APPELLATION SOUTH AUSTRALIA: NUTS

CARTO GRAPHICS' CLEVER NEW TOPOGRAPHIC MAP FOR BAROSSA GRAPE AND WINE AS SEEN BY THE FIGHTER PILOT ... THE ALTITUDES HERE, HOWEVER, ARE EXAGGERATED FOR EFFECT. CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE.

Mount Lofty Ranges Regions
Wrong Borders, Wrong Names?
Who's In Charge Of Change?

by PHILIP WHITE - this story originally appeared in THE INDEPENDENT WEEKLY

The Barossa Grape and Wine Association has just released a clever, handsome and revealing topographical map of the viticulture zone called Barossa. This transverse slice of the South Mount Lofty Ranges was delineated by the local vignerons and the Geographical Indications Committee, a subsidiary of the Australian Wine And Brandy Corporation, the Government statutory authority which polices wine law.

The map was made by Carto Graphics. As it was completed, I coincidentally noticed an increase in wineries using Mount Lofty Ranges as their location. The official wine appellation doesn’t suit them.

There are two reasonably distinct ranges that run from the tip of the Fleurieu to Peterborough; South Mount Lofty Ranges from Cape Jervis to around Eudunda; North Mount Lofty Ranges further to the west, running through Clare and Burra to fizzle out in the desert around Peterborough. North and west of them run the Flinders: Southern, then Northern. These names are official topographical names for standard maps, so they can be easily located by people all over the world.

Not so for our official wine appellation boundaries. These are, well, different. There’s a huge slab of country called The Adelaide Superzone, which includes the Barossa, Fleurieu and Mount Lofty Ranges Zones. The latter Zone contains the Adelaide Hills, the Adelaide Plains and the Clare Valley Regions. The Adelaide Hills Region contains the delineated Sub-regions of Lenswood and Piccadilly Valley, as well as other land that extends north to where the appellation abruptly and illogically becomes the Eden Valley Region in the Barossa Zone, as distinct from the Barossa Valley Region to the west.

Like the Barossa Zone, the Adelaide Hills are not on any ordinary map. This is a colloquial and nebulous term for some of the hills in the South Mount Lofty Ranges. Kuitpo, Mount Barker, and Hahndorf are in the Adelaide Hills Region, Harrogate and Kanmantoo are not. Dumb.

What a pity these boundaries were not set on existing place names, or more easily determined geographical and geological features that were on maps for a century before Australian wine appellations were invented! I initially suggested that the Adelaide Superzone was so named because everyone in the wine world was presumed to know of the whereabouts of Adelaide University, which is smug about its wine course. GIC members have since scorned this idea. Because Adelaide proper is not in any hills or ranges, the South Mount Lofty Ranges Superzone would have had more natural clarity, as Adelaide is on their floodplain and piedmont.

Then, the North Mount Lofty Ranges would make more sense as a Zone, as does the Southern Flinders Region, which I had the pleasure to officially open some years back. There’s not much call for a Northern Flinders Region yet, but this may become necessary if those who insist the Earth is cooling prove correct.

When you examine the fine new Barossa map, it becomes very clear that the Barossa is a distinct valley that runs north-south between the Barossa Ranges on the eastern side, and the ridge that runs from Kalimna in the north, south through Greenock to Gomersal on the western side. The enormous, monocultural tax-dodge vineyards recently planted outside the Valley on the western flats around Sandy Creek have nothing to do with the Barossa or its flavours. This should be Adelaide Plains. Similarly, the upland vineyards in the chaotic network of ranges and valleys to the east of the Barossa Range have nothing in common with the Barossa, other than that Valley’s propensity to use their finer fruit to improve its own, which they can still do without losing the precious Barossa moniker. The dodgy intellect of this is revealed by the new map. They made their Barossa far too big. Dumb.

THE HILL OF GRACE VINEYARD, MUCH IMPROVED BY PRUE HENSCHKE SINCE MILTON WORDLEY TOOK THIS PHOTOGRAPH. IS THIS IN THE BAROSSA VALLEY?

The South Mount Lofty Ranges are a continuous geological feature that extends to Cape Jervis, and yet the Southern Fleurieu is not included in the Mount Lofty Ranges Zone, while Clare is. Dumb.

