SOUTH AUSTRALIA'S BRAVEST NEW CREWS

SOME YOUNG PUNKS DO THE WASHING: Dr JEN GARDINER, Dr COL McBRIDE, AND NIC BOURKE

A Baker's Brave Dozen

Top Hotshots To Watch

Cream Of South Aussie

by PHILIP WHITE - a version of this appeared in Decanter's April South Australia Supplement

SOME YOUNG PUNKS - Various regions

Dr. Col McBride has tattoos all over his very large muscles, and he tends to lean back and stretch them cruciformly while you chat. His partner, Dr. Jen Gardner, is generally better covered, if a tad gothic. Both are nerdy biochemists: yeast experts. Their partner is winemaker Nic Bourke, who was covered in grape skins last time I saw him. These are Some Young Punks. Their delicious wines are covered in classic original dimestore pulp fiction covers and drawn-to-order cartoons. They have reached into the past, back into the epoch before critter labels, to start a revolution in wine livery.

Some Young Punks have also returned to the past to rekindle some pre-industrial love in their winemaking, which is performed largely by Bourke at a contracting winery in McLaren Vale. They buy select parcels from other districts, generally use wild yeasts, and leave the wines on skins much longer than the fast-food norm. After all that study, McBride readily admits they can’t work out exactly what wild yeasts do, but they know enough to appreciate their advantages over factory yeasts, and that each vineyard has its own indigenous culture giving unique aromas and flavours.

Like Jeanneret, the Punks are bending the Riesling rules: their Monsters Monsters Attack Clare Riesling 2009 clocks in at 28 grams per litre of residual sugar, much more than seems apparent in its alluring complex form. And the reds? Big. Lush. Soulful. Adventurous. And much more serious than their labels.

NATASHA MOONEY – Adelaide Hills and Barossa

Tash Mooney says the key to her winemaking soul is her preference for wines from Italy and Burgundy. She made wine at Penfolds, Lindemans, and Barossa Valley Estate before establishing Fox Gordon with some mates. She also makes wine for others, like the Amadio family, whose front line vineyard near Mount Crawford in the Adelaide Hills supplies her with some of the newly-introduced varieties she is quickly mastering.

Like the best of her ground-breaking colleagues, Mooney keeps one foot grounded firmly in the past: she loves working with old Barossa grape-growing families whose generations of experience with more traditional varieties – Shiraz, Grenache, Mourvedre and Cabernet sauvignon - provides the foundations for forays into the likes of Arneis, Aglianico, Sagrantino, Sangiovese, Tempranillo and Zinfandel.

“It’s a hard sell, so far, with these alternatives”, she says. “It’s difficult to tell how much the market can absorb. It’s a big learning curve for the drinker, as much as the retailer.”

While she’s made “easy-drinking fruit bombs” from the new types thus far, Mooney’s major wines are staunch, yet sensual, reflecting that rare gastronomic intelligence that the industrialised wine world seems to have forgotten. “We’ll make more serious wines from these new varieties as I learn more about them” she says. “In the meantime profit is still Shiraz-driven!”

There are many exquisities to come from this uncommonly bright, tenacious, eternally curious wine lover.

YANGARRA ESTATE - McLaren Vale

Peter Fraser is the winemaker-manager of Yangarra, a 420 acre Aussie slice of the huge Californian Kendall-Jackson empire. In the decade since its purchase, Fraser has led a charge towards wine more spiritually entwined with the Mediterranean coast of Spain and France than anywhere else. Why? He believes McLaren Vale has the best Mediterranean climate on Earth.

Fraser and his vineyard wizard, Michael Lane, have ripped out modern trellised vineyards of Chardonnay, Cabernet sauvignon and Merlot to plant bush vines of Tempranillo, Graciano, Mourvedre, Cinsault, and Carignan. This adds deep blending texture to their trellised plantings of Roussanne, Viognier, Shiraz, Mourvedre and Grenache. Grenache blanc and Counoise are on the way, Vaccarèse and Bourboulenc are on the cards.

