EXCISE IDEA COULD DESTROY BLADDER BIZ

AN EXCISE WOULD SEE THE PRICE OF EXPENSIVE WINES LIKE THESE TUMBLE WHILE BLADDER PACKS WOULD DOUBLE. photo LEO DAVIS

Rudd Money Man Wants Excise WET Rebate May Dry Up Lobbied Pollies In Abject Panic

by PHILIP WHITE - a shorter version of this story appeared in The Independent Weekly

Treasury wallah Ken Henry has thrown a very tricky handful of marbles under the feet of the wine industry with his recommendation that the current scramble of alcohol taxes be replaced with a simple excise. For seasoning, he’s thrown another handful under the political dries who want to tax kiddylikker - and spirits - to oblivion. With state and federal elections brewing, we’re in for a spat of extreme panic in Pollyville, as the mighty grog lobbies get to their nefarious work.

Henry is a favoured apparatchik of Labour Prime Minster Kevin Rudd, who faces an election soon, in the midst of insurmountable difficulties in attempting to manage the dimishing waters of the Murray Darling Basin. Two Australian states also face elections, six quick weeks from now. One of these, Tasmania, which is sinking in good water, has a premium wine industry but no discount bin plonk production; South Australia produces the most of both types of wine, with much of the business dependent on Murray River water, of which there is none.

Although general political commentators have so far failed to realise the full implications of Henry's proposal, State Labour leaders like South Australia's Mick Rann will soon be forced to announce the attitude they'll take when lobbying their federal counterpart.

WHILE THE TAX WOULD BE A NATIONAL IMPOST, SOUTH AUSTRALIAN PREMIER MICK RAM HAS ONLY DAYS TO MAKE A STAND ON THE EXCISE WHICH HIS FEDERAL COUNTERPARTS ARE CONSIDERING.

Wine is currently taxed on the value of the unit sold, be it bottle or bladder. Under an excise, which is a tax on the total alcohol each unit contains, the cost of a $14 bladder pack would double, to $31.07, while a $30 bottle would fall to $27.53. These KPMG figures would see your favourite boutiques boom, and the Murray-Darling Basin wine industry collapse.

HARD LIQUOR PRICES WILL TUMBLE UNDER THE EXCISE PROPOSAL

Never before has the gap between the polarised wings of the wine business looked wider. But industry bodies, like the Australian Wine And Brandy Corporation, which is partly funded by the taxpayer, are obliged to represent everybody in the business, so will have to protect the bladder boyos, who produce half the wine consumed, if not made, in Australia.

These two ends of the business have always been at war. It was Brian Croser who went to Canberra at the onset of the GST and current messy regime and organised the Wine Equalisation Tax, which offered newly disadvantaged small producers an annual rebate.

This writer argued contentiously at that time that an excise was the only clean, logical manner of taxing alcohol. It was a classic Aries vs. Virgo reposte. Croser came home touting his deal as a great victory for the entire industry. I argued that it was terribly messy, and would only postpone the inevitable collapse of the discount bin business.

WINE AND BRANDY CORPORATION BOSS ANDREW CHEESEMAN WAS BRIAN CROSER'S ACCOUNTANT AT PETALUMA

Croser’s band-aid would simply keep the huge irrigating industrialists on side with the tax-dodging doctors and lawyers with ill-conceived hobby vineyards. No doubt he had discussed this at great length over many Bridgewater Mill lunches with the likes of Alexander Downer, the former Liberal government's Minister of Foreign Affairs. Not to mention folks like Amanda Vanstone (Immigration Minister under the same conservative regime) and Robert Hill (Defence Minister who became Ambassador to the United Nations), who co-owned the relatively tiny Amicus brand with Walter Clappis. These guys had a very heavy pull on John Howard’s wine taxation philosophy.

An open, far-sighted mind might see Henry’s proposal as the perfect opportunity to cleanse the big rivers of the scourge of an industry which is in such gross, nay, grotesque, oversupply to the extent that it’s collapsing anyway. This would release water to the Murray Mouth, and remove the source of much of the grog consumed as an alternative to sniffed petrol in aboriginal communities.

HENRY'S EXCISE WOULD SEE A BLADDER PACK SOAR FROM $14 TO $31, AND THE COLLAPSE OF THE IRRIGATING DISCOUNT WINE BUSINESS, LEAVING A LOT MORE WATER TO RUN DOWN THE MURRAY. GOOLWA IMAGE BELOW BY KATE ELMES.

It would also, according to the Winemakers’ Federation of Australia, result in the loss of 12,000 jobs.

Whilst the cynic might argue that these jobs are going anyway, the idea of the new tax will fill many country electorates with even more fear and depression. The milder sceptic could suggest that the discount wine industry is in permanently deep merde as long as the international wine glut continues, and that any movement which might lead to its dimunition is something healthy which much be addressed.

Apparently Henry has stepped his excise numbers: the brackets would be 3.5 per cent alcohol and below, then up to 5 per cent, 7 per cent, 10 per cent, 15 per cent, and above 22 per cent.

This would also favour the premium wine lover who has spectacularly, internationally, turned away from the sorts of dead-head alcohol bombs we’ve been rotely making in the twelve years since one American critic, Robert Parker Junior, began to tout them. While the wine blog explosion has seen Parker lose some power, the notion of an increased tax on wines above 15 per cent would surely be a strong incentive to Australian winemakers to return to healthier alcohols. Sales of more modestly balanced alcoholic wines should increase internationally.