The McLaren Vale Region is part of the Fleurieu Zone. It sensibly drew most of its boundary according to its geology and topography, following the escarpment formed by the Willunga fault line from the Victory pub to Kangarilla. The western boundary is sensibly the sea. Part of the reason this region stretches north across the Onkaparinga to include Glenthorne Farm and Chateau Reynella is to protect them from housing development. Which will look really dumb if governments and owners continue with their nefarious villa rash. Which the intellectually decrepit Rann government has just permitted to occur in letting Constellation Brands rip out John Reynell's heritage vineyard which had been in full premium wine production for 161 years. Forty-one tiny apartments will replace it. The winemakers of McLaren Vale can take a deep bow for permitting this to happen. And Onkaparinga Mayor Lorraine Rosenberg, who will eventually fall on her own fork. Show Lorraine a hill, and she'll immediately want somebody to put a shed on it.

In the meantime, there's an unholy row brewing between Jane "Spock" Lomax-Smith, the Minister for Tourism, and the McLaren Vale Grape Wine And Tourism Association over the naming of the Fleurieu, the Peninsula which McLaren Vale sits upon. The McLVGWATA should not really be claiming any holier-than-thou rights to naming intelligence until it cleans that idiotic acronym up. But the winesmiths of the Vales want the Fleurieu name officially changed to Fleurieu and McLaren Vale, which J-Lo the Vulcan will not abide.

Consider Doug Govan of The Victory Hotel. His two tiny Rudderless Vineyards behind his mighty pub sit astride the boundary separating McLaren Vale from Southern Fleurieu. This line should logically follow the creek, flowing just south of his pub down through Cactus Gulch to the Gulf. Instead, the appellation line actually divides one of his three tiny Lots, as delineated on the Hundred and Section maps determining ownership.

Doug’s dog Swahili could have worked that one out.

Just as we constantly adjust electoral boundaries to suit demographic changes, and rename electorates, surely we can begin correcting some of this really stupid mess.

VICTORY HOTEL PUBLICAN, DOUG GOVAN, TOOK THIS PHOTOGRAPH OF HIS BELOVED SWAHILI, WHO IS CONSIDERING THE BOUNDARY OF McLAREN VALE AND FLEURIEU. SWAHILI IS IN McLAREN VALE. THE COOPERS SIGN IS IN SOUTHERN FLEURIEU.

K1 BY GEOFF HARDY (AND HUNGRY TRIBE)

These Hardys Will Not Be Eaten
New Wave Of Smarts Cross Range
by PHILIP WHITE - a version of this appeared in The Independent Weekly on 8 MAY 09

In McLaren Vale, they call it “over the range” ... “up on the range”. It’s over the Willunga Fault, the handsomely revegetated escarpment to the east of the Willunga Basin.

In the ’eighties, all the McLaren Vale vineyards were in the basin. Over the Range, Brian Croser was preaching his Piccadilly gospel; Ashton Hills was established, Geoff Weaver, Prue Henschke and Tim Knappstein were opening the Lenswood ridge, Lloyd Light had a vineyard and winery above Clarendon, and unless you went way up north to the serious visionaries like Karl Seppelt and David Wynn, that was about it for Adelaide Hills/South Mount Lofty Ranges viticulture.

Geoff Hardy had wine in his gizzards from the womb. He helped make Australia’s first seriously good – and probably the only – commercial pinot noir in 1978, the famous Hardy’s Keppoch. That neat, nutty, revolutionary red made from a champagne clone grown broadacre near Padthaway was still good a decade beyond its use-by date, by which time Hardy’s had eaten Reynella, only to be eaten by Berri-Renmano, which was eventually dutifully eaten by Constellation.

Geoff has never been eaten. He’d established himself as a canny, clean, swift establisher of vineyards by 1980 when he bought the Willunga piedmont vineyard, Pertaringa, with fellow viticulturer Ian Leask. Since then, he’s planted over 3000 hectares of vines and consulted to over 200 different vineyards in Australia, France and Italy.

THE OFFICE, TASTING ROOM AND FUNCTION CENTRE AT GEOFF HARDY'S K1

















He took me for a drive around his gorgeous Kuitpo vineyard the other day, in Greg Trott’s old Audi wagon, which seemed utterly fitting. In the back, where most people keep their kids and dogs, Geoff had a crowd of baby grüner vetliner vines, all swaying to look out the window.

“I’m toughening them up, he grinned. “Trying to encourage them to put a bit of wood on”. The car, with all that glass, is warmer. An incubator.

So why Kuitpo, the place with the unpronounceable name that nobody knows the origins of?

