GALLO FAMILY: JUDGE SAYS "ON YER BIKE!"

THE GALLO FAMILY AS IT NOW STANDS: SHIRAZ AND MERLOT DO NOT A REAL PINOT MAKE ... POOR BUGGERS FEEL RIPPED OFF BY NEFARIOUS FROGS!

Gallos Go Sideways Merlot Is Pinot Que Syrah Syrah
Cunstellation Looks Inwards
by PHILIP WHITE - a version of this was published in The Independent Weekly

Anyone with the time to check the Gallo family on Wikipedia may not be surprised to hear that officers of America’s Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Bureau are investigating the little matter of a monstrous wine substitution racket.

And anyone who’s been shafted by the leviathan Constellation Wines, like the growers of Australia who’ve just been told their grapes are worth bugger all, may be equally blasé to discover Constellation is also in the gun.

A judge in Carcassonne, in southern France, has just dealt with twelve wine sharks whom he found guilty of selling eighteen million bottles worth of fake Pinot noir to E & J Gallo, America’s biggest family-owned wine company, and perhaps to Constellation, the world’s biggest wine company, run by the Sands brothers of upstate New York. It appears the Gallos bought only 20% of the wine exported to the US by the French makers between 2006 and 2008.

The Pinot was made from Shiraz and Merlot. As I write, Constellation is “investigating” itself, so we don’t yet know where that bit went. The Gallos sold theirs in their popular Red Bicyclette brand. However packaged or passed off, this is the sort of sly grog that Australian irrigating winemakers are attempting to outsell in the discount bins of the Old World.

The judge handed out fines of between 1,500 (A$2,270) and 180,000 Euros (A$272,700), and suspended jail sentences of one to six months. The 135,334 hectolitres of fake Pinot netted the gang some seven million Euros. The tough guys at the USA ATF are curious to discover whether the Gallos – cousins of Freddie “Two Buck Chuck” Franzia - and the Constellation mobs were in on the scam from the start, or whether their publicly apparent hurt is not simply the shame of being sprung. One can’t help but wonder how their buyers didn’t realise they’d shipped more pinot than the French district grows.

In the late 1970s, Thomas Hardy & Sons produced a sound cheap pinot called Keppoch. The grand old family company planted a great swathe of Padthaway with the only clone available then and while that was a simple Pinot clone for making Champagne, the grapes loved the South Australian sun, ripened fully, and presented themselves in a good value bottle that was many Australians’ first taste of the mysterious red variety of Burgundy.

Hardys went on to purchase John Reynell and Sons, the great establishment in which their founder, Thomas, first worked in 1850. The company burgeoned, was eventually absorbed by the irrigating Riverlander Berri Renmano Limited, and then sold to Constellation for $1.1 billion in 2001. Looking back, one could say the wheels began to wobble the moment BRL became BRL-Hardy, if they weren’t crook before, but they’ve certainly wobbled right off since the Sands brothers made it a small part of their humungous Constellation.

Constellation is hurriedly withdrawing from Australia, hoping to lose just enough money to avoid a tax bill insiders claim to be north of $700 million. They leave Padthaway floundering in sandy soils riddled with salt from irrigation, and Reynell’s 161 year old vineyard uprooted for housing.

THE AUTHOR AT THE GATE OF JOHN REYNELL'S ORIGINAL VINEYARD. THE VINES HAVE BEEN REPLANTED OVER THE YEARS, BUT THIS HAS BEEN A VINEYARD FOR 161 YEARS. ALL GONE NOW. photo KATE ELMES, INDEPENDENT WEEKLY

Pinot was virtually unknown to the US wine drinker until the 2004 Hollywood movie, Sideways. This was about two American boyos on a winery tour, and how one taught the other to scorn Merlot and drink Pinot. Merlot, which America confuses with mellow, was the popular red because of this ambiguity. Most of what was sold tasted nothing like the magnificent Merlot of Bordeaux, and Pomerol brands like Le Pin and Petrus: vinous exquisities the world tries to copy, but which you won’t buy for less than a grand per pop. So America, addicted to Merlot which tasted nothing like proper Merlot, suddenly switched to Pinot noir as the result of one dumb movie, and quickly became addicted to Pinot which tasted nothing like proper Pinot. Now we know much of it wasn’t even Pinot: if you were drinking the Red Pushbike, with its cute Gallic treadly on the front, you were still drinking Merlot.

Australia, of course, is not without sin in the fields of substitution. We substitute precious River water with wine sold for less than the price of bottled water with full government support. Apart from the odd stray bleat of enragement from the likes of the very brave Leon Bignell, Labor Member for Mawson, nobody dares speak out.

There are other foggy practices, most of them within the law, which permits the addition of fifteen per cent of this or that, without label acknowledgement. Have you ever wondered where most Australian Viognier goes? It’s hidden in your Shiraz, the labels of which rarely mention this inclusion. Where does all our Pinit gris come from? And Alboriño? Well, that’s Savignin now, but it’s not the producers’ fault. The government nursery imported the wrong cuttings.