VINE PULL: THE WORST POSSIBLE PROMO

Post Modern Wine Fire ... Aussie Vineyards Burning ... Bad Billboard For Wine Biz
by PHILIP WHITE - A VERSION OF THIS APPEARED IN THE INDEPENDENT WEEKLY

Now that the bulldozers have started, the Australian wine business faces one of the most awkward marketing problems it could encounter.

Vineyards are like vast billboards for wine, and for winemaking communities.

You don’t need a sign saying “Australian Wine Industry” in the middle of an horizon-to horizon Nuremberg rally of vinous monoculture. You’re in the middle of a much bigger advertisement for wine than any planning regulation would ever permit a signwriter to erect.

This was recognised in the eighties, when the Vine Pull Scheme was stopped, more on the grounds of the ruination of heritage and civic amenity, than anything much to do with the modern wine business.

Vineyards are dreadfully honest advertising, too. Vignerons have little idea that the droll repetition of the grapeyard can be a pretty good indicator of what flavours the bypasser should expect. By their fruit ye shall know them.

So now that the tourist will be driving through terrain scarred by bulldozers, inhaling the wafting smoke from mighty piles of dead vines, does that person feel like pulling in for a case of premium? Do they recall that just months ago the proprietors were telling us this was a great thing, this vineyard, and its fruit?

Vineyards fried to virtual extinction by drought and sunshine are one thing; vineyards bulldozed and put to the torch are another.

Vine-pulls are bad for the captains of industry. Anybody who encouraged such plantings in order to lower prices – look like greedy, unscrupulous cretins. But they’ll move on: swap boards; swap industries. They’re just as likely to be on the board of the Scrubbed Pine Red Setter Kennel Company tomorrow.

When the vineyards burn, the biggest damage is dealt more innocent folks. The humiliation instilled by a large-scale vine-pull is deadly to those who must pull. I can’t forget the old men weeping openly in pubs in the Barossa in the mid-eighties, after they’d pulled their grandfathers’ gardens out. Pulling the vines was like pulling the teeth of the entire community, without anæsthetic. Families fall to bits. Suicides occur.

The wandering wino may miss this cruel undercurrent, and drive about bathed in the sanctimonious light of the opportunist about to make a killing, buying wine at bargain prices when the international market is overflowing.

But what does gross oversupply really mean to the wine lover?

First, it means quality drops. When the refineries are competing to control the bargain bins of Europe, they must make wine at cheaper and cheaper budgets. Corners are cut. Sawdust replaces barrels. Shovelled acid and tannin replace what trimmed vineyard budgets failed to achieve naturally. The “make” budget shrinks; the “promo and packaging” budget swells.

Second, it means quality drops. When growers suddenly find themselves without a grape purchaser, they’re faced by a cruel choice. They can spend money they don’t have making the wine themselves, or spend money they don’t have hiring a bulldozer to rip the vineyard to make way for almonds (if only) or car yards. Most try to make a wine. Others let the grapes hang, and let the vineyard fall into disrepair, hoping Mary MacKillop or somebody will send a buyer along next year.

(Unlikely. Since her sainthood, Mary has made it essential that a freeway bypasses Penola, which would slash a great swathe of Coonawarra vineyard asunder.)

Whether in a wheelie bin or a contract refinery, 2010 has seen a stupendous amount of wine made on spec by people who can’t afford to do it properly – precisely the sort of wine directly responsible for the collapse of international respect for Australian wine in the first place.

Hoping that some cleanskin dealer will emerge at the last minute with the money to pay for bottling, many Australian working families have turned their 2010 crop into bulk plonk. They’ve done it in mate’s sheds, or pulled the cash sock out and paid a contract refinery to convert their grapes to alcohol, which is at least semi-stable, and may last. As long as they can afford the tank rental.

So, within the next couple of years, the lake of unsold wine in Australia will be joined by a tsunami of poorly made plonk, sold at increasingly diminishing returns out of mendicant desperation.

Which, to summarise, means that, third, quality drops.

If they are lucky, the mongers of this plonk might find some nefarious Flash Harry to sell it in China. If it’s white, forget it. If it’s red, sugar it up, fizz it up, put a golden dragon on it and flog it as an Aussie heritage item that will heal your teeth.

But mark my words, within a few years, we will be buying our teeth etching fluid from China. It will be called Premium Wine Of China, and they’ll put kangaroo dot paintings on it, broken fish plates, Cohiba cigar labeling; whatever we want. It may well be better than what we’ve sold them.

The wines I recommend on this page are not like these. As a buyer, you have the best chance yet of choosing which bits of the business you’d like to see survive.

BETWEEN SCORCHING DESERT AND DERANGED GUNMEN, VINEYARDS ARE BEING PUT TO THE TORCH

Cynicism Aside, This Crap Is No Surprise ... Any Fool Could See It Coming
From the archive: January 2006. This is the sort of writing that led to Melvin Mansell, editor of Rupert’s Advertiser, firing me after twenty years of wine columns.

“The Vine Pull words excite people”, says Paul Clancy, chairman of the new Wine Grape Growers Australia. I’d asked about current rumours of another such episode, when government pays hopeless grapegrowers to uproot vines and leave the business. This last occurred in the mid-eighties.