“I’d been looking for the ideal cool climate vineyard site for eight or nine years”, he said. This was the fourth place I’d tried to buy. It wasn’t for sale. I found it through the Lands Titles Office, and contacted the owners. Bought it in 1986; begun planting in 1987.”

The reason I’m writing this story now is that Geoff’s wines, labelled K1 by Geoff Hardy, are suddenly very, very authoritative. Geoff would say that’s been gradual, as the vineyard matures and everybody in the winery gets their head around what sort of flavours it wants to produce, but in my case, it’s been the fruit of the last two years’ releases that caught my attention. The wines have become confidently stylised and enticing.

And that’s just the beginning. Apart from the usual staples, and the baby grüners in back of his car, Geoff has planted arneis, dolcetto, durif, graciano, lagrein, marsanne, montepulciano, picolit, primitivo, roussanne, and savignin blanc B, which was called albarino until the CSIRO admitted it wasn’t actually alborino just a few weeks back.

The vineyard plunges dramatically through the sclerophyllous scrub between the Kuitpo forest and the edge of the Willunga escarpment, on sand and clay and reefs of ironstone so pure that Lang Hancock would squirm.

“Few of these things have stood the test of time yet”, Geoff says. “Like arneis. What will it do? Like the nineties had a cool chunk in the middle, 95-96, and I thought ‘fantastic! Pinot and chardonnay country!’, but with global warming the ripening curve has moved two and a half weeks to the left and we’re growing really good shiraz and cabernet, so who knows?”

One dude who’s learning to know rather abruptly is winemaker Shane Harris, a former chef who’s beginning to really make a mark at the contract winery at the foot of the scarp, McLaren Vintners. Shane’s now got the room to apply his high gastronomic intelligence to his wine science – something that’s pretty thin on the ground amongst the white coat brigade.

The wines are quite different, of course, but K1 by Geoff Hardy and Shane Harris has developed an authoritative, seamless style and stance that reminds me somehow of the way Wolf Blass and John Glaetzer gave Wolf Blass wines a trophy-winning presence that changed the whole wine business in the mid-seventies. There was no stopping them; no way they wouldn’t be recognised. Which is happening now, increasingly, to Geoff’s brand.

THE NEW WAVE OF HARDYS, L-R: BEC, HANNAH, JESS AND SEB - WAITING FOR A WINERY!

Just in time, really. His four kids are all out working in the wine business, but they’re ready to move in on Dad. This is the beginnings of new Hardy dynasty: the momentum is almost urgent in its confidence and detremination.

So. When will he build them a winery?

“Well, Whitey”, he says, wheeling the Trottmobile over a spectacular ironstone knob that’s just been ripped for vineyard, “it was always going to be right here. But the money wasn’t quite right, so this is where I’m gonna plant these grüners. If the kids want their winery, they’ll have to convince me to pull a vineyard out. So it won’t be a snap decision.”

Hand Crafted by Geoff Hardy Adelaide Hills Arneis 2008
$18; 13% alcohol; screw cap; 93 points
The savvy Linda Domas made this wine from Kuitpo fruit. That means it’s out there, as far as pioneering goes. Barolo bianco hits kangaroo ground! Pear, marzipan, honeydew melon, chick peas, peanut butter, artichoke: them’s words I don’t use much on wine descripto. But that’s what swam around my glass, with grand mealy tannins and, contrary to Auntie Jancis’ claim that arneis has low acidity, plenty of that too. It makes perfect sense, planting a white from Italy’s piedmont on land like K1, but it still seems freaky. The result is profound: this is a big new flavour indeed! Cool pork cassoulet.

K1 by Geoff Hardy Adelaide Hills Cabernet Tempranillo 2006
$18; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 92+++ points
Yuppie Itie wine perves will know Sassicaia, the hyper-priced super-Tuscan red. Forget it. Here comes the Sassikuitpo, the Spanish version via the ironstone and kangaroo turds of the Hardy vineyard way up past the Base Camp on K1. Neat, clean, seamless, and as tightly-formed as a leg of cured Iberian ham, which it manages to smell like, this is one for the long haul dungeon as much as Norberto’s house of meat right now. And when you’ve drunk it all, which will take a month, we’ll get the 07, which is even better, with all its violets and lavendar atop the Zorro boots. They’re both stunning wines!

I shall be posting notes on all the K1 by Geoff Hardy wines on DRANKSTER later this week.