In the meantime, a relaxing of the stifling tax laws and regulations on distillation could see a great deal of the wine glut converted to industrial alcohol, the income from which could perhaps be devoted to funding the next vine-pull scheme, which seems increasingly imminent, and would be likely to see a permanent cessation of irrigating to produce wines which sell for less than the price of bottled water.

As for the price of alcopops falling from $3.30 per unit to $2.42, well. At the risk of adding complexity to Mr. Henry’s pristine simplicity, perhaps the excise should be extended in the case of premixed drinks to include an extra charge on sugar and other sweeteners when mixed with alcohol. If caffeine was also included in this kiddylikker, another hike could be imposed. Banning such cocktails is futile: anybody can whup down three or four stiff short blacks between sessions in the boozer.

HICKINBOTHAM SPEECH RILES WINE POLICE

CASTAGNA'S BIODYNAMIC WINERY AT BEECHWORTH; BEAUTIFUL WINE REFUSED EXPORT APPROVAL

Great Aussie Plonky At Fault With Fault Obsessives
Letting The Wrong Crap Out And The Wrong Crap In
by PHILIP WHITE - A VERSION OF THIS STORY APPEARED IN THE INDEPENDENT WEEKLY

The Ian Hickinbotham speech I quoted last week grew legs. Hick addressed the Sydney International Wine Competition, talking about bacterial diseases in wine, and human tolerance to them. He wondered whether the export approval tasters employed by the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation were “actually stultifying individualism in our winemakers” by occasionally refusing export approvals to wines unfamiliar to them. His insinuation was that they imagined too many wines had bacterial spoilage.

Hick’s point was that the forensic scrutiny with which judges seek faults eliminates many interesting wines with organoleptic characters which they mistake as faults. He said that there are no bacteria in modern finished wines, implying that everybody should relax a little, and that maybe we don’t need these approval tastings at all. Huon Hooke reported this in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Steve Guy, who manages the export tastings, quickly reassured his troops that Hick was out of touch: things have changed; systems improved. But beautiful wines – Grange, Castagna, Torbreck etc. - have been refused approval in past years. These judgings have been like our wine shows: powerful levellers that can lop the eccentric, brave, and strange, and reinforce the industrial status quo which writers and drinkers all over the Old World are rejecting. They’ve approved thousands of dead flat boring crap plonks plastered with dot paintings and weird beasties, then denied the likes of Castagna et al an export approval because they thought they could smell something funny in one of his biodymanic beauties.

Having had one wine refused approval by two tasting panels, Julian Castagna told the authorities he would take the wine to London, call a press conference with television and all the wine critics who'd been suggesting Australian wines were all too boring and show them the quaklity of wines that we were not permitted to export. He suddenly got his approval.

Hick also took a typically obtuse swipe at writers who recommend wines which smell of lychees. “This disease is a consequence of bacteria attacking grape sugar during some stage of fermentation”, he said.

Lychee is an aroma, and flavour, I often find in gerwurztraminer. I like it there. Gewurz can also have lovely musk aromas, and rosewater, or turkish delight. Very few Australians have mastered this grape: this country is too hot for something that comes from the colder reaches of Alpine Europe.

Gewurztraminer succeeds in parts of New Zealand and Tasmania, but you need a hillbilly winemaker. Wild yeast, old oak, disdainful treatment is what it loves. No hard hats or safety glasses required.

In the early ’eighties, I learned to love the Reserve and Vendage Tardive gewurztraminer of Hugel, and my Alsace mate, Michel Dietrich, taught me how to drink this variety with his father’s Dietrich of Kaiserberg wines, with choucroute, the Alsace sauerkraut. You serve a great steaming plate of pickled cabbage with dollops of hot mustard and grilled smoked sausages of pork or game packed with chili and black pepper and you drink gallons of flinty, musky gewurztraminer.

Now, if gewurztraminer is not the ideal grape for this baked slab of country, I cannot imagine why on Earth anybody’d gamble for success with traminer, the original alpine white from which the slightly pink gewurztraminer mutated.

So why are Australian winemakers who have never worked in Alpine Europe suddenly growing, making, and marketing, traminer? They don’t attempt gewurztraminer. So why its awkward grandfather? And why are they calling it albariño?

Because they were sold a dud, that's why.

In the desperate search for new flavours, somebody in Australia decided that the punters would just love alboriño, the acidic thick-skinned white from Galacia and northern Portugal, where it’s called alvarinho. The CSIRO, in response to persistent demands, imported some, put it through the serpentine wiles of the government's quarantine process, and grew a scrillion cuttings, which they sold. These have been planted along the dead River, and everywhere from Orange to Clare, the Barossa, and McLaren Vale.

I expected it would take our winemakers a few vintages to work out what to do with the new baby. They seemed oilier, somehow thicker than expected. “They’ll work it out” I told myself thoughtfully. You can check my reviews by searching for alboriño on DRANKSTER. But it suddenly appears that the stuff they bought is savignin blanc B, a Tyrolean grape that also grows in Jura.

Even forgetting the freezing alpine nature of these places, which we do not emulate anywhere, it would be fair to say that the “yellow wines” which are where most European savignin ends up, are not too much in the way of your standard Australian industrial export-approved sort of a thing, if you get my drift. Try the Jura Vin Jaune recipe: six years in old untopped barrels, where a yeast like flor grows on the meniscus, slowing oxidation, to make a sort of unfortified sherry.

