AUSTRALIA'S BORDEAUX VINTAGE SUCKS

ROGER PIKE'S MARIUS VINEYARD AFTER PRUNING LAST YEAR

Rots Rattling Sopping Aussies Worst Vintage Ever For Some Smart Dudes Chill And Endure

by PHILIP WHITE

Sitting on the veranda at my friend Pike’s beautiful little vineyard on the faultline at Willunga on Tuesday, you could have thought the long slow vintage of 2011 was just jim dandy.

The pickers had made their last snip of the season and were settling back to a classic Marius Wines repast, the grapes were all safe in the winery with very snappy vital statistics, and a pair of Wedge-tailed Eagles slouched around on the breeze about thirty metres up, ignoring the frenzied Magpie Stukas.

CLEAN McLAREN VALE SHIRAZ FROM EARLY IN THE VINTAGE

Sure: the stray berry in Pike’s Shiraz had an initial touch of the botrytis that growers were complaining of, but nowhere near enough for that noble rot to cause ignoble trouble in the winery. The fruit tasted brilliant.

But as the rain settled in across the whole of South-east Australia, growers in Clare, Barossa, the Adelaide Hills, Langhorne Creek, McLaren Vale, the Murray Valley and the Limestone Coast couldn’t do much more than sit back and weep.

In this apocalyptic vintage of drought followed by irrigation restrictions then tropical deluge, cyclones and merciless floods, we had watched vineyards fail for months, down along the Great Divide from Hilltops and Young, through Griffith, and all along the Murray-Darling, from Bourke to Blanchetown and right through Victoria. If it wasn’t too little or too much water, it was moulds and mildews of all sorts, made worse because there simply wasn’t enough standard petrochem fungicide in the country.

In contrast, the lead-in to vintage was just about perfect in the Mount Lofty Ranges, from the tip of the Fleurieu to the top of Clare. The rains were good, the breezes welcome, and the summer eagerly awaited. But it simply never came.

On that moist Monday, we joked about McLaren Vale having a Bordeaux vintage. Tuesday, while Pike picked, growers with less advanced fruit watched the botrytis develop. Peter Barry, of Jim Barry Wines in Clare was first onto the breakfast news, declaring that he’d be using modern spraying techniques to blitz his moulds the good old-fashioned way. Barossa vineyard spokeman Leo Pech, never a tower of unjustified posivitism by any means, reached further down than I’d even heard him reach before when he said this was the worst vintage he’d seen in 61 years. By Wednesday morning, as the rain followed Pech down with a vengeance, many had kissed their year good-bye. By Wednesday afternoon, the Bordeaux jokes had been replaced by lame sniggers about it being a classic Hunter vintage.

The Hunter, of course, is sub-tropical.

This rain swelled berries to bursting point, fed the rapid growth of the nasty moulds and funguses already mentioned, and set loose a wave of botrytis mould unlike anything any of us have ever seen here.

BOTRYTIS CINEREA ONSET ON SHIRAZ ...SOME BERRIES APPEAR CLEAR, SOME HAVE INITIAL SKIN SOFTENING AND SHRIVELLING; THE MOST EXTREME CASES SHOW THE SKIN BROKEN DOWN COMPLETELY photo JAMES HOOK DJ's GROWERS

It’s rare in places like Bordeaux and Burgundy for a vintage to pass without some botrytis infection of the red fruit. Fastidious bunch selection, even down to individual grape selection, sorts most of it; the winemakers have their little tricks to manage it, and of course many of the laziest winemakers make a complete botch of it.

Botrytis cinerea – noble rot - is one of the most common moulds. It lives fairly harmlessly in your fridge – it’s the first thing that makes your tomato skins wrinkly and your strawberries mushy. It lives tidily at the pore in the skin of fruits, sending a little spike-like root through the vent into the juice, where it converts some of the fruit’s sugar to glycerol, hastens the evaporation of the water in the juice, and somehow makes the wine smell like dried apricots being reconstituted in water.

When this occurs cleanly, without other moulds, in white grapes in Bordeaux, the Semillon and Sauvignon blanc of the Sauternes and Barsac districts are used to make those revered luscious wines that people happily pay the earth for.

But in red wine, while adding similar viscosity and mouthfeel with that glycerol and shriveling through transpiration, botrytis also gives rise to laccase, an oxidase enzyme which turns red wine milky when exposed to oxygen.

EVEN THE GLORY VINE IS CHALLENGED BY VINTAGE 2011: SOME LEAVES THINK WINTER'S HERE, WHILE THERE'S A SECOND FLUSH OF NEW ONES ... SIMILAR THINGS ARE HAPPENING IN THE VINEYARDS

While the Australian technique has been to blitz all vineyards with fungicides so no botrytis survives in the vineyard, winemakers trained in Bordeaux and Burgundy obviously have clever tricks to handle its arrival in the winery.

One such person, the late Stephen Hickinbotham, came home to Australia in the early ’80s to make exquisite dry reds deliberately infected with some botrytis, because he knew this peculiar mould was common in Bordeaux and Burgundy, the wine regions Australia had otherwise copied. He quite adamantly maintained that he never made red wines without some botrytis.