HAHNDORF 155 YEARS ON: MUCH BETTER

HAHNDORF HILL MEN: LARRY JACOBS AND MARC DOBSON; PUTTING SOME ALPINE STYLE INTO THE ADELAIDE HILLS













Hahndorf Hill Adds Alpine Style To Germantown
Strassendorf, Fachwek, Trollinger, Limberger, Grüner Und Max
by PHILIP WHITE - a shorter version this was published in the ADELAIDE INDEPENDENT on 27 MAR 09

It wasn’t quite like this at the time, but once it had sunk in, it retrospectively seemed like all the Hahndorf kids got off the bus one morning and sang in unison “We’re gonna have tourism”. I was just a kid at Mt Barker High and I didn’t really know the word. Tourism. Anything with ism on the end was very suss, like Calvinism, Catholicism, or Pentecostalism.

Their parents must have had a meeting or something, or got briefed by a developer, because it was quick. I reckon it was before 1970. It was not quite a boast, because everything uttered was filtered through a bale of good old Lutheran stoicism. Yet it was more than an utterance, because it contained a degree of emergent confidence, like a boast. Fair though to register the overt uncertainty of a generation promised an improvement which they could not understand.

My school was populated by the pimply kids of brickmakers, miners, abattoir workers, tanners, butchers, smallgoods makers and the freckled milkwashed bubbies of dairy farmers. The cleanest, most polite ones generally came from Hahndorf. We could tolerate ’em. But anybody professing a sudden belief in tourism was up themselves.

They sure got their tourism, “them Cherman kids”. I doubt that any of those old families with the thick accents are still there. They couldn’t afford it. I reckoned even then that the tourism notion was more likely to have squirted from a Duffield than a Schubert.

Hahndorf was, as far as German villages go, pretty schmick. It followed the Strassendorf town plan: fachwerk cottages eave-to-eave up a street, with only 100 metres of long, skinny back yard. Not enough, in other words, to be self-sufficient farm-wise. You could feed chooks and a pig or two from your scraps, and run a veggie patch already, but the men would have to do other work.

A village like Lobethal, on the other hand, was a Hufendorf in the planner’s manual of the day. These cottages were a little more widely spread along their street, but most significantly, they had front gardens, and a back yard that was a practical farm, as the ribbon-long block would extend several hundred metres, ideally reaching or crossing a creek before it hit the next lane. Mediæval strip-farming. Even then Lobethal had an early planning advantage over Hahndorf: right from the start, it had inbuilt plans for industrial developments.

I always find amusement in the notion of the Barossa Hufendorfers’ kids, like those at Bethanien, politely leaving their mediæval strip farm each morning, and climbing over the Kaiser Stuhl and Mengler’s to go to work on the rolling park-like estates of the Smiths, Angases or Randall’s, all sitting up there smoking cigars and drinking port. The Germans were always too damned nice to the English.

HAHNDORF VILLAGE FESTIVAL

And the English, of course, knew what a good thing they were on. “Germans”, be they Jew or Gentile, Catholic or Protestant, from Prussia, Posen, Silesia, Brandenburg, Mecklenburg or Pommern, were much better than convicts. They wanted to pay for everything and feed themselves. You didn’t have to lock them up. And they worked and worked and worked.

Look at old Hahndorf now. Germanworld. Shizen. But I quite like some of it. Walk into – no, walk’s wrong. Respectfully enter Max Noske’s butcher shop, for example, and inhale. Not a better smell on Earth. I can’t name a better butcher shop. The Noske’s grow nearly all their own beasts in the hills nearby. Name a butcher who does that. Try Max’s kassler. Then, I love the leatherworker whose sign promises “All our leather was grown on vegetarian cattle”. I love the little breezeblock dairy next to Paech’s that we used to call the Golf Club. I drank Bacardi there while I first listened to a new record called Bridge Over Troubled Water.

At that stage my waters were troubled. I had shit on my liver. Dirty water on my chest.

Now, like Jeremy Clarkson, I’ve written myself into a corner before even mentioning my topic, which is the wineries: Starvedog, Shaw & Smith, Romney Park, Nepenthe and Hahndorf Hill. Hahndorf Hill more specifically. The Burgundy-fetishist’s Romney Park’s had a deservedly good trot in DRINKSTER ; the S&S cousins act as if I hate ’em and don’t spikka; and that fierce lady at Starvedog fanged me a few weeks back for suggesting this was a difficult vintage, which it is, on top of her boyfriend making his dislike of my attitude obvious for those many years when his wines left a bit to be desired, so, well, you know, Nepenthe’s part of the decaying McGuigan empire and Hahndorf Hill is real and it’s good and I’ve not been there for years. Out there on the springy ridges where I used to kiss girls in Spriggy’s old man’s Fairlane. Mmmm.