Savignin blanc B is traminer. Their DNA matches, like zinfandel and primitivo. Same diff. We may well see some respected albariños suddenly becoming savignin blanc B, much to the embarrassment of those critics who raved fulsomely about their quality and promise. To do their savignin blanc B justice, all Australian regions might have to sprout a snow-peaked mountain like the one on the Seaview bottle. Pity the whitecoats hadn’t done a little import checking and sniffed the cuttings for lychee.

But the lawyers will make up for them. This’ll take years.

COMMENT FROM IAN HICKINBOTHAM:

"I should tell you that the lychee smell of 'disease' is not that of Gewuerztraminer. It is possible you have never seen it, but it is most likely to occur in Chardonnay (where it does not 'over-lap' the pleasant lychee smell associated with that fragrant variety).

"Interestingly, Gewuerztraminer still only constitutes 0.5% of German vineyards (in spite of its name). People tire of it!"

HICKINBOTHAM SAYS PASTEUR WAS WRONG

Is Oz Too Obsessed With Germs?
Great Aussie Plonky Gets Volatile

Controversial Keynote Speech Delivered by Ian Hickinbotham RD Oe OAM at the Sydney International Wine Competition's Awards & Trophies Presentation Banquet 2009

Pasteur's pronouncement regarding wine was — and I say it slowly with Anglicised 'pronunciation' — if bacteria are present, 'le mal existait'. As the first Australian oenologist to 'allow' bacteria to grow in wine (to do the malo-lactic fermentation and at a time when an oenologist was sacked for not adding sulphur dioxide to prevent any secondary fermentation), perhaps I have a duty.

IAN HICKINBOTHAM RD Oe OAM - CLICK IMAGE FOR A REVIEW OF HIS ASTONISHING AUTOBIOGRAPHY

There is a trade story from the days when Penfolds Grange was Grange Hermitage. Seems the Australian Wine Board's powerful tasting panel rejected the great wine for export on the grounds that the wine was volatile! To the credit of Penfolds and indeed, the wine industry itself (if true) the story was kept 'in house'.

'Volatility' is an all-embracing word: it means 'too much vinegar in a wine' — in various forms — and is invariably the consequence of bacterial activity.

There are commendable movements to revert to more natural ways and the word 'biodynamic' is much bandied, while last year at this august event, wine writer, Max Allen, expounded the biodynamic viticulture movement, mentioning the mystical cow's horn filled with manure, to be emptied onto the vineyard when the moon is in the right phase! Significantly, these attempts at embracing the old ways concern the 'growing' phase. My subject concerns the 'winemaking' phase — a natural extension, surely!

There are about 8 recognised diseases of wine, but you may never see any of them due to Australian oenology probably — not possibly — probably being the best in the world! I actually ponder if our wines are too clean now! English critics (who really lead the world) have been saying this another way, by asserting that our wines are bland, that they all taste the same and consequently have no reflection of 'place': they lack 'terroir'.

In 50 vintages, I saw 'graisse' in a wine once and it was indeed an experience — and spectacular. The wine was viscous: when poured from one glass into another, 'plopping' was quite audible! (In viscosity, it was more viscous than olive oil.) The event was the subject of recent correspondence to 'Wine International' magazine: we had missed adding sulphur dioxide to the new wine. French technical literature gave us the definition 'graisse', which can be loosely translated into our word 'fat'.

True, the content of sulphur dioxide in wine is a tenth of the amount added to some foods, especially commercial smorgasbord type salads, but even Japanese would not buy black apricots! Importantly, it is commendable that when I started as an apprentice, 400 parts per million was a normal dosage to Riesling wines, but a quarter of that addition would be considered quite excessive by current oenologists.

Another disease I saw in the 1950s afflicted a million litres of dry red made from Shiraz and Grenache that was undrinkable because of intense bitterness of taste, a consequence of unbridled activity by some bacteria!

Again, the remedy turned on judicious use of sulphur dioxide and clarification. The bitterness had resulted from bacteria attacking the natural glycerine of the wine: the French define the disease as amertume. (It is not generally known that glycerine is about the 4th natural component of table wines, after water, alcohol and acid.) Significantly, that wine became the second Australian dry red to win an international Gold medal!

LOUIS PASTEUR: WRONG?

Still another disease (and one you may well have seen without knowing) is 'tourne', which was described by Louis Pasteur himself. As the name implies, it turns dry red brown in colour with loss in desirable fruitiness when only months old. The disease is caused by bacteria attacking the natural tartaric acid in dry red wine, but such wine is at least drinkable!

Also drinkable, and actually appreciated by some (including some wine writers) are white wines that develop the distinctive smell of lychee fruit. This disease is a consequence of bacteria attacking grape sugar during some stage of fermentation.

Current winemakers have their own scourge in the form of Brettanomyces, commonly known as "brett". This wayward yeast affects dry red wine and 'metallic taste' seems to be the common descriptor. Prevention centres on increased use of sulphur dioxide, while oenologists are almost blamed for being all too sedulous, thereby bringing the scourge upon themselves!

Ancient civilisations drank increasingly acescent wines during the year, just because they could not keep their wine away from air and the ever-present bacteria progressively turned all of their table wines to vinegar. Vintage festivals are a reminder: they were the wonderful celebration of the new wine, which really meant – no more having to drink near vinegar: indeed at eleven months the ancients were drinking almost straight vinegar. Tourists in Europe today are still heartened to see the telltale bush affixed to the winemaker's door to inform the traveller that the new wine is ready.

