VINEPULL FOLLOWS THE OZ FLOODS SOUTH

Symptomatic Week For Ozplonk
Hunter Vineyards Shrink By Half
Fosters Battles Wine Australia 
by PHILIP WHITE

It’s been a symptomatic week in Australian wine.

The biggest end of the Australian wine industry has a long record of ignoring the symptoms of its ailments. This week leaves the callow observer wondering just how crook it’ll let itself get.

First came the news that half the vines in the Hunter Valley have been uprooted in the last eighteen months.

Compared to the Barossa and McLaren Vale, the Hunter has never been a great player, depending historically on fruit from both those regions, and the big rivers, for its bulk products. While its best producers – usually long-term family wineries - can grow and make truly wonderful Semillon and Shiraz, the Hunter’s hardly ideal for viticulture, being sub-tropical, and would probably not be there if there was no Sydney. Nevertheless, the removal of 3250 hectares of vines is a big deal.

In the good old days Max Schubert (right) would flog his horny Rambler coupe – “she’ll sit on 140 MPH”, he’d say with a grin – from Penfolds at Magill to check the vintage at Penfolds’ Dalwood winery in the Hunter. Within years of his death, the Oatleys, founders of the mercurial Rosemount in the Upper Hunter, had raided Southcorp’s Penfolds, and flew regularly the other way in their private jet.

Their audacious 2001 reverse takeover saw Bob “Wild Oats” Oatley (below) paid $1.4 billion - $881 million cash and 94.3 million shares – which swelled beautifully by the time the monolith was “rationalized” and sold to Fosters in 2005.

Fosters soon butchered this prime wine business with further “rationalization”, confusing its management, marketing and sales with its beer sector, an entirely destructive process which it now professes to have successfully reversed in its disentanglement of both sides of the firm for sale.

In ten years it spent AUS$6.7 billion building an empire with a current book value of $3 billion.

Clever operators, the Oatleys. They knew the difference between barley and grapes. And coffee. They made their first fortune running plantations in Papua New Guinea. Of all the coffee-producing countries, it was the closest to the International Date Line, making it easier to influence daily international coffee prices as the sunrise moved west.

Now Rosemount’s iconic Roxburgh Vineyard is part of a coal mine, like an increasing amount of the Hunter. When I visited the region last year, the chopper flew into a thin layer of brown gas the moment we crossed the crest of the Brokenback Range. This was the colour and aroma of hydrogen sulphide, or rotten egg gas, one of the things you tend to get when you scratch open great swathes of lignite and coal shale.

It seems strange that in recent years, the owners of the region’s many thoroughbred studs have complained more loudly about the resultant health of their nags than the locals have about their children.

The coal business is a big employer.

Patriarchal winemaker Murray Tyrrell complained regularly to me about the industrialisation of his beloved Hunter in the ’eighties. At one point he suggested the pollutants in the air were as corrupting of his business as the corruption of the NSW Labor government, and said it was becoming increasingly difficult to fully ripen grapes.

The late Tyrrell (left), “The Mouth Of The Hunter”, once told a gathering of wine writers that with two other prominent Hunter winemakers, he visited Premier Neville Wran, slapped their sugar invoices on the table, and complained that the pollution had become so bad that some years they were forced to illegally chaptalise their wine to get to the point of “ripeness” the market demanded.

Adding sugar to fermenting must is permitted in cold countries like France, but not in Australia, where ripening is sometimes too easily achieved, and acid additions are permitted to bring the wines back into balance.

It says something about the compliant nature of wine criticism that I was the only reporter on that junket who reported Tyrrell’s claim.

Since then, government claims consequent regulations have restricted Hunter pollution, and winemakers say ripening is no longer such a problem.

Newcomers, largely opportunist short-term investors driven by the government’s stupid tax incentives, planted most of the industrial grapeyards which have just been uprooted. If you can stomach their current claims, it is these types of vineyards, and not seriously profitable products like Grange, that keep giant exporters of bottom-end discount plonk, like Fosters, in business.

This leaves the Hunter in the hands of the old families who’ve always been there, stoically growing quality grapes for their old-style wines.

‘‘Fifteen to 20 years ago the dream was to retire from Sydney and live in the Hunter making a wine that was better than Grange and it just hasn’t happened,’’ Tyrrell’s son Bruce (below) said this week.

‘‘There were many vines planted in the wrong place, for the wrong reasons and they will all have to come out.’’

In the same week another small symptom of a huge change: psychologist Karen Hutchison was named NSW Rural Woman of the year at a posh dinner in parliament house. Formerly CEO of the Murrumbidgee Horticulture Council, she currently works for Murrumbidgee Irrigation, which has been responsible for watering enormous vineyards that supply the sorts of wine Fosters exports in shipping containers stuffed with giant bladder packs.

Fair dink. A huge rubber bag is laid into each container, then pumped full of wine which is pumped back out after its voyage.

The current ruin of much of the vast vignoble of the Murray-Darling, through fungal disease and flood in the short-term, and the sudden government-imposed cessation of unsustainable, profligate, environmentally-destructive irrigation in the longer view, must see great reductions in the amount of rock bottom fruit these exporting discounters say they depend upon.

The Hunter diminishing by half is nothing on what’s happening in the Murray-Darling. In the Murrumbidgee catchment alone the draft basin plans irrigation cuts of up to 45 per cent leaving more water to flow into the Murray.