Marc Dobson and Larry Jacobs came from South Africa via Sydney and bought Hahndorf Hill, a young vineyard of freaky Germanic grapes: trollinger, limberger, and now, grüner vertliner. They got posh French varieties too, but in Hahndorf anything German makes more sense.

After a few years making their wine at the troubled Nepenthe, Hahndorf Hill’s now back at Shaw & Smith, and jesus you wouldn’t believe how good the wines are.

They should be good, mind you. Larry’s a biodynamic viti man, who’s recently left his stint as chair of the Adelaide Hills winemakers’ Environment Committee. Under his leadership, the Hills became the first region in South Australia, if not Australia, to have a functioning and government endorsed Environment Management System available to its members, just pipping McLaren Vale, which is close, but not quite there.

HAHNDORF HILL IN AUTUMN

While being totally snookered time-wise in such a role, Larry managed nevertheless to improve and enhance the Hahndorf Hill vineyard until it became a benchmark of healthy, responsible management, and a grower of fair dinkum flavour.

You must visit the winery and dine, gaze out the window and taste everything, polish up the plastic and stack your cellar with these lovely drinks that are perfectly suited to late summer/early autumn moods and cuisines.

And call in at Max Noske’s before you leave town. Try that kassler. See if you can get it home without eating it in the car.

Hahndorf Hill Winery Adelaide Hills Trollinger and Lemberger Rosé 2008
$19; 13% alcohol; screw cap; 92+++ points
As this is the only incidence of either of these varieties in Australia, I’ll admit it’s difficult know what to compare a blend of them to. Compare? Campari’s a good start. All that blood orange, Curaçao orange and bright lemon, with saffron. And then the fatty acids, adding the smell of soap and rolled cold pancetta porkfat. Take a slug, and ooh! That’s viscosity! Somewhere between rosewater and turkish delight, making sense of the illusion of confectioner’s sugar in the bouquet. But then those citric acids swish back in, adding refreshment to the comforting nature of that viscous texture. Dusty ironstone and podsol tannins, reflecting the dirt outside, play neatly off that acid and you’ve another dead serious, bone dry rosé that will improve with a few more years’ bottle, or knock your socks off if you have it chilled, now. Achtung!

Hahndorf Hill Winery Adelaide Hills White Mischief Chardonnay Sauvignon Blanc Pinot Gris 2008
$19; 12.5% alcohol; screw cap; 93++ points
Not to take my name too lightly, this White Mischief’s my territory: intelligent blending: realistic alcohol and a price to match. So we’re off to another good start. That hard ironstone soil makes its presence felt again, with dust, spice, and hessian tweaks at the cutting edge of a perfume that follows with comfy honeydew melon and clingstone peach, and then the isovaleric acid smells that often delude us into imagining we’re receiving a pheremone that makes men drop their voices and become dangerously protective of women while women want to suckle: it smells as fresh and fleshy as a hot scrubbed bubby. As you’d then expect, the texture is fleshy, too, and carries a refined silky polish which gradually becomes velvet as the tannins of the terroir and that steely acid wind up the finish. Stunning. It’s a most intelligent and creative use of three much-abused varieties, with a total that’s better than the sum of its parts. It’s like a really good Alsace gewurztraminer.

Hahndorf Hill Winery Adelaide Hills Sauvignon Blanc 2008
$21; 13% alcohol; screw cap; 93+ points
Amongst the best ever Hills savvy-Bs, this bouquet transported me to Chateau Rahoul ca 1980 when the finicky Dane, Peter Vinding-Diers, was making exquisitely fine, perfumed dry Bordeaux whites that were beginning to change the whole notion of such a beast. Sure, it’s crunchy and brittle, with hints of oxalis and gooseberry amongst the shattered windscreen, but even the bouquet has enough fleshy filling to make very clear this is not your front lawn doused with battery acid sort of HillsBilly no savvy. The palate’s full. Full-bodied. Check that glycerol! It’s almost as if the fruit had a gentle botrytis strike and StepHen Hickinbotham got at it. This is a perfectly-balanced wine in its extreme infancy, and maybe the best sauvignon I know of emerging from the S&S cousins’ weinhaus. And we’re only half-way through. The finish is a real tease: leanly astringent, with that counterplay of citrus and podsol common to all these lovely wines.

