter Zone contains the Adelaide Hills, the Adelaide Plains and the Clare Valley Regions. The Adelaide Hills Region contains the delineated Sub-regions of Lenswood and Piccadilly Valley, as well as other land that extends north to where the appellation abruptly and illogically becomes the Eden Valley Region in the Barossa Zone, as distinct from the Barossa Valley Region to the west.

Like the Barossa Zone, the Adelaide Hills are not on any ordinary map. This is a colloquial and nebulous term for some of the hills in the South Mount Lofty Ranges. Kuitpo, Mount Barker, and Hahndorf are in the Adelaide Hills Region, Harrogate and Kanmantoo are not. Dumb.

What a pity these boundaries were not set on existing place names, or more easily determined geographical and geological features that were on maps for a century before Australian wine appellations were invented! I initially suggested that the Adelaide Superzone was so named because everyone in the wine world was presumed to know of the whereabouts of Adelaide University, which is smug about its wine course. GIC members have since scorned this idea. Because Adelaide proper is not in any hills or ranges, the South Mount Lofty Ranges Superzone would have had more natural clarity, as Adelaide is on their floodplain and piedmont.

Then, the North Mount Lofty Ranges would make more sense as a Zone, as does the Southern Flinders Region, which I had the pleasure to officially open some years back. There’s not much call for a Northern Flinders Region yet, but this may become necessary if those who insist the Earth is cooling prove correct.

When you examine the fine new Barossa map, it becomes very clear that the Barossa is a distinct valley that runs north-south between the Barossa Ranges on the eastern side, and the ridge that runs from Kalimna in the north, south through Greenock to Gomersal on the western side. The enormous, monocultural tax-dodge vineyards recently planted outside the Valley on the western flats around Sandy Creek have nothing to do with the Barossa or its flavours. This should be Adelaide Plains. Similarly, the upland vineyards in the chaotic network of ranges and valleys to the east of the Barossa Range have nothing in common with the Barossa, other than that Valley’s propensity to use their finer fruit to improve its own, which they can still do without losing the precious Barossa moniker. The dodgy intellect of this is revealed by the new map. They made their Barossa far too big. Dumb.

THE HILL OF GRACE VINEYARD, MUCH IMPROVED BY PRUE HENSCHKE SINCE MILTON WORDLEY TOOK THIS PHOTOGRAPH. IS THIS IN THE BAROSSA VALLEY?

The South Mount Lofty Ranges are a continuous geological feature that extends to Cape Jervis, and yet the Southern Fleurieu is not included in the Mount Lofty Ranges Zone, while Clare is. Dumb.

The McLaren Vale Region is part of the Fleurieu Zone. It sensibly drew most of its boundary according to its geology and topography, following the escarpment formed by the Willunga fault line from the Victory pub to Kangarilla. The western boundary is sensibly the sea. Part of the reason this region stretches north across the Onkaparinga to include Glenthorne Farm and Chateau Reynella is to protect them from housing development. Which will look really dumb if governments and owners continue with their nefarious villa rash. Which the intellectually decrepit Rann government has just permitted to occur in letting Constellation Brands rip out John Reynell's heritage vineyard which had been in full premium wine production for 161 years. Forty-one tiny apartments will replace it. The winemakers of McLaren Vale can take a deep bow for permitting this to happen. And Onkaparinga Mayor Lorraine Rosenberg, who will eventually fall on her own fork. Show Lorraine a hill, and she'll immediately want somebody to put a shed on it.

In the meantime, there's an unholy row brewing between Jane "Spock" Lomax-Smith, the Minister for Tourism, and the McLaren Vale Grape Wine And Tourism Association over the naming of the Fleurieu, the Peninsula which McLaren Vale sits upon. The McLVGWATA should not really be claiming any holier-than-thou rights to naming intelligence until it cleans that idiotic acronym up. But the winesmiths of the Vales want the Fleurieu name officially changed to Fleurieu and McLaren Vale, which J-Lo the Vulcan will not abide.