"I've come from the Snowy Mountains, so I've seen first-hand the power of water to build communities and also to change landscapes,” Hutchinson (below) said at her award bash. "I now find myself working in the irrigation industry at a time of fundamental change around water policy so I'm seeing the power of water to both divide communities and galvanise them.”

She has just converted her wine grape vineyards to Sultana production for table grapes.

Which is almost funny. It wasn’t that long ago that highly-irrigated, obscenely high-yielding Sultana was Australia’s most used white wine grape, and Fosters, and the preceding owner/managers of its wine group were amongst its worst addicts. Like, they had to realize that Cabernet franc, watered to crop at 12 tonnes an acre, trucked across two states then bleached, was no longer ideal for making things they called Champagne. At least sultanas are already white - they don’t need bleaching. And you can get forty tonnes of sully to the acre, given enough water.

At the insistence of companies like Fosters, the Murray-Darling growers soon replaced their dual-purpose Sultana with Chardonnay, which yielded just as well, was of a similar quality, and at least had a name you could put on the bottle or bag.

But you couldn’t sell it as food.

Another symptom of panic in the boardrooms is this sudden changing of names. Like Fosters recently rebranded its huge wine group with the name of one of Tony Bilson’s grand old restaurants, Treasury. Constellation took a UAS$1.6 billion dive flogging its Australian business to the investment group Champ, which also delves in mining, media and other industries, and promptly changed the name of its new monster baby to Accolade.

These sound like the names of Korean cars, which is another symptom, given their resale value.

And now that the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation has become Wine Australia, Foster’s Treasury has had a hissy fit and withdrawn its financial support for Wine Australia’s first big global promo push. Fosters says this campaign, called A+, fails to promote importer's “own labels”. These are the bottom-end Australian plonks exported and flogged under generic labels by supermarkets and the very same giant discounting retailers which have brought the Australian wine business to its knees.

Wine Australia was, in an unusually enlightened manner, attempting to promote the sorts of premium wines that have a home, a winery, a historic reputation, and a profit margin. Sustainable products. Like Grange, and its siblings at Penfolds, which may bear lesser appellations, but in both profit and quality are a serious step above the sort of plonk exported in those big bladders.

Which, incidentally, are bottled by foreign packagers with little of our wine quality control, but ridiculous complexities masquerading as occupational health safeguards.

Could it be that Fosters hasn’t really learned anything?

Or is its spat with Wine Australia a desperate grasp at increasing the value of the discount brands it expects to sell to another Champ in a bulk deal?

And I mean the brands, not the booze. The booze is worth almost nothing. But I suppose that because there’s such an ocean of it still to sell, Fosters’ attempt to outstare Wine Australia could be a last-gasp attempt to flog more grog at any price.

It must realise the Hunter uprooting is miniscule compared to the great vine pull which is working its way down the plagued river systems from the Murrumbidgee and Bourke to Blanchetown and beyond, and that the days are dying when they can pay less than cost price for grapes.

In the meantime, this ongoing devaluation of the once grand Brand Australia is of little consequence to a company which intends to be out of the business the minute it finds its Champ.

That’d leave it with lots of beer, a direct rival of cheap wine.

CONSTELLATION STARS CRASH IN OZPLONK

THE GRAND OLD CHATEAU REYNELLA WINERY IN McLAREN VALE; FORMER HQ OF NEW YORK MARAUDERS THE SANDS BROTHERS, UPSTATE NEW YORK RUBES WHO NEVER GRASPED THE HARD REALITIES OF WINEMAKING IN AUSTRALIA'S WILD FRONTIER, WHERE ONLY THE SMART AND THE TRUE SURVIVE PROFITABLY - photo KATE ELMES


Bad Business Butchers Bush Wrong Sands In Our Wineglass Fosters Faces Devalued Assets
by PHILIP WHITE

This is a story of how changing climate, political skulduggery, disastrous public relations and general business ineptitude is destroying what many have long seen to be Australia's greatest agricultural export success.

There has never been a vintage quite like 2011. The calamitous matter of international oversupply aside, Australia’s wine business is a sodden, mouldy husk of its old budding beauty, with great swathes of its traditional lifeblood rotting on the vine because our mightiest ethanol peddlers (read transnational winemakers) refuse to pay the cost price for grapes.

This is coincident with the big chemical manufacturers and importers deciding that nobody could afford to pay for their fungicides because atop the insulting prices offered for fruit, the lack of irrigation water had broken the growers' financial backs. So these chemical traders neither imported or manufactured sufficient fungicide spray to deal with the country's current plague of moulds and mildews.

To help ease this crisis, the irrigated wine business, through the Winemakers Federation of Australia, has even negotiated a temporary relaxation of Canada’s severe restrictions on Australia’s use of phosphorous acid as a fungicide, so the mildew which too much rain and flood has set blooming all the way from Blanchetown to Burke can perhaps be limited and wine exports to Canada will remain unimpeded.

If they're lucky.

China has also been approached for a similar deal, but, perhaps wisely, refuses to respond. China has its own burgeoning wine business, and will soon be exporting cheap wine to Australia.

However you see it in the meantime, that rather vainglorious appellation which some genius, for want of a more precise term, called “South Eastern Australia”, is cactus. At a time of the most destructive irrigation restrictions ever, a deadly percentage of the vineyard in this vast appellation, equal in size to Portugal, Spain, France, Germany and Italy combined, is wet, mouldy and rotting.

The current disastrous floods are only the latest derisive insult to the many thousands of struggling bush families the wine industry is in the business of wrecking.