“There IS talk of a Vine Retirement Scheme” Clancy says. “Just different words. The wine industry doesn’t like too much government intervention, but we’ve got growers going to the wall right across Australia, and a fair slab of the blame lies with Canberra, so we’re having a meeting of appropriate parties there next month. Everything’s on the table.”

Sinister things happen in a big wine flood. Hardest bit to swallow is that some wine might get cheaper, but it never improves in quality. The refineries are under immense pressure to cut their winemaking budgets to compete with speculative bottom-feeders. Things fall apart. Lakes of heartless swill flood Australia’s tankfarms. Drinking a bargain? Toast the poor grower who went broke. Poor fella my country.

And on it goes. Apart from the abundance of dubious cleanskins and bladder packs, and their massive environment and public health costs, the biggest change to hit the sensitive wino during a Vine Pull Scheme is social. Many grand old families were gutted during the last effort. Walk into any Barossa bar and it was in your face: good people grievously distressed about uprooting their great-grandfather’s beloved vines.

Tourist attraction? Men with blank teary faces gazing into too many schooners of stout? You’d flee outside, to find the whole valley shrouded in wafts of smoke from the smouldering windrows [SUBS: WINDROWS NOT WINDOWS] of ancient vines. It went on and on. The big companies wouldn’t pay enough; so the government paid. To destroy the gardens. Ein prosit.


Whatever it’s called, the next uprooting will be more widespread. With any luck, and with Clancy’s immense capital of hindsight, this time we’ll pay to remove stuff we won’t drink. If nobody wants to buy it, if the growers can’t afford to have it made, then they can’t afford to pick it, much less cough up for the conversion to better varieties. Or pay the bulldozers.

Clancy contemplates government assistance paying for the clearance of failed vineyards, to be repaid by the industry through a small levy on the long-term professional viticulturers who stay in the business and survive. “It’s in their interest”, he says.

Politicians must cease their blithe effervescence over the wine business. A responsible planning and establishment cycle for a serious new winery development is at least twice the life of a government, three or four of them if you were a man of category, like David Wynn. But, just like the big refineries encourage gluts to keep costs down for their shareholders, politicians see the wine business as some sort of Instant Lite: a cute, popular, and safe novelty El Dorado. Forget the water issues: think of the export!

“The tax regimes attracted all the wrong people” Clancy bemoans. “In it for the wrong reasons. Real men of the land in all regions find their livelihoods crushed by a planting boom talked up by big wineries and ignited by tax minimisers who have no interest at all in viticulture or the economic and social impacts on the country. It’s Australian against Australian. Well done those men.

”There are rice farmers up the river in New South Wales, for example, putting in thousand acre vineyards simply because they can. They’ve got cheap water and flat land.

“Then, a lot of others have planted in the wrong bloody places. Like the Hills. The only growth in export sales is below four pounds ninety-nine a bottle in the UK and you can’t possibly grow cool climate grapes at that price. The cool climate regions are now producing forty per cent of our grape supply but generating only sixteen per cent of demand.”

In case your bargain wine hasn’t curdled, consider: you may not have invested in these failures, but you pay three times anyway. When government spends your money paying tax-avoiding speculators to uproot and piss off, it’s not the end of the story. Somebody has to make up for the tax not paid. And then we pay again for the rehabilitation of the land. Not to spend too much time reflecting on all that wasted water. The wine industry hasn’t quite grasped that water is a vital gastronomic item.

Maybe it’s time to kick a wine refinery into reality with some king-hell distillation. Make petrol. Get the McGuigan Simeon mob, you know, Nick Greiner, Perry Gunner and Brian McGuigan, on the job. They blame high petrol prices for the slump of their bottled wine sales. So sort out a few harbours of cheap water with the Member for Schubert and the lass up the river, and plant more. Market it varietally at the bowsers. Mine goes better on cabernet, mate. C’mon Kero, you won’t win by tilting at trams. Go positive! Go Petrol! The punters’ll love it. We could be self-sufficient!

NOTES FROM MY INTERVIEW WITH CLANCY INCLUDE THESE COMMENTS:

For what it’s worth, I have some rather unfinished ideas about removing vineyards at the taxpayers’ expense, even if that cost is eventually reimbursed by the industry.

A formula should be devised which includes the following:

1. Last in first out. Youngest plantings go first.

2. Prices of last crops. Most recent market prices should be included so lowest incomes are the first to go.

3. Water used to achieve that price. A ratio should be devised that sees those who have used water most inefficiently should be at the head of the queue for removal; i.e. growers who use more water to achieve lower income should go.

... and back to 1999: referring to the National Wine Centre ... the budgie syndrome:
Excerpt from my speech to planning students at the University of Adelaide, Wednesday 13th October, 1999. A slightly shorter version of this address was delivered to the Australian Institute of Urban Studies, S.A. Division, at Chesser Cellars, Friday 26th March, 1999.

So what started as a simple, profit-making service for visitors quickly became a State-funded wine museum, which quickly reverted to an office block for bureaucrats and mandarins, partly because nobody thought the word museum was much good in this modern age. On the committee I joined at Premier Brown's invitation, the first wine centre committee, the word museum was abandoned because nobody really knew what it meant.

None of those great brains had heard of Zeus, or Jupiter, the boss of the heavens, nor of his wife, the Goddess Mnemosyne, or Memory. They didn't realise the daughters of this couple, the cover girls of their day, were the official inspirers of all poetry and art. Cleo was the trigger of history, Thalia of comedy. Euterpe was the source of all music; Urania of astronomy, and so on. They were called the Muses, just like my much uglier lot's called the Whites. The Muses lived in the Museum.

