MOLLYDOOKER'S VELVET GLOVE INCIDENT

MOLLYDOOKER OWNER/WINEMAKER SPARKY MARQUIS WITH WINE DAMAGED WHEN A SHIPPING CONTAINER WAS DROPPED, TRIGGERING AN INSURANCE CLAIM FIRST REPORTED TO BE IN THE VICINTY OF $1 MILLION ... CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO HEAR THE WHOLE SORRY STORY photo MOLLYDOOKER

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by PHILIP WHITE

So. Mollydooker Winery’s export shippers somehow managed to drop, shatter or damage a lot of cases of very expensive McLaren Vale Shiraz.

In all the international fluff and bluster surrounding the dropping of the shipping container filled with Sparky and Sarah Marquis’ Mollydooker Velvet Glove Shiraz ($185 per bottle), nobody bothered to mention that the source of the wine, the revered Gateway Vineyard owned by rival David Paxton and a consortium of McLaren Vale A-Listers, is immediately adjacent to the Seaford Heights property that the Labor government and its developer mates are determined to cover with housing.

In all the front-page tears and grief that the busted boxes triggered, nobody has mentioned that Marquis’ possible $1.025 million loss is piffling compared to the income that site would trigger were it sensibly put to clever vineyard.

Sell it for houses; it’s gone forever and you get one quick squirt of cash. Plant it to vineyard, and you’d get those very big numbers every year, ongoing, ad infinitum. Many ordinary vineyards on lesser land may come and go according to the wine industry’s crazy splurge-and-retreat cycles, but only this intellectually decrepit Labor mob would seriously consider cementing this one over.

DAVID PAXTON IN HIS GATEWAY VINEYARD, THE SOURCE OF MOLLYDOOKER'S $185 PER BOTTLE VELVET GLOVE SHIRAZ ... THE SEAFORD HEIGHTS SITE IS THE HILL BETWEEN HIM AND THE GULF St VINCENT, PATRON OF VITICULTURERS photo KATE ELMES

While the priceless 650 million year-plus siltstones of the Reynella Member and the Wilmington Formation have been almost entirely built over on the northern third of the McLaren Vale Geographical Indicator, the only bit of this geology in the Willunga Embayment is the Gateway Vineyard and Seaford Heights, just across the road. David Paxton has never had a shard of doubt as to its importance and its potential, and had sought fruitlessly to purchase the Seaford Heights land for more super-premium vineyard some years ago.

Another small outcrop of the same geology, just north of the Onkaparinga Gorge between Cox’s Hill Road and States Road, is home to the Ulithorne Vineyard, source of prized fruit for many canny Vales winesmiths, including Rose Kentish, who just a couple of years back won her Bushing Crown with it. The houses are creeping toward those fences, too.

But back to matters of publicity, which the Marquis family is determinedly grim at reaping. After gaining significant coverage through its distribution, they “withdrew” their original press release, and issued another statement requesting that “journalists and other readers should disregard the news release Years of Tears and Sweat and More Than $1 Million Worth of Fine Wine Go Down the Drain, issued 25-Jul-2011 over PR Newswire.”

The news of this turnabout seemed to garner more international press than the first, presumably erroneous one. While that apparent backflip sizzled around the internet and the tittering tippling classes, they were left awaiting yet another release to correct the first: a dramatic pause that the Bard himself would find savoury.

Even London’s pompous Decanter magazine had a huffy hissy on its website, complaining that while “a revised release 'will be issued at a later time' … it has not been possible to contact Mollydooker for more information.”

I scoured the first release for possible legal hitches and insurance problems – the container had been fully insured – and thought I saw a few claims and suggestions there which some lawyers may think to be possibly contentious to one party or another, but surely in a very minor way.

CLICK ON THIS MOLLYDOOKER PROMO IMAGE TO WATCH VID OF THE MARQUIS RESPONSE TO THE GOODWILL THEY'VE HAD SINCE THE VELVET GLOVE INCIDENT

Just fishing, I thought I’d ask the Mollydooker owners which parts of the release were inaccurate. Janet Gawith, Sparky’s Mum, was quick to respond. She said the release I had was in fact the third one, with all the corrections in place.

“Somebody accidentally sent out a draft of the first release”, she advised. “It had the wrong heading; the wrong facts. You’ve got to be very careful with these things, with big insurance claims pending and so forth,” and assured me the release I held was the correct one.

She also thanked me for bothering to check, and said no other journalist had done so.

Surprisingly, Sparky himself then sent me a copy of the erroneous one – the one you wouldn’t want falling into the hands of the press. Again.

“I wasn’t sure if you wanted to see what the differences were from the press release that was the draft and mistakenly put online and the correct one,” he explained. “I found the draft on the Coca-Cola internal web site (that in itself made me laugh – maybe we are competing against Coca-Cola).”

Attached was a link to that initial, presumably erroneous document. It’s fascinating to compare the two.

The headline – “Years of Tears and Sweat, and More Than $1 Million Worth of Fine Wine Go Down the Drain” - had disappeared from the third release. But Mollydooker had already got that tearjerker into circulation in both the first release and their second one, which “withdrew” the first.

How anybody can “withdraw” a press statement which had gone around the world, won the winery a front page in The Advertiser, this state's only metro daily, and even made the internal mailing list of Coca-Cola staffers, is a baffling notion, but there you go.