Otherwise, the season is nearly perfect: the cool wet start has set the better regions up beautifully; ongoing moderate breezy weather ensures the smart cookies who’ve done everything right will get some exemplary fruit. Only the jaundiced take joy suggesting the rotten side of the crop will assist clear the welling lake of unsold swill: only the idiot suggests the sweaty hands steering the industry’s confounding array of governing councils have solved the problem by their own cunning design.

Two of the most inelegant words in the history of English summarise the situation perfectly.

The first, “premiumise”, is the creation of the propaganda unit of the Sands brothers of upstate New York, the men who run Constellation, the world’s biggest wine company until a few minutes ago. They have been “premiumising” their ethanol mongery for a couple of years now, trimming it in the hope it will look better.

The wise observer (barely seen in the international business pages), the comfortably jaundiced, and even the idiot, must agree that “premiumise” seems to mean “hope to charge more for the same old same old”.

The second word, “demerger”, is the new form of “dismantle”, “dismember”, “flay”, or “gut”. It is the creation of the propagandists at Fosters, which intends to rip apart the huge wine and beer businesses it had only just completed “merging”, which always seemed to mean “crash senselessly and illogically together”.

This closely followed the disastrous “merging” of Southcorp with Rosemount, where, disguised as a white knight, Bob “Wild Oats” Oatley walked away with one or two billion, leaving his punchdrunk monolith sitting pretty for Fosters to gobble and rename.

Both “premiumise” and “demerger” are rather quaint negligees for that haggard old whore we once called greed. But these current captains of the ethanol racket can’t even successfully commit greed.

Take Constellation. In 2003, it spent AUD$1.9 billion erecting the Australian winemaking and United Kingdom distribution show it has just dropped for AUD$290 million, although the Sands boys have thrown some snakes in the murky water by insisting they’ll retain a 20% slice of the action, which means they’ll pick up only AUD$230 million “subject to closing adjustments".

Having confidently predicted their determination to get the hell out of Australia two years ago, this writer sees no joy other than cruel ridicule in any of this: in their retreat they clumsily butchered the main bits of their “premium” involvement, the grand old wineries of Chateau Reynella and Tintara. At the former, they last year destroyed a heritage-listed vineyard (below) at least the historical equivalent of Grange or Hill of Grace to make a quick $5 million in a rude housing malignancy; the latter, Tintara, the last winery to survive in the main street of McLaren Vale, they mothballed.

DEPREMIUMISED: THE HERITAGE LISTED JOHN REYNELL VINEYARD DESTROYED BY CONSTELLATION LAST YEAR - photo KATE ELMES

These two deft actions alone cost them much much more than $5 million of goodwill.

After the Reynella destruction, few would dare to permit their interference with Tintara’s heritage status.

One could be forgiven for suspecting that these people have no idea of the common meaning of premium.

A particularly sickly exemplar was their involvement in the USA Merlot racket. Most Americans seemed to think Merlot meant “mellow sweet red” until a schmucky Hollywood film suddenly made Merrrllow soooo yesterday that everybody needed something else to drink, immediately. The movie suggested Pinot noir, so, with Gallo (suddenly the world’s biggest wine company, again), the Sands lads unwittingly got themselves entangled in a scam in which they bought Pinot noir made from south of France Merlot and Shiraz.

This was much easier than mastering the notoriously tricky red grape of Burgundy, but, until the French wine police picked the scab off the racket, America loved it. They were ignorantly drinking the same swill they thought they’d fashionably abandoned, indicating the incredible naïve vulnerability of ethanol addicts who imagine themselves to be epicures and gourmands. Sideways, see?

To rub all this in, the scrillion tonnes of salt the Murray-Darling floods are about to unsettle will be just dandy for curing the wounds Fosters has incurred in its parallel disaster.

Before he jumps ship (as promised), Fosters CEO Ian Johnston will settle David Dearie into the hot seat at Treasury (the new name their propagandists thought up for their wine division), and CUB CEO John Pollard into the beer biz (which should be a cruise, comparatively).

Apart from the brilliant success of Penfolds, the rest of the Treasury wine lake could do with some serious premiumising, but you wouldn’t follow the example set by the Sands brothers.
David Dearie starts his year looking down the backwards telescope of the Sands’ imposed evaluation of the very ordinary end of Treasury’s Noah’s Ark of brands. These stretch from Andrew Garrett (really) to Queen Adelaide (currently in a gay resurrection), and Kaiser Stuhl to Wolf Blass (both of which Fosters has for years listed as Mildura wineries in the Australian Wine Directory).

Mildura is sinking.

If these treasured assets were worth anything last vintage, all the above has seen their value plummet by about the same sickening lurch the Sands brothers have stupidly engineered themselves.

Both these demergers could use some retrospective premiumising. If it had occurred, it could have been called logical and moral propriety, or perhaps even good business, subject to closing adjustments.

SOME BACKGROUND

As through this life you ramble
You’ll meet some funny men
Some will rob you with a six gun
And some with a fountain pen.

- Woody Guthrie

The Sands brothers, of upstate New York, obviously enjoy being seen, on their home patch, as men who respect culture, heritage, and the arts. As well as promoting their awards for community service in these areas, they are proud to pay big money to have their name on the Constellation Brands Marvin Sands Performing Arts Center in their home town of Canandaigua, near the Finger Lakes.

Their propaganda boasts that “The Friends of the Constellation Brands-Marvin Sands Performing Arts Center, Inc (CMAC) is a New York not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) corporation that was formed to assume responsibility for financial operation of CMAC. CMAC supports the mission to improve the quality of life in our community through culture, education and the arts.”