At night, Yangarra is cooled by air spilling from the Adelaide Hills, making a sharp diurnal contrast to its hot, sunny days. Its distinct geologies include rounded riverine pebbles, a great wind-blown sand-dune covered with healthy 65 year old unirrigated bush vine Grenache, and prominent ridges bony with ironstone.

Wild yeasts, older barrels, small batch, minimal intervention, then masterly blending gives unusually fine, gentle wines from across these distinctive terrains. The highlight, High Sands Bush Vine Grenache, has now been joined by Ironheart Shiraz, from the ironstone vineyards.

Using biodynamic principles, Yangarra is in transition to full organic certification. A radical new small-batch winery was finished just in time for vintage 2010.

JEANNERET and GOOD CATHOLIC GIRL - Clare

Years back, when the River Murray still trickled into the sea, Clare winemaker Ben Jeanneret irritated his rivals who’d begun piping its salty water to Clare to irrigate their industrial grapeyards. He put a line on the Jeanneret back labels stating that no River Murray water was used to irrigate his grapes. Environmentalists loved this fact. Now the river’s virtually dead, Jeanneret’s a reluctant hero. And guess which vineyards are for sale?

When the authorities banned the use of the word moscato, as in d’Asti, Jeanneret labelled his delicate, frizzante Muscat blanc à petit grains Mosquito. Sales boomed. Everybody must get stung.

Jeanneret simply gets on down, making wines in the most natural, industrochem-free manner possible, infuriating the wannabees. While his uncommonly clean, svelte reds stand out, his Rieslings were amongst the first to break from the traditional steely, humourless style, with a touch of wild yeast adding fragrance and allure to their sinuous form.

Jeanneret’s partner, Julie Barry, of the Jim Barry Wines tribe, has her own vineyard adjacent to the latter’s famous Armagh. While this is the source of her astonishing James Brazill Shiraz, which is made with similar attention but sells at a skerrick of the cost of the wine from across the lane, her Rieslings are also outstanding, eccentric glories: perhaps bigger and bustier than most, but still perfectly poised. Appropriately, both are under the Good Catholic Girl brand, labelled with the cover of her Catechism book.

McLEAN’S FARM - Barossa

Big Bob and Wilma McLean went through the roof of the wine business, as he was the first modern PR flak/marketer/backslapper at Orlando in the late ’70s, then marketing boss at Petaluma in the days of its ascendancy, thence to shareholder/GM at St Hallett, where he collected a modest bag of gold when that company was floated and absorbed by somebody promptly absorbed by somebody else. The McLeans spent that loot on a high rocky farm atop Mengler’s Hill, overlooking the Barossa. Since the beginning of the colony, nobody had been mad enough to plant anything there.

So what did they do? They planted 6144 bush vines without trellises in 500+ million years old sandstone. Without water. Shiraz, Grenache, Mourvedre and Riesling. McLean talks about the importance of the soil, but I’ve been there with a shovel. There ain’t any soil. The porous sandstone holds enough rain to keep the little critters alive. And now, after six years, they’re growing enough fruit to make wine.

While the McLeans buy grapes from their downhill neighbours to give visitors something beautiful to drink, the initial wines from this crazy lunge upwards and further into the past – way past anything the German settlers were game to attempt - are simply stunning. Naive, but stunning. Lock in early to this ride, and get the thrill of weightlessness as McLean’s Farm set a new ceiling for vinous adventure and crazy, wild, inspired playing of the gastronomic cards. This is not only high, but very, very cool.

