PATRITTI SWAPS PIEDMONTS: ITALY TO S.A.

GIOVANNI PATRITTI, LEFT: A VERY NEW AUSTRALIAN, SELLING ICE CREAM BY THE ADELAIDE BOTANIC GARDENS GATES IN THE LATE TWENTIES.

The Patrittis Throw A Top Party
Great New Tasting & Sales Suite
At Aussie's Oldest Italian Winery
by PHILIP WHITE

There was a special party in an ordinary little back street in Dover Gardens, Adelaide. The Patritti family had used some of the beautiful Jarrah hardwood from their old wine vats to make a stylish new sales and tasting suite at their suburban winery that hardly anybody knows about. Now it was complete they thought they’d have a bit of a knees-up with politicans and the mayor and their business colleagues, customers, and drinking mates.

A CELEBRATION AT THE SAME WINERY IN EARLIER YEARS: ITALIAN DANCE PARTY IN THE FIFTIES. CHECK THE DUDE IN THE SHADES AND PALE SUIT SECOND FROM RIGHT OGLING THE PRETTY GIRL'S DERRIEIRE ...

I stood outside the marquee to the side, brooding over a ravishing Patritti Barossa Saperavi 2009 ($14; 93+++ points), watching Ines Patritti take the microphone to welcome us. She was shy, and she was obviously moved, and her story was even more moving.

“My Father, Giovanni Patritti, arrived in Adelaide in 1925 at the age of 25 from Piedmont, Northern Italy,” Ines said with humble dignity. There were some sniffles, the big inhalation, recomposure, and a fresh start. You knew that what she was about to say would somehow explain how that mighty winery behind her grew there, and it was obvious she’d grown with it, and in it, that they were part of each other..

“We have no idea how he managed with no English and a community with few native countrymen. However, manage he did – initially doing odd jobs, even selling ice cream as you can see from the old photo taken in front of the gate at the Adelaide Botanic Gardens.

“He came to live in the Marion district around 1926. Making wine was second nature and through the production of wine for his own consumption came a business enterprise. As more Italians arrived in steady numbers, the demand for Italian style red also increased and the business began to flourish.”

Some big people in suits, and a lot of quite ordinary folk, stood in dead silence as they absorbed the weight of the Patritti story. Ines’s description of those long decades of sweat and toil emerged with its own patina in place. Her words had the same beige tint as the old family photos flickering on the screen.

Giovanni (right) leased some land to start with, and gradually purchased more, some of which was planted to old bush vines, as was much of the Adelaide Hills piedmont. There were vineyards from Skye right along the slope to Marion and hooking back north to Glenelg: very fine vineyards which were gradually devoured by mindless villa rash.

I have an etching from the late 1800s, made from somewhere around Skye, looking south across the Grange Hermitage and Romalo, down along that rich piedmont slope. Adelaide is a distant smoky village; the great swathe of vines fades gradually into the Gulf St Vincent, patron of vine growers, thirty kilometers away.

Some of the most recent vineyards to go, those last few hectares the Patrittis owned, were compulsorily acquired by the state government to build a school. The family decided to stay put with the winery, nevertheless, as modern transport made it very easy to truck grapes from over Flagstaff Hill around Morphett and McLaren Vales. Fully understanding that they were part of the population growth essential for the colony’s growth, they thought a school was the best idea, if indeed population growth meant their beloved vines had to go.

THE PATRITTI BROTHERS PAUSING FOR A STOCKTAKE IN THE LATE SIXTIES

But you see a bristle of quiet rage when you ask where the school is.

“After a few years they knocked the school down, sent the kids further away, sub-divided the land, and built more houses,” Ines’s big winemaker son, James Mungall, said later, eerily reflecting what the University of Adelaide plans to do with Glenthorne Farm, the 206ha research property it was granted for a dollar a decade ago, just over the ridge. How stupid we are to imagine that houses are more vital than productive gardens, education and research!

In the dark old vintage halls out the back, James, and his trusted buddy, winemaker Ben Heide, annually crushes around 1000 tonnes of grapes. With 500 tonnes crushed elsewhere, and brought in as must, they make fifty products, give or take a few.

GIOVANNI AND GEOFF PATRITTI WITH THE NEW VINTAGE FRUIT: NOTE THE HAND-MADE BRICKS IN THE WINERY WALLS: EVERYBODY CHIPPED IN TO MAKE THEM AFTER WORK AND ON WEEKENDS. WHEN THEY HAD SUFFICIENT, THEY'D BUILD A NEW WALL.

“The original buildings that had been constructed with corrugated iron - and seaweed for insulation - were slowly rebuilt with hand-made bricks that were manufactured on the winery premises,” Ines continued.

“Power was made available when Dad’s third son, Geoffrey was born in 1947 and this was when a 10 hp Blackstone motor drove the wooden Horwood & Bagshaw crusher.

