RIESLING: ALL ABOUT TESTOSTERONE?

PROPER RIESLING PEOPLE: COLIN FORBES, left, MAKER OF MANY OF THE GREATEST HIGH BAROSSA - EDEN VALLEY RIESLINGS KNOWN TO DRINKSTER, WITH MARIE LINKE OF KARRA YERTA WHERE THEY MAKE SOME OF THE BEST OF THE REST, IN TINY, DRY-GROWN VOLUMES photo MILTON WORDLEY

Wine Mavens Hot On The Lash:
No Chance In Softcock Chardy v.
King Hell Mofo Top Whizz Rizza
by PHILIP WHITE


BACK IN the olden days, newspaper editors would bark orders to their wine writers, demanding more stuff about women winemakers. This had little to do with the quality of their wine, but was about getting more lasses onto the page. If the editor was male, like the one who called me his “squirt writer,” I’d cringe, knowing their tendency to bugger it up with a sexist photograph and dumb headline.

Feminist editors were perversely insistent, on the other hand, on including the word feisty in their headline. Something in my Vikin soul told me this was wrong. It wasn’t so much the insinuation that winemakers with vaginas would make wines of better flavour than those made by people with penises; my problem had more to do with feisty coming from feist, which is a constantly yapping mongrel cur, usually small.

The term originates in the Old Norse and Icelandic fisa, which means fart.

There must be ways of measuring the relationship of gender and wine, but I’m sure it’s more about hormones and pheromones than your actual genitalia: more about fuel and electricity than gearbox.

A recent study in the Philippines has revealed how testosterone levels vary: how this affects the way men live their lives, and how rotely accepting they are at the loss of it.

Christopher W. Kuzawa, PhD, of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and his colleagues, tested 624 men over a stretch of years, and have discovered that young men with high testosterone levels are more likely to become fathers early, at which point their testosterone levels tumble and they become much more nurturing and protective and very much less horny. The fearless hunter becomes the mungbean sprout cultivator.

The dummy washer.

Scientists had long known of similar patterns occurring in many other animal species, but had, until now, only suspected its parallel occurrence amongst humans.

Of course this made me think of Riesling.

LOUISA ROSE: AS CHIEF WINEMAKER AT YALUMBA, SHE'S BOSS OF SOME KING-HELL RIESLING

It’s not so much the actual gender that makes the difference. I suspect it’s the winemaker’s level of testosterone. While women produce only a fraction of the amount manufactured by men, this hormone is still a very important part of the character and attitude of all of us. And I suspect Riesling, particularly the best stuff from the Eden and Clare Valleys, is preferred by men and women with very healthy testosterone levels.

Riesling is grown and made to be challenging, bracing, austere wine. It is deliberately designed to be tight with steely, macho acidity. It is the wine of the dominatrix and the severe, the head prefect and the righteous. Morticia Addams drinks Riesling.

I regard Chardonnay, in contrast, to be generally made to be the carer’s wine: the tipple of the cuddlepot and the motherly, even the dangerously sensitive.

Of all grapes, Chardonnay seems to react most overtly to the malo-lactic fermentation, in which bacteria, not yeast, convert its harsh natural malic acid (which tastes metallic, like Riesling) to the fatty lactic acid, the natural acid of mother’s milk and, well, vaginas.

Fair dinkum.

Good Chardonnay is generally creamy and comforting; quite the opposite of your savage lashing Rizza, which does not have a malo-lactic fermentation. Which is not to say that’s always the case: in her Chapel Hill days, Pam Dunsford seemed determined to make her unoaked Chardonnays more like Riesling.

The late winemaker Dr. Max Lake theorized a lot about these things and wrote many books on the topic of aromas and pheromones. Derided while alive by the sorts of zombie winemakers who come off the University of Adelaide production line in their hard hats and steel capped boots to make wines which have led to the collapse of the Australian business, Max was the ultimate sensualist, and many of his suppositions and postulations are gradually earning respect.

THE OTHER MAX:
Dr MAX LAKE


















I wish he was here to urge the Australian Wine Institute to test my theory. Surely Mike Rann could fix this before he goes: he could get Winestate magazine to sponsor Chris Kuzawa and his team on the Adelaide campus. Does the fearless Riesling-drinking hunter always become the mungbean sprouting Chardonnay drinker? A dummy-washer?