In the corrected version, the line about the container falling six metres “and doing away with one third of the winemaker’s annual production” was gone. As was the bit about the failure of the forklift’s “security locking device … sending the wine more than 18 feet to the ground.”

Another paragraph down, however, the revised version then re-inserted the line “luckily we still have two-thirds of our production left so we still have plenty to share with our friends.”

So, we’re half way in, and there’s barely a scrap of difference between the withdrawn document and its replacement. But then the revised version adds a plug for “International Mollydooker Day”, when the wine was intended for release in the USA on September 15th.

ANOTHER OF THE PROMO PHOTOGRAPHS MOLLYDOOKER DISTRIBUTED TO THE PRESS AFTER THE VELVET GLOVE INCIDENT

“The Marquises and insurance assessors are now checking each bottle by hand to determine if any of the $1.025 million shipment can be salvaged,” it added, dropping the initial claim that “at least 70 per cent of the cartons have been reported damaged.”

The revised version also includes a new plug for the confounding “Marquis Fruit Weight” index, which is trademarked, and apparently helps determine which parcels of fruit make the Velvet Glove appellation. Then it goes on to add more breathless claims to the wine’s quality, as measured by the equally confounding USA wine press in the form of that dreaded lover of jammy gloop-gloop high alcohol wines, Robert Parker Jr., who has awarded the Marquis tribe “more 94-99 point scored than any other winemakers in the world” and dubbed them “Top Wine Personalities in the World.” The equally adoring Wine Spectator magazine has included four Mollydooker wines in its Top 100, and so on, and so forth. They’re not missing any opportunity to rub in the bling, but nowhere do they advise us that the Gateway Vineyard, the source of the fruit in the dropped bottles, is owned by David Paxton and his partners, and not Mollydooker.

So there you go. Three waves of press attention in place of one, and now I hand them a fourth. At least this should sit in neat counterpoint to the tear-jerking stuff they’ve put all over Youtube and Facebook.

Just between you and me: the Northern Hemisphere’s fascination for late-picked wines of incredibly dense fruit is waning as blogosphere rabble dilutes the opinions of the few US critics mentioned above. On top of that, the Aussie dollar now buys 110 US cents. So if I were Sparky, I’d be happy to see a successful insurance claim deliver the money: it could be safer and quicker than waiting for the USA salesmen to cough up. Sparky’s former USA partner, Dan Phillips, comes to mind. Their bitter court battle was not so long ago; Phillip’s Australian operation is still in receivership.

GLENTHORNE FARM: ONCE AGAIN UNDER HOUSING THREAT photo LEO DAVIS

And, sorry, but one last plug for the viticultural worth of the ground which produced this expensive luxury. There IS one more bit of it left unplanted. That’s the 209 hectare Glenthorne Farm at the top of Taps. This, of course is the farm we taxpayers bought from the CSIRO, and gave to the University of Adelaide for $1, provided it set about using the land for desperately-required viticultural, horticultural, and winemaking research.

As Planning Minister, Deputy-premier Rau is the only one who could release the University from the solemn deed it signed a decade back, promising to carry out such research, and repeatedly forbidding it from any sub-development. As Attorney-general, he is the appropriate Minister to advise the Planning Minister as to the legal hitches which might be encountered in scrapping the deed, which the University desperately wants to do, so it can sub-divide and develop the site. It has never really attempted to keep its pledge and use the site for viticultural, horticultural, and winemaking research.

In his suggested plan for “saving” McLaren Vale from further ghetto spread, the same Minister makes it clear this land should be excluded from the preservation zone, meaning that once again, it, too, would be ripe for another outbreak of dreaded villa rash.

Given their phenomenal international reputation and respect, their skill at the gathering of such fame, and the fact that they can get so much money for a bottle of Gateway which may cost them, say $20 to produce, perhaps the Marquis family might exert some influence? Do something civic-minded?

BOTRYTISED SHIRAZ WITH SEVERELY STRESSED LEAVES IN THE MOLLYDOOKER VINEYARD BESIDE THE WINERY, VINTAGE 2011 ... MOST OF McLAREN VALE HAD PICKED OR GIVEN UP BY THIS STAGE OF VINTAGE, AND YET MOLLYDOOKER WAS STILL WATERING THESE VINES DURING THE SECOND WETTEST VINTAGE IN HISTORY ... CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO LEARN ABOUT MOLLYDOOKER'S TRADEMARKED FRUIT WEIGHT INDEX

And that's not all they've trademarked. There's also the Marquis Vineyard Watering Programme (sic) ™ ...

On April 28th, the Mollydooker Facebook entry said "The Marquis Vineyard Watering Programme™ tells us how much water we need to apply each day in the weeks before harvest to keep the canopy working and to hold the grape sugar levels down. Because we are watering, we can leave the grapes on the vines for an additional 10-14 days to accumulate extra flavour and colour. We don't pick grapes for Mollydooker until the flavour levels reach Awesome, and the juice has a Marquis Fruit Weight™ of at least 60%. It is our guarantee of quality to you. Janet."

On April 16, the site had reported: "We are watering to keep the sugar levels down and the canopy flourishing so that the Mollydooker grapes can continue to bask in the beautiful Indian summer sun. The vines are maturing and sending ripe tannin signals to the grapes, which gain extra flavour and richness every day."