“Dad met and married my mother, Giovanna Callegari, in Melbourne in 1938. Mum was a sister of one of his Melbourne-based customers. They went on to have three sons and a daughter (me), all of whom entered the family business.”

THE SECOND GENERATION OF AUSTRALIAN PATRITTIS: PETER, JOHN, GEOFF AND INES IN THE LONG-GONE DORADILLA VINEYARD AT DOVER GARDENS IN THE EARLY 70s

English Adelaide got a bit shy about its European immigrants during the wars. If you were German, or Italian, with the wrong attitude, or the wrong contacts back home, you were locked up for the duration of the war. But after the second war, influential people like winemakers Ian Hickinbotham (Kaiser Stuhl) and Colin Gramp (Orlando) made it fashionable, if not a little quaint, to be German in such a quaintly English settlement. People came to the Barossa to look at the Germans, listen to them, and try their food and wine.

There were, however, “New Australian” Italians quietly filling up backstreets and market gardens all that time, enduring the kind of loutish irrespect earlier settlers of this land habitually show the newest wave of immigrants, whatever their homeland. Life was tough for those we derided as Spags, Eye-ties, and Dagoes. It wasn’t cool to be wog in this town until those scarlet Ferraris screamed around the streets in the first Adelaide Formula One Grand Prix in 1986. After that it was compulsory.

Ines made no mention of any of this. She pressed on with the story of the family’s export success, explaining how their first cargo of barrels of red wine were sent by ship up the east coast of Australia to the Queensland cane fields in the ’forties. The tireless Italians who built a good deal of modern Australia need lots of good red wine.

Giovanni Amadio also knew this. He leased vineyards north along the Adelaide piedmont at East Marden, and sold his Amadio Dry Table Wine to the Australian government. This was served to Italian prisoners of war in the internment camps up the Murray - they were a happier lot with some good red wine at mealtimes. Surprise, surprise. And they were the enemy. We lock genuine refugees up in similar camps now. Imagine the outrage if their guards gave them a civilized glass of wine at the taxpayers’ expense!

Faithfully, but prematurely imagining that Australia was ready, in 1962 the Patrittis imported all the necessary machinery and built a state of the art pasta factory beside the winery. Patritti Pasta Gloria was rightfully adored by the few Australians in the know, but the rest of us knew proper spaghetti was squishy white worms in a tin of bad tomato sauce. The business struggled, faded, and ceased, just in time for the winery to require another shed. On things went. To commemorate that brave excursion into fine Italo-Australian cuisine, they now make an incredibly cheap Gloria range of premium wines, using the original pasta label.

GIOVANNI PATRITTI, PATRON OF JUVENTUS SOCCER CLUB, PRESENTS A TROPHY. JUVENTUS EVENTUALLY BECAME ADELAIDE CITY, THE CURRENT CLUB.

Ines went on describing the huge grape glut of the early ’seventies, when her brother Geoff had a brainwave.

“Geoff revels in new ideas and is a constant advocate for the development of new products,” she said. “After considerable thought, the development of the non-alcoholic juice production went ahead and he and my brother John produced the first batch of juice in 1974. After all – what did they have to lose? At worst it could always be turned into wine! What was produced and bottled during that 1974 vintage proved to be so popular it sold out very quickly. In the 1975 vintage, the quantity of juice produced was quadrupled and also sold out prior to the next vintage.”

Once again, Ines sidestepped a scary reality: 1974 was the wettest vintage in Australian history, when the destructive moulds were akin to the ruin of the second wettest, 2011. When nobody else could produce anything worth drinking, Patrittis made unfermented pasteurized juice at a profit. The secret lay in their modern technology: sanitary pressurized bottling and careful pasteurization, as had just been perfected by Ian Hickinbotham, Wolf Blass, and Colin Gramp.

“The juices went into green pressure Riesling bottles with screw caps,” Ines explained. “The range included a Sparkling Grenache, Sparkling Golden Muscatel and Sparkling Pedro. In following vintages, a Sparkling Shiraz grape juice was added. Bottling took place as soon as the juice was stabilized. As it is now, the juice is in-bottle pasteurized. In those days it meant that my brothers, Geoff and John, would spend long into the night making sure that pasteurisation took place correctly as it was done in batches using tanks with two or three batches at a time, whereas now bottling is continuous using a tunnel pasteurizer.

“The 20,000 units (1.5 containers) produced then must have seemed an enormous quantity,” she continued. “When John was telling me about these early times - still with the excitement of the achievement of producing 5,000 units and going on to quadruple it, I was thinking to myself – but that was only 1.5 containers; now only a morning’s work!”