It was only some 300 years ago (not long in the 10,000 year saga) that the English made better bottles, that lead to the use of cork, which neatly compensated for the small differences in bottle mouth dimensions and protected wine from air somewhat.

When I trained as an oenologist in 1950, an inordinate amount of time was spent teaching us to recognise acescence. Indeed we were actually trained to decrease our thresholds of perception, with wines containing decreasing volatile acidity! Importantly, it was instilled into us that if a wine displayed traces of volatile acidity, then it would assuredly get worse. Volatile acidity would inevitably increase with aging. So the official tasting panel of the Australian Wine Board (now the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation) rejected wines with trace amounts of volatile acidity. Today, that assertion is no longer valid, because for at least 20 years, oenologists can remove every bacterium that could increase the volatile acidity in wines!

Remembering that Grange has a relatively high volatile acidity — deliberately — and the official tasting panel is charged with approving every wine intended for export, the panel comprises tasters who live near Adelaide. Further, given that the task is voluntary and panellists are called at short notice (often so the wine can be loaded onto a departing ship), panellists are generally retired wine industry executives — who — importantly, were trained in detection of miniscule amounts of volatile acidity in wines. Add to that normal human competitiveness — who can detect the lowest threshold amount of Volatile Acidity — and we have panels that are hell-bent on detecting volatile acidity — and rejecting them for export. Contrary to the out-dated entrenched opinion, though such a modern wines may contain traces of volatile acidity — its amount will not increase: there are no bacteria in such modern bottled wines!

So we do not need the official tasting panel of the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation? Perhaps they are actually stultifying individualism in our winemakers.

Our two sons went to Bordeaux and Burgundy universities. Stephen told me that at Bordeaux University they actually teach that bacteria and moulds on grapes contribute something to the final wine!

Renowned English critic, Michael Broadbent, wrote in 'Decanter' Magazine in 2006:

“All were aware that Robert Parker had given the 1990 100 points. The fault is brettanomyces. Like volatile acidity it is often present, can even enhance the smell and taste. But over a certain level of noticeability, it is a fault. The day I was drafting this article I telephoned Farr Vintners, ‘when did you last sell 1990 Montrose?’ ‘We sold a case this morning: £2,200 in bond’.”

Finally, let's consider the famous pronouncement of the French professor long ago:

"If we did not interfere in the winemaking process, we would be drinking vinegar — not wine — as vinegar is the end product of Nature's glorious scheme"!

JANCIS: 2009 OZ VINTAGE NOT SO BAD

"We've All Got Some Adjustments To Make"
Fosters Admits Simple Cockups
Pommie Coke Hits £1 A Line
by PHILIP WHITE

Since the Wine And Brandy Corporation AND St. Jancis are saying the Australian vintage is not as bad as some errant scoundrels reported, I knew a brilliant statement from Fosters must be coming next.

It seemed unlikely on the face of it, because Fosters must be all statemented out after last week, with a new business plan for their wineries, and their new wine branch and all, and the terrible challenge of what to call it ... I mean they’ve decided it’s there, and there it must be, like the wine group and everything, suddenly absorbing baby wine marketers like a driver recruitment racket for a stretch limo mob, and it hasn’t got a name? Oh my God.

What comes to mind? Now, let me see ... Fosters? Penfolds? Wolf Blass? Rosemount? Tollana? Jamieson’s Run? Black Opal? Kaiser Stuhl? Andrew Garrett? Tin Men? Repo Man?

But it came! Nah, not the name. That’ll cost ’em $200,000 ... Not for me - I’m not in the league of the winebiz serpent greaser who could sell Fosters its own word for $200,000. I'm talking about the unlikely statement from Fosters, which would once and for all trounce the namby-pamby positivism of our beloved vintage Jancis and the Australian Wine And Brandy Corporation.

Something really bloody gut-wrenchingly depressing!

It came. It was magnificent when it came. It even trounced the hot slow news of how the fair Jancis narrowly survived Black Saturday. It came from Group Director James Lovell, who today told the Australian Bureau of Agriculture Resource Economics Outlook 2009 conference:

“We've all got some adjustments to make".

Does he know something Jancis and the AW&BC don't?

“Our competitive advantage has gone and our competitors are catching up”, he said.

Dr Lovell must have verged on bitter regret when he then went on to explain that Australian wines were “a bit the same”, that drinkers were “looking elsewhere”, and that Australia needed to push and "rebuild brand Australia” by promoting luxury wines and making wines with a broader ranger of flavours and styles.

This astonishing revelation came hard on the heels of that same Fosters, Australia’s largest sudsmonger, admitting it had completely buggered up when it shrunk the Cascade stubby by 45ml from 375ml to 330ml without dropping the price accordingly.

James must have been completely shagged after the humiliation of admitting that Australian wines are a bit the same, so another Fosters person, Felicity Watson, took her turn at the Gatling and admitted that when Fosters shrunk the stubby by 12%, sales dropped by 33%.

In a more or less blondish moment she said they’d shrunk it to “give the bottle a more European appearance”.

Why didn't she say it was an attempt to stem binge drinking?

And Tasmanian beer? European? I thought it had a Tasmanian tiger, a thylacine, on the label. European? With the help of the swarthy Armada Irish, the blonde European settlers killed all the poor bloody thylacines by 1936!