Consider Doug Govan of The Victory Hotel. His two tiny Rudderless Vineyards behind his mighty pub sit astride the boundary separating McLaren Vale from Southern Fleurieu. This line should logically follow the creek, flowing just south of his pub down through Cactus Gulch to the Gulf. Instead, the appellation line actually divides one of his three tiny Lots, as delineated on the Hundred and Section maps determining ownership.

Doug’s dog Swahili could have worked that one out.

Just as we constantly adjust electoral boundaries to suit demographic changes, and rename electorates, surely we can begin correcting some of this really stupid mess.

VICTORY HOTEL PUBLICAN, DOUG GOVAN, TOOK THIS PHOTOGRAPH OF HIS BELOVED SWAHILI, WHO IS CONSIDERING THE BOUNDARY OF McLAREN VALE AND FLEURIEU. SWAHILI IS IN McLAREN VALE. THE COOPERS SIGN IS IN SOUTHERN FLEURIEU.

McLAREN VALE GEOLOGY MAKES FLAVOUR

RHONE EXPERT JOHN LIVINGSTONE-LEARMONTH ENJOYING A GLASS OF GRENACHE ON A BONNIE SPRING DAY IN McLAREN VALE ... photograph by KATE ELMES - INDEPENDENT WEEKLY

Rhone Man Tastes Vales Stones
500 Million Years Missing
Some Hammy Ironstone Survives

by PHILIP WHITE ... a version of this first appeared in THE INDEPENDENT WEEKLY

John Livingstone-Learmonth is a student of the Rhone. He has crossed its countryside, kicked its dirt, contemplating its geology, and studied its wines for thirty-five years. He knows three generations of growers, and has watched their attitudes and vineyard husbandry change. Or not change. He is the living library of Rhone whites, cellaring, and knowing implicitly decades of viognier, roussane and marsanne. He was in Condrieu, the home of viognier, when its total plantings had dwindled to around twelve hectares. He has written scholarly books about this; now he is attempting to encourage those Rhonely types to learn more about their geology.

“Take Saint Joseph, in the Rhone”, he said, over a breakfast tasting. “It is transversed by streams which come down from the range to the west. When I taste those wines, and study their prices through history, these vary in parallel to my opinions of their quality, depending on the various alluviums they have washed downstream ... the geology of these sources are vital sources of flavour. The old growers accepted all this for centuries, without knowing why; without appreciation of precisely why and how geology influences the flavour and structure of their wines.”

“We need an international guest at our wine show” Vales PR flak Elizabeth Tasker had said, half apologetically, “to give it weight in the publicity ... we need a point of difference to elevate our image.” Which is why John was here. But we were discussing something bigger than PR.

Way beneath the Willunga Basin lie the rocks of the Neoproterozoic, stuff that was there around a billion years ago. Before multi-cellular life really took off. A billion years before humans invented God. Atop those lie layer upon layer of deposits left by repeated intrusions and retreats of the ocean, which has all occurred during the ice ages of the last sixty million years. Only in that time have we drifted away from Gondwanaland, the great Antarctic continent. That may seem a long time back, until you think of the preceding billion years or so.

When Earth’s water concentrates, frozen, at the poles, the sea falls. Eighteen thousand years ago the beach was away off on the edge of the continental shelf, at least one hundred kilometres from where it now stands. Ten thousand years ago, you could walk to Kangaroo Island. There were aboriginal people living where the Bass Straight now flows.

I attempted to explain the differences between the geology of McLaren Vale and that of the Rhone, the target and source of John’s life’s fascination, when a weird reality hit me with newfound clarity. Apart from their newer stuff, which was laid down or exposed in the same last sixty millions that saw the top layers of the Willunga Basin form, the basement Rhone is from the Jurassic, the age of dinosaurs and coniferous forests, from 135 million to 180 million years ago.

I found myself having to explain that those layers of history do not exist in McLaren Vale. They are quite simply gone. Away. I can show you sites in the Vales where you have a layer of Neoproterozoic rock topped with layers of stuff that are sixty million years old, from the Eocene. Five hundred million years of geology have vanished. The stuff that once filled that gap is the geology on which the Rhone Valley grew. So we had an exciting point of difference: the bit missing from the Vales is the bit in which France happened.

