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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Take Some Essence Of Oak Chips, Add Weeds And Vanilla ...

by PHILIP WHITE - This first appeared in The Independent Weekly in May 2008

“Chardonnay will be the vanilla of the Australian wine industry”, the late Len Evans, OBE, preached for thirty years.

Who? This feisty ex-Mt Isa Mines storeman eventually ran Rothbury Estate, owned Evans Family Wines, chaired Petaluma, controlled the national wine show ring, became a highly influential mentor to hundreds of adoring winemakers and critics, et al. Like Sir John Falstaff, Evans smudged the boundary between ebullient and bumptious, and, after port, was borborygmic.

In Champagne, chardonnay’s used for champagne; in Chablis it makes lean, unoaked chablis, and in Burgundy, it’s used to make creamy, extravagantly oaked white burgundy. Like chardonnay, all these words sound nice, and while it was all fabulously expensive, fabulist Len loved shunning expense at the table.

But it snows in those places. Apart from bits of Tassie, like the Upper Tamar, and tiny slices of the mainland - high Orange or Tumbarumba - we could never grow chardonnay vaguely like the great French vignobles. So why chardonnay? It doesn’t snow along the Murray. Then, Len never drank much Murray.

Locally, Romney Park proves that on one tiny ridge near Hahndorf, you can make delicious chardonnay, as Ashton Hills does near Summertown. Penfolds makes mighty stuff from other Hills vineyards. Mountadam’s returning from a ten year slump. There’s Evans’ ex-pet, Lion Nathan’s Petaluma, with its alluring bunch of Riverland doradillo on the front label. After that I’m scratching.

Scarce cool country is not the only problem with Australian chardonnay. From the start, back labels invariably claimed this new variety was lovingly fermented and matured in new French oak, oak being the only thing available to legally impart vanillin. But as I wrote in 1991, when Len’s sermon was reaching crescendo, France typically harvested enough oak to make only about 250,000 new barrels – about 800,000 short of the amount of Burgundy-sized barrels needed to contain the juice of our 20,000 freshly-planted hectares of chardonnay. If indeed they eventually grew a berry. Forget barrels for the reds, or for the rest of the world. Or for the French, for that matter.

Luckily, Len had an attitude to oak that didn’t always require barrels. At a tasting at Rothbury in May 1983, I sidled out for a smoke when a courier arrived with four large plastic drums of liquid. Rather than interrupt my host, who was inside preaching, I signed for it, then read the chit, which said “Essence Of Oak Chips”. That’s cheaper than chips!

Evans’ acolytes and disciples always rather contentiously insisted that the customer demand for chardonnay was insatiable. Only a few years back blokes like Phil Laffer and Stephen Millar, bosses of Pernod-Ricard/Orlando/Jacob’s Creek and Constellation’s BRL-Hardy, were urging more plantings.

As these come into production, we now have 32,151 hectares, mostly in the wrong places. We might as well irrigate weeds. Constellation’s retreating from the River, and Fosters and Pernod Ricard have just told growers there that demand for the vanilla of Australia is plummeting. So the punter is not a mug.

Chardonnay’s not dead: Penfolds paid $5000 a tonne this year for cool district grapes for its top example, the Yattarna, and Chablis and Burgundy sales are soaring. Champagne’s so popular they’ve just made the district bigger. But while their new price for River chardonnay, $300 a tonne, might be rather fortuitous for the transnational winemakers, it won’t cover the grower’s costs.

One of the world’s oldest wine merchants, Berry Brothers and Rudd, last week released a report suggesting the Murray-Darling will soon be too hot for fine wine production, and - surprise, surprise - that the future lies in expensive luxuries from cool places like Tassie. This was timed to lob explosively in the middle of the London Wine Trade Fair.

Even more practically destructive was the CSIRO’s announcement that our own Rudd’s budgetry idiocy will close the vital Murray Valley viticulture research establishment, just when Stephen Strachan, boss of the Winemakers’ Federation, was busy reassuring everyone that “the industry’s doing a lot of research around climate change”.

The poor old River couldn’t take deadlier hits below the waterline. Alley juice for our bladder packs is already coming from third world vineyards where wages are miniscule and environmental controls non-existent; now our bottom-end bottles are threatened.

As for Berry Brothers and Rudd’s forecast that China will be the world’s major wine supplier in fifty years? Anyone who’s believed my musings since Remi Martin helped China plant its Dynasty vineyard - in a place where it snows - way back when Len began his vanilla sermon, would have to agree that the real number’s now about ten years.