Highly retouched, Thylacinus cynocephalus, above, [Greek: dog-headed pouched one] is what we call the Tasmanian Tiger. Fosters put 'em on its Cascade beer label, long after they were all dead by 1936. And then the boofheads cut the volume of the stubby by 12% and left the price where it was!

Anyway, Fosters will gradually reintroduce the 375ml stubbie for the thylacine freaks, without increasing the price. Talk about capitulation!

You’d think that at a time when so many great minds are completely contrite and freshly focused on the brave new hyperprofits of tomorrow, they’d have the brilliance to just go that little bit extra and realise that they’re all in the business of flogging really cheap recreational drugs which are in fact dangerously depressive. So the cut in volume could have been sold as a socially-responsible manouvre. No?

Okay. Try this: Why not sell cheaper, stronger, arguably safer, much more reliable stuff that won't cause depression?

The Babyboomers need pain relief!

The British Home Office has just admitted that the street price of both cocaine and heroin has fallen by half in a decade, with cocaine now available for £20 a gram, down from £77 ten years back.

So when a takeaway bottle of execrable Australian plonk can set you back £2 to £4 in a London Tesco, a glass of said swill at a bar £3.50, and a pint of lager around £2.75, a line of coke will set you back just £1. Glass of water, line in the bogs, go home sober without your head kicked in, still do the bedroom business, and save money, see?

In a stroke of analysis whose brilliance could only be matched by Fosters, the Home Office suggested that drug prices may be falling partly because fewer people are buying drugs.

So why are previously reliable British plonk discounters’ not restocking shelves? Why do five British pubs go bankrupt each week? Eh? Don't try to tell me it's not 'cause cocaine's the better buy.

Are we all incapable of stretching our tiny minds just that one extra inch? Bugger this pretending vintage is lovely and Fosters will get better, and Cascade drinkers can count ... why don’t we all work together to sell beautiful Tasmanian Government heroin to the rest of the world? We can make cleaner hospital grade opiates than Afghanistan in Tassie, and we do!

You might think I'm getting off the track here, but please bear me out. This is lateral thinking, and, as my dear departed mate Stephen Hickinbotham used to say, "one lateral kiss is worth a thousand standing up".

Over thirty years, the Tasmanian opiate industry has grown to a $200 million a year business. Best pain relief on Earth, so America insists it should remain illegal.

Funny, really. The American wowsers are encouraging Tassie to bugger its beautiful opiates business in much the same way Carlton United Breweries, now a Foster's subsidiary, mucked up the Tasmanian hop business when they monopolised it and tried to control the market, and the flavour of all Australian beer, by making an essence from all the hops and selling only that to anybody who needed fresh hops.

Imagine Coopers having to buy industrial hop essence from CUB.

Pretty soon all Australian beer tasted like Carlton Draught, so we flocked en masse to Coopers, and to European lagers. To discover why, CUB got into bed with Interbrew, the Belgian Beer Cafe mob who owns nearly every interesting beer. They set up Belgian beer pubs around Australia to learn about the premium beer market. They even tried to buy The Exeter!

So soon we had the new smaller Cascade bottles filled with beer which the labels boasted was lovingly hand-crafted with only the best fresh hops from Europe.

The USA, which runs the world's opiates business, buys 80% of its hospital-grade opiates from India and Turkey, whilst much of its street hammer comes from Afghanistan. It strictly limits the amount of opium poppy Tassie can grow to supply the rest of the world's hospitals, using the excuse that stuff might seep onto the streets of Emurka. We wouldn't want to interfere in the Afghan trade, now, would we. Nope.

Now, driven by their paranoid fear of morphine, the Americans are gradually relaxing their 80-20 rule on the proviso that Tassie grows more of the tricked-up opiate-free Thebain poppy, which is used to make the drug OxyCodon, which is not as intense in its pain-relieving capacities as morphine or the old Nepenthe hospital grade heroin, which the pious and sanctimonious USA also put an end to.

It's like the genetically modified Canola business, or the corn/petrochem industry.

Mallinckrodt and Noramco, the Johnson and Johnson subsidiary, report that last year their sales of OxyCodon increased by 95% to suddenly make it a $1 billion business.

Anyway, I reckon that with CUB's raw experience in the Tassie hops racket, and the brilliant marketing skills of Fosters, who know how to provide less for more, then replace it with more for less and get everybody feeling sorry for them, we should nationalise Fosters, liberate the Tassie poppy farms, and flood the UK and USA with pure Tasmanian Government grade heroin, using Fosters' expansive international distribution networks.

There are those among us, after all, who cannot forget the pristine beauty of Sandoz, the USA goverment branded LSD, which was second only to Owsley's in quality.

Sandoz, eh? ... Mmmmm ... Fosters posh new wine division, whatever they eventually call it, could distribute the Thylacine Superior brand, which would be in a pack just 12% smaller than the Tassie Devil Magnum, which would be the bigger pack, but cheaper, and distributed by the beer division.

This would return Australia's competitive advantage, and destroy the traditional marketplaces of all other purveyors of the Dreaded Devil's Brew.

We've all got some adjustments to make.

I could get my lovely Mum Drinksy (top) out of the pinot vat long enough to pose for some poppy shots for the "Put An End To Depression" advertising campaign, and Brand Australia would once again conquer the world ...