Hahndorf Hill Winery Adelaide Hills Pinot Grigio 2008
$24; 12.5% alcohol; screw cap; 93+
If Campari was made from lemons, and not oranges, it’d smell like this. It’s almost limoncello in its precise reflection of lemon pith. Then, this is like garganega, like a really smart, austere Soave without too much trebbiano. Rizzardi. It’s not greasy or slimy, like Kath Quealy’s get-all-over-you slimebombs from Mornington Peninsula. “We deliberately avoided the gris style” said Marketing Marc. No, this is lean, entertaining Alto Adige style grey pinot. Which leads me to ask: “would Australians flock so much to pinot gris and pinot grigio if it was called grey pinot?” Nope. But sauvignon fanatics would like this ravishing palate, that finishes so friggin bone dry it’s like it’s made from smashed up bone china. It’s intensely satisfying, appetising wine.

Hahndorf Hill Winery Adelaide Hills Chardonnay 2004
$26; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; 92++ points
Crême caramel, clingstone pêche, faintly gingery oak, lovely creamy elegance, this is what chardonnay’s sposed to be like: clean and precise in the palate, with really lovely fine acidity and general finesse. Try it with kassler from Max Noske, cool fresh tomato and basil, sourdough from Bullocks in Mount Barker, and a good swoosh of Blair’s Original Death Feel Alive Chilli Sauce. I await more eagerly the chardonnays that S&S will make from HH fruit.

Hahndorf Hill Winery Adelaide Hills Shiraz 2005
$29; 14.5% alcohol; cork; 92+ points
I doubt that slick, polished, silky shiraz like this would ever have ripened in the freezing weather I recall of Hahndorf when I was a kid. Not only the main street has changed. But this sure has ripened, and it’s packed with smooth, harmonious mulberries, prunes and plums flavours; even maybe a little black fig. It has no more tannin than the furry skin of a ripe fig would impart. It’s luxurious, opulent, self-satisfied wine. I can’t help suspecting it would be more entertaining if it hadn’t got quite so ripe. S&S will do a better job. In the meantime, have this with one of Max’s incredible fillets, blue, with blue cheese sauce and capers. Practice cooking them on your own for a few months, and once you’ve got it nailed, ask that one around that you’ve never been game to ask. Clean sheets please.

HILLSBILLIES BECOME HILLS ANGELS

NGERINGA BIODYNAMIC VINEYARD, MOUNT BARKER
Adelaide Hills Turn Green In Drought
Enviro Smarts Plan Track To Future
by PHILIP WHITE

Bacchus, a large part of the community, and then possibly the entire wine drinking world, will bless the Adelaide Hills winegrowers.

The Hills vineyard environment, and its wines, are certain to improve through the new ecologically-responsible framework devised, established and broadcast via the Adelaide Hills Wine Region website by the region’s savvy Environment Committee.

For twenty years the Hills have been too easily satirised for their profusion of posh hobbyist growers who planted vineyards with little idea of viticultural science or oenology, not to mention the realities of a crowded marketplace. Vineyards of the wrong varieties were planted holus bolus in the wrong places for the wrong reasons. Machiavellian transnationals love taking this fruit at minimal rates for amorphous blends without attribution.

The side effects include inappropriate petro-chem regime management, pollution of watercourses, water abuses, bird scarers, neighbour disputes, lack of native vegetation, and so on.

But the Hills have suddenly leapt ahead of all other South Australian regions.

Last week the Adelaide Hills Wine Region Australia launched its impeccably responsible Environmental Management System. While nobody from The Courier could find the time to attend, or indeed The Advertiser, the Mount Barker Council mayor, Ann Ferguson, and its CEO Andrew Stuart were there with keen enthusiasm to see a few quiet local heroes make a most impressive presentation.

While rival regions have depended upon vague claims to green awareness, and maybe even practice, the Hills region association has nailed the theory better than the rest, released its template for measurable practice, and thus laid the gauntlet down to all its members, not to mention the other districts, like McLaren Vale, which have depended on anecdote and impressionable writers like me, to spread the word about green credentials.

The determined and seemingly tireless Larry Jacobs, of the biodynamic Hahndorf Hill Winery, has worked like a tiger, chairing the region’s Environment Committee.

“It is extremely exciting for us to realise”, he said, “that after all our effort to develop a program we saw could genuinely benefit the Hills, we’re the first region in the State, if not Australia, to have a functioning and government endorsed regional EMS available to our members”.

Put most simply, this system will grow and evolve as more practitioners climb aboard. It may not be long before the punter is paying a premium for these classified products, as the whole thing grows by competition.