Artists like Willie Nelson, the Levon Helm Band, Robert Cray, Maroon 5, Cheryl Crowe, George Thorogood, Ringo Starr, and the Fabulous Thunderbirds are regular headliners there.

Not to mention a group aptly named Shit Is Fucked.

These people are totally unaware of the cultural destruction the Sands boys have wrought on McLaren Vale, South Australia, the former home of the enormous Australian wine empire they bought, built and butchered in seven quick years.

Just a couple of years back, Constellation’s PR troops were working hard on their “premiumizing”. They boasted of having “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, apart from sacking hundreds of faithful workers at their heritage wineries of Reynella and Tintara they last year destroyed one of South Australia’s oldest commercial vineyards, and one which historically was at least as important as the Grange vineyard at Magill Estate, Langmeil’s The Freedom at Tanunda (probabaly the wold's oldest producing Shiraz vineyard), Kalimna near Nuriootpa (the world's oldest producing Cabernet vineyard), and the Hill of Grace near Keyneton.

Constellation made a measly AUD$5 million with the sale.

Just how this occurred is a vivid example of how Australia’s Labor governments, whose leaders seem to yearn to display business acumen not usually evident in the left, are transfixed by flash Harries much more expert at taking money and property from weaker and more vulnerable others.

Constellation hired a little-known historian to contradict years of its own sales hype - and decades of it from BRL-Hardy and Chateau Reynella before they were purchased - which had promoted this vineyard as an invaluable and irreplaceable cornerstone of the history and heritage of the Australian wine story. Together with the master fudgers of the Onkaparinga Council (the local government) and the soft cocks of the State Heritage Branch (State government), they managed to use this expert’s cheaply-bought advice to have the vineyard’s Heritage listing expunged.

ARIEL VIEW OF THE FORMER CONSTELLATION JEWEL AND HEADQUARTERS AT CHATEAU REYNELLA. THIS DISTRICT, WITH ITS PRICELESS ANCIENT GEOLOGIES, WAS ONCE CARPETED WITH DRY-GROWN VINEYARDS.

The photograph above shows the Chateau Reynella complex, and its surrounding vineyards. The large stony vineyard on the slopes to the right is the inferior one, and has been so regarded since John Reynell’s day. The smaller one (2 hectares - marked with the ellipse) bordered the heritage village of Old Reynella, was sold to the developer, Pioneer Homes, to build 41 apartments there on blocks averaging 22 x 22 metres.

Ebenezer Ward was the wine critic on The Advertiser in South Australia in 1862, preceding me by 126 years. Having visited Reynell Farm in that year, he wrote “Thus his [John Reynell’s] vineyard on the hilly land is confined to the Clarendon sorts, The Rousillon, and the Verdeilho. The Carbonet – a variety which, for the quality of its produce, cannot be too highly valued – Mr. Reynell has planted in another vineyard which he formed in 1848 on the flat bordering the creek, and where the soil is a black alluvial deposit on the surface, with a red loam subsoil. In this vineyard there are also Malbec and Shiraz … we thought a wine made from an admixture of Malbec and Carbonet best of all.”

In spite of this published first-hand report, and those many years of praising the vineyard’s significant history, Constellation managed to have the vineyard’s heritage listing removed.

JOHN REYNELL'S OLD CHATEAU REYNELLA HOMESTEAD, THE FORMER HEAD OFFICE OF BRL-HARDY - CONSTELLATION STRIPPED IT OF ITS ANTIQUES A YEAR AGO AND SOLD THEM AT A PITTANCE - photo - KATE ELMES

This occurred when they convinced the powers that be that the hill vineyard was indeed the most significant.

Part of the decision seems to have been justified by confusing the lower vineyard’s name. Somewhere in its recent history, amidst a peculiarly Australian fashion of naming export wines after hills and ridges which usually did not exist (Australia is famously flat) somebody gave the lower site the misnomer, “Stony Hill”, a strange appellation considering its proximity to the adjacent hill, which is indeed stony.

The lower vineyard also had a highly-significant viticultural importance, being the source of what was for years erroneously called “the Reynella clone” of Cabernet sauvignon, a superior strain of the variety which has been favoured, even revered, and propagated all over Australia for its superior flavour.

When I asked Geoff Hardy, the last formidable viticulturist of the Hardy tribe, about this, he explained "Noel Chapman was the architect of the current Reynell selection (not clone) which he told me was a process of elimination through three generations of plantings and he told me it was most recently from about 7 separate mother vines. We know that at least one of these is quite virus affected but I suspect it is two, without having done the testing. I understand the ‘current’ Reynell selection is the older Stony Hill planting (1968?) and this is where I have sourced perhaps 400 acres of planting material from, propagated or distributed through my own nursery business and this is the tip of the iceberg in an Australian sense.

"As regards naming the Stony Hill block I think Noey told me this was his doing because of the limestone in the higher part but my memory is very vague on this. Apparently there’s no mention of Stony Hill’s existence in Margaret Hopton’s significant writings on the Reynell family.

"The block has produced some great wine that I know of but I lost contact with its quality ratings in the late eighties.

"It certainly has a lot of history and is in the wrong hands at the moment."


These comments were backed up by Andrew Hardy, another significent member of the great winemaking family, and managing winemaker of Petaluma.

Chris Hackett, a former Reynella winemaker said that in his day the Cabernet from that block was the best in the winery every vintage and that when he attempted to buy the vineyard the owner dared not let it go.