Not if you think at length about my list of true Riesling masters. I suspect that once your testosterone leads you into the Riesling camp, you’re here for life. Perhaps Riesling triggers testosterone manufacture.

RIESLING WOMEN: KERRI THOMPSON (left) WITH CRABTREE CO-OWNER RASA FABIAN photo JOHN KRUGER

Think of the great Riesling makers of our age. Brian Barry. Wolf Blass. John Vickery. Colin Gramp. Colin Forbes. Jeff Grosset. O’Leary Walker. Ben Jeanneret. Andrew Hardy. Tim Knappstein. Some of these blokes are even older than me: the wise scientist would hire a diligent social historian rather than a whitecoat taking swabs to estimate the testosterone that drove them in their heyday.

Few have ever gone on to become famous for Chardonnay.

Brian Croser regarded himself as something of a Riesling maker back at Hardy’s, but he later cross-dressed his Petaluma Rizza with a peculiar Graves yeast which released sooky esters I felt were more akin to the mood of Chardonnay than to your whiprod-and-rapier, steel-and-lemon Riesling.

While Blass (leaning on tractor, left, with colleagues) was sweetening his Riesling with pasteurized unfermented Riesling juice to tickle the national sweet tooth, Croser and his Chairman Len Evans preferred the illusion of sweetness which their R2 yeast offered, with all that artifice of estery banana and pineapple.

Surely they missed the point. How many use R2 today?

While he affected the strut of a Riesling king, Evans (below)was always a runny Chardonnay in the middle.

“Chardonnay will be the vanilla of the Australian wine industry” was his mantra. Then, as if such stuff was suddenly about to appear out of our desert, he’d pop a great Mersault or Montrachet Burgundy that cost somebody hundreds of dollars. (White Burgundy should never ever be confused with Chardonnay, which is what it happens to be made from.)

But, c’mon, vanilla? Why didn’t he preach the lactic acid gospel? The cream!

So there went the Petaluma Chardonnay. On the Riesling front, Petal mercilessly flogged its R2 yeast culture to its rivals, until the point where much of Australia’s Riesling smelt of R2. But no R2 Riesling ever achieved what Blassie did, getting his Yellow Label Riesling into the number one sales slot with neutral commercial yeast and a dash of pure unfermented juice.

Blassie was never an R2 man, and never a Chardonnay: he spent the ’eighties questioning Australia’s lunge to the variety, insisting it wouldn’t work. He preferred his characterful blends of things like Semillon, Colombard, Trebbiano and Crouchen, which he called Classic Dry White. The Margaret River lot pinched his CDW moniker for their blends of Semillon and Sauvignon blanc: admixtures designed to give Sauvignon blanc some creamy Chardonnay-like nurture.

On my testosterone index, most Sauvignon blanc is thin, pissy Riesling with aftershave in it. I realized this in the later ’eighties. Suddenly a girl couldn’t steer her Manolos more than ten steps up Double Bay without teetering into an ice bucket full of Cloudy Bay. But these pioneering Sauvignon blanc boulevardiennes were, shall we say, fully grown-up women, beginning to worry about things like osteoporosis.

My occasional role as a manfriend has revealed that some of these mature types quite like their HRT testosterone, the sudden application of which generally triggers a savage lurch to Savvy-b.

Riesling with aftershave, see?

Which leads to the Riesling-making womenfolk; our dominant winemavens. You don’t get too much along the way of teetering going down in their neck of the woods. These women march.

Julie Barry (Good Catholic Girl), Elizabeth Heidenreich (Sevenhill), Kerri Thompson (KT and the Falcon; Crabtree), Keeda Zilm (O’Leary-Walker; Zilm-Heidenreich, with the author on the lash, '09, right), Judi Cullam (Frankland Estate), Stephanie Toole (Mt Horrocks), Louisa Rose (Yalumba), Elena Brooks (Dandelion Vineyards) … while these winemakers can be fierce red beasts when provoked, they first hone their thirst on the Riesling strop. They are masters all, and not one of them a feist.

They can souse my dummy in Riesling any time they like.

And while I suspect that they would rarely equal, say, Wolf Blass on the testometer - at his peak, anyway - I reckon for determination, intelligence and demeanour, as well as their beautifully strapping, bracing Rieslings, they’re an easy match for them cocky old Riesling farts.