With the assistance and support of Greenochre Environmental Consultant Andy Chambers, and Bryce Routley, Efficiency Project Officer at the Environmental Protection Authority, the Hills have adopted the philosophy of green guru Heinz-Werner Engel, an expert in environmental management systems and ISO 14001, the latter tattoo being a key international identifier of rigorously environmentally aware businesses which must practise what they preach.

Perhaps most critical to the Hills plan is Engel’s system called EcoMappingTM.

“An environment management system (EMS) is simply a tool for measuring and then managing a organisation’s impact on the environment, said Janet Klein, of the Ngeringa biodynamic vineyards and winery at Mount Barker. (Having well and truly completed his stint, Larry Jacobs has left his position as chair of the environment committee, and the able Janet has now taken the role.)

“Ecomapping is a simple flexible tool that helps with environmental management, leading if you like to achieving ISO 14001 status” Janet said.

Both went on to explain how Ecomapping helps a grower/maker become aware of their environmental impact and ongoing behaviour, identify issues and emergent problems, give these rank, and schedule the appropriate reactions.

Once completed, Ecomapping can serve as the basis for a wider environmental management system which promotes itself.

So, with all the confounding acronyms and psuedo-religious verdanture, what does this actually mean on the ground at the coalface further along down the track at the grassroots?

It means that by self-promoting rivalry, individual vintners in the Hills, and then entire wine regions elsewhere, will learn to clean up their act.

The new practitioner simply learns to draw maps of different aspects of their business. Larry showed us his Hahndorf Hill maps, based on aerial photography of his site. There’s a ten step method, available on the association’s website, www.adelaidehillswine.com.

These generations of maps cover, in order: urbanity and biodiversity; water, soils and storage; air - including odours, noise and dust; energy; waste; risks; materials flow; employee opinion; and the maintenance of an ecolog book.

The next step it to devise a badge or logo to identify and reward businesses and products that have committed to the system, and made progress in cleaning up their act. This will make the whole deal competitive, both within the region, and with its rivals, who are all desperately keen to make sales to an increasingly environment and health-conscious international marketplace.

So Hillsbillies become Hills Angels? I’ll say it again: “By their works ye shall know them

SHOWS: BIG CO.s KILL HILLS; JUDGES KILL VALES

by PHILIP WHITE

It’s official: out of 58 Adelaide Hills sauvignons blanc exhibited at the Adelaide Hills Wine Show, the best is from Constellation Wines and the generally-discounted Oomoo range.

The big chains are ordering their Constellation Oomoo Adelaide Hills Sauvignon Blanc 2008 as I write, but both are coy about the price they’ll charge. I expect it to eventually sit between $15 and $19, but who knows?

“The top sauvignon blanc awards showed fresh bright fruit characters but with an extra dimension” reported chair of judges Louisa Rose, from Yalumba. “Clear but well integrated acid was rewarded.”

The judges seemed once again to steer away from wines deliberately built with some complexity, like the O’Leary Walker Fully Worked Adelaide Hills Sauvignon Blanc 2007, which is a personal favourite.

Fully-worked chardonnay won the day, however, with Penfold’s Bin 06A Adelaide Hills Chardonnay 2006 taking top gold in the commercial chardonnay class, as well as winning best wine of the show. Luckily for the drinker, the much cheaper Penfolds Thomas Hyland Chardonnay 2007 came in only half a point behind, equal scoring with Shaw & Smith’s premium M3 2007. The Starvedog Lane 2005 also won gold.

None of this writer’s preferred pinots got anywhere. Ashton Hills Reserve 2007 scraped bronze; Honey Moon and Romney Park didn’t score. Boo hoo.

The cabernet and merlot classes scored rock-bottom across the board, but there was a glimmer of hope in the shiraz sector, with Honey Moon winning gold, as did Brackenwood, Argyle Cawdor, Shaw & Smith, and Starvedog with its shiraz/viognier.

These results were similar to those of the recent McLaren Vale Show, where the stunning wines which didn’t score - Coriole Nebbiolo Rose 2008; d’Arenberg The Coppermine Road Cabernet 2006; d’Arenberg the Dead Arm Shiraz 2006; et cetera, were as noticeable for their omission as the trophy winners were for their victory.

Not one white wine was rewarded gold at McLaren Vale.

COMMENTS:

GINGER MEGGS said:

"Of course Oomoo's the best sauvignon in the Adelaide Hills! Have you tasted the rest of them?"