OLD MILL ESTATE and BEACH ROAD - Langhorne Creek and McLaren Vale

An Aussie parable: Peter and Vicki Widdop became vignerons only when a mighty flood washed their lucerne farm into the Murray River estuary. Unwilling to take the risk itself, a Barossa winery convinced them to plant Touriga nacional, the Portuguese vintage port variety. After several years of good business during which the purchaser quietly convinced Barossa growers to plant Touriga, it brutally dropped the Widdops’ contract, leaving them a vineyard full of ripening grapes that nobody really understood.

Fed by panic and nous, some urgent Aussie smarts took hold. To feed the hungry bank, the Widdops created a brand named after their defunct lucerne mill, and engaged Simon Parker to turn their vintage port grapes into rosé. By the time they discovered the market’s rote sluggishness to accept the new, they had three vintages of a rosey beauty with much more body, mouthfeel, depth and complexity than rosé normally displays. It also became obvious the wine grew admirable condition with age.

Led by the eternally-curious Melbourne restaurant market, and then the Adelaideans, Australians are discovering this suits their blistering clime and seafood cuisine a little more harmoniously than Shiraz at sixteen per cent. And now, with the help of master winesmith John Glaetzer, the ex-Wolf Blass guru, Old Mill is perfecting a full-bodied dry red from the same grape. With uncanny serendipity, the popularity of this wine is leading curious drinkers into the easier wonders of the rosé.

Meanwhile, across the same estuarine flats, the delighted ex-Rosemount winemaker Briony Hoare discovered Dennis and Elliot Zonda had brave, but modest plantings of Arneis and Greco di tufo, a rare Campania variety never before planted in Australia.

Briony slipped her acute sensories into gear and immediately made two of the most fragrant, entertaining white wines this writer has seen lurch unheralded onto the shelves. These radical whites are available, with lovely McLaren Vale reds, under Briony’s new Beach Road brand. Pour them, and the table overflows with a joyous aroma that triggers intense savoury anticipation: a much happier flood than the one which pushed the Widdops into the wine lake.

PIOMBO - McLaren Vale

Paul Petagna is a hard-core shedtser who uses words like ethos. He was a computer tech and graphics wiz until his father-in-law, Modestino Piombo, took him into his shed at MacLaren Vale and showed him how wine occurs. With measured confidence and thirsty curiosity he pours soulful, hearty drinks simmering more with Italian genetics than any Aussie industrial sophistry.

Petagna cooks like a master: he has the sort of gastronomic savvy that the Australian wine industry’s terribly short of. And he’s never been lobotomised by the University of Adelaide or Roseworthy. He makes wines from the belly up.

Similarly, without any rockdoctor training, he isolated a string of gnarly vineyards on the rubbly piedmont of the Willunga Escarpment, on the coast at McLaren Vale. Geologists can draw a line where this terrain ceases and gives way to hopeless black Bay of Biscay cracking clay; Petagna seems to have done it by smell. He buys from these growers to blend with the little vineyard Modestino left upon his death. Finally, he has a graphic skill which puts him beyond the skrillion winemakers who can only pretend knowledge of label art.

Apart from some remarkable yet-to-be released fortifieds, including a bone dry white that tastes like a savoury vermouth base, Petagna’s Piombo triumphs are the zappily-packaged Dio and Diavolo. Dio is a Grenache-Shiraz-Mourvedre trinity; Diavolo is Shiraz and Cabernet: harmonious delights with ethos and Earth a-plenty.

BAROSSA BIRTHDAY: ALL BOZOS ON THIS BUS

Wilma Kills A Year Secret Sausage Ritual In Barossa Three Top Cellars

This was one of those days, away back before a near-perfect vintage: stunning clear weather ... wicked company ... a safe bus driver ... three great wineries ... and a crew of thirsty devils loose in the Barossa on the occasion of Wilma McLean's birthday. These photographs are by the ace, Milton Wordley, a regular contributor to DRINKSTER, and a man who can hold frame and focus in the most savage and challenging conditions ...

