CONSTELLATION WINS BUSHING CROWN

BUSHING QUEEN AND KING: ALIX HARDY AND PAUL CARPENTER

Consto King Takes Hardy Queen
One Trophy For Them
One Trophy For Us

BY PHILIP WHITE

I don’t know whether McLaren Vale has its own local Bacchus and Pan pulling the strings of its court, but there was some wired poltergeist at work, on somebody’s behalf, at the Bushing King crowning on Friday.

One minute I’m up there weeping, taking possession of the revered Trott Family Trophy for my efforts protecting McLaren Vale’s dwindling green belt, specifically Glenthorne Farm, and then Paul Carpenter gets up to be crowned king of McLaren Vale’s winemakers for a year. Paul’s the amiable and respected guy who played a great central role at the Grand Cru show at the Victory a few weeks ago, displaying four reds from different bits of McLaren Vale. On that day, he felt awkward, as he said, representing Constellation at a show for tiny shedsters. The irony lies in the fact that no small Vale Cru-sized winemaker could do what his giant mob could do, and bother to make small batch wines from different sub-regions.
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THE AUTHOR WITH PAUL CARPENTER AT THE VALE CRU TASTING ... LEO DAVIS PHOTOGRAPH

When he got up for his crown in front of the five hundred on Friday, Paul was regal and statesmanly in his clear appreciation and expression that he worked for Constellation. I'd give him a job straight away: he could be in charge of my palace guard. Vigilant loyalty to his employer was the trademark he left there on the air, as the applause took it all away.

But this is the company that has just uprooted John Reynell’s famous cabernet and malbec vineyard at Chateau Reynella, where Thomas Hardy got his first vineyard job. So I get a trophy for saving some vineyard land, which still has no vineyard on it, and the bloke who works for the mob who’s just ripped out an irreplaceable historical vineyard gets one too. That priceless little block that's disappearing under a ghetto as we speak made good wine for 161 years.

There’s more irony in here: nearly a decade ago, when Greg Trott was busy saving Glenthorne, and needed a big winery to agree to take its fruit, it was the pre-Constellation Hardy’s that put its huge mitt up in the name of sponsoring essential vineyard research. How times have changed!

Since it has so well and truly trashed so many of its Australian adventures, Constellation has a new morality mantra. Its army of PR flaks have “defined three areas in which all of its Corporate Social Responsibility focus will take place: sustainable business practices, philanthropy and social responsibility. From these three focus areas flow specific categories of emphasis, including our environmental impact, corporate giving, marketing and advertising codes, community involvement and much more. All of Constellation's social responsibility efforts flow directly from its values and culture.”

But there was another delicious layer of irony, as thick as whipped cream. The new King Paul was accompanied by one of the enormous Hardy tribe, a descendant of Thomas Hardy. This was Alix Hardy, whom Paul has chosen to be his queen for a year.

Now this was Friday, remember. My paper, Adelaide’s brave little Independent Weekly, that morning ran my piece examining Constellation’s new corporate mantra and strange panicky behaviour. This (see below) went round the world rather quickly, with links appearing on boozy hives like Dr. Vino. For some reason, on Sunday, Constellation felt obliged to make a statement. This contained little that was new. Basically it’s the collision of two great husks: one, the shell of Constellation Australia, rattling emptily with the remains of all the great companies and properties that leviathan has gutsed up, trying to make some sort of sicko procreative act with the great husk of Australian Vintage Limited. This latter lot, the remnants of Brian McGuigan’s third empire, had even taken his name off its flag to make things look better. To no avail. McGuigan, Simeon, Australian Vintage, Galaxy, Milky Way, Universal – doesn’t matter what it’s called. It has always spent a lot of its time in the shallow edges of wine’s gene pool.

RAZOR WIRE AT REYNELLA; THE 161-YEAR-OLD VINEYARD OPPOSITE IS THE ONE THAT'S GONE ... photo by KATE ELMES

Which is not to say these great corporations can’t make good wine, of course: Australian Vintage’s Nepenthe gets regular gongs, and Constellation, as well as the Bushing Trophy, has absolutely cleaned up at the Royal (yep, they still call them that), at the Royal wine shows of Adelaide and Perth.

So on Sunday, Constellation Brands Inc., the world’s largest winemaker, releases a statement from its CEO, Rob Sands, which says “The Australian wine industry is facing unprecedented negative operating conditions”. And suggested that if a deal could be done with Australian Vintage, where Constellation swapped some of its carcases for a substantial equity stake, but not a controlling one, the new combo “would create synergies between the two companies, better positioning the new entity for success in the current challenging operating environment”.

If a transaction results, the combined companies would operate as a stand alone wine company, which would be listed on the Australian Stock Exchange, but typically, Sands also said the talks with Australian Vintage are preliminary and may not lead to a transaction. The company didn’t identify any other potential partners. But there was one pretty obvious one on the stage at the Bushing lunch, being crowned queen of Constellation’s new king.

There has been a quiet, somewhat ungainly attempt at courtship with certain branches of the Hardy family tree, with Constellation exploring the possibility of the lovely Hardys finding the money to take Chateau Reynella back off its hands.

Which would go some way to explaining why key Hardy winemen who were first aghast at the notion of Constellation uprooting the first vineyard their great founder worked in, suddenly withdrew their support from my failed campaign to save Reynell’s priceless little vinegarden.

And why not one squeak of support from the stupidly-named McLaren Vale Grape Wine And Tourism Association in my battle for the Reynella vineyard? Like why did I lose? Partly because everyone who may have been likely to voice some enragement depend upon Constellation buying their grapes. And partly because, whatever its name at the time, that association has been fed for decades by funds from the Hardy Family, from Hardy’s Reynella, from BRL-Hardy, and then Constellation. Now that money’s drying up, maybe even the McLVGWATA’s sufficiently swift to sniff the disappearing possibility of the odd pound note wafting down from the tables of whichever Hardys would be crazy and/or brave enough to have another go at what has already proved to be beyond them.

Those Hardys meanwhile, whom are serious grape-growers, must feel rather uncomfortable about just who will be buying their grapes should the remnants of their old family show finally die in bed with Australian Vintage.

Not to go on too much about the work of Constellation’s incredible PR hacks, but the last bit of their Sunday statement more or less said it all.

“This news release contains forward-looking statements”, it said. “The words ‘anticipate,’ ‘intend,’ and ‘expect,’ and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements, although not all forward-looking statements contain such identifying words. These statements may relate to Constellation's business strategy, future operations, prospects, plans and objectives of management, as well as information concerning expected actions of third parties. All forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those set forth in or implied by the forward-looking statements.”

K1 BY GEOFF HARDY (AND HUNGRY TRIBE)

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

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

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

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

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

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

















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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So. When will he build them a winery?

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

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

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

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