VINE PULL: THE WORST POSSIBLE PROMO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOTES FROM MY INTERVIEW WITH CLANCY INCLUDE THESE COMMENTS:

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

A formula should be devised which includes the following:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NO FUTURE IN OLD WORLD DISCOUNT BINS

M. Robert Beynat, Big Cheese at Bordeaux's forthcoming Vinexpo



Major Frog Kicks Ocker Teeth
Numbers War Hots Up As Everything Changes

OK. It’s official. By 2012, the United Kingdom will be world’s biggest importer of wine.

While France’s wine consumption tumbles, along with its Cognac and Armagnac guzzle, the French are hitting the Scotch whisky big time, with an eight per cent increase.

Meanwhile, the Japanese, Chinese, and Russians are following the Poms to reverse the Frogs’ trend away from wine. They're into it.

So. What’s new?

This news from Reuters’ reporter Marcel Michelson is the first of a huge wave of numbers and propaganda that we can expect from the powers that be at Vinexpo, the world’s biggest regular plonkfest, held every second year in Bordeaux.

It's on this year in June. We all hope they've got the airconditioning fixed.

Robert Beynat, chief executive and co-founder of the Vinexpo has opened the squirt by prophecying that the world will continue to drink more wine in the next few years.

Champagne and other sparkling wines will increase by twelve per cent, he forecast.

This may explain why the French have recently, suddenly, made the precious appellation of Champagne quite a lot bigger, in spite of global warming simultaeneously forcing Champagne producers to begin eyeing land in the south of England, where it is now warm enough to make wines as good, perhaps better than, Champagne’s. The geology, after all, is identical. The white cliffs of Dover are made from the same precious Kimmeridgian chalks that give Champagne and Chablis its class.

With typical Gallic aplomb, M. Beynat dumped big time on Australia.

"China will enter the top 10 producer countries while Australia is dropping out," he said, citing our water issues, new heat and “export problems due to long distances”.

“Italy, which overtook France as biggest wine consumer country in 2007, and the biggest wine producer in 2008, is set to lose the former crown to the United States in 2012 when Americans will buy some 314 million cases of wines with an 11.9 percent rise between 2008 and 2012 following a 14.8 percent gain over the 2003 to 2007 period.

“Spain will see a further 6 percent decline in 2008 to 2012 to 92.2 million cases and will drop behind Russia that will have a growth of some 25 percent in the 2008 to 2012 period.

“That compares to a baffling rise of 60 percent over 2003-2007 and remains below the 36.6 percent expected growth in China in the period 2008-2012.

This follows recent news that Australia’s exports have suddenly dropped eleven per cent in gross volume, due partly to difficult exchange rates. What made things worse was the value dropped even more – eighteen per cent.

Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation senior analyst Peter Bailey confirmed that the fastest-growing market for Australian wine was China, which spent $74 million on our product in 2008, up 32 per cent from 2007, and making the nation the fifth-largest market in value terms.

Reflecting the growing wealth of Chinese drinkers, sales of bottled wine were up 27 per cent while sales of cheaper bulk wine were down 68 per cent, lifting the average price per litre sold by 58 per cent to $4.92.

But the gains in China were not enough to offset declines in the US, Australia's second-largest wine export customer, where sales were down just 5.6 per cent by volume but plummeted 26.5 per cent by value.

At the same time, the biggest producers report increasing international sales in their more expensive brackets as they inch away from their inexplicable long-term addiction to the discount bins of the UK and USA.

Adding spice to the soup is Fosters’ claims that their up-market sales have improved, while rival Constellation is dumping a huge lump of its low-end spirits manufactory, a move, some suggest, to cash up for the purchase of Fosters’ gutted wine division.

I can't help feeling that these great prophets, bean-counters and money-changers are even more hopeless than the finance gurus which failed to forsee the recent disappearance of all the money in the world.

They obviously have no real handle on issues of climate change, the new heat, the disappearance of the water, or the true issues associated with transport of a totally unneccessary, fashionable commodity which just happens to be a major recreational drug and one of the most scary depressants available.
.
COMMENTS:

Wayne Young said... Let's do some math... "In 2012, the US will consume more wine than Italy".

For the sake of comparison let's use some current statistics: Approx consumption: 300 million cases per year. Italian population: 60 million. US population: 300 million. Italian consumption per capita: 5 cases per year. US consumption: 1 case per year.

When we get American consuming HALF what Italians consume, per capita, that will be news.