But subsequently, when Constellation was attempting to convince the diaspora of the Hardy family to buy Reynella and Tintara back, all significant members of the family suddenly clammed up, and withdrew support from the burgeoning movement to save the vineyard. This could simply have been at the urging of Bill Hardy, the last senior member of the tribe to remain employed by Constellation, and the person wheeled out internationally to give the company an air of history and continuing family involvement.

His famous mother, Barbara Hardy, a revered and highly-awarded conservationist, green activist, and heritage enthusiast, also remained silent.

The death knell came when the McLaren Vale Grape Wine and Tourism Association flatly refused to support the vineyard’s retention. This association had long enjoyed the major funding supplied by Hardy’s, BRL-Hardy, and then Constellation, and seemed blind to the reality that the world’s biggest wine company was determinedly pulling out of the district, to concentrate on buying much cheaper, inferior fruit from the irrigated arid lands of the Australia outback, which were even then under severe and ongoing threat due to the abuse and over-allocation of dwindling irrigation water.

Perversely, these areas are now facing freak floods the like of which have not been seen for a century.

In response to a letter from New Zealand journalist, Sally Marden, urging the retention of the Reynell vineyard, Dudley Brown, Chairman of the McLaren Vale Grape Wine And Tourism Association, and a grapegrower who had depended on Constellation’s contract for his fruit, wrote “as our Association represents the interests of multiple industries, we have long had a policy of not commenting on commercial matters of members or disputes between industry groups except to the extent that they violate the law.

“Constellation’s forerunner company, Hardy’s, has been a member of our association in good standing since the inception of our forerunner bodies.

“We have and continue to actively lobby on matters of urban encroachment in our region (including the recent Glenthorne Farm matter) where and when we can.”

Independent State parliamentarian David Winderlich told the Legislative Council “According to Onkaparinga council, the vineyard was removed from the state heritage list by the Department for Environment and Heritage. This is a very strange decision, because the vineyard clearly meets at least three of the seven criteria for listing under the state’s Heritage Places Act: it demonstrates important aspects of the evolution or pattern of the state’s history; it is an outstanding representative of a particular class of places of cultural significance; and it has a special association with the life or work of a person or organisation or an event of historical importance.

“To delist such an important part of our history for such a small gain, 41 homes—we are not talking about this vineyard blocking the development of Roxby [Roxby Downs, the world’s largest uranium mine], for example—raises the concern that nothing is safe. It also raises questions about the integrity of the heritage listing process.”

Local independent parliamentarian Kris Hanna, chairman of the Reynell Business and Tourism Association, said the development would “wreck the place ... The site has been used continuously as vineyards since about 1840 and we’d like to see it preserved as vineyards as a tribute to our early history ... there’s a growing feeling among residents that the senior management at Constellation aren’t concerned with the history of the area or the locals,” he said.

Leon Bignell, a highly-popular parliamentarian from the district, was even more overt in his rage.

"This vital historic vineyard is symbolic of the whole district", he said on ABC TV.

"Gutter to gutter housing is something that belongs in the inner city suburbs where people want to live like that, close to the parklands and the city amenities and the high-rise offices where they're happy to work.

THE AUTHOR AT THE GATE OF THE OLD VINEYARD, JUST WEEKS BEFOTRE ITS DESTRUCTION - photo KATE ELMES

"It's like sub-dividing The Grange," he said. "Putting this sort of development on John Reynell's old block is like putting multi-storey flats on the site of the Old Gum Tree at Glenelg, or like crushing the first FJ Holden for scrap. We've already lost too much beautiful grape-growing land to tupperware tuscany housing. And that's a special piece of soil, Reynell's last block: if you read your history you'll see that ground is perfect for premium vineyard and the unique flavours those soils give, which is why Reynell planted there in the first place. It's a dumb move, and while it's not in my electorate, I'll do whatever I can to stop it."

Bignell’s colleague, Planning and Development Minister Paul Holloway, had seemed in full support when he had earlier promised ABC radio “because the Barossa Valley and McLaren Vale are important economic areas of the state, because they’re wine regions, also significant tourism regions, it would not make sense to have urban encroachment to a significant extent into those areas. So we’ll avoid those areas and the areas that we’ll be looking at for future expansion are those areas where there’ll be less impact on the important tourism and economic areas. So yes we do recognise those areas but look it’s simple common sense: why would you want to encroach on areas that are important to the economy because of the significant contribution that they make to the state’s economy through the wine industry and the tourism industry? Clearly that would be put at threat if we allowed rampant urban development within those areas.”

But it was his government which overthrew the heritage listing, and saw the Pioneer Homes developers bulldoze the heritage left by Reynell, a true pioneer.

Now, at Reynella, since Constellation’s departure, the gate to more destruction swings dangerously open. All it will take is the new owner to suggest that the destroyed vineyard was erroneously removed from its heritage status, and was indeed the more significant, meaning the remaining hill vineyard can now be replaced with housing.

And the old ironstone Tintara winery in the main street of the McLaren Vale township is looking awfully like a nice place for more villa rash.

The best summary of all this is the name of that aforementioned rock band.

EBENEZER WARD'S 1862 REPORT

EBENEZER WARD


THE township of Reynella is about 13 miles from Adelaide, on the Great South-road. The section on which the Crown hostelrie, the Reynella Mills, store &c., now stand was originally taken up by Mr. Reynell in 1838, and he has resided in the locality ever since. His present residence is barely a quarter of mile south-east of the township, on a slight eminence rising from Peel’s Creek. He has now about 450 acres of land in his possession, and in its management he aims at a combination of vine-growing, grazing and farming. He has 15 acres of vines, 2 of orchard and garden, about 100 under crop, and the remainder of the estate is fenced off for grazing.