Even when he had the Wine Research Institute import an enzyme from Sauternes to measure botrytis via gluconic acid and certify that his dry reds were infected, disbelieving industrial winemakers and prominent plonky academics ridiculed him to his face.

At a special tasting we organized in 1984, Max Schubert was the only winemaker who said he had no reason to disbelieve Hickinbotham’s claims, and declared the wines to be lovely things indeed.

THE SUMMER OF 2011 HAS BEEN WET, WET, WET, WINDY AND WET, EXTREMELY WINDY AND WET, AND WET AGAIN IN AUSTRALIA, HALF OF WHICH HAS BEEN UNDERWATER FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE NOAH

A rigorous intellectual and sceptic, Hickie was amongst the first Australian winemakers to work, well, nearly everywhere. By ’84, at 30 years of age, he’d studied at Bordeaux University, made wine for the Rothschilds, worked in a government wine research laboratory in Alsace, then at Bollinger and Mumm, and had completed vintages at Rutherglen, Barossa, Mildura, the Hunter Valley and Great Western. He first predicted that Marlborough would become the Sauvignon blanc garden of the planet. His were amongst the first great modern Tasmanian reds, and he’d made some of the earliest Adelaide Hills wines at his uncle Allan's vineyard at Clarendon. Which is not to overlook the ravishing reds he made at his family’s vineyard on a volcano at Anakie, near Geelong.

Like his grandfather, the mighty Hick, founder of the Roseworthy Oenology degree course, and his father Ian, another legendary winemaker and wine scientist, Stephen was great student of pasteurisation. He believed that in his relentless determination to boil ALL organisms out of beverages, Louis Pasteur overlooked the notion that some are good for the winemaker.

“If Pasteur’s well-intentioned advice was heeded by all the French vignerons, we’d have no great French wines today,” Hickie told me. “Pasteur neglected to study great wines, and he never came to realise that if they were properly controlled, the same bacteria would, or could, have some highly desirable effects, like conducting the malolactic fermentation which is common to so many great French wines.

“The role that noble rot can play in making red wines has been obscured for several reasons. Certain ill effects found in red wines have been attributed to noble rot because the original grapes were noble rot infected. The great, healthy wines have never really been studied, and because researchers often have so little practical winemaking experience, the role botrytis can play in red wine making has been ignored. That’s pretty simple.

“Carefully controlled noble rot can contribute great complexity to red wines. Many of Bordeaux’s greatest red wines were from grapes infected by botrytis.”

At that historical 1984 tasting, Max Schubert said the test wines reminded him of the days when he used flor yeast on red juice to make “nice complex mother wines”, the bases for his famous blends. “Nobody really believed I did that either”, Max chuckled. “I had to get used to keeping my mouth shut. I heat-treated those wines.”

Cornered, Dr. Terry Lee, then the head of the WRI, said “There’s not really such a big mystery about handling botrytis in reds. You can handle it with heat treatment”.

While Stephen Hickinbotham (above) took his secrets to his early grave after a plane crash, it’s worth remembering that it was his father Ian who made incredible breakthroughs at Kaiser Stuhl in the ’fifties, working with pressurised pasteurization of white wine for sparkling, stabilizing them to a degree otherwise unknown in those years, but heating the wine to only 63 degrees centigrade, “therefore not damaging the quality”, he wrote in his autobiography, Australian Plonky.

“In fact, in our experiments we had found that the heat treatment helped ‘round’ the taste, meaning the wine was more drinkable immediately.”

So while three of those four Hickinbothams are in their graves, and Ian is in genteel retirement at a great age, we could certainly use their brains in a vintage like this. Perhaps part of the Hickinbotham secret lies in the flavours and textures imparted by certain bacterium and enzymes, and part of it lies in the fastidious management of low-temperature pasteurization to remove some bacterium, while letting others, or their traces, survive.

It’s a great pity that in the midst of the abject panic now rife in the industrial wine business, there’s no Hick raising a helpful hand.

But, after all that derision, even if they were alive, why should they?

It looks like there’ll be some sunshine next week, but meager heat. Some vineyards will survive, just, if the sun shines warmly and drying breezes blow. Others, like Pike’s Marius, and other clever specialists, already have.

But the bullies who manage the brutal business of purchasing fruit for the biggest companies, who walked away from partially-damaged vineyards just days before the big-time botrytis hit, must now be rueing their bloody-mindedness, as the better fruit they imagined would emerge elsewhere vanishes like a wicked spinning genie.

WINERIES HAVE SAT QUIETLY, WAITING FOR THE SUN TO BREAK THROUGH AND THE CROP TO RIPEN AND DRY, BUT NOW THERE'S A CERTAIN DEGREE OF PANIC IN SOME QUARTERS, WHILE WINEMAKERS RISK PICKING GREEN FRUIT TO AVOID FURTHER BOTRYTIS INFECTION