I don’t gloat over the agonies of the gullible and unfortunate, but it’s becoming increasingly tempting to say “I told you so”. If only the Chinese had planted chardonnay and oak, Australia could have avoided much terrible grief. And saved quite a lot of water.

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PINOT IS LIKE RIESLING

Pinot is like Riesling

by PHILIP WHITE - This was first published in The Independent Weekly in 2006

“I’ve learned about three things about pinot in the last twenty-five years” muttered Stephen George, who often makes my favourite Australian versions of it at Ashton Hills. He didn’t expand. Already halfway into the car, I left without asking. We’ve been discussing pinot noir for decades.

Pinot is a felicitous, difficult, but sometimes heady, sensual, hypnotic and salacious red grape. Stephen’s success in it comes from his curious sensory intelligence and stoic patience, as much as from the high altitude, cool, and peculiar soil of the vineyard. He and his partner, Peta van Rood, acquired this from her pioneering parents, Peter and Sophie, both deceased. Commenced in 1982, it’s away up in the crown of the Piccadilly Valley, near Mount Bonython, and they’ve spent the years trialling many ways of growing many clones of the same variety.

You will usually find pinot addicts where the best duck or pig is served. They guts in exclusive bunches, bellies nudging the table like the rubbing strakes of so many tugboats, perversely muttering and mooing over very big glasses. The hard core will never be seen drinking pinot from anywhere other than Burgundy. If more of them could be as relaxed about their fetish as Stephen and Peta, good pinot would be a much bigger hit.

At Ashton Hills, a bottle might cost you thousands of dollars less than the preposterous legends from Burgundy.

Proper pinot is more like riesling in structure than any red grape. Pinot is about acidity, and grown in the right places, riesling is the king of acidity.

Riesling has fruit aromas of lemon, lime, pear, nashi pear, and to a lesser degree of acidity and spine, banana, pineapple, and sometimes white stone fruits. The best pinots have the same rapier of acidity as great rieslings, and share the same lithe texture, weight and structure, but their fruit aromas are cranberry, raspberry, various sorts of cherry, baby beetroot, pink meats, and whatnot. Pink and light red, not white and yellow.

As great rieslings age, their fruits decay to marmalades of lime, lemon, ginger, and maybe even orange. Pinots, too, become more like conserves of the fruits they began with. Not full-bore, boiled jams, but lighter conserves, where there are still whole berries in the mix. The fruit remains alive. Oak provides cinnamon and nutmeg spicing.

Acids have individual flavours. Tartaric tastes metallic. Ascorbic - vitamin C – is like aluminium. Citric’s all lemons and limes. Oxalic acid’s soursobs and rhubarb. Aspalgic has mild flavour, but smells like the water closet at an asparagus dinner. Malic acid’s slightly less metallic than tartaric or ascorbic. Lactic acid is fatty, creamy, and custardy, like the first drink you get after the Big Nurse smacks you on the bum and hands you back to your new Mother. Comforting, and milky. These occur in wine; mystifying combinations occur in Pinot.

I’m overwhelmed by the power and acidity of the Ashton Hills Riesling 2005 ($19, 13 per cent alcohol, and 93 points). Like the Swedish fencing instructor I never had, she’s lithe, wiry, sensual and lean. I want her to thrash me long after she’s grey.

The entry level Ashton Hills Piccadilly Pinot Noir 2005 ($24; 13.5; 88 points) has coarser tannin than its more expensive kin. That makes it more macho: the furry tannin covers its acid spine. It lacks sensuality, but it’s your best opener.

Move up to the $45, 2005 Estate model (all from the estate vineyard – 14%; 93 points) and you see more cherry and lemon, and a great deal more sensuality with that finer tannin, greater viscosity, and more prominent acidity. Like the riesling, this wine will earn more points as it matures.

And so will the ravishing 2004 Reserve ($56; 14%; 94). It’s gorgeous. Maraschino, raspberry, wild cherry, spicy oak, slender but sensual viscosity, and heaps of natural acid, from newly ripening cherries to lime and lemon, are its hallmarks.

Half way through what I thought was my own radical posturising, Stephen produced a book that also suggested pinot was like riesling. Miffed,I refuse to remember it. “Most of the places that grow good pinot will grow good riesling”, he said, avoiding mention of Burgundy, where the arcane appellation laws forbid riesling plantations. “But it doesn’t always work in reverse.”

More mystification. More thirst.

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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

Out for a duck

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

Outside T-Chow for his last fag, ever, your correspondent set down his big balloon of pinot, and settled back to observe. Moonta Street, Chinatown: Saturday arvo. It could be any Chinatown on Earth. Our Chinese friends know and love this fact.