Dr. White, tour leader, with the crew in the Karra Yerta vineyard atop Flaxman's Ridge in the high Barossa. James and Marie Linke and their boys are perfect Barossa hosts up here in the cool near the 500 metre mark, where the weather is often not quite so beatific. Check those old vines: with a neighbour, they share-farm Semillon, Shiraz, and Riesling here, in 600 million year old sandstone and micaceous schist.

The ancient hand-hewn Barossadeutscher barn and stables at Karra Yerta: James Linke pouring a round of killer Karra Yerta Riesling; Daniel Linke on guitar. The floor tiles are short redgum logs buried, up-ended in sand, the ceiling burlap. The Linke boys always turn on some very cool original music.

The high, wild, seven-year-old dry-grown bush vine vineyard of Big Bob and Wilma McLean, north of Karra Yerta, at McLean's Farm, smack on top of the high Barossa at Mengler's Hill. This is the schmick view from the winery apron. Wedge-tailed eagles are common on this ridge, the site of many gastronomic crimes.

Designer, sculptor and fabric artist Annabelle Collett loses her head doing the limbo beneath a six foot Barossa garlic mettwurst. Big Bob and Wilma turned on a classic lunch of Barossa meats, smallgoods, crunchy loaves, dill pickles and cheeses. Not to mention the crackerjack McLean's Farm wines.

Robin Wordley, lifestyle co-ordinator at Mixmasters Studios hits a lower note ...

Birthday girl Willie does it without spilling a drop. That's McLean's Farm Dry-grown Riesling, after all!

So blessed, the great wurst is carried aloft to the dining table ...

Big Bob sings the tenor part of Au Fond Du Temple Saint ...

... and then tells us grace: "Over the lips and over the gums, lookout guts, here she comes; knives and forks as sharp as razors, praise the lord and go like blazes ... "

Uberrieslingmeister Colin Forbes, with Marie Linke of Karra Yerta. Colin does tastings of his wines by arrangement at McLean's Farm.

The birthday girl attacks her spectacular McKuchen already.

Next stop: two Annabelles shopping for Shiraz at Greenock Creek Vineyards and Cellars, near Seppeltsfield. The underground tanks provide constant cool storage.

Taking a breather on the Greenock Creek open fermenters. This is one of the high temples of Shiraz, internationally. Michael, a master stonemason as well as ace winemaker and brilliant viticulturer, built the winery. The fermenter walls are good and thick, providing reliable insulation to prevent sudden changes of temperature. That's Peter Fraser of Yangarra Estate with the legs. He's a Shiraz and Grenache king, too, but in McLaren Vale.

"That's enough! That's enough!" Mick Wordley of Mixmasters Studios attempting to avoid drinking too much Greenock Creek Roennfeldt's Road Shiraz. Hardened experts know this to be a totally futile exercise.

Annabelle and Michael Waugh: custodians of some of the most revered Shiraz and Grenache vineyards in the world.

... and a few cold Trinnie's pales to seal the deal. This is the bar of the hallowed Greenock Creek Tavern, which has been in the hands of the eminently hospitable Schluter family since 1870 - probably an Australian record for continual country hostelry. Wolf Blass blended the first wines to bear his name in the stables at the back of this pub, and is still a member of the luncheon club.

Thanks again to Milton Wordley for the cool photography. As you can see, Milt specialises in the wine business, which he's been photographing for thirty years. If you need photographs of Australian wine, contact him through his website.

AUSSIE PLONKMONGERS LOSE THE PLOT

Ethanol Floggers Flog On ... Oz Pollies Taken For Suckers Again ... Forensic Enquiry May Shake These Dangerous Tendenciesby PHILIP WHITE - a shorter version of this appeared in The Independent Weekly


There is no better metaphor for the Australian wine industry than its National Wine Centre, which has finally become a busy pavilion for weddings. It lies there, ribs poking skyward, its drying gizzards wriggling with brides.

I have no statistical evidence to suggest the success of these marriages is any different to the national average: one in three generally ends in divorce.