Mr. Reynell commenced planting 21 years ago, when a considerable portion of the present orchard was formed. A few vine-cuttings from Tasmania were planted at the same time, and three years afterwards wine was made from them. The vineyard proper dates from 1844, when half an acre was planted with cuttings from Mr. Anstey’s. In the following season four-and-a-half acres were planted with cuttings obtained from the Macarthurs, of New South Wales, and the sorts recommended in “Maro’s” letters – viz., the Verdielho, Carbonet, Malbec, Pineau Gris, and Gouais. The situation, however, was too dry, and the soil too light, for most of these varieties to bear largely there, and a number of them have been already superseded. One acre of Pineau Gris has been grubbed up, the Rousillon varieties have been previously planted alternately with the rows of Pineau, and the Rousillon have also been grafted on the Carbonet. In 1847 and 1848 Mr. Reynell obtained cuttings of the white sorts from the Clarendon Vineyard – viz., Pedro Ximines, Doradilla, Temprana, Palo-mino-blanco, &c.: and since then he has planted a considerable extent with the Rousillons.

JOHN REYNELL

Thus his vineyard on the hilly land is chiefly confined to the Clarendon sorts, the Rousillon, and the Verdielho. The Carbonet -- a variety which, from the quality of its produce, cannot be too highly valued – Mr. Reynell has planted in another vineyard which he formed in 1848 on the flat bordering the creek, and where the soil is a black alluvial deposit on the surface, with a red loam subsoil. In this vineyard there are also Malbec and Shiraz to mix with the Carbonet, the Rousillon sorts, and (planted in 1861) Frontignac, Verdeilho, and Riesling. None of Mr. Reynell’s vines are either staked or trellised, and the Rousillon sorts appear very well able to support themselves. The Verdielho have a more straggling growth, but Mr. Reynell thinks the cost of staking is greatly in excess of the advantage to be gained. Throughout the vineyard the rows are 6 feet apart, and the vines at from 4 to 5 feet in the rows. The vineyard has a northern to north-eastern aspect, and is well sheltered on the south and west. The ground between the rows is stirred with horse-hoe or plough two or three times every season, and is flanked with rows of almond trees planted for shelter. On the highest point of the hill the soil is very sandy; but on the lower slopes it is a good red loam on the surface, with a sprinkling of ironstone intermixed, and the subsoil is chiefly composed of friable limestone. Mr. Reynell has about 40 acres of this kind of land at a sufficient elevation above the creek to be secure from frosts, but he unwilling to increase his vineyard very largely until there is a prospect of our wines being admitted to the Melbourne markets without an import duty. We certainly hope the day is not far distant when our friends across the border will be wise and magnanimous enough to reduce very much, or altogether remove, the present impost. The apple- and pear-trees in the orchard are some of the largest we have seen in the colony. We noticed there a tree of the indiarubber variety, which was obtained from Sydney 20 years ago, and has grown to great size. It is an evergreen, and the foliage has an elegant appearance. A few orange-trees have been planted near the creek. Several years ago Mr. Reynell made a pure wine from the Pineau Gris. It is now perfectly matured, and has been highly spoken of by connoisseurs. His Verdielho is also remarkably good, but we thought a wine made from an admixture of Malbec and Carbonet best of all.

- from Ebenezer Ward’s Vineyards & Orchards Of South Australia 1862.

REYNELL'S OLD VINEYARD AS IT WAS, VIEWED THROUGH THE RAZOR WIRE FROM CONSTELLATION'S FORMER HEADQUARTERS - photo KATE ELMES

REYNELLA - by Ernest Whitington, The Register, 1903

The cellars here are the property of Mr. Walter Reynell, who has always taken a keen interest in the wine industry. I believe one of his missions on his present trip to England is to see if he cannot do something to find increased markets for our wine. All vignerons pray that he might be successful. Mr. Reynell’s oldest son was superintending vintage operations when I arrived. The make this year was expected to be between 80,000 and 85,000 gallons. In the winery there are 28 fermenting tanks, each of a capacity of 1,500 gallons. The water for cooling is run down from an underground tank on the top of the hill. After passing through the coils in the fermenting tanks the water is run over eight canvas trays, which have a fan playing on them, and then down into the well, the source whence it first came. The canvas cooling machine cools the water to 60 degrees. There are two gable-roofed storage cellars running parallel to one another, and when the occasion arises the space between will be covered in and converted into a cellar. In the first cellar there are 16 3,000 gallon jarrah vats, and in the second 20 similar receptacles, as well as 300-gallon casks and hogsheads. Altogether there is 170,000 gallons in store. The old cellar, which is 40 years old, is right under the ground. The roof is of logs and earth overgrown with grass, and presents a very picturesque appearance. M. Reynell has 150 acres in bearing at Reynella and 120 acres at Riverton and Magill. The grapes from these vineyards are treated at Reynella, while Mr. Reynell buys from 15 or 16 growers in the district.

- from The South Australian Vintage 1903, by Ernest Whitington

Men of Category

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SPEECH to the SOUTH AUSTRALIAN WINE PRESS CLUB at the EXETER HOTEL

by PHILIP WHITE – Wednesday 27 March 2002

I want to read to you the opening passage from One Man’s Ambition,the introduction to Wynn Winegrowers Diary, 1970, written by the late Walter James, who was a great and humble winewriter in Melbourne.

