INTUITION: SANITARY SCIENCE LACKS SOUL

CASTAGNA WINERY AND VINEYARD AT BEECHWORTH ON THE NORTHERN SIDE OF THE VICTORIAN ALPS: JULIAN AND CAROLANN CASTAGNA HAVE JUST WATCHED YET ANOTHER HUGE BUSHFIRE FROM THEIR RIDGE

More Old Drunks Than Old Doctors

Castagna Cleans Up Without Poison

by PHILIP WHITE - THIS STORY WAS WRITTEN FOR THE INDEPENDENT WEEKLY ON 30 JAN 09

When I started in this racket, back in the precambrian, a few lunies professed to make natural wines.

Gil Wahlquist made wines which would crawl outa the bottle all by ’emselves at his cobwebbed vineyard at Mudgee. In McLaren Vale, Gabor Berenyi almost equalled Gil with some of the most feral tinctures ever. If you didn’t let em out, they’d eat straight through the side of the bottle.

Through the ’eighties, and into the ’nineties, there were several characters who plied more intuition than wine science. Some even remembered what their grandfather had taught them about the draw of the moon. But they’d never admit such dangerous tendencies. Basically, everyone made hyper-sanitary wine like Brian Croser’s. That was the only way to get a trophy.

The petrochem industry, which grew from the explosives and nerve gas industry after the First World War, ruled the wine business. They’ve learned to switch back to explosives and gas when the demand’s there, but they, well, you know ... a man’s still gotta make a buck when peace breaks out.

Then, in 2000, I was half way down a row of two or three hundred masked shiraz bottles in my annual Top 100 tasting, when a wine exploded in my face. Vibrancy, intensity and vigour.

Disbelieving, I had my crew first check that it was Australian. Yep. They put it another bag with another number, further down the long row. It whacked me again. And again. As the day wore by, the damned thing just got more and more audacious, alarming and cheeky.

Once it had eventually earned the highest points of the whole tasting, all varieties, I rang the maker, who’d just got home from LA or somewhere, where he’d been directing a theatre ad for BMW or somebody, which is what he did to pay for everything. His name was Julian Castagna. He was a bit puffy from running to the phone, but his breath soon settled when I congratulated him and told him what had happened. I then asked his secret.

“Do you really want to know?” he asked ... perfect theatrical pause ... “It’s biodynamic.”

Castagna wines, of Beechworth in the Victorian Alps, went on to win that competition, or get in the top three, for years. He even won it with a rosé. Eventually he staged a conference of biodynamicists from all over the world, and many Australians who attended came back convinced.

Even David Paxton, who had been a relentless pursuer of yields came back to McLaren Vale, turned off the tap, and turned on the moonjuice.

You can drink the results in the Paxton bottles now: more intensity; more depth; more raw sex; more ethereal sensuality.

“It’s not the fact that you’re doing it”, he told me of his change of career, “but the resultant wine that hooked me, from vines which are all in balance – their natural ability to resist disease is enhanced.

“It’s about the density of the cells. The fruit is more naturally expressed. The true flavour is enhanced ... the further we go, the more we get into it. And surprisingly, it’s cheaper!”

Given the current allegation that bio-D is being used by charlatans as a marketing tool, I am the first to agree that you can make bad bio-D booze as easily as you make decrepit plonk the scientific way. But just as there are lot more old drunks than old doctors, there’s a lot more execrable swill being made by the scientists than the moon swooners, and always will be.

“Biodynamics for me is intuitive” Castagna wrote recently, “a craft rather than a science”. But he went on to cite the findings of Professor Stuart B. Hill, formerly of the Department of Entomology at McGill University, Canada, but now in the Department of Social Ecology at the University of Western Sydney-Hawkesbury.

"Biodynamics tends to be presented with a high level of mythology and talk of etheric forces and so on, but if you analyse the preparations you find they are in fact, if properly made, highly concentrated inoculums containing high levels of trace elements and a variety of micro-organisms" Hill said.

"A purely scientific approach does not allow for the intuitive understanding of the ‘good’ farmer” he continued. “Most people, including scientists, make decisions partly based on ‘feelings’ and intuitions, probably more often than they recognise, but science makes no allowance for that.

“In fact, most aspects of science are in denial about the phenomenon, and scientists set up experiments which ignore it. Those feelings or intuitions are, in fact, based on readings of inputs we don’t consciously recognise.”

Back to Castagna: “I wonder if the criticism now being levelled at Australian wine of ‘sameness’ would be tempered if our highly-skilled, highly-trained, science-based winemakers listened to their inner-self, their intuition, a little more often”, he asks.

Do they have any? I ask.

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The Victory's Rudderless!

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

“Fire authorities sift through Victory Hotel ruins” blared my browser. Not The Vic! Had Bacchus torched one of our best pubs in exchange for my glee over the demise of Starbucks?