The writer was soon confronted by a brace of drinking types. Charles Hawker, grazier (ret.), a rugged rugby, Cooper’s Sparkling, and vintage port man if ever there was one, and his companion, who thrust forth a business card, both hands. “Dr. Eddie Chung Gon, MB. BS (Adel.), photojournalist” read its front; the back proclaimed the Doc to be an inveterate Hash House Harrier of the Kunt Foo school.

The Doc looked down at the glass. “You’re drinking pinot noir”, he said. “I can tell by the colour. Is it from Burgundy?”

“No”, was the baffled response. “It’s from Tasmania. From the Derwent.”

“Aha!” he said, staring at the glass. “Stefano Lubiana. That’s the Primavera 07. Very good!” Having picked the wine on colour alone, he lurched into an eager appraisal of the peculiarities of Lubie’s terroir…

Your correspondent had spent thirty years preaching the pinot gospel; from the days when, apart from an unlikely Barossa job from Peter Lehmann, it all came from Keppoch, where Hardy’s had planted far too much of a clone normally reserved for fizz. Fortunately, the Aussie dollar bought quite a lot of French francs then, so the eager student could easily move up into the Burgundy shelves…. To be lost there forever, if only one could live without a car, family or house… (The exchange rate changed, which is probably why they call it that.)

He had gurgled with awe the pioneering Tassie pinots, Moorilla, Meadowbank, Heemskerk, Piper’s Brook; and early ’80s pinot adventures at Mountadam. He’d corkscrewed his way around Burgundy, frequently mistaken for the dreaded Robert Parker Jr., whose face was not yet known, or Tim White, the FinRev bloke who’d been through ahead, helpfully telling Burgundians what to do.

Your writer had climbed into fermenting pinot noir for the pigeage, that slow snake dance performed naked in a fizzing tank of juice, berries and stalks: it feels like a missionary pot of live shrimps and warm Coke. (The idea is to gently disperse the hotspots that develop in the must when certain subregions of the ferment overheat, making jam). He had eventually drunk such wines upon their maturation, searching their mystery for fleeting whiffs of tootsie or shrimp.

He’d even dined at Le Bourguignon in Tokyo, where the Japanese chef speaks English with a Burgundian accent, gets his truffles and sloppy Burgundian farmhouse cheese flown in daily, and pours only Burgundies aged twenty-five years or more…

He sat through insufferable tastings of pinot with insufferable pinot snobs, and was sufficiently derided by them to be even bolder in his brattish criticism: bold enough to gain certain infamy by daring to award the newly-released Domaine de la Romanée-Conti (DRC) Echézeaux 1995 a miserly 78 points at a blind tasting – although he DID give the DRC Romanée-Conti of the same year 96++.

Tim Evans, the Negociants Australia bloke in charge of Australia’s allocation of the forthcoming 2005 release on August 1st., says all his DRC stock is accounted for, despite the Echézeaux being $560 a bottle, and the Romanée-Conti a mere $5000. I don’t think you’ll get to see too much in the way of a blind tasting going down this year.

Anyway, inspired by Dr. Eddie’s alacrity with pinot’s mischievous hue, the writer engaged Cheong Liew and eight other two-bottle fellows for a duck walk, which involves touring the duckmongers of Chinatown according to a pre-arranged schedule, each diner well-armed with pinots noir and a pair of good pinot balloons. There they were, at Morphett Street, heading for Ming’s Palace and his particular version of Peking Duck after gutsing on duck tongues and giblets in The Grange, and Cantonese duck and duck roast with Chinese mushrooms at Ken’s Barbecue, to hear Cheong excitedly announce that “Soon it’ll be all the white men riding bicycles while the Chinamen drive around in big cars”.

Like Chaucer’s rugged pilgrims those ducksters progressed, marveling at great local pinots - Romney Park; Ashton Hills – and those from further afield, like Curly Flat, Kooyong Ferrous, and yes, Lubijana’s Primavera.

Steve George brought a wondrous classic from Burgundy: a 1983 Comte George de Vogüé Chambolle-Musigny Premier Cru from 1983. It’s from a tiny vineyard called les Amoureuses - the Lovers - at the top of la Vogüé creek.

“That’s the year we planted Ashton Hills”, Steve chuckled to Peta. “Twenty five years ago. And they say pinot won’t age!”

While they finished with tandoori duck at the Indian Brasserie, your writer snuck out and lit up his last smoke, ever, wondering whether Dr. Eddie could pick les Amoureuses on its burnished colour alone. It’d be far too pale for Charlie Hawker.