"When you choose to direct your life to the task of making money you may be sure that your success will arouse the admiration, and the envy, of a vast army of men who have had similar aims,” he wrote. “Should you set out not to make money but to make something really worthwhile in itself, your success will with equal certainty be rewarded with the admiration, and the goodwill, of men who really matter - men of category, as the Spaniards call them.”

He continues: "In some fields of productive endeavour, of course, you cannot achieve much without substantial means; it is only a little sad that so many men of ability as they reach for success and meet it are beguiled into allowing the means to submerge the aim and in the end are content to do, adequately enough, no more than a hundred others around them are doing equally well. Their obituaries describe these people as successful businessmen and they pass promptly into oblivion."

Among the businessmen who will pass promptly into oblivion in the near future are many of those we see running the great Australian wine industry.

And not to be unduly cynical, it IS a great wine industry. Again.

Just last night I was ploughing through some old Winestate and Wine and Spirit magazines, from back in the days when a Petaluma chardonnay was $7 and we’d give you a free bottle of Grange if you bought a $12 annual subscription. Australia hadn’t discovered shiraz then.

I read an interview I did twenty years ago with Frank Stone, a wine merchant from Atlanta. He was a man of category. He cursed Australian winemakers because he had never had one Australian wine shipper bother to visit Skinflints, his six wine supermarkets in Georgia, that were turning over $25 million a year of premium wine. He was also the President of an international wine education association with 1600 members, and he’d never once been contacted by an Australian winemaker or promoter.

Frank told me of the phenomenal success of the Italians in the United States, quoting figures like Villa Banfi, who’d gone from shipping nothing in 1975 to 17 million cases in 1982, and how the Italian government had got behind its winemakers and got some order into their promotion and made sure they went and visited blokes like Frank.

The people who’ve put Australia there beside the Italians might have taken twenty years, rather than seven, but they’ve done it - they’ve achieved some very grand things indeed, but even many of those will pass into oblivion.

Writers pass into oblivion, too. I remember Richard Farmer, the political journalist and major Canberra liquor merchant standing up in Len Evans Bulletin Place restaurant in 1984 to address the New South Wales Wine Press Club. “Fellow drug dealers”, he began, addressing an issue that has never really been faced since that day. Then he wheeled into a loud warning about Australia’s wine explosion being the result of the product being tax free, and said loud and clear that unless the industry got its shit together and grew up and lobbied, it would of course be taxed.

Now, thanks to the lobbying efforts of Brian Croser and Ian Sutton, we have an absolute dusie of a tax, but we don’t hear much from Richard since he penned Bob Hawke’s immortal line that by 1990 no child in Australia would be living in poverty. As a fellow writer, I think I know the sort of personal oblivion that might eat Richard right up....

In the same year - the apocryphal 1984 that my generation of bookworms thought we’d never ever reach - Nathan Chroman, wine writer from the Los Angeles Times was here, saying he didn’t think anybody in the world needed to make better wines than our best shiraz.

Gerard Jaboulet was here in the same week, handing out glasses of his La Chappelle Hermitage (1976 - $16!), from the French vineyard which is the very source of that shiraz, totally disbelieving that we were spending taxpayers’ money to uproot our best and oldest shiraz vines, not to mention nearly all of our ancient grenache. There was hardly a vine of cinsault or carignan left after that exercise. These just happened to be the varieties Gerard coveted from Chateauneuf-du-Pape, the district which McLaren Vale now seems determined to emulate.

Funny thing about these “new” rousillon varieties, viognier, marsanne and roussane, that they’re madly planting to get more South-of-Francey: they were all down there growing brilliantly in the Vales when Ebenezer Ward was writing The Advertiser wine column in 1862.

Gerard Jaboulet has tragically and prematurely returned to the great silence, but I don’t think we can say he’s gone to oblivion. I don’t know about Nathan. He’s a writer. And so was old Ebenezer, who shared one or two of my human tendencies. He got his tab in the Yorketown pub up to 50 quid in 1880, perhaps because of his derision of the quality of the local fizz, and his irritating habit of calling repeatedly for Krug.

Coming a bit closer to today’s men of category, one chubby fellow who was on the National Wine Centre board buttonholed me and boasted of how he would win his Order of Australia Medal for getting the Centre up against all the odds and dangerous detractors like me. I thought immediately that he was a man who had become “beguiled into allowing the means to submerge his aim”. He will pass promptly into oblivion.

Mark Cashmore, the great Hunter winemaker and marketer, is a name we don’t hear too much of any more. Before he sooled his lawyers on me for calling him Mark Morecash in 1983 I asked him the following question: “Why have you changed the name of your blend of chardonnay and semillon from pinot riesling to semillon chardonnay?”

To which he honestly replied: “Pinot riesling doesn’t mean very much at all. Chardonnay’s not pinot chardonnay and I don’t think riesling in the context of pinot riesling means very much. I mean riesling is semillon and pinot is chardonnay, and we have more semillon in the wine than chardonnay, so it should be semillon chardonnay.”

Not to put too much of a mozz on the Hunter, but the notorious Murray Tyrrell beat that hands down when I rang him for a comment on one of his habitual imbroglios: “Philip”, he roared like an old Chev blitz starting up, “what these fellers in the press are saying about me is completely unfalse!”