PEAK OZ BODY REEK: WINE BIZ ON THE NOSE

GREENOCK CREEK ROENNFELDT ROAD VINEYARD AT HARVEST: BUGGER-ALL IRRIGATION; NEVER MORE THAN A TONNE PER ACRE; HAND-MADE; ONE OR TWO BARRELS A YEAR; $190 A BOTTLE; HUNDREDS OF PARKER POINTS; ALWAYS SELLS OUT - SUSTAINABLE? INDUSTRIAL? LEO DAVIS PHOTO

Australian Wine Industry Goes Off In Summer Break
Sudden Sicko Revelations On New Year's Eve

by PHILIP WHITE

“Wine industry grapples for new hook” croaked the Sydney Morning Herald on December 31.

Precisely who it was that decided to run this piece of deep misery on the last day of the year, when most readers are too full of the fruits of the wine biz to remember anything, let alone read, remains to be seen.

I’m sure it was dumped, like the unseemly crock it is, by somebody who hoped it would just sort of gradually break down and dribble through the many levels of the business nice and easy over the summer holidays, so’s not to cause too much of a stink all at once.

Reminds me of John writing in The Holy Bible, King James Version, in chapter 3, verse 13 of his gospel: “And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.”

Good enough reason to keep the stink under a tin until dark falls on New Year’s Eve and the whole nation gets maggoted, eh?

Having sat watching this nefarious business for thirty years, I feel vaguely qualified to respond to this article, bit by bit.

The wine industry was exposed to some unpalatable truths this year, as the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation acknowledged that vineyards and winemakers would need to make major changes if they are to survive an ever growing plethora of challenges.

Well, yes. This is the body that has overseen the dumbest broadscale rooting of the Australian countryside, local economies, public health, families, environment and water during the last decades. Its board includes nobody who grows grapes; nobody with actual investment in the wine industry; nobody I would call a particularly talented hands-on winemaker. (There is one winemaking director who is on the board for his marketing skills, according to the original press statements). Two of its small number work for huge transnational companies (Pernod-Ricard; Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessey) which are direct rivals of the Australian wine business. Its members change in about one quarter the time it takes a responsible winemaker to decide upon a flavour, find the land, prepare it, plant it, harvest it, convert it from primary to secondary product in the winery, mature it, package it as something gastronomically attractive, market it, promote it, sell it, distribute it, and see it winning respect.

Major changes indeed.

With the preceding "boom time" party now well and truly over, 2009 could prove to be a major turning point for the consortium as small and large operations alike look for innovative measures to help the Australian wine industry recover from what has been a long-running hangover.

Yes. As I have consistently written for thirty years, there is no point in the driest country on Earth buggering arid land and wasting precious water to make cheap rotgut bladder pack quality wine which is two or three times the strength of your average beer for sale to the world at the price of imported water.

2009 IS the major turning point. Things have already changed, and admitting this on New Year’s Eve will not make the facts go away.

This industry is cactus whether these geniuses look for innovative measures or not.

The confronting reality for Australia's wine industry is actually a cautionary tale for all producing countries, says the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation.

Well, yes. The Australian wine industry should immediately advise the world to drop the Australian winemaking recipe immediately. It is Australia’s duty. Through its great publicly-funded halls of academe, like the University of Adelaide, this industry trained thousands of winemakers and sent them out like apostles around the world to advise our rivals how to do things our way. We never seemed to realise that because they had the equivalent of slave labour, no environmental restrictions, and either plenty of water or plenty of water which could be procured illicitly, we never seemed to realise that these countries would be able to make cheaper wine than Australia could.

So before their environments fail like Australia’s, before their water dries out, before their communities drink themselves to oblivion and ruin, of course we should be out there, telling them to stop.

The University of Adelaide should quickly knock a course together, offering a doctorate in how to undo what we’ve just taught these hapless copyists to do.

The people who have encouraged the Australian wine industry to develop to this sickening delusion should all be on the road, at their own expense, apologising, and helping put things right. In Georgia, Romania, China, India, Argentina, Chile ... wherever it’s necessary.

The corporation's market development manager, Paul Henry, says the industry will in all likelihood face production without profit and diminishing bargaining power in the face of attritional retail dynamics caused by the global financial crisis.

Well, yes, and all the above. Has anybody sat down and considered precisely how much wine the world should be expected to drink? That would a handy number to have before we encounter tricky difficulties like the global financial crisis, which wasn’t really much of a surprise to those of us who live moderately and watch.

Despite the ongoing drought, wine production went up this year, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), but lower domestic sales and a drop in exports led to a surplus in wine stocks.

Yes. But this was no surprise. The whole business was looking forward to a bumper harvest until the Lord smote the grapeyards with withering heat. The heat was the surprise. The export slump was predicted; the increase in yields per acre and total tonnes harvested was exactly what the University of Adelaide and the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation have been struggling for decades to achieve. This oversupply – two billion litres in tank at the moment, and another good vintage looming – is the direct result of everything everyone’s struggled for. Just how this industry could justify the use of the extra water required to achieve these enormous increases should confound and enrage the entire community.

"Global financial crisis aside, Australia has manoeuvred itself into a situation where innovation and efficiency in production has outstripped the sector's own ability to manage that capacity," Mr Henry said.

What did I just say?

Exports of Australian wine fell by nine per cent to 715 million litres and the United Kingdom remained the largest importer of Australian wine, taking 268 million litres valued at $895 million. However, Mr Henry says Australia's competitors should be mindful of being hubris.

I think that should be hubristic.