No good, no good. It'll have to be the National Wine Centre. It'll have to be in the Botanic Park because:

1 The Gardens already attract 1.3 million visitors a year - more than any other government-owned property;

2 The East End is already a famous tourism and gastronomic precinct (The Universal Wine Bar's there), and

3 It's a nice place to have your offices.

They overlook the fact that the East End is rapidly becoming a violent drug-crazed mirror of the old Hindley Street, where a good deal of the working community are the enthusiastic users of a constant wave of powder drugs; and they don't realise that the very reason that 1.3 million people visit the Botanic Gardens each year is that there are no industrial headquarters, office blocks, car parks, conference centres, or monorails in sight.

Don't laugh - a monorail was seriously suggested, to siphon customers from Rundle Street across the Botanic Garden, which is a dry zone, to the Wine Centre. This was seen as a possible solution to the car parking problem in the Garden. Nobody listened to the traders' complaint about the loss of business in Rundle Street, because there's no real parking there, either. Anyway, show me a monorail and I'll show you a Premier who's just lost power.

The initial concept for a straightforward, self-funding facility for wine enthusiasts was sufficiently attractive to lure a horde of self-interested political amateurs and industry mandarins, whose clumsy and transparent manoeuvres in pursuit of taxpayers' funds and sacred inner city parkland, abuse not just the clarity of the first proposal, but snigger in the face of the uncommonly tasteful and discerning community of Adelaide.

After five years of squandered expense and volunteered energy, this centre is further from its origins than credibility extends.

The citizens of Adelaide now face the construction of an industrial headquarters in their extremely popular Botanic Garden. This $40 million-plus tax-payer-funded Xanadu will have little purpose beyond housing the bureaucrats who will be responsible for the next taxpayer-funded Vine-pull Scheme.

There has been no consultation with the neighbours, none with the community at large, nor anything vaguely resembling consultation with the wine industry proper. The old buildings wisely rejected by the wine industry will now house the unfairly misplaced botanic scientists whose perfectly suitable, unobtrusive buildings and laboratories will be demolished to make way for the imposing new wine industry headquarters.

Those who intend moving into this facility, like Wine and Brandy Corporation Manager, Sam Tolley, refer to it as their "new offices". Winemakers Federation of Australia Chairman, Brian Croser, admits privately that the centre, as imagined by him, does not "necessarily have to be in the Botanic Garden".

And driving force Ian Sutton, Chief Executive of the WFA, Wine Australia Pty. Ltd., Australian Wine Foundation and the Australian Wine and Brandy Producers' Association, says "My job's not to consult the wine industry -- my job is to represent the wine industry".

Now that Glenthorne Farm, a perfectly suitable alternative site for a self-funding centre has been found and purchased on the old CSIRO research site at the top of Flagstaff Hill, those who would raid the public purse, not to mention the Botanic Garden, have become more secretive and even more determined in their nefarious pursuit.

SOUTH EAST OF OZ CONTINUES TO FRY

FIRES BLAZING IN GIPPSLAND, VICTORIA, LAST NIGHT THREATENED KEY LA TROBE VALLEY POWER STATIONS AND BURNED MANY HOUSES TO THE GROUND

Victoria’s Gippsland Ablaze

Picking Begins In Intolerable Heat

by PHILIP WHITE

In spite of two slightly cooler, breezy nights in the ranges, South Australia’s vignerons have started to pick what’s left of a horrible harvest.

2009 looks like being the earliest vintage on record.

As vulnerable people are dying in this unprecedented fiery furnace, the Bureau of Meteorology has begun issuing a new warning atop the usual ultra-violet warnings, blackout forecasts, and pollen counts for asthmatics and allergics: this is called the Heat Health Warning.

The Adelaide interstate bus terminal, which is air-conditioned, has opened its doors to offer the homeless some cool respite on its concrete, cold drinks from its faucets, and a shower in its travellers’ amenities.

In the fledgeling cool-climate viticulture region of Gippsland, east of Melbourne, Victoria, bushfires are threatening the power supply lines and generating stations as the precious cool-climate rainforests of the Strzlecki Ranges explode in flames.

We expect another day over 40°C today (Sunday 1^st February), and consistent high thirties or forties through the next few days. The optimist may believe forecasts of mid-thirties temperatures later in the week, but optimism is thin on the ground this vintage.

Old unirrigated bushvines, the heart and soul of much of South Australia’s super-premium fruit, are taking the record heatwave very badly. Common misunderstanding about the resilience of the oldest strugglers includes the notion that such vines are somehow tougher than modern, trellised, irrigated vineyards.

The hellish heat of the summer of 2009 puts paid to such naive shibboleths: many of the grandest old vineyards have fruit that’s cooked and shrivelling before they even reached veraison.

The ones that might survive with tolerable quality are those with the best balance of leaf and fruit; carefully-managed canopies for shade, a modest supply of water, and an aspect that shelters them to some degree from the worst afternoon heat.

Breezes that move the leaves are good, as the leaf surfaces don’t simply take the full blast of the sun at the same angle all day, but then the horrid northerlies that have been blasting in from the vast central desert simply dehydrate everything they hit, and quickly.