It's all tiresomely suburban.

The Wine Centre’s biggest publicity – ever - followed the incident when Rick Phillips went in there and whacked our Premier, Mike Rann, about the face with a rolled-up Winestate magazine.

Phillips pled guilty, while his ex-wife, Michelle Chantelois, who’d been a barmaid in Parliament House, repeatedly claimed she’d maintained a sexual affair with Rann who repeatedly denies this, while publicly apologising for any distress it has caused her or her family.

And now, as if to complete its transformation from National Wine Centre to wedding and celebrity divorce factory this troubled facility is even flogging its wine collection.

Smart observers knew, when $50+ million of taxpayers’ money snuck that corpse into our sacred Botanic Garden a decade back, that this industry, its august councils, and the politicians it seduced, all deserved forensic scrutiny.

Who are these people? The hairdos have gone from Brylcreem combovers to spiky and shooshed, but the mentality is as constant as the suits.

They cannot halt the wine industry holocaust. For their shareholders, they encouraged it to fester, at the expense of our water, our environment and civic amenity, the salinity of our soils and aquifers, our public health, and our economies: national, town-sized, familial and individual.

The glittering refineries they inflicted on our rural vistas frankly reflect the chrome pillows blowing like leaves about aboriginal lands.

They built an industry that - by vast chemo-mono grapeyards - mines the arid Mallee for sugar, which is used to make ethanol, a highly-dangerous depressant and recreational drug. Over half the Australian business depends on this formula, and in bladder packs or cleanskins sells sweetened ethanol - which is three times the strength of your average beer - at about the price of bottled water. Or less.


They built an industry in the Australian desert which depends upon endless supplies of virtually free water, an international clientele with a constantly-intensifying addiction, and a pathetic Aussie dollar.

It also lacks basic gastronomic intelligence, expects the same of its clients, and presumes the absence of any smart competition from other countries.

Like, say the countries adjacent to the Andes, which happen to be full of snow which melts to make irrigation water. These grape regions are populated by peasants who work for almost nothing, and whose laws lack the scant environmental restrictions which somehow survive in Australia.

A telling gauge of how this industry’s authorities are respected is the advent of the Family First Winemakers. As this new coalition of the great wine families – Peter Barry, Hill Smith, Taylors, Tyrrells, Brown Brothers, d’Arenberg, McWilliams et cetera – barges forth to promote the “heart and soul” of the Australian business internationally, they attempt a task which the bodies they were implicit in creating have obviously failed to perform.

Who else gets a gong? Oh yes. On February 7th, Dr. Brian Croser AO (left) made a hissy speech blaming the big companies for mucking everything up. This was reported widely.

The Australian Winemakers Federation Croser established helped shove the Wine Center upon us, only to see it slide two years later, virtually bankrupt, into University of Adelaide hands for $1 a year.

When he was determinedly pushing the Wine Centre into the Garden, I questioned Ian Sutton, then Chief Executive of the Winemakers’ Federation of Australia, Wine Australia Pty. Ltd., Australian Wine Foundation and the Australian Wine and Brandy Producers' Association. I asked about the strangely optimistic business plan, and just how much consulting had been done to get the true feeling of the industry, much of which seemed a tad embarrassed about the whole thing.

"My job's not to consult the wine industry”, Sutton snarled. “My job is to represent the wine industry".

Croser was the University’s deputy chancellor at the time, determinedly pushing his agenda to have what was the fusty old winemaking school at Roseworthy fully absorbed by the glittering Adelaide campus. "Technologising", I heard one boffin describe it at the time.

Big companies? To the tune of hundreds of millions, it was Croser’s Petaluma group that slid through Lion Nathan into the hands of the mighty Japanese Kirin Brewery under the caress of his Petaluma accountant Andrew Cheeseman (right), who now heads the Australian Wine And Brandy Corporation.