I’ve only met Paul Henry once, and on that short occasion he impressed me. He seemed to understand that he was on his donkey, riding into a seething Jerusalem. But I got the feeling that the only eternal life he could see was the history he’d leave behind. There are not many successful liquidators remembered down through the years.

"These current market and structural challenges are not exclusive to Australia ... they are common to the development cycle of all wine producing countries," he said.

Well, yes, apart from the fact that this country seems to be withering, bleaching and cracking rather faster than those with snow-peaked mountains providing them with ongoing life.

There are no environmental scientists on the board of the Australian Wine And Brandy Corporation, either.

Remaining optimistic the industry will return to its former days of glory, Mr Henry said the real judgment call should not be based on how Australian viniculturists got themselves into such a difficult supply and demand situation, but rather, how and when the industry will get itself out.

Yes, of course. Savoury though the notion be, there is little point in stringing the whole roadside with crucifixes. But what should happen immediately is the old guard, who got this amazing industry into this decrepitude, should never, ever be given another chance. They should take their money and the remnants of their glossy gastroporn fame, and retire, planting native vegetation as they go. They should have no further influence over our own great public institutions, like the University of Adelaide. They should never be permitted to represent or influence this country anywhere, ever.

Which brings us to the question: is there sufficient hot young blood hiding in the hallways and annexes of the Universities and the great glimmering refineries of this country to come out and lead? Have we trained any? If we did, would we recognise them? Are they brave enough to speak? Do they have the intellectual and moral exactitude to do this awful job?

If we haven’t trained any such leaders, then those in charge should in fact be crucified on the roadsides after all.

"The stated aim of the industry is to identify a credible premium to be paid for Australian wine and to move our production and marketing platform towards a quality vision that celebrates sustainable value above unprofitable volume growth," he says.

Doesn’t that mean make better wine at better prices if indeed the environment permits, the market desires, and government tolerates?

Although at the end of 2007 there was concern there would be a mass exodus from viniculture in Australia, experts now say the removal of several vineyards is necessary if the industry is to remain on a sustainable footing.

Several vineyards? The whole mentality of the current “industry” – and that’s it’s own word – is to continue planting enormous broadacre monocultural grapeyards the like of which continue to be planted, lickety-split, right up the Murray darling Basin into Queensland, and all over the bits of the south-western corner of Western Australia which aren’t already dying under intensive bluegum plantations.

The whole mentality of the current “industry” is to keep the grape prices down by forcing out of business the specialist families who’ve hand-worked environmentally-responsible vineyards with modest expectations through drought, bushfire and flood, for generations.

The Australian wine “industry” is about as smart as the American corn industry, which must over-produce to succeed. There are no fences anymore, no plants, no insects, no shops, no townships, nobody with dirt on their hands. Plenty of petrochemicals; plenty of poison. But no flavour.

Despite earlier gloomy predictions, ABS statistics show the total area of grape vines this year was slightly higher than last year at 166,000 hectares and, with production up, yield rose from 9.3 to 11.8 tonnes per hectare.

See? From whence came that water? Eh?

Winemakers Federation of Australia chief executive Stephen Strachan says it is because of the success of the industry in recent years that so many challenges have arisen.

Exactly. We’re so goddam clever – remember hubris? – that we fucked it completely. Greed comes into mind, too.

"We saw a lot of people come into the industry expecting the phenomenal growth to continue and we've got a job to do to try to keep that market share, rather than continue to grow," he says. "Australia, I think, is now the fourth largest wine producer in the world."

There’s a lot of stuff in that par.

The likes of Strachan talked the business up for years, encouraging increased investment. Every extra tonne of grapes grown in Australia sees the Wine And Brandy Corporation budget swell. The money comes from a levy on tonnes harvested.

Which has nothing to do with market share. Share of what? The biggest wine oversupply in history? The biggest recreational drug racket fiasco ever? Share of what?

The ABS says the total grape crush for the 2007-08 vintage came in at 1.8 million tonnes, up by about 30 per cent on last year, and produced 1.2 billion litres of wine.

Giving us two billion litres of very ordinary plonk to sell into a world market that’s already overflowing.

Australia's largest winemakers accounted for 71 per cent of the total crush, while the smaller winemakers averaged 97 tonnes each. Mr Strachan said although the drought continued to ravage the country, the high quality and size of the 2008 vintage surprised a lot of people.

And delighted those big four companies with the 71 per cent, as their costs were delightfully low. Two of those four, half, of course, are not Australian companies, and you needn’t be a cynic to realise Foster’s won’t be Australian for very much longer.

"It was a very challenging vintage because of the size of it and if we have another vintage of that magnitude, then there is a fairly high likelihood that a significant amount of fruit won't be processed," he said. "The bottom line is there needs to be an adjustment downwards in terms of our vineyard capacity in Australia and that will probably happen at a greater pace now because grape prices are going to be very low this year. From an industry perspective we need to see some vineyards removed so we get back on to more stable footing in terms of sustainability."

Okay, Mr. Strachan, we get your drift. We need to lose a quarter of our vineyards. If you like, I can make available thirty years of tasting notes, with say, two to six thousand wines assessed each year. Let’s say we sort them in ascending order of scores, and tell the producers of the bottom quarter that they obviously don’t know what they’re doing and should simply eff off.

That would provide this industry with its biggest ever international marketing message.

If we also locked in a ratio of water used per dollars profit per tonne of grapes, and native vegetation planted to counterbalance the environmental damage inevitably incurred, that would be another incredible marketing message that would be of enormous assistance in notifying the world that we’ve been leading them in the wrong direction, too.