Regular readers will know of my obsession with licking rocks and dirt to taste their flavour. In spite of some nonsense circulating about some boozy US geologists claiming the opposite, grapes are little bags of sugary water, which are directly influenced by these flavours of the Earth.

Soil, the obsession of Australian winemakers, is the dandruff of the Earth to the geologist. Drive through any cutting on any of the roadways in our Hills or the Vales, and look at the soil: it’s usually only a metre deep, if that. The key roots of vines drive quickly through that dandruff, and derive flavours from the skull bone beneath. John Livingston-Learmonth understands this more than any wine writer I have met. I passed him a small lump of ironstone from the Yangarra sands. It tasted like a slice of smoky Iberian ham.

UNIRRIGATED 1946 MODEL BUSH VINE GRENACHE IN AEOLIAN SEMAPHORE SAND AT YANGARRA ESTATE NEAR KANGARILLA

A team of master geologists, W. A. “Bill” Fairburn, Jeff Olliver, and Wolfgang Preiss, all colleagues of mine from the old days of the Mines Department in the ’seventies, has almost finished work on the official PIRSA geology map of McLaren Vale, due for publication soon. I have assisted in this publication, having first dreamed of it with some of these clever men in the SA Geological Survey all those years ago.

This map will fairly quickly unlock many of the mysteries of the flavours of the region, replace most of the winemakers’ preoccupation with dandruff, instantly begin to influence grape prices, and therefore land prices, and will play a major role in future town planning and development issues. I trust that Premier Rann’s Thirty Year Plan for greater Adelaide will be sufficiently flexible to absorb these realities, which have been there a helluva lot longer than he has.

MURRAY MOUTH FAKES ONE LAST FLOW

WOODEN BOATS RACING BENEATH THE HINDMARSH ISLAND BRIDGE AT GOOLWA, WHERE THE MURRAY RIVER PREVIOUSLY FLOWED INTO THE GREAT SOUTHERN OCEAN ... photograph by KATE ELMES/INDEPENDENT WEEKLY

Turning Water Into Wine
Viticulture Helps Kill River

by PHILIP WHITE - a version of this first appeared in THE INDEPENDENT WEEKLY

Aquacaf is a great little seafood restaurant at Goolwa. It sits on the edge of the new fake lake the government’s made with its dam wall at Clayton. It now looks as if the Murray River once again flows into the sea. Where the Finniss waters would normally gush into the channel and make a sharp left hand turn to flow north into Lake Alexandrina, flushing, filling and oxygenating it, she now turns left and bounces off the new earthern wall, then sorta swirls around and back, filling Tom and Wendy’s boat thing, even spilling a little over the Goolwa Barrage into the Southern Ocean after the good rain.

There were a jolly lot of diners there last week, watching a fleet of classic wooden boats perform a polite race in the snot-green water. “Actually it’s more like khaki”, my fierce off-sider told her perfect gravadlax, which came on a wooden trencherboard.

Very ancient ritual, serving food on a trencher. I thought of the rough hands of the carpenter breaking bread for the rough hands of the fishermen at another meal in another epoch. They would have used trencherboards. I wondered how the Damascus rosé looked at that last strange supper; how it glinted in the light. How well it accompanied whatever they’d caught.

Aquacaf provides the perfect platform to gaze upon the Hindmarsh Island bridge. Its gentle bulging curve is easy on the eye, humping, as it does, from out of that old street of stone harbormaster’s offices, across the narrow channel to plunge straight into an aboriginal graveyard.

It’s an highly evocative place to sit, there at Aquacaf. Look north, across the bridge, towards Clayton and Langhorne Creek, and if your brain’s like mine it fizzes with rage and confusion about what the wine business has done to these waters. There was a good fresh aquifer there, but greed and ignorance saw it sucked until it turned too saline for use. More modest use of it has seen bits of it return to something like normal, but the Lake and the Bremer will never again be normal, although the Bremer actually flowed a little the other day, and I liked the thought that it might be putting what my Mum would call “goodness” back into the aquifer, and maybe even the poor buggered Lake.