Vineyards in reflective soils are the worst hit: the grapes are being roasted top and bottom as leaves roll, droop and fade. In normal conditions, such reflective soils are a boon, ensuring smooth, even ripening.

Heat susceptible varieties, like viognier, are unlikely to be picked. Growers of chardonnay in anything other than very cool places are wondering whether to bother picking at all.

Newly-planted vines are perishing in their grow tubes.

My bellwether vineyard, opposite the cool Salopian Inn in McLaren Vale, this vintage had budburst a fortnight earlier than the previous year, when harvest was the earliest on record and a fifteen-day heatwave blitzed everything that wasn’t picked early.

This year, as DRINKSTER then predicted, harvest is yet another fortnight earlier.

There is little traditional Aussie humour on the grape receival aprons and hoppers; stoic sobriety hangs over the whole wine industry. This will be a year when depression is as big a threat to vignerons as financial stress and the usual vintage exhaustion.

But before breakfast, I called Michael Waugh, of Greenock Creek in the Barossa, and he’s still showing his usual droll digger’s wit.

“We’re not crying in our beer”, he chuckled. “There’s nothing we can do about it. But, you know better than anybody, all our vineyards are on different soil types and they’re not all reacting terribly badly. And we only grow reds, which are tougher.

“The sauvignon blanc next door looks dead, but then sauvignon blanc in the Barossa never made much sense to me.

“The modern vineyards that are generally over-watered are carking it – they spoil them with too much coddling and the poor vines have no physiological resistance to conditions like these. They just fall over.

“But, you know, our acids are holding – last week that was all we had, bloody acid – and later this week they reckon it’s going to cool down.

“So, no panic here.”

Michael promises to report later today, once he’s done a thorough inspection of his priceless suite of vineyards, so watch for a later post.

Another wry exception to the fact of this stressed-out, deeply-shocked and exhausted community came by SMS yesterday. My mate Pat Conlon, the wine-loving Minister for Transport and Infrastructure, who has no reason to laugh as his systems grind to a halt in the heat, sent me the following message:

“The Premier has urged people to make sure they check on elderly friends in this heat. So. You OK?”

This came to my phone five hours before the message to which he referred.

“For urgent assistance”, it said, “phone 000. Do not reply to this message. IMPORTANT SA GOVERNMENT HEAT HEALTH WARNING: Heat Stress Can Kill; Stay Cool; Stay Inside; Drink plenty of water; Check the safety of vulnerable neighbours; Listen to your radio.”

STOP PRESS

NOSES TO THE WINESTONE: DRINKSTER BODYGUARD PETER PAYE, (L), WITH PHILIP WHITE AND PENFOLDS WINEMAKER PETER GAGO (R) IN VINTAGE 2008, WHICH WAS EXTREME, BUT NOT AS EXTREME AS 2009.

Last year, Penfolds winemaker Peter Gago told DRINKSTER that for the last fifteen vintages, he’d had to annually readjust his definition of extreme weather.

He’s just done it again.

“We start fermenting at Magill on Tuesday”, he told DRINKSTER this morning.

“Not unexpectedly, this is the earliest vintage on record.

“We had some shrivel in the most stressed vineyards yesterday, but miraculously, it’s not excessive.

“Even though the heat has been hauntingly constant, we’re seeing quite a lot of variation between vineyards.”

Typical of Peter's usual calm politeness, this matter of "quite a lot of variation" leads me to wonder just how far the winebiz spindoctors will go in their attempts to suggest things aren't as bad as they initially said.

Various regions are already sending out the message that they're on top of it, or that they're not beaten yet. The more brazen tuggers will soon be saying it's a great year for this or that for whatever magical reason.

Such fey blatherings will of course backfire when the same people later attempt to get financial assistance from government, as grain farmers do with drought relief. Mallee wheatboys never pull any punches when they know their season's cactus.

Winemakers could learn something from the disarming honesty of the graziers, pastoralists and grain cockies, but I doubt it'll happen this year. Just depends on how bad things really get.

But Peter Gago's guarded optimism - or hint of it - echoes Michael Waugh’s Greenock Creek report. Check back later today for Michael's full round-up.

Good Year For Feathers

by PHILIP WHITE – This was published in The Sydney Review in 1990

Now I’ve become a city slicker I shall miss the muck of vintage. It infects the lives of everyone in some necks of the woods, neo-Dionysians and Primitive Baptists alike.

I lived for a while in the arid badlands north east of the Barossa. Dutton was a dry ghost town perched on the side of the last hill before the land swept down to the endless Mallee flats. Well, it looked like a ghost town. Most of the cottages had people in them, but there was no shop and you never saw anybody. The most recent ghosts were the souls of the poor kids the Truro Murderers buried down on those vast flats around Stonefield. Vintage even affected us there.

If you drove east from my hut, down the slope and off across the flat lands toward your Gilded Palace of Sin on the east coast, the first real hill you’d strike had the Hydro Majestic Hotel sitting on its top, and that’s a bloody long way away.

Most of Australia’s grapes are grown between those two hills.

I lived perched there on my hill, halfway between the Barossa Valley, which doesn’t really look like a valley, and the Murray Valley, which looks even less like a valley. In fact, it’s all the flat land between my hill and yours, fourteen hundred bloody kilometres away. Every damned truck of grapes or must or wine or bottles that sang from one place to the other spread my little joint with a layer of fine red dust.