In fact, their drinkers might even forgive us. People might begin to trust us again.

Mr Henry agrees there is an urgent need for rationalisation and downsizing required within the industry. "But there was little consensus about where and who that corrective measure would come from," he said.

Try my suggestion above, Paul.

And while some might expect a limited amount of water to restrict the number of hectares covered in vines, the corporation reports that the physical availability of water is not likely to be a serious constraint on the size of the 2009 harvest. The ABS says nearly all vineyards in Australia were forced to irrigate this season, bringing the average water consumption to 3.2 megalitres per hectare, with drip and micro spray the most common forms of watering.

So?

"About 65 per cent of all wine grapes are grown in South Australia's Murray Darling Basin and even if drought breaks, the issue is not so much how much rain we have but more so how much irrigation there is," Mr Strachan said. "The river is going to take a number of years to fill up after the drought breaks, so the water outlook is not terribly promising."

Does that mean growers should steal water? How does he know this is a drought and that it will break?

He said federal reform was needed in regards to water trading allowed between irrigators and universal allocations.

Oh. Gotcha. Put him in charge of the River.

Wine consumers are proving to be "unforgivingly Darwinian", says the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation. The peak industry body says the market place is showing "little or no interest in any attribute other than volume at low cost".

"The most likely effect of the credit crisis is more conservative spending by consumers and gravitation to lower price points," the corporation's information and analysis manager, Lawrie Stanford said. And Mr Strachan agrees.

"We've got a global financial crisis that's leading to either a reduction in demand or consumers trading down to lower priced wines," Mr Strachan said.

Right. Let me think aloud. Forget most of our export. It’s neither profitable nor sustainable. Half the wine Australia drinks is in bladder packs, right? Mothers’ little helper. The silver pillow; the chrome handbag. Then we have, say, Greenock Creek, or Wendouree, which never makes more than fifty tonnes and never sells a bottle below, say $50.

The chrome is begat by chrome. The glittering refineries; the monoculture; the efficiency; the reliability; the science; the University of Adelaide; the salination; the alcoholism; the health costs; the full jails across the outback.

Wendouree is begat by Wendouree: by its hard dirt; its meagre climate; its humble expectations; its honesty with its customers; the way it decided against releasing any wine this year because it wasn’t good enough.

What do these businesses have in common?

Nothing.

So why are they lumped into one big cuddly “wine industry”?

Because the refineries need some modest honesty to ride upon, that’s why. Some quality, some reality, some gastronomic achievement. Some nuts and berries.

With domestic sales dropping by five per cent, Mr Strachan predicted the figure would continue to grow, particularly if the government introduced a tax on all alcoholic beverages in the new year.

I think he means “continue to fall”.

And the tax issue? Easy. Tax all alcoholic beverages on the amount of alcohol they contain.

Combine the resultant effect with that – cheaper, stronger, higher-volume packs will increase in price; winemakers will be encouraged to make wines of lower alcohol – with the results of my culling process above, and you have a happy, sensible, profitable, sustainable business.

Currently undertaking a review of Australia's tax system, and having already introduced a tax on pre-mixed alcoholic drinks, the government says "it is sometimes possible to improve overall welfare by taxing the consumption of particular commodities that cause social harm".

If government didn’t find these geniuses so easy to shove around then the twisted and arcane tax system the industry has already earned itself would never have been imposed in the first place.

As for pre-mixed alcoholic drinks? All the biggest wine companies have them. The wine industry invented them. In the ’sixties and ’seventies they were called Vin Spa or Pineapple Pearl, in the eighties they were West Coast Cooler and the like. Orlando (Pernod-Ricard) even had one called “e”, obviously hoping that a fair few bit of e would be dropped by the kiddies. The wine industry has always been in the business of selling alcohol any way it can. That is its nature.

But Mr Strachan says he is yet to see evidence that wine plays a big part in Australia's problem with alcohol abuse.

Then Mr. Strachan has never stood in the bed of the Todd River with his eyes open. What began with the gun is being finished by complacency.

With the government having signed an agreement with the European Union last week conceding the use of region-specific names such as champagne, Mr Strachan said Australian consumers might also steer away from their favourite drop for a short period once it was given a new classification.

Boo hoo. No more passing off.

He said wine lovers might be frustrated initially due to products formerly known as champagne, port, sherry and tokay being more difficult to locate on bottle shop shelves.

"It's just more a matter of working through a process where people become aware of a different set of descriptors," he said.

Mr Strachan said the new deal conceding the use of European names would mean less constraints on the way wine was made in Australia, allowing it to be more easily exported.

A different set of descriptors? Has Mr. Strachan ever read the claptrap, codswallop and balderdash that’s written on Australian wine bottles?

Mr Strachan said he expected large scale exporters would survive the economic downturn as a result of the deal, but that he was worried how the smaller-scale premium vineyards would fare.

"Consumers tend to trade down in a time of uncertainty, so they still continue to consume as much wine, but they tend to trade down, so those who are selling premium products are going to find the going pretty tough until we work through all the economic uncertainty."

This suits perfectly the perpetrators of the whole racket, right from the beginning. Trade down, and you support the refineries that have buggered the Murray and the Todd, and their inhabitants, you support the mentality of continual oversupply regardless of its effects, and you will need desperately to maintain status quo, with its morality, its experienced players, and its utter, overwhelming destruction.
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