I thought of the abandoned tailings dams at the old mines of Kanmantoo and Brukunga, then, and how much of their poison seeped downstream with the lovely rains. The wine in my hand came from the safer side of those headwaters, at Romney Park, between Hahndorf and Balhannah, where the water runs the other way, down the Onkaparinga and into the gulf accidentally named after the patron saint of viticulturers, Vincent.

That Hahndorf chardonnay is about as good and fine and precise a drink as the South Mount Ranges have produced thus far. It’s the perfect thing to have with such perfect dishes as Aquacaf’s squid and gravadlax.

While I wallowed in this repast, there with the bridge and the boats and the tupperware tuscany, I wandered back to the days of Premier Dean Brown, who moved some water allocation permits from upriver to Langhorne Creek, to feed the incredible explosion of viticulture that occurred there as soon as the tap came on. In 1991, there were 471 hectares of vineyard at Langhorne Creek: an area limited by the amount of available water coming down the Bremer, and the varying freshness of the aquifer.

The wine industry councils released their thirty year plan in 1995, outlining the amount of vineyards Australia would need to keep the world supplied through to 2025. Thanks to Premier Brown’s new water, the Langhorne Creek bit went very quickly. By mid 1997, there were about 2,500 hectares; by vintage 1999, there were 4317 hectares: a tenfold explosion in eight years.

In one $30 million hit, Vinescape Management Services, planted 320 hectares for the Guild Pharmacists’ superannuation fund, on completely unproven samphire country. It soon grew its own little salt pan, smack in the middle. I still keep the Orlando press release boasting of the size of its new planting: one vineyard with 200,000 trellis posts, 1,000 kilometres of drip line, and 50,000 kilometres of wire. Must be good eh? They planted riesling for Bacchus’ sake! That vineyard’s been on the market for years now.

Anyway, the mighty wine industry sure planted everything its thirty year plan outlined. In about five years. Not just in Langhorne Creek, but all along the Murray, and right across the nation. Nobody seemed to notice this unseemly haste.

HINDMARSH ISLAND BRIDGE ... photo by KATES ELMES/INDEPENDENT WEEKLY

As the waters of the Finniss gradually wear their way through the sinking dam our government has built to seal the fate of our greatest river system, I wonder what wise counsel Dean Brown offers Ms Maywald and Mike Rann today?

What punishment would this mob of rack ’em, pack ’em and stack ’em bullies deal out if this destruction had been wrought by, say, a gang of unemployed thugs from Murray Bridge?
.

CADENZIA: ADDING CADENCE TO GRENACHE

McLAREN VALE: HOME OF AUSTRALIA'S BEST GRENACHE ... photograph by MILTON WORDLEY

Cadenzia Hits Six For Grenache
McLaren Vale Getting The Point

by PHILIP WHITE - a version of this first appeaered in THE INDEPENDENT WEEKLY

There’s a big district on the Rhone delta away down in the south of France where an unholy number of Popes shacked up after 1308. They call it Châteauneuf-du-Pape. An appellation gradually evolved there. Unlike any other in France, this one permitted a great number of varieties, and while over 70% of it is now planted to grenache, fourteen other varieties can go in the blends.

So a red Châteauneuf will most likely be grenache noir-based, but may also contain any percentage of other stuff, like the reds (cinsault, counoise, mourvèdre, muscardin, picpoul noir, shiraz, terret noir, and vaccarèse), and the whites (bourboulenc, clairette, grenache blanc, picpoul blanc, picardan, and roussanne).

Early this millenium, grenache was beginning to earn some overdue respect in the Barossa, with the wiser small producers paying it the attention and winemaking budgets previously shewn only shiraz.

