While the mighty Lindemans was building million-litre steel tanks for bladder-packs at Karadoc, near Mildura, A. P. John, the Barossa coopers, were building nine of these 100,000 litre oak vats for making marmalade at the Riverland Fruit Cannery ... posted in pursuit of a juxtaposition of philosophies ... note the total volume of these vats is still 100,000 litres short of one of Karadoc's new tanks ... photo Glen Schulz, A. P. John
The nature of consistency in mega-bulk and micro extremes: it's a tricky business both ends
by PHILIP WHITE
Lindemans' wines
propaganda unit showed a dangerous naïvete
when it first invited little Whitey to its glittering Karadoc artifice to show him
a thing or two.
It was the biggest winery
in Australia back then, nearly forty years ago.
Jacko's Don't Stop Til You Get Enough was
rockin' the stereo as I drove; video was still killing the radio star, and as a
sort of musical warning for the flood of Sauvignon blanc to come, the Kiwis -
Split Enz - held the Number 1 slot for eight whole weeks with I Got You.
The Kiwis eventually
got us fair and square. But Lindemans never got Whitey. The writer was prepared. It
was a handy thing, coming to the wine racket from the mining business.
Some basic rock-hard geo
logic prepared me to enter the vine from below, through its roots.
Awareness of the scale of
huge refineries for petrochemicals and giant enriching plants to extract the
good bits of rocks and dirt was handy, too.
Knowing how the
professionals did it brought me to the wine industry's early emulations of such
machinery with a finely-jaundiced derision.
And an understanding of
the precision required when assaying things like silver and gold, arsenic and
plutonium instilled in the young observer the unlikelihood of the wine business
ever affording such accuracy in marketing its most profitable ingredient: the
depressant drug, ethanol.
Once you cross the Murray
at Blanchetown, it's old seabed all the way to Mildura and beyond to Karadoc:
brine-filled limestone laid down as the oceans came and went with the ice ages and
Australia began its voyage from Gondwanaland to India about 40 million years
ago. We're nearly halfway there.
Soil profile at Coonawarra ... photo©Milton Wordley
I thought about this as I
drove, understanding that the top reds they would show me came from the highly
irrigated Coonawarra, at the bottom of the Murray-Darling Basin. Famous clarets:
St George's and Limestone Ridge. (Pyrus wasn't dreamed of until a last-minute
experimental blend up and won the Jimmy Watson Trophy years later in 1986 and
somebody had to think a name up real quick so they could inform the media.)
I was doubtful that they'd
be showing me much wine from the extremely-irrigated, high-yielding grapeyards
anywhere near the actual winery, which was spreading its steel and concrete
over the flats between the Gol Gol State Forest across the River to the north
and the giant salt pan three kilometres to the south.
'Karadoc' comes from Caer
Caradoc, a rugged crest in a hogsback ridge in Shropshire. With a good twist of
Camelot myth, this was named in turn after Caratācos, or in the Welsh Caratawc or Caradog, the savage Catuvellauni chieftain who led
the wars against the Roman invaders.
Vision of Caratacus by William Blake
Lindy's PR told me they
thought it was an aboriginal name.
Anyway, the boss there was
particularly proud of the gantry system they'd installed. The grapes would be
tipped from the harvesting machines into big steel grape bins. They'd haul
these to the winery, hoist 'em off and slide 'em along this overhead pulley affair to be
poured into the nearest empty crusher.
Nothing ever stopped.
The other thing they were
very proud of were the first million-litre tanks in the Australian wine
industry. I'd seen much bigger ones in
oil and gas, but these were the beginning of something new in wine. Each of them
seemed to be in the care of its own young winemaker whose job it was to ensure
nothing went wrong with its contents until that great day when the phone on
their desk would ring and a voice would announce it was the turn of their tank
to be sucked through the underground pipes and squirted into the new-model silver
pillows, then boxed and sent to the cities.
I knew from very early on
that the burgeoning wine industrialists of the day were teaching themselves to
use impossibly cheap irrigation water and the petrochem web of fungicides,
herbicides and fertilisers to mine the Murray Mallee for grape sugar. Their
scorched earth policy showed much less environmental sensitivity than most
miners were forced to adopt under the conditions of their leases.
But these Karadoc blokes
were the first winemakers I encountered who actually dressed like miners: steel
caps, hi-vis vests, safety glasses and hard hats with a Dymotape name and rank
on the front.
Imagine a great chef
dressing like that.
That day, as a phone rang
somewhere and the bag-filling machine swapped its supply line from one giant
tank to another, I noticed the boxes didn't change. Some tiny secret code
somewhere may have changed but this wasn't like changing the vintage or
anything. Even if a publisher did ever risk the litigation possible should I honestly
review bargain bladder pack wines, there would never be any solid guarantee
that my reader would be buying the wine I wrote of.
Million litres each, sure,
but different tank, different wine.
Bacchus only knows how
much method has changed at Karadoc, which is much bigger now, and is part of Treasury Wine
Estates, who don't boast of it much.
Supported by a compliant
wine show system, that sort of vast industrial monoculture went on for decades.
It happened in beer, too. For years all the beer in Australia - Coopers
excluded, bless 'em - smelt and tasted of the hop essence peddled by Carlton
United Breweries after they'd monopolised the Australian hop industry and
'rationalised' it to the extent that nobody, including their own brewers, had easy
access to traditional fresh hop flower cones.
They owned all the hops
then boiled 'em up into a goo and they'd flog that until all the barrel and
bottled beer in Australia smelt like the brewery slums
of Richmond and Burnley.
Twenty years of this 'rationalisation'
mentality eventually triggered a very predictable revolution. Blokes started
growing Mennonite beards. Young women began dying their hair grey, and
everybody started making orange wine. Brown wine. Craft beer. Gin, for Bacchus'
sake.
In a gentle hippy sort of
way, the booze of the western world took a colourful swirl from mono to
chaotically retro-fractal.
photo©Philip
White
So when an editor
suggested a few weeks back I should take a bit of a look at the craft beer
world, it was confronting, after we hung up, to realise my reluctance to enter
that realm comes from the same fear of discontinuity I first developed at
Karadoc.
Small batch beer
production is extremely variable, especially when managed by untrained opportunists
without a full brewers' kit. Like a hop kettle. I refuse to call anybody who
doesn't brew their own hops a brewer. A brewery has its own hop kettle. It doesn't
buy a half-made essence from somewhere else.
It's a lot harder to make
a good beer, especially a consistent one, than it is to make a good red wine.
A still is an even more
confounding and tricky beast to run.
So forgive my fear of
batch variation in megabulk goonbag alleyjuice as much as in tiny-batch bearded
beer, wine and spirits.
I'm still trying to devise
a way of approaching this.
So far, one responsibly-made
Australian wine vintage a year has proved a tricky bugger to explain.
In the meantime, in the
spirit of retro as much as a more colourful, reliable drinking future, I'd be
happy to taste new discoveries made by genius revolutionaries of the calibre of
great deceased wine scientists Dr. Ray Beckwith and Stephen Hickinbotham. Bring
that on. That's different.
That'd be the ramparts
getting the storming they deserve from fair dinkum Caradogs. If only there were
true warriors out there with that skill set.
Just a little reminder from George from not too many years back ... BUT HERE'S NEWS: Treasury Wine Estates boss Michael Clarke has called for the winding-up
of the WET rebate and told the Global Food Forum (yesterday, 20th
April) that cheap wine is damaging Brand Australia
.
.
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