JACOB'S CREEK SKIPPER LEAVES HIS TILLER

RETIRING WINEMAKER PHILIP LAFFER ON HIS BELOVED JACOB'S CREEK, WHICH STARTS ON MOUNTADAM AND RUNS DOWN PAST THE SCHILD FAMILY VINEYARDS INTO THE SOUTH PARA RIVER. IN A WORLD INCREASINGLY CURIOUS ABOUT TERROIR, ONLY A TINY VOLUME OF JACOB'S CREEK WINE COMES FROM ANYWHERE NEAR THIS TINY STREAM. LAFFER GOT IT ELSEWHERE.

Laffer's London Club Laugh-out How Tiny Creek Became Big River Slow Boat To China Next Big Back Whoosh
by PHILIP WHITE

Philip Laffer, 69, Group Chief Winemaker, Pernod Ricard Pacific, wound it back last week, announcing he’ll be spending a lot more time mucking about in boats, and it won’t be on his beloved Jacob’s Creek.

Affable, but stern, Laffer’s one of the most influential winemakers on Earth.

Like Peter Gago’s role at Penfolds, this is heady business. After vintage, it involves the supervision of the annual assemblage, when thousands of wines made by the small army of winemakers are blended to fit the company’s suite of brands.

The rest of the year’s spent filling passports with stamps and wearing out the R. M. Williams on endless promotional travel. So it was appropriate for Laffer to choose a London club for his valedictory. I hear that camp old panto stager-cum-wine star, Oz Clarke, delivered an enthusiastic roast.

I first encountered Laffer about thirty years back at Lindemans’ Karadoc winery near Mildura. His dad, a lecturer for a time at Roseworthy, had convinced him he wasn’t bright enough to be a vet, so after his Roseworthy studies he joined Lindemans in 1963.

Laffer was the first winemaker I’d struck in a hardhat and steel-caps; a shock until I realized the scale of Karadoc, with its million-litre tanks and overhead gantries cranking huge grape bins around. It was our first modern wine refinery, put together by Philip Shaw for the tobacco company, Philip Morris, Lindemans’ owner.

I’d hardly donned my Karadoc helmet than it became apparent that things would never be the same in the Australian wine business.

Somewhere out the back sweated a young Jeffrey Grosset; Barossa boy Philip John was there, too. Each winemaker seemed to guard their million litre tank, ensuring nothing went wrong until that great day of judgement, when the phone rang with the news that today was the day the gargantuan would be emptied, and its wine sucked down an underground pipe to fill silver pillows, pfffshhht, pfffshhht, pfffshhht.

But Lindemans was active in Coonawarra, too, where Laffer had been to establish vineyards in the mid-sixties. He built the Rouge Homme winery, which I visited to celebrate the win of the 1981 Jimmy Watson Trophy with the delicious 1980 Lindemans St George Cabernet Sauvignon. With viticulturer Barney Kidd, these pert dudes were determined to show the wine world a thing or two: they couldn’t wait to teach me about their new invention: minimal pruning.

This involved mechanically hedging towering vines, saving enormous amounts of money, and dramatically increasing crops. Coonawarra is still struggling to throw off this mantle: after some years it became apparent such viticulture required industrial levels of petrochemicals to control fungus, and a helluva lot more water to fill the berries.

Lindemans’ win of another Watson a few years later served only to extend the trend, but it soon became apparent the wines were becoming green and leafy commodities, in place of warming and soulful gastronomic luxuries.

Treated badly when Penfolds bought Lindemans in 1990, Laffer did a stint consulting, then joined Orlando Wyndham. In 1989, the giant Pernod Ricard, had bought the business, not so much for any recognition of the potential of Jacob’s Creek, but to distribute their pastis aperitifs in Australia.

Always a tad more strict and uncompromising than most of the daggy winemakers of the day, Laffer came home from the Harvard business college with an astronaut haircut and a new severity. He was ready to move.

As chief winemaker, he climbed aboard the Jacob’s Creek steed and charged the world markets with a fury. Orlando’s MD, Perry Gunner, had originally convinced a small British merchant, Caxton’s, to take one pallet of Jacob’s Creek; before long they were shipping a million cases.

Laffer restructured everything in the wine’s manufacture, from grape grading and purchasing, to building today’s stunning facility.

There were some fluffs, of course: a great swathe of vineyard they bunged into untried land near Langhorne Creek in the late ’90s was on the market within a decade of my receipt of the press release boasting of its 200,000 trellis posts, 1,000 kilometres of drip line, and 50,000 kilometres of wire.

It doesn’t seem all that long ago that Laffer, along with the likes of Constellation-Hardy’s MD Stephen Millar, were hollering about the Chardonnay shortage, begging growers to plant more. But last week he told the gentlemen in London that Australia now has enough, and that he won’t be dabbling in the wine business other than some consulting to Pernod Ricard.

'Australia doesn't need any more vineyards,' he said.

It seems he’ll keep an eye on Pernod Ricard’s big vineyard in far north China, and continue his interest in their Spanish growth.

But he leaves the brand - first launched in 1976 - as Australia’s most popular, currently selling more than 8 million cases in 65 countries.

One wonders what William Jacob would think.

NEW JACOB'S CREEK REFINERY BOSS, BERNARD HICKIN, AT THE BENCH