It seemed to me that since McLaren Vale grew grenache of a strength, finesse and character that deserved particular attention since the 1860s, the variety had fallen from favour in the post-war Croserised Roseworthy epoch. So I invented Cadenza, a sort of sub-appellation for wines made principally of McLaren Vale grenache, which could be made by any winery, but marketed together. The idea was to improve the profile of grenache in that region, to the advantage of growers, makers and, most importantly, to my readers, the thirsty.

A cadenza’s a passage of classical music where the lead player gets a chance to improvise a few riffs while the rest of the band sticks to the composer’s written score. It’s the beginning of jazz. My idea was that like the winemakers of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, the Vales makers could take the opportunity to have a bit of a blow, and after all the standard boring varietals are put to bed, blend something unprecedented in its complexity and form.

Because a couple of winemongers elsewhere on Earth traded under the Cadenza name, the Vales version blended in an i to become Cadenzia, and now the project is in its sixth release, with seven winemakers participating, fewer than some years, but increasing again. The winemakers’ council owns the name, which was donated, along with the whole idea, and any local producer may release a Cadenzia provided it contains more grenache than any other variety and passes a quality examination conducted by a panel of independent judges.

The project has been a little disappointing to me in the sense that so many of the wines are straight grenache, which is permitted, but hardly takes full advantage of the spirit of the original idea. Maybe the winemakers are taking longer than the punters to learn what grenache is like; perhaps some have no varieties suitable for blending. Which is not to decry the quality of any of these new Cadenzias, straight or blended. There’s little market resistance to well-grown and made grenache, best manifest in the fact that the price of good quality Vales grenache fruit has doubled in the decade, sometimes trebled, whilst other stuff has tumbled.

This year’s release contains three blends and four straight wines. For obvious reasons I’ve paid close attention since the project commenced six short years ago, and sat on the quality assurance panel. This lot’s the most accomplished yet.

Of the straight wines, the Oliver’s Taranga 07 may seem more intense and inky than many expect of grenache, with Clare-like kalamata and dense black cherry dominating any raspberry that may lie beneath. The palate’s silky, then chalky with tannin, and there’s some American-looking oak adding sap. Tapestry’s 07 is even more austere, tight and sooty to sniff, with juicier fruit in the mouth: black russian tomatoes and mature beetroot come to mind; the tannins finer and softer. Samuel’s Gorge 07 is headily perfumed, like His & Hers parfumiers crashed into Ditters; its palate velvety and slightly doughy, like chocolate sourdough. The Dog Ridge 07 seems more like traditional McLaren Vale Dry Red, with sinewy athleticism leading to sweet plum pudding, and Mississippi mudcake tannins.

D’Arenberg’s 06 Cadenzia is grenache, shiraz and mourvèdre. It has that classic d’Arry stripe of stubborn red character - like his old “burgundies” when babies - somehow imparting plump plummy fullness as much as balancing lemony sinew before the velvet tannins arise. The extra year has done it proud. Yangarra’s 07 grenache, shiraz, mourvèdre will do well with another year, or fifteen, as its wood is still very fresh, and its intense complexity and dense, taut stance guarantee the longevity of a top Châteauneuf. Gemtree’s 07 Cadenzia is grenache, tempranillo and shiraz, and is the only wine to step off the Châteauneuf-du-Pape template: it’s done a runner across the Spanish border, picked up a very classy travelling companion, and with all that pomade, perfume and shoe polish, is determinedly heading to the bull ring.

Go catch the Cadenzia train. That was the idea. Get a driver, do the cellars, and stock up for next winter.

CANNED WINE = CANNED MUSIC, WET

SOME THINGS DON'T BELONG IN A TIN

Sofia's Canned Sophistry
VinTins V. Bladder Pack
Penfolds Goes All Glassy

by PHILIP WHITE - a version of this first appeared in THE INDEPENDENT WEEKLY

Sceptically mumbling that there’s nothing new under the Sun, your thirsty correspondent was amused and bemused to hear that Sofia Coppola, the film-directing daughter of the famous film-directing Napa wine magnate Francis, had released a sweet blend of pinot blanc, sauvignon blanc and muscat called Blanc de Blancs California. In a pink tin. With a straw attached.