December 3, 2008 10:48 AM

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Domaine de la Romaney Counting

by PHILIP WHITE
This was first published in The Independent Weekly in February 2008

“This is the first wine I ever made”, said Rod Short. “I didn’t have a crusher/destemmer, so we picked ’em, then pulled each berry off its stalk by hand and then stood on ’em”.

The wine was the Romney Park Pinot Noir 2002. The guinea fowl on the label matched the live ones cleaning the vineyard, and yellow-tailed black cockatoos skwerked and skerulled prehistorically in the pines. I was remembering the flavour of guinea fowl when Rachel Short brought me back with a snap. “Well, two women stood on them” she asserted. “We took one look at the hairs on the men’s feet and said ‘No’.”

The wine was a folly: a pinot for the shirazzabazza. Right up the Parkerilla line, all Ribena and Blackberry Nip, without edge, finesse or delicacy. I was sniffing for toenail polish when Rod said “That sold out”, and replaced it with his Romney Park Reserve Adelaide Hills Pinot Noir 2006 ($36), one of the few trophy winners deserving of its gong at the Adelaide Hills wine show. The peanuts in charge had served it in thimbles at that event, so now, with keener curiosity and a proper glass, I slid the proboscis in …

I was already seated so I couldn’t sit down and weep, in the company of a polite couple I’d only just met, so I could barely disrobe and dance …

The oak stonkered me first. Perfectly apt, old, seasoned French barrels had adorned the welling fruit with an edgy piquancy that reminded me of a Spanish lady I met on a train …

All that fleshy fruit: a little roll of it protruding over the edge of her polished black satin. Like the cleavages between each toe, puffing up against the edge of the low-cut flamenco shoe leather, as mysterious as baby beetroot; but as simply obvious in intention, purpose, and presentation as pomegranite and raspberry; as tight with gushing blood as a juicy black cherry ...

I licked it. Mmm. Tang of sweat, putting an edge on the savoury olive oil texture … and yes, a little kalamata amongst the cherry and baby beetroot, with a dollop of sour cream, like a borscht …

“Utterly wicked and sinful”, I was scratching, “swoooonful! 94+ points – now to 2014 – ” when the bodgie pterodactyls outside swooped me back to Hahndorf.

Which is where we sat. In a big sandstone house with a dressage grey at the bottom of the garden, pines down the sides, and a vineyard where the apples were, just there above the frost line at 370 metres, up to the vintage shed at the top, at 410 metres.

“It took ten years searching to find this place …” Rod’s voice drew me back this time. “I was the electrician at the Waite, and I’d been a total pest in the oenology department, where they all had opposing doctrines about wine … but we knew early it was all in the vineyard. So here we are … The house is too big for two of us, but the old billiard room makes a great bottling hall, and there’s so much ironstone out there that’s it’s no good dangling a magnet to pick up the nails after the farrier’s been, because you pick up half the hill …”

Romney Park is named after the Romney sheep they once counted, with a doff of the beret to Domaine de la Romanée Conti, the sacred heart of Burgundy. While Ashton Hills pinot is probably closer to the austere DRC in style, this red is more like Smitty’s devine Domaine de l’Arlot: more amiable and fleshy from the start, with one less zero at the end of the price.

But Romney Park is no one trick pony. I was first nailed by the disgorged-to-order 2004 Blanc de Blancs ($28; 93+), which I reckon’s in the Kreglinger/Arras/Clover Hill/Yarra Bank league, and given its junior status and kindergarten price, scarily close to the Gosset/Krug school.

Then there’s the little matter of the Reserve Chardonnay 2006. They shoulda called it Chevalier-Montrachel, for there’s more than a little Chevalier-Montrachet about this svelte blonde beauty, with its waft of pineapple cream and dried banana, gradually falling to that amazing swarfy acidity that I presume comes from the ironstone. (The same mighty, almost fierce natural acidity adorns all these wines.)

Rod also makes a knockout wetfeet merlot from the Onkaparinga flat and an old vine Barossa shiraz that smells like a black horse. But the true king hell killer is his forthcoming cross-dressing gunslinger shiraz from just beside the pinot at Domaine de la Romaney Counting. I mean Romney Park. So. A Rhone variety with a Latin name in a Burgundy vineyard in a German town in Australia? Too right. Get in before they learn about pricing.

FOOTNOTE: All Romney Park Wines are sealed with the superior Diam compound cork closure. They are available at romneyparkwines@senet.com.au