Just days after his spray at the Big Guys, Croser made another speech: he’d suddenly discovered that Jacob’s Creek Chardonnay was much better than he’d previously considered.

His initial blast at the big companies would have infuriated people like Phil Laffer of Pernod-Ricard, the French families who own Jacob’s Creek, whose company secretary, Kate Thompson, sits on the board of the Australian Wine And Brandy Corporation. Along with Dr. Tony Jordan, antipodean lieutenant of Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessey.

Croser made the Adelaide Hills wine region. He planted the Piccadilly Valley with Jordan, and set forth preaching his gospel for decades, adding great value to his Petaluma. Over endless lunches at his Bridgewater Mill, he encouraged Dr. Ed Tweddell of Fauldings to invest massively in the hills, by setting up the Nepenthe viticulture company that planted vast swathes of vineyard whose fruit ends up now in Jacobs Creek or the carcass of McGuigan’s Australian Vintage. If Kirin doesn’t want it.

The latest top yarn concerning this lot is the Rabobank report of senior analyst Marc Soccio (left). It says the industry’s crook, although he thinks it’s not so much the buggered Riverlands, but cool places like the Adelaide Hills which are far too slow to uproot.

Like the river grapeyards, too much of this upland planting was committed by the wrong people in the wrong places for all the wrong reasons, like tax advantage, or fashion. Many of these doctors, lawyers, and wealthy retirees who dared, with the persuasion of people like Croser, to compete directly with seasoned generational growers in McLaren Vale and the Barossa, should never have entered the industry.

Tragically, we can't ask my good friend Dr. Ed Tweddell about this, as he committed suicide in 1995 (CORRECTION : 2005; not 1995). His son James, who ran the vineyard development company, now runs a nightclub in Queensland.

Rabobank seems confused about gradings of wine quality. Like the freshly-re-enlightened Croser, it obviously regards Jacobs Creek as premium. You can’t blame them: as Croser and his Petaluma chairman, Len Evans, ran the Australian wine show system for decades, megabulk brands like Jacobs Creek won bounteous bling.

Croser would never enter Petaluma in the wine shows. There are still people who remember his rage when he discovered his marketing manager, Bob McLean, had quietly entered Petaluma red in the Melbourne show. While the Petal was notably failing to win the Jimmy Watson Trophy inside, where Croser vented his feelings, ace Wolf Blass red man, John Glaetzer, was crawling around the bushes out the front, yelling “Where’s the dummy? Where’s the dummy?”

Glaetzer could afford to joke: he’d already won a record three Jimmies, and went on to win a fourth.

Individuals aside, this crazy amalgam of savagely competitive ethanol dealers needs a new sheriff. Those responsible for the current carnage should be forced to withdraw, never to play with such power again.

But the blithe refusal of the Rudd government to accept treasury official Ken Henry’s perfectly logical and fair excise regime for all alcohol taxation is crisp evidence that the ancien regime still rules: its lobbyists have been very hard at work reinforcing the constipating inertia extant. Henry’s proposal would have finally and sensibly rendered most of the unsustainable arid land grapeyards unprofitable, but bolstered the chances of small, premium producers.

The frisson of delight at the dribble now oozing down the big rivers proves there is no change, and no change likely. The same old suits sniff a new wave of dirt cheap Riverland premium. Maybe the piddly prices the National Wine Centre gets for its wine collection will best reflect just how premium all this premium really is.

While they’re saying twenty per cent of the national vineyard must go, it’s time somebody admitted the figure should be more like thirty or forty per cent. In lieu of any smarter method of devising the number, they could follow the success rate of the weddings in their National Wine Centre, loaded with an index locked to the tumbling prices of that premium wine collection.

But with all dread seriousness, the vine pull formula should be based on the number of jobs and dollars each litre of irrigation water creates. In places like Barossa and McLaren Vale, this ratio is normally exponentially ahead of any part of the Murray-Darling Basin, which now seems to extend to include the Limestone Coast. Not to mention the Adelaide Hills.