PATRITTI MEN MAKING AN EXPORT DELIVERY IN THE EARLY DAYS

She talked about exporting juice to Canada, about getting Halal certification, which only upset the USA given its tetchiness about Islam, and about how the ’eighties Gulf War saw their sales to Saudi Arabia stop dead. But other sales picked up in the ’nineties, and Patritti opened other markets in Sweden, New Zealand, Malaysia, and India.

Ines recalled her phone ringing in the street in Glenelg. Somebody in Vietnam wanted seven containers of sparkling juice for the Chinese New Year. She ripped back to the winery, everybody dropped everything and they got those containers packed and delivered on deadline in six weeks. Last year they sold 37 containers of Patritti juices in Vietnam.

But not without a hiccup. Literally. Instead of copying Grange, some genius with “close links to the Vietnamese army” launched a counterfeit Patritti Non-alcoholic Sparkling Apple Juice there, but at 11% alcohol. Their agent was wisely tremulous at the thought of legal action, so they pumped some promo money into a big print campaign advising people of the difference and the danger. The true blue no-alc Patritti won the sympathy of the ’Nam punters, and they sold everything before the Chinese New Year. Back to packin’ ships from Dover Gardens.

The Patritti Chinese exercise is fascinating. They sold juices to China; then lower-end reds. And already they’re getting Chinese enthusiasts working from their bladder packs into the lower-priced bottles, and then up toward the top end, where my hypnotizing Saperavi smugly sits at $14.

GIOVANNI PATRITTI, FAMILY AND FRIENDS AT THE VISIT OF PRIMO 'THE AMBLING ALP" CARNERA. AT 197CM AND 129KG, CARNERA WAS THE HEAVIEST WORLD CHAMPION BOXER IN HISTORY. HE BEAT MOST OPPONENTS BY KNOCKOUT, AND ATTRACTED WHAT SEEMED TO BE THE ENTIRE ADELAIDE ITALIAN COMMUNITY TO PATRITTI. BACK IN NEW YORK HE KILLED ERNIE SHCAAF BY KO IN MADISON SQUARE GARDEN, AND WENT ON BECOME A HEAVYWEIGHT WRESTLER AND ACTOR. HE APPEARED FAMOUSLY IN MIGHTY JOE YOUNG, A BIG APE MOVIE WHICH AFICIONADOS REGARD AS SUPERIOR TO KING KONG IN THE QUALITY OF ITS SPECIAL EFFECTS.

“We believe it’s the wide variety of packaging options that we can offer that’s helped provide starting points for these export customers,” Ines said. “The Indian market has embraced our de-alcoholised wines and some juices. Once again, we negociated with our clients and the labels were modified to suit their requirements. Because we have our own production and packaging facility, we’re able to tailor the products and packaging requests to suit the client.”

As it grew, Patritti remained self-contained, an incredible rarity for wineries today. Not only do they have their own packaging and labeling lines, but they can make just about any type of sparkling anything and bottle it to order at your price. I was surprised to find they didn’t own a printing press. Check the Patritti website and marvel at how cheaply you can sell wines if you do everything in-house.

And when you consider how they turned the botrytis disaster of 1974 into good money with modern technology, you can bet Patritti will be the one winery to make the most of this year’s mess after another 37 years of perfecting the old Hick/Blass/Gramp technology. Not many wineries boast a continuous pasteuriser!

THE ANCIENT PATRITTI BUSH-VINE GRENACHE VINEYARD SOUTH OF THE SUBURBS AT TATACHILLA IN McLAREN VALE IS GRADUALLY BEING REJUVENATED.

Finally, to really rip the strings of this sultry heart, the Patrittis have taken over the management of the council-owned Marion Vineyard on Oaklands Road. Surrounded completely by houses and light industry, this final single hectare of the great southern suburban vignoble was planted to Grenache and Shiraz in 1907. Saved from conversion to a fast food wasteland for obese taggers by my Adelaide Vines project, and Brian Miller in 1989, it had once again been let fall into disrepair. Council decided in 2006 to invite the Patrittis to look after it in exchange for its precious fruit, which they are doing with fastidious skill. Their first release from the rejuvenated vines is the delicious 2008; each vintage the pressings go into a special fortified, yet to be released.

Along with the remnant of the Grange Hermitage Vineyard now called Magill Estate, and the tiny 1932 Montmartre Vineyard in Paris, this is the most significant suburban vineyard on Earth. Traffic should be forced to slow down as it passes, and learn some respect. It has the earliest vines, and at last it’s in appropriate hands: the oldest Italian family-owned winery in Australia. I could think of no more appropriate, nor delicious Adelaide souvenir to give foreign guests or new Australians.

But make yourself a gift: go visit Patritti. Be astonished. You won’t need much money, and you’ll leave with a freshly-warmed heart.

OLD OAK VATS AT PATRITTI: STILL LOVINGLY MAINTAINED FOR WINE STORAGE