The starlings always told me when harvest was nigh. A few weeks before any of the first grapes were ready the starlings would call in at my birdbath. It was the only water for thirty kays. They’d muscle the grass parrots aside and spray the feed dish with grape pips. It must have been terribly uncomfortable for the poor little bastards, flying all that way with their bellies tight with green grapes. The nearest vineyard was at least as far away as the nearest water. They would have been busting for a drink as well as an evacuation of their little gizzards by the time they got to me.

The birdies could also be relied upon to signal the beginning of harvest. The roar of the trucks would gradually build up and suddenly, instead of carrying rocks or tractors or oranges or ready-made houses they’d be chock full of the earliest vintage pickings. Even ordinary tip trucks get in on the act. The drivers glue their tailgates shut with giant tubes of stuff they call Gorilla Snot.

Mechanically harvested grapes bear little resemblance to the pleasant peasant basketsful that winery propagandists have preferred we consider down through the ages. The machines literally bash the fruit from their vines, so not only do the bunches shred, but the berries are torn separate and they leak their juice so by the time the tip truck has covered the two hours of dirt road between the River and my place the top layer of its cargo is caked in road dust and the bottom half of the tray is awash with browning juice and regardless of the strength of that Gorilla Snot the tailgates leak. So the roads get sticky with fermenting grape juice which attracts most of the insects in the world which attract most of the birds in the world which get so heady and confident there in their terrible feeding frenzy they tend to get squashed by the next truck. So you can tell when harvest has commenced by the feathers on the roads.

This happens too during the grain harvest. The roads are sticky with dead galahs, and their broken wings signal sadly as you drive by, pink and grey, pink and grey. Once your road has acquired a good layer of grain or insects eating carcases, the carrion birds get in on the act to pig out on the flesh of those who’ve gone before, and they get squashed, too. So there in the beautiful array of grass parrot, rosella and galah feathers you start to get the jet black of the raven, the speckled khaki of the prey birds and some white from the odd maggie and the whole thing makes driving a lot more interesting. Unless you’re on a motorbike, when it becomes lethal. You either end up plucking a drunken hysterical cocky from your visor and face, or slip in the guts of the fallen and catch a painful case of gravel rash mixed with feathers and bird guts and the first wine of the year. There are better ways of ingesting it.

Silly things happen to the trucks, too. A few years back a brace of them were struggling up my hill, their tanks filled with freshly-crushed Murray Valley must. They weren’t chilled tankers. The day was hotter than expected and the trip took longer than they’d planned, and by the time they’d got to my place their must was fermenting vigorously. Half way up the slope the first one blew its top and released a geyser of two or three tonnes of bright purple juice, skins and pips. The second fellow drove straight into this, lost vision, lost traction, and slid gracefully over the edge into a paddock, spilling his fizzy burden into the same thirsty dust. Very absorbent place, Australia.

There are dark little pubs like the Snakepit, undefiled by tourists, where drivers of these trucks see to their thirst and it’s always a delight to join them in their work. You hear the fair dinkum wine industry news, like which Barossa winery is making wine from concentrated apple juice; or which one’s selling Murray Valley plonk to the Hunter, pretending it’s Barossa. Or the one about the rookie with the shiny new tanker. He backed into the winery, sucked out his load of booze with a big mono pump, and looked around at the critical moment to see the whole damn tanker crumple up like Alfoil because he’d forgotten to open the aircocks at the top and that thirsty big pump turned his new truck into one enormous vacuum.

If you’re particularly good to them, these drovers of the long wine paddock will even arrange samples for you, so the strategically-placed critic can get to taste much of the Hunter vintage before the Hunter winemakers do.

It’s a pity that this year I won’t be able to keep you informed. But then again, the call of the wine road is strong, the Snakepit is dim, quiet and cool, and there are a million avian souls to toast.

.

Frocking Up

L to R: Rolf Binder of Veritas, Philip White, Chris Ringland and Greenock Creek's Michael Waugh at the Barons of the Barossa 2005 ceremony at which Ringland was made Winemaker of the Year and Waugh viticulturer of the year. Contrary to the bullshit Dan Phillips and Robert Parker spread about Ringers being the Greenock Creek winemaker, Michael was well and truly making the wine. In spite of incredible drought conditions since, he still remains unique in that he will not add water to his musts. PHOTO - LEO DAVIS

I've taken some flak for presumption or silly walks or something for my attire in the photograph above, which was previously posted on DRANKSTER.

I was honoured some years ago to be inducted into the Barons of the Barossa, the philanthropic order of people who the Barons Grand Council believes have made a significant contribution to Barossa life, and the protection of its unique culture. One is a Baron for life.

Just for the record, my citation read thus:

"Philip White is a writer and broadcaster.

"Philip’s first visit to the Barossa, as a journalist, was 25 years ago when he came to write about Yalumba’s radical new computer system for the quarterly IBM magazine.

"Within a few years he was living in a heritage cottage at Dutton, writing what was Australia’s most influential wine column in The National Times. In spite of tasting at the hands of the PR spin-doctors, he claimed to learn more about the wine industry drinking beer with tanker drivers at the top pub in Truro, and he learned a lot more about drinking beers in the old Buick he co-drove with Peter Lehmann in the 1988 Redex Rally.