In a rare accurate use of the word, the press bumpf insists this is aimed squarely at the “sophisticated” market. (My Oxford On Historical Principles advises that sophisticated means “mixed with some foreign substance; adulterated; not pure or genuine; deprived of primitive simplicity or naturalness; rendered artificial; falsified ... ”)

This was a Californicated shot at the cute little splits of champagne popular in the sorts of night clubs your writer consistently fails to frequent. After all that utter codswallop about which shaped glass the precious makers of champagne insist their suds are best served in, they feel no quirks about putting it in cute little bottles with plastic stoppers so supermodels can suck it seductively through straws when they’re draped across bars. Lipstick don’t smudge with a straw, see.

Barokes, the South Melbourne winemaker, has had the Vinsafe Wine-in-a-Can on the market for a fairly unremarkable five years. They won something shiny for their canned chardonnay at a show in Singapore, which was fortuitous, because they’re aiming their tinny ordnance at Asian sophisticates, of which there are apparently quite a few.

As the wine glut continues to swill biliously back and forth across the sodden globe, plonkmongers are trying anything, everything, to attract attention and move juice. Most of these are being sold in a fashionably verdant light: the producers generally claim their allegedly new container is more environmentally-friendly. Stuff like like PET plastic bottles, new angles on the bladder pack, and Tetra Packs.

Don’t laugh. The first Tetra-Pak wine these eyes saw was in Robert O’Callaghan’s flash leather briefcase at the Mascot airport in the early eighties. Rocky had not yet learnt the marketing filip he'd get by getting all verdant, and Rockford was still as small as it can only pretend to be today. He’d been working, with adman Tony Parkinson, on a way of emptying the tanks of the old Angle Vale co-op winery. That was back before the arrival of the green angle, but kiddylikker issues were already fomenting, and Rocky’s Sydney promo trip was futile. Parky went on to invent such magnaminities as Black Chook, Timbuktu, and Woop Woop.

And now we’ve got the new aluminium bottle. Aluminium and wine don’t marry. Many metals affect the flavour of wine. Drink your favourite red from a pewter chalice and you’ll know what I mean: it tastes like silver paper stuck in an old amalgam filling. The Barokes folks claim they’re got this cured with their patented plastic film which lines the can, but the consequent flavours still fail to impress this gnarly hack.

What the new USA users of various shapes of aluminium bottles are using to solve this problem is a mystery. Perhaps they imagine there is no problem.

Then, if you're talking about carbon footprint, the cost of smelting aluminium in Australia far outweighs the cost of doing it in nuclear-powered countries: Australia's electricity unfortunately comes from burning coal.

The glass container, for storage and serving, remains the preferred tankard at Casa Blanco. And now, it seems, it may also become the preferred seal.

PENFOLD'S GRANGE MAKER PETER GAGO

For many years, Peter Gago, Grangemaker, has fantasised about somehow having a glass bottle with a glass closure. Not like the natty Vino-Lok glass stoppers gradually appearing now; these have a polyvinyl chloride o-ring seal: the same stuff used in the thin film over the sealing wafer of a screw cap. What Peter dreamt of was a glass-on-glass closure, an emulation of the old apothecary’s bottle, with the machined glass tapered stopper in a tapered, machined glass neck.

This is, of course, impossibly expensive for a modern bottler.

But Peter’s nearly got it, shall we say, cracked. He’s found a machine that can shave the opening of a standard bottle so that its top edge is to all extents and purposes, perfectly flat. Upon this sits a special glass disk, also flat. In prototype trials your writer has observed at Magill, this can be held in place with a ceramic clip or a screw cap yet to be perfected. It is indeed glass-on-glass: no plastic touching wine.

“We know the PVC in the screw cap holds white wine stable for decades without taint”, Peter said, “but red wine? We won’t know until the same sort of time scale has passed. Glass-on-glass will remove any such concern.”