But that’s enough of that. I know what dear Walter James and David Wynn were thinking of when they conspired to write that paragraph I read to begin. They were talking of the true cycles of wine, and how so few of us ever really get to see it properly, gloriously, wholesomely occur; if not our very short lives, at least our concentration is too short to plan a flavour, and spend a year or three selecting the ground which will deliver it, then another one preparing it for the action. We might endure the few years it then takes for a crop to appear, or even stick around for another four or five so the fruit begins to show some complexity of flavour, but will we still be paying attention when those wines reach their maturity another ten years on?

How many decades of close attention does it take for a true believer to feel knowledgeable and comfortable about his terroir?

I interviewed M. Derallier-Dubrez once, and thanked him for the beautiful colour advertisements he’d been placing for his Quelltaler Estate, which was part of his Remy Martin empire. But I also voiced concern that the stylish ads were too subtle for Australians, and asked him how long he thought they’d take to reflect real change in his sales. This was in 1983, and he was nearly eighty.

“Aaaah M’sieu”, he said from his wheelchair, “I am planning for the year 2020.”

Remy foundered with its debt after buying Cointreau, and Derallier-Dubrez, who is still a man of category, sold Quelltaler to Wolf Blass, who sold it to Foster’s, who shut it down, ripped its tanks out, then put them back and opened it again. Perhaps their new 75,000 tonne wine percolator at Bilyara’s not big enough. Whatever will the shareholders think?

Since our staunchly anti-gambling Prime Minister has insisted on Australians becoming the world’s biggest investors in the stock market, the popularity of wine as a sheer investment property has boomed. I don’t mean the idiots who buy the stuff like gold bars at auction, and lay it down and wait til it’s too old to drink, at which point they sell it on at a grand profit to some other dunderhead who’ll repeat the dumb cycle - I’m talking about the nature of a wine industry which has become dependent upon short-term investors for its survival.

What happened to Seppeltsfield without its family? Why are our heritage wineries, like Saltram and Quelltaler, under constant threat of closure in the name of shareholder interest? How could empires like that one which the Wynns built, over three generations and a whole century, continue to survive this deadly slow cycle, if their sole duty was to return value for money to their impatient but faceless shareholders, who are scattered about the globe avoiding tax?

The two systems, on the face of it, seem totally mismatched. To me, a wine which is good value for the shareholder is a terrible wine to drink, and, conversely, as Richard Farmer said on that tumultuous day in Sydney: “Small vineyards are a rich man’s hobby.”

How can shareholders imagine or learn or care that their fast buck comes at the expense of salinated soil and buggered river systems, somewhere else, and how can their managers afford to let on? How can they possibly conceive of the patience required, the foresight and drive to establish a vineyard like Coonawarra?

Of course the sad truth is that Coonawarra had already passed into oblivion when David Wynn bought the old Riddoch cellars and vineyard land there for £22,000 in 1952. One year the farm’s being sold on its value as sheep grazing land, the next Wynn and his winemaker, Ian Hickinbotham walked in and by 1954 they were directing the first deliberately induced and managed malo-lactic fermentations on earth. I’ve tasted that wine many times. It’s still delicious, and the Frogs still can’t believe it.

Like Wynn, I don’t think Hickie will be in oblivion when he goes. They’re what those Spaniards call men of category.

And so, I believe, might the Oatley family be. The plans Philip Shaw unveiled for the replanting and refurbishment of Coonawarra in my piece in today’s Advertiser are unlike the sort of thing you hear from a publicly-listed company. The previous regime was certainly less likely to chop yields and short term profits so dramatically. What will make the Oatleys serious men of category, who will not pass quickly into oblivion, would be to see them carry on with the plan I like to imagine them following. Like frighten the investors off, get the price down nice and low, then buy the whole thing out and delist it. I’ve done my bit.

South Australia was enjoying a spectacular wine export boom exactly a century ago. Ernest Whitington, writing in The Register of 1903, reported:

“At present time the vintage is in full swing .... new, clean and up-to-date appliances have taken the place of old-fashioned and dirty methods, and the results in every case have been most gratifying”. He went on to explain that the state’s wine production had gone up fourfold in the previous decade, and the export trade had “gone ahead by leaps and bounds. Wine has grown to become one of the staple products of South Australia”, he wrote, “and there is no knowing what dimensions the industry will develop. The possibilities are almost illimitable.”

But within thirty years, the war, the wowsers, changing public tastes, stupid government intervention, and a wave of investors who knew nothing about wine, at both the British and Australian ends, saw that boom go a complete gutser.

Our sale of strong alcoholic wines to fatten up the ration-starved Poms after the next war worked for a while, and we enjoyed another boom. “McLaren Vale furruginous wines” were pumped for all they were worth: smooth and alcoholic, and yes, in some instances, even grown on ferruginous soils. But suddenly the English felt they’d put on sufficient condition: they’d had enough, and flocked, en masse, back to the lighter, more accessible, less heady stuff from just across the Channel, and Australia’s great wine business belly flopped again.

Men of category are what we need more than anything, right now. The wine industry is suddenly in the hands of a generation which has experienced no surplus, no collapse, and indeed has faced very little inclemency at all in this golden age. All its investors are fairly new; many of them are in it only to avoid paying tax.

What we need is people who are determined and wise enough to make something really worthwhile in itself, people who will not let the money submerge the ambition. Because there are plenty of people who really do matter in Australia, people of true category, who will reward such enlightened endeavour with extremely valuable admiration, delight, and goodwill. And you never know: their children, and their grandchildren, might even drink.

Thankyou very much.

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