"Philip was a vital battler for the retention of the precious old shiraz, carignan, cinsault, mataro and grenache vines in the face of the notorious vine pull scheme, and was, behind the scenes, instrumental in forming the Barossa Residents’ Association, which eventually forced the government to put and end to that destruction.

"In the years since, Philip has written passionately and honestly about the Barossa in most of Australia’s major newspapers and many magazines, local and international. His decade broadcasting on the ABC was special for its knowing references to Barossa life, religion and agriculture. His controversial commitment to environmental conservatism in viticulture, the protection of aquifers in the face of deadly salinity, and the preservation of the culture that makes the Barossa unique, is exemplary, tireless, and ongoing."

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Unlocking The Rocks

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CONTRIBUTION TO THE 2008 GREENOCK CREEK VINEYARDS AND CELLARS NEWSLETTER

by PHILIP WHITE – September 2008

Time for some rough science. While global warming is such a hot topic cough cough it seemed perfectly appropriate to take a little geology lesson: geology shows we’ve had global warming before. So, like, how bad can things get?

Before you check out Snowball Earth on Wikipedia, let me quote a report of Hoffman, Kaufman, Halverson and Schrag, suggesting one of the things that happened at the bottom of the Neoproterozoic groups which underly Greenock.

“… biological productivity in the surface ocean collapsed for millions of years. This collapse can be explained by a global glaciation (that is, a snowball Earth), which ended abruptly when subaerial volcanic outgassing raised atmospheric carbon dioxide to about 350 times the modern level….resulting in a warming of the snowball Earth to extreme greenhouse conditions. The transfer of atmospheric carbon dioxide to the ocean would result in the rapid precipitation of calcium carbonate in warm surface waters, producing the cap carbonate rocks observed globally.”

I’m sure they make a big difference, but there were no Hummers in those days.

It was also high time the Barossa seriously compared local wines according to their geological sites. But fearing that they may end up with a geology somehow less desirable than others, some vignerons have opposed such an approach for decades. Their excuse? They say they don’t want an appellation imposed like those of France. My response? It’s not a man-made imposition. It’s in the ground beneath you. It was there first.

So a highlight of my thirty years of wine writing finally exploded like a firework, when, in June, I was invited to assist the Barossa winemakers assemble a blind tasting of 52 unfinished 2008 shiraz wines from across the breadth and length of the Valley, from Lyndoch to Kalimna. These were tasted in brackets roughly according to their geological sources, as set out in The Geology of the Barossa Valley, a brochure and map by revered government geologist, W. A. Fairburn. This work, which has the authority of having been gnawed over by the author's scientific peers, is available from Primary Industry and Resources SA. We also had input from the contrary geologist-turned tea-trader turned wine-merchant turned wine-blogger David Farmer, who is writing a book on Barossa geology, and who disagrees with some of Fairburn's mapping.

The tasting was astonishing, while predictable enough. Neighbouring vineyards in each precinct offered flavours and aromas in common, and these characteristics changed from precinct to precinct. This pioneering tasting, conducted with thirty wine writers from around the world, will no doubt be the first of many such exercises, and marks the beginning of a whole new database of gastro-geology.

The base rocks around Seppeltsfield, the Greenock Creek homestead, and Roennfeldt Road are all from that Neoproterozoic, the geological era in which multi-cellular life first appeared. This era stretches from about 550 million years ago to 1.2 billion years. Just for reference, the Universe seems about 13 - 15 billion years old; Earth about 4.5 billion. While these old rocks are generally below the topsoil, they do extrude, and have of course influenced and added to the formation of much of that soil, which very directly influences the flavours of the grape.

But it’s those base rocks that really interest me, particularly when I read back labels and brochures claiming “our vines are grown in some of the oldest soils on Earth”. Most of the Barossa geology formed in the Tertiary and Quaternary, the last 50 million years; its soils are only tens of thousands of years old: most of them are such recent alluviums they’re barely soils at all. “To the geologist, soil is the dandruff of the Earth”, my friend Wolfgang Preiss, Chief Geologist of the Geological Survey in PIRSA, sagely uttered on a recent field trip.

The Greenock Creek vineyards are on four quite distinct formations. The creeklines, both at the homestead and Roennfeldt’s, are very recent alluviums, just tens of thousands of years old. The cabernet, the Creek Block shiraz, and most of the Apricot Block are in such alluviums. These deposits fill the creeklines between the sharply-dipping older strata which protrude in the ridges.

These include the blue-grey dolomitic siltstones - Willunga slate, for example - of the Tapley Hill Formation, deposited as sediments in still deep lakes that once covered the area about 750 million years ago. The Seven Acre and part of the home blocks are in this formation.

Below that lies the Yudnamutana Subgroup. This dark mix of siltstone-derived soil with blotches of bright quartzite and pebbly dolomite is up to 800 million years of age. These layers reappear in Clare and the Adnyamathanha country of the North Flinders. They are pocked with dropstones, which were deposited by floating glacial ice floes. These rocks were one of the fascinations of the great geologist and explorer, Sir Douglas Mawson. Alice’s and part of the Apricot Block are in Yudnamutana.