The Grange trials are borderline hush-hush, but they continue. For those wanting more oxygen in their wine – like, say, a cork would admit over time – psuedo-sintered glass is available, meaning the bottler can offer a range of disks with the capacity to admit varying degrees of oxygen ingress without the wine seeping out. So the Grange buyer could take a case in which four bottles will live for almost ever with minimal oxidation; four bottles with, say the degree of oxidation generally achieved with screw caps, and four with the same sort of oxidation you’d get with cork. And no faults.

Totally unsophisticated, see.

TROTT FAMILY TROPHY AN HONOUR

EMILY TROTT, DAUGHTER OF GREG, WITH THE AUTHOR AFTER SHE AWARDED HIM THE TROTT FAMILY TROPHY 2009.

Emily Trott’s Award Speech
The Trott Family Trophy

Thankyou. It gives me pleasure to be back here again.

Having enlisted considerable help in piecing together this trophy’s history and its recipients, as Dad was not good at keeping ordered records, I learned that this trophy had its beginnings in viticulture, to even the ledger on this day of “The Winemakers’ Lunch”.

However, over the years, the trophy has deviated, meandered and weaved its way to many who have contributed to McLaren Vale, as seems natural as this area was Greg Trott’s delight. Dad would have a vision and he would subsequently weave his magic, meander his way, for example, into state parliament, and, on the odd occasion, deviate agendas to the betterment of McLaren Vale and the South Australian wine industry as a whole, and there is no better example of this than Glenthorne Farm.

Most of you know the history. Glenthorne Farm has been many things to many people. In 1839 it became known as The Lizard Lodge named so by Major Thomas O’Halloran. After that it became a horse estate; in 1913 an army property, followed by the CSIRO in 1946 and in 2001 Glenthorne Farm was passed from the CSIRO to its current guardian the University of Adelaide. Importantly, since the 1830s, Glenthorne Farm has always remained a green buffer between development and the southwest.

This land was transferred to the University on the basis that there would be no housing on the site and that the land would be used for viticulture, research and winemaking. However, this year the University of Adelaide wanted to sell 63 hectares of the farm for housing to cover the cost of returning the rest of the land to its pre-colonial bush state or native woodland.

With contributions from politicians, significant petitions from Friends of Glenthorne Farm, and through sheer persistence, on the 24th March 2009, the Adelaide University proposal was rejected by the state government.

Instrumental in this fight, with perpetual lobbying, and an even louder voice, and words, and then even a louder voice than before, was Philip White. He was around at the time of the original proposal by Greg Trott and was subsequently mortified with the idea that Glenthorne Farm might be earmarked for housing, as were many. He wasn’t pleased and chose to do something about it, as this was contradictory to Greg Trott’s initial vision and in total disparity to the agreement made on the existing deed.

What Philip has helped to achieve by preserving Greg Trott’s intention for Glenthorne Farm is more than protecting a great friend’s vision when he is no longer around to physically watch over it himself.

More importantly, what Philip has vehemently helped to protect, is the vital, green, ever-buffering farmland, and its practises, which, in turn, is to the benefit of all of us, and crucially, the future.

I can safely say that Dad would be pleased.

It gives me great pleasure to award the Trott Family Trophy 2009 to Mr. Philip White.

GLENTHORNE FARM ... LEO DAVIS PHOTOGRAPH ... FOR LATEST GLENTHORNE FARM NEWS, CLICK ON IMAGE

MEDIA RELEASE from McLAREN VALE GRAPE WINE AND TOURISM ASSOCIATION
2nd NOVEMBER 2009

Paul Carpenter Crowned McLaren Vale Bushing King

Paul Carpenter of Hardy’s Tintara Winery in McLaren Vale was crowned the 2009 Bushing King at the Winegrapes Australia McLaren Vale Wine Show Luncheon on Friday 30th November 2009.

Hardy’s Wines won the prestigious regional award for their 2004 Eileen Hardy Shiraz.