The glut these industrialists created sees professional growers, some four to six generations strong, suddenly being paid $300 a tonne instead of $3000. You don’t need so much premium fruit at $3000 now that you’ve decided the desert produces premium at $300.

Anybody taking water from the Murray-Darling should be forced to pay real prices for it. A litre of water should have a price. Period. Irrigators should pay a price a helluva lot closer to the amount that an Adelaide resident is expected to pay for what manages to ooze from the mains.

If you’re growing truly premium grapes in a unique place like McLaren Vale, where much of the irrigation water is recycled waste from coastal housing estates, you should be encouraged to remain in the business.

But the percentage of vineyard currently for sale in the Vale simply serves to prove that in the eyes of these industrialists, true quality, continuity and professionalism, let alone the environment, simply do not matter. The casual investor, the shareholder, is king.

The politicians are simply inept in addressing this. The only one to poke his head up with a sensible suggestion was Leon Bignell, the Labor member for Mawson, which includes McLaren Vale. The great Rudd/Wong/Rann triumvirate has failed to convince anybody. Tellingly, against all the pundits’ great wisdoms, after his statement, Bignell actually increased his margin in the recent South Australian election. Much greater egos saw their margins shrivel, and seats disappear.

When the wool business, the miners, or the wheat board makes a mess like this, there’s a very prompt independent enquiry. Heads roll. People are stood up and expected to explain their actions. Heros emerge.

Before Croser comes back to save the wine industry, there should be an independent judicial enquiry.

BIG BOB McLEAN: BACK UP THE HIGHLANDS

BIG BOB, THE BIONIC YETI-STEINER of McLEAN'S FARM ON MENGLER HILL ALREADY: BACCHUS SENDS THE HOLY LIGHT DOWN FROM ABOVE, THE HALO FLICKERS ON, THE WALL GOES THIN, TRANSPARENT, AND PEELS BACK, AND THEN, AGAINST THE ADVICE OF HIS HELLHOUND, THE GRINNING LOVELY BOY WALKS STRAIGHT TOWARD YOU ON HEALED KNEES ... JEEPERS, CREEPERS, WHERE'D HE GET THEM PEEPERS?

Squeaky McLean Resurrects As Big Bob
Barossadeutscher McLeinig Sheds Skin
Somebody Please Shout Him A Kilt!
by PHILIP WHITE - a version of this story was in The Adelaide Independent on 13 MAR 09

Let’s face it. If I were Big Bob McLean’s knees, I would have given up too. Not just from carrying his mighty frame around the hills and gullies of city and field the wide world round ... it’s the sheer number of drinks that needed support.

Anyway, they did wear out, and McLean shrunk.

Not in girth, mind you. McLean’s equator is constant. What altered was the altitude. As those poor legs approached serious kiltspreader bandy, McLean got shorter than me: a difficult thing for an old bouncer to digest. McLean did big time door at the Redlegs Club and The Old Lion when he was a lift electrician and I had spiky hair and ripple soles. Suddenly he was PR at Orlando, and somehow he got Bacchus to tell MD Guenther Prass to send him to live in Sydney to promote Pol Roger champagne, which he did so thoroughly that for a time there in Australia’s brash biz gizzard, PR in fact became Pol Roger, and that front bit of McLean’s vast equatorial zone was known as Pol Pot.

McLean nearly squashed Sydney, which only intensified its thirst for PR.

Sir (Arthur) Roden Cutler VC AK KCMG KCVO CBE, Governor of New South Wales, was awarded the Victoria Cross for his matter-of-fact valour in Syria, which cost him a leg. He was a 'go in do it' sort of fellow; a dignified humble man who enjoyed intelligent, honest and hearty company, especially if there was good red about. Sir Roden was accorded a State Funeral on Thursday 28th February, 2002. He left a big hole at the top of Australian living history. This photograph is from Wine And Spirit Buying Guide, DEC 84, which was edited by me. I reckon I may have taken this photograph. If it's yours, please correct me. Sir Roden was at least 6'6". Bob was big.