The Hopeless Hill, on Roennfeldt’s, is on the border of the Yudnamutana and the underlying Burra Group, where we get to really ancient glittery micaceous schists, metasiltstones, calcsilicates and quartzites. These are as old as it gets in the Barossa. The Roennfeldt shiraz, cabernet and the Cornerstone Grenache are in Upper Burra.

In geology, there are many arguments. But having finally got this sorted better than ever before, I’ll never approach Greenock Creek wines in the same way. The distinguishing characters of each vineyard already make much more sense, and the differences between the Greenock Creek/Marananga/Seppeltsfield/Roennfeldt vineyards and the much younger formations in the rest of the Valley become even more meaningful.

So that’s the ancient history. Contemporary history includes the salination, through introduced irrigation water, of the young creekline sediments and clays. And, of course, it includes current weather and climate. People are finally beginning to understand my salination theories. Now, the pace at which the climate is changing must force closer investigation, much quicker than anybody has imagined necessary. If, in a couple of decades, man can change the soil sufficiently to kill a vineyard, like the poor old Creek Block, never irrigated, but dying through salination from upstream irrigators, we can surely bugger up our air.

Or maybe old Mother Earth will just carry on doing what she did before. Now and again, as geology shows, something makes her lose her cool.

PS.

Just to put all this perspective, Don Francis, professor of geology at McGill University in Montreal, has since reported in Science journal that his team has found a sample of Nuvvuagittuq greenstone on Hudson Bay that they believe is 250 million years older than any other rocks known.

"The rocks contain a very special chemical signature - one that can only be found in rocks which are very, very old," he said. "Originally, we thought they were maybe 3.8 billion years old. Now we have pushed the Earth's crust back by hundreds of millions of years. That's why everyone is so excited."

Before this study, the oldest whole rocks were from a 4.03 billion-year-old body known as the Acasta Gneiss, in Canada's Northwest Territories, and the oldest Australia had to offer were 4.36 billion years old mineral grains called zircons from Western Australia.

The greenstone contains fine ribbon-like bands of alternating magnetite and quartz, typical of rock precipitated in deep sea hydrothermal vents - which have been touted as potential habitats for early life on Earth.

"These ribbons could imply that 4.3 billion years ago, Earth had an ocean, with hydrothermal circulation," said Francis. "Now, some people believe that to make precipitation work, you also need bacteria. If that were true, then this would be the oldest evidence of life. But if I were to say that, people would yell and scream and say that there is no hard evidence."

(This additional information was taken from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7639024.stm )

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The best recipes

by PHILIP WHITE – This was published in the Independent Weekly in December 2006

“I cut my teeth at Yalumba. I dragged hoses for Charlie Melton. I worked at St Hallett and Tatachilla. I do vintage every year in Portugal, making dry reds from Touriga and Grenache for Azamor in Alentejo. This year I’ve worked as a grunt for Ralph Fowler at Chateau Tanunda. And I make my own wines at various sheds throughout the Barossa.”

So explained the intensely quiet Tim Smith over a duck at T-Chow. It tasted so good it must have anticipated what it would finally swim in: his supple and elegant Tim Smith Wines Mataro Grenache Shiraz 2005 ($27; 14.6 per cent alcohol; 93 points).

“I’m finding I like Mataro more and more”, he said, “like the Bandols of southern France, where it’s called Mourvedre. I’ll be using more of it in this blend in the future. Bugger this obsession with GSM. Grenache Shiraz Mataro? Why should it always be those three in that order? Whose idea was that? I’ll probably end up dropping the Shiraz from the blend altogether.”

Tim’s exquisite wines are a lot about texture. I mean this blend shows amazing fruit intensity, freshness, and depth of flavour, but its texture, its silky smooth viscosity, gives it elegance and form, and what Max Schubert used to call warmth. At the risk of being gender specific, it’s feminine.

“If you want big firm extracted red, drink Stonewell”, he says, respectfully, of one of Peter Lehmann’s macho flagships.

Hot ferments and plenty of stirring of the yeast lees in barrel is the trick to the Tim Smith Wines fleshy, silky style. “That leesy slime is essential”, he continued. “A lot of people can’t sell their wine because they don’t have a point of difference. Their tanks are full of ordinary wine. Attention to detail must be absolutely mercenary when it comes to quality decisions. It’s those one per cent decisions that give you a point of difference.”

So to his Tim Smith Wines Barossa Shiraz 2004 ($33; 14.5; 93), which seemed even softer, sweeter, and more opulent and silky, in spite of its velvety tannin. This wine was fermented with complete bunches suspended in the must, and had daily lees stirring for a month.

“And pigeage”, he says, referring to the old French method of gently agitating the ferment without bruising the uncrushed bunches suspended in it. “Great form of relaxation. Buy yourself a six-pack of beer, wash your feet, and walk up and down in your ferment for a while.”

We chewed over a barrel sample of his 2005 Shiraz (94 points; for Christmas release). This had a tiny proportion of the white, firmly tannic Viognier in it, which seemed in a sense to reverse some of the silkiness which is his trademark, but this will soften with time. “It’s okay. Just a trial”, he shrugged, when I suggested the French put the tannic white Viognier in their Shiraz to make it bigger and drier, especially in the simple, raspberry and cherry Shiraz of the cooler north Rhone.

In sunny Australia, where the Shiraz is already tannic, the questionable tendency is to let the Viognier get too ripe before the addition, and you end up losing its tannin and replacing it with a most unwinelike canned peach syrup.