Paul is the winemaker* behind two trophy-winning wines at this year’s McLaren Vale Wine Show. The award winning wines consisted of the 2004 Eileen Hardy Shiraz and the 2007 Tintara Reserve Grenache which won both the Grenache Trophy and an International Judge trophy.

A tradition that has been carried out in the region since the 1970s, the Bushing King or Queen is selected from winemakers receiving trophies in the McLaren Vale Wine Show. The Bushing King or Queen award goes to the best wine of the show.

Paul and Alix Hardy undertook the ritual ‘coronation’ and were officially crowned by event sponsor Dave Wright, Chairman of Winegrapes Australia.

Paul made a passionate acceptance speech in front of the 500 strong crowd, thanking the Hardy’s team with special mention of the history and heritage of the brand which is based in McLaren Vale.

“I am very proud to accept this award on behalf of Hardy’s and has special meaning as someone who has lived the majority of my life in this wonderful community based region” Paul said.

Alix was particularly pleased to be carrying on a family tradition as her father, Bill Hardy, had been crowned Bushing King in 1988.

The Bushing King/Queen tradition was taken from medieval times when Tavern owners would place ivy bushes above their tavern doors to celebrate the arrival of the new vintage wine, or fresh mead. In the early 1970’s, McLaren Vale’s winemakers incorporated this symbol to 'ring in' the new vintage by hanging olive branches over their cellar doors.

PETER JOSEPH COOMBS, THE ADELAIDE DESIGNER AND JEWELLER WHO MAKES THE McLAREN VALE BUSHING TROPHIES AND SHIELDS

MEDIA RELEASE from McLAREN VALE GRAPE WINE AND TOURISM ASSOCIATION
23 October 2009
McLAREN VALE REDS LEAD THE WAY

The results of this year’s Winegrapes Australia McLaren Vale Wine Show confirm the region’s strength lies with red wines, however with Chardonnay making a comeback. Sixteen gold medals were awarded by the judges to red wines and three gold medals for white wines.

Chair of the Winegrapes Australia McLaren Vale Wine Show, Chris Thomas said that the number of overall gold and silver medals were in line with previous years.

“Although the region has recently experienced challenging vintages, the results show the region continues to produce some great quality wines, with white wines beginning to show great promise.”

In particular three wineries each enjoyed two gold medals, Hardy Wine Company, Leconfield and Serafino.

“In addition to Shiraz, Cabernet and Grenache, it is fantastic to see other varieties like Chenin Blanc, Rose and Tempranillo being awarded gold medals.”

The judges were impressed with the 2008 Grenache commenting that “It is a strong class with winemaking respectful of variety. This is a region where this variety should shine and does.”

2009 McLaren Vale Wine Show

Trophy Winners:
Chardonnay - 2008 Serafino Reserve Chardonnay
Single White Variety – 2009 Dowie Doole Chenin Blanc
Rose Style – 2009 S C Pannell Rose Arido
Grenache - 2008 Vinrock Grenache
Cabernet Sauvignon – 2008 Richard Hamilton Hut Block Cabernet Sauvignon
Shiraz (Less than $25) – 2008 Richard Hamilton Shiraz
Other Single Red Varieties – 2008 Gemtree Vineyards Luna Roja Tempranillo
Grenache -2007 Tintara Reserve Grenache Shiraz
Shiraz (more than $25) – 2004 Eileen Hardy Shiraz
Fortified Wine – Woodstock 500ml Very Old Fortified
Fleurieu Shiraz and Shiraz predominant blends – 2008 Lake Breeze Bullant Shiraz
Fleurieu Dry Still White Wine – 2007 Geoff Merrill Reserve Chardonnay
Fleurieu other single varietals – 2008 Bleasdale T&M

This year’s International Judge, John Livingstone Learmonth, awarded his choices to:
2007 Tintara Reserve Grenache
2008 Richard Hamilton Hut Block Cabernet Sauvignon
2006 The Old Faithful “Top of the Hill” NV Woodstock 500ml Very Old Fortified

* The Eileen Hardy Shiraz 2004 was actually vintaged by Rob Mann and Simon White.