No, it wasn’t Douglas Govan’s Victory, that hallowed thirst emporium on Sellick’s Hill. It was the Vic in Brisbane that Bacchus blitzed. Along with all those Starbucks. I mean, bad luck, Brisbane, but… Whew.

There was an essay competition. “I won it with an entry under my own name”, says Douglas. “And I also came third with another entry under another name. With the winnings I bought a Sony amplifier. I had no speakers or anything. Just the amp. I’d turn it on and marvel at the little green light. There was a Japanese kid at school with big stereo headphones. He let me try them on and once I was in there – like wow! Stereo! Suddenly I understood. I got right into music. I got into some serious platter-spinning. The wheels of steel. Within a few years I was running nightclubs, and eventually made enough money to buy a pub.”

….just in case you were wondering where great publicans come from….

And Douglas is a great publican. The Vic, which he’s owned since 1989, is the most successful and respected public house and victualler in the McLaren Vale region, if not the whole of the Fleurieu. Now it also has three wicked little B&Bs, which together add up to something along the lines of the Great Bed Of Ware, which held around twenty passengers at a time in the White Hart Inn in Hertfordshire, as reported in Billy Shakespaw’s Twelfth Night. Another great pub.

All of which says something. The Vales generally had good pubs. In 1845 The South Australian praised “the extensive and rich valley of McLaren….almost the whole of the country inns visited on this trip are neatly and cleanly kept…everywhere the traveller meets with civility and attention…and there was no lack of good viands”.

The Vic did disappoint me, once. A decade back, I stupidly went down there for a restorative steak on New Year’s Day. Came in a bit late and shaky, but there stood Douglas on the lawn, up to his ankles in beer cans and butts. Incredulous. It had been a large night. “You gotta be joking!” he said when I asked to be fed. “Take a look around. If you’d eat anything I cooked today you’d be mad. Look at me! Go back to The Barn Whitey.” Even Lord Nelson had his bad day on the mighty vessel which gave this inn its name.

Since then, The Vic has well and truly made up for that brief, forgiveable lapse. Nowhere will you buy better, fresher, simple seafood, or more succulent steaks. Try that eye fillet. (No pun intended, m’Lud). And then there’s the cellar. Oh my.

Pubs with great wine lists? The Exeter. The Wheatsheaf in Thebarton. But the Victory’s is the best. You may know another; it’s not jumping to my mind. Take a tumble down into The Vic’s cellar, and you’re suddenly far too deep behind the lines: out in the nether regions beyond thirst being your major excuse: greed takes over. Eat your plastic. Retreat.

See. You can’t. You look about: Castagna. Cascabel. Chablis. Chevalier. Cullen. Greenock Creek. All the best, impossible to procure pinots. Wines from temples so great and rare and secret that I never mention them.

And now The Vic’s getting bigger. Douglas has built a huge new cellar, which will permit him to display for sale some of the various thousands of premium rarities he’s been collecting and maturing. There’ll be a new verandah for smokers, with a view clear down to somewhere near Antarctica. So what’s the catch? Well, the front bar’s about to get a lot bigger, too. That’s the price you pay.

Then there’s the little matter of the vineyards, one either side of the pub - one in McLaren Vale; one in Southern Fleurieu - planted from cuttings from Douglas’s favourite vineyards. Follow the track between them for five minutes and you’re in the ABC Range in the Northern Flinders. Literally. Same geological group: the fossils, and the vegetation. Come back down the gorge, and again you’ve got that view over the Gulf St Vincent, patron of viticulturers, vinegar makers, lost stuff, and schoolgirls.

Given the nature of The Victory, these wines are sold under the Rudderless brand, which has nothing to do Kevin. Made by Justin McNamee at Samuel’s Gorge, they’re something else, too. Shiraz, grenache, graciano, malbec, mataro and viognier, growing in sparse dirt that tastes nearly as good as the pub food. Seriously. I’ve tasted it all. A smorgasbord.

And since I’ve been snide about Starbucks, try The Victory’s coffee. They’ll even make a castrato. All you get is the squeak.

OOPS! CHEERS FOR VICTORY

(Letters, The Independent Weekly, August 15-21, 2008)

Philip White (IW August 8) is wrong when he asserts it was Lord Nelson’s mighty vessel which gave the Victory inn its name. Local history can be a fragile thing.

To wander down the old coach road that meanders its way over the Sellicks Hill Range from Pages Flat Road to Sellicks Hill is to walk what was once called The Victory Road. In 1859 the then long-disputed question of the route for a road from Noarlunga to Myponga and Yankalilla was finally settled. For his part in that outcome, Aldinga Council Chairman John Norman was considered a local hero, and the result of his incessant exertions, a grand triumph.

The ceremony to open the road was held on Tuesday, March 15^th at the new inn on that road and a celebratory dinner was held there that night. The inn was named Norman’s Victory in the hope that it would be a perpetual commemoration.

To shorten the name of this great little pub to the Victory, though somewhat sloppy, can be seen as a term of endearment.

Chris Davies,

Willunga.

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