“Yeah”, he continued. “In a way, Shiraz Viognier is a waste
of time in the warmer Australian districts.”

Thence to the majestic reserve Shiraz 2005 (95 points; release next year), which includes a touch of McLaren Vale Shiraz to further soften its structure. “I won’t live long enough to see this in its full glory” he murmured into his glass. His recommended food match? “Bloody rare haunch of Bison.”

So why the Barossa? There was no pause.

“Location, location, location” he said, finally approaching animation. “It’s fifty minutes from T-Chow. It’s a five minute blast on a Triumph Bonneville to the top of Mengler’s for the world’s best sunsets. It’s ninety minutes to the southern beaches. And it has all this amazing loamy soil with plenty of ironstone.

“Then, of course, there’s a really good vibe of camaraderie amongst the young winemakers now”, he continued, almost raising his voice. “Winewriters call me a young winemaker, but I’m forty-four years old. There’s a whole new generation rising. They’re on fire. Look at their surnames: Henschke, Glaetzer, Teusner, Lehmann, O’Callaghan.”

He went back to his original hush for the last line. “But Whitey, you know, the real Barossa heroes are the unknown hosedraggers and steel fitters who make it all happen and are happy to tell us pompous winemaking pricks where to get off. They’re always the ones with the best humour.” And then in a whisper: “And the best recipes.”

Tasting the dirt

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

Now that the vintage Band-aids are coming off, it was a great treat last week to taste a sweeping selection of the Barossa’s 2008 shiraz. All were single-barrel samples, so anything could happen on the blender’s bench between now and the bottle.

I say Band-aids, because never before have I witnessed so many industrial accidents during a vintage. Knuckles, fingertips, toes, feet, noggins - all bore the brunt of humans working utterly ridiculous hours under totally unfair pressure in close proximity to great big things made from steel, many of which move.

But the Band-aids are coming off the wines, too: it’s now much easier to see the true nature of these woody babies. And while this tasting did NOT include much wine picked after the arrival of the worst heat wave on record, it certainly included fifty or so of the best of those picked in the sublime cool before that heat, and they’re very good.

The tasting was also a ground-breaker in that we poured the wines in groups according to their geological sources. I’ve gone on a lot lately about geology, but suddenly, in the local haute couture of wine, geology is the New Black. Even James Halliday was quoting what sounded like precise geological ages, reporting Brian Croser’s wines in The Weekend Australian last Saturday.

There’d been constant opposition to organizing a Barossa tasting on geological bases since I first suggested it in 1983. People thought it would become an appellation which they did not want; others obviously would do anything to avoid discovering that their geology wasn’t everybody’s favourite. My response has always been to suggest that this delineation is not a man-made imposition or regulation, because it is, very simply, already in the ground. It is there. Why not consider it? That’s what we did at Yalumba last week, and I don’t think things will ever be the same.

To those who are reluctant to admit to a direct influence on wine flavour from geology, which includes soils, subsoils, bedrock and whatever, I suggest they mount a similar tasting and look for the taste of salt. Salt is, of course, just one of the many compounds which come from geology, and, through the roots of the plant, very directly influences the flavour of the wine. Each year, more and more of the vineyards along the Barossa’s creek lines produce salty flavours.

This happens, too, in Clare, Padthaway, McLaren Vale, Langhorne Creek and just about everywhere. Australia is, after all, mainly comprised of ancient sea beds. It’s full of salt.

Just as wine is eighty per cent water. And water is, as John Gilbert wisely pointed out last week, “the ultimate solvent”. This becomes sap, which becomes juice. Then, apart from all the glycerols, fragrances, polyalcohols and other alcohols, on top of the thirty or forty organic acids in wine, as well as all the nitrogenous stuff, like the amino acids, apart from all the polyphenols and tannins, the pigments and vitamins, come the mineral salts of chlorides, phosphates and sulphates, locked onto calcium, magnesium, potassium, and sodium – all through the water, the sap – before you begin thinking about the trace elements: fluorine, boron, iodine, silicon, zinc, iron, manganese and what not.

So as we tasted our way through, and across, the Barossa’s natural history, we discovered little glimpses of this pretty flavour and that common to certain sub-regions. This infernally complex wave of new knowledge will snowball as more such tastings produce more intelligence, eventually making it much easier for blenders to produce better wine, and much easier for those single-vineyard producers with truly unique geology to win praise for their distinction.

Call such a technology an appellation if you will, but at least realise that it’s coming up from beneath. It was here first.

And if we’re really about to tackle the very best of France and the Old World, instead of drowning in the sickening downward gurgle of the discount gutter, we shall have to very quickly learn about our geology, just as the French have learned theirs for many centuries, and have regulated their plantings accordingly.

There will be many spats. Former geologist and tea and liquor merchant, David Farmer, is obviously exciting some Barossa winemakers with his theorizing, and he seems keen to prove the map I promoted here last week, W. A. Fairburn’s learned work from PIRSA, is wrong, which brings the Coonawarra boundary dispute to mind, but, you know, oh well. Get published; get it all approved by your peers, and on we’ll go.

The day after this tasting, I was greatly pleasured to taste the 2008 barrels of Greenock Creek Vineyards and Cellars according to the various local geologies, and suggest they are the most profoundly stimulating wines I have seen yet from 2008. Not the slightest hint of Band-aid.