That was a long time ago. McLean went on to wear his knees out kneeling on them during his Petaluma years, then using them as a sort of PR forklift in the St Hallett epoch. By the time him and Wilma put McLean's Farm on the top of Mengler’s Hill in the high Barossa Ranges he was shorter than me. Which is handy getting through a fence with a shotgun.

To make up for this lowering, McLean, with Wilma, Sarah and Adam, added 500 metres by planting 6,144 vines in the tough sandstone and schist of that speccy ridgetop, way up in the weather and the yaccas. Dry grown bush vines. Riesling, grenache, mataro and shiraz. Nuts. Wilma runs it more or less along the lines of bio-D, and uses her fat-tailed sheep for weed control and fertiliser. The vines are in their seventh year now, and have spent half of that time in drought. Poor little buggers.

Last summer, which was bad enough, when we sat there on the winery apron, gazing reverentially through the heat at that vinous garland on the ridge, we agreed that something was keeping those vines alive. We took a sledgehammer, and knocked a predominant piece of the vineyard off. In a bucket of water for a while, the weight of that grey stone increased by almost half.

This was something I’d learnt at Mountadam, whilst drying the dishes with David Wynn in the cliff top eyrie he built there with Patricia. The actual bedrock loomed in a huge outcrop outside the kitchen window, and through most of the year, he pointed out, you could watch the water oozing from it. That whole long ridge is ancient seabeds, and the sandstone’s like a sponge.

McLean’s rocks held so much water through the last summer that it wasn’t weeds that needed munching: the vineyard suddenly sprouted thousands of red gums.

BOB McLEAN IN THE SHADE OF HIS NEW WINERY APRON IN A VERY HOT VINTAGE: THE CRACK WAS GOOD

I was scared to visit or call this year. But,you know, things being what t hey are, McLean reckons his crop might be down twenty or thirty per cent or so. The vines look quite healthy; even happy. Some leaves yellowed in the heat; they fell. Others took over.

Make an appointment to visit and buy and sit there looking up at that vineyard and drink it: the first vintages are beginning to ooze out of bottle, and both red blend and riesling are exciting indicators of many joys to come, hell or high water.

Some of McLean’s wines are from grapes around about the Eden Valley and Kalimna, on the Barossa floor. Some are blends of that with some Mengler’s fruit. And some, the barr-Eden wines, are off that amazing vineyard, 100%.

The barr-Eden grenache, shiraz and mataro blend is a sultry old oak and wild yeast raven: about as farm gate as you can get. McLean’s cruisy nonchalance on the old basket press had impressed me during its manufacture: the mighty left arm disinterestedly winding the ratchet down – a job due two men - the right switching twixt cigar and glass. It is the fruit of all that you see: McLean’s lovely shed full of barrels, which has the dry gizzards of a library growing within it, as wood panels, books, and the consequent knowledge are the best insulator. Open the wall, and you’ve got that wild, crazy vinegarden on the hill.

And the riesling? With Col Forbes’ help, it’s a rarity of true blue beauty. Like the original Orlando Steingartens. Go, sit, buy.

What I meant to say was McLean’s got new hinges in his knees. A year with the quacks and he’s Big Bob again. Whew! He’s no good short.

BOB AND WILMA McLEAN'S VINEYARD ON MENGLER'S HILL. IT'S TWILIGHT, AND WE'RE LOOKING DUE NORTH FROM THE WINERY DOOR. SEE HOW THE LIGHT'S BRIGHTER IN THE WEST, WHICH IS LEFT. THE VINES ROLL ON OVER ANOTHER RIDGE OR TWO. THIS WILL BE A LEGENDARY VINEYARD.