FRIENDLY WARNING TO THE THE LONE STAR

COONAWARRA'S TERRA ROSSA OVER LIMESTONE: HALF OF TEXAS IS LIKE THIS, GIVEN THE LONE STAR'S PROPENSITY TO PLUNGE AT ONE BOOM AFTER ANOTHER, CAN IT LEARN TO AVOID AUSTRALIA'S HUGE MISTAKES? IS CABERNET REALLY THE ANSWER TO ANYTHING, WITHOUT THE OTHER, MORE DIFFICULT TO GROW BLENDING VARIETIES USED BY FRANCE TO TEMPER, FLESH AND SPICE CABERNET SINCE THE BEGINNING? AND WHY DID DAVID WYNN SELL OUT AND SKI-DADDLE FROM COONAWARRA ALL THOSE YEARS AGO? Photo: MILTON WORDLEY


Don't Follow Us, Texas -- We're Not Sure Yet
(Don't Repeat The Aussie Cab Kaboom, Nor Your Own Petrochem Bean/Corn Blowout)

by PHILIP WHITE

In Tokyo in 2002, I was introduced to a local wine writer whose reputation, I was assured, was equal to that of Robert Parker Jr..

I was ushered to a tiny Italian-style Japanese restaurant to meet this bloke, a little annoyed because he had not been published in English, which made it difficult to understand this likening to the Parkerilla.

I'd prefer to know my man.

I’m sure he was similarly annoyed that I hadn’t been published in Japanese. I wonder what they told him I was like.

Funny thing, though, in China in that same week, even in the outback, the officials had been briefed of my record with astonishing accuracy, regardless of my dearth of Mandarin or Cantonese publishing.

Anyway, we’re in this little joint and the Parkerilla man eventually arrives with a test for me: he’d brought a bottle wrapped in aluminium foil. Just what every travelling wino needs ... a little test.

Eventually I was handed a big Riedel containing the mystery wine. Both rows of eyes, two sides of the table, were upon me, in that strange no-eye-contact sort of way perfected by the most terribly polite Japanese.

No need to taste it.

“Aha!” I said after a sniff. “If you were sufficiently fortunate to have access to such great vineyards as Morey-St-Denis, why would you have an Australian winemaker in to spoil the wine with too much new oak?”

“Ah but Mr. White”, the critic said, “don’t you think that with a few years maturation, this oak will assimilate into the body of the wine?’

I fingered my amber necklace, and said “See this sap? This is from the Oligocene. It has been washing around the Baltic Sea for twenty-five million years. I think the same of the oak in this pinot: it will never homogenise.”

This was a bad thing to say, because I’d not only picked the winery, but criticised it, which was rude, but then, worse, I had criticised my own countrymen, which shows no sense of honour at all.

Not to mention the introduction of the little matter of an epoch of history which far predated anything even vaguely Japon.

And then I’d told the Robert Parker of Tokyo too much about oak.

As if to reassure me that Australia was not such a bad place, and that its winemakers were not all lumberjacks, and that I must be feeling awful now that I was beginning to realise the depth of my ignorant insults, my new Japanese colleague then lurched into a long speech about Coonawarra, and how it was indeed one of the world’s great vignobles. Before this adulatory missive got too obsequious, I made another huge mistake.

“If you blokes ever think of invading us again”, I advised, “you might as well come in through Coonawarra, because as far as I’m concerned, you can have it.”

I then had some explaining to do. Most young Japanese have no idea that their dads and grand-dads brutally, determinedly, repeatedly, bombed the hell out of Darwin and our quiet northern towns, nor that Japanese mini subs invaded Sydney Harbour.

But my derogation of Coonawarra was even more difficult to explain.

This was at a time when Coonawarra had yet to emerge from twenty years of gross mismanagement. As its great vineyards were crashed from owner to owner through corporate silverback marauding in the boardrooms of Sydney, Paris, London and Melbourne, these absentee landlords and robber barons typically demanded ridiculous increases in productivity and treacherous cuts to vineyard budgets.

Such monstrosities as eternal overhead irrigation by water winches and mechanical, minimal pruning were mindlessly imposed on a place which could well be amongst Australia’s best cabernet producers.

Coonawarra had unfortunately become a vast bleak metaphor for all that was wrong with the bold new agricultural regime which was virtually run by the petrochemical suppliers: the manufacturers of fertilisers, fungicides, insecticides and herbicides.

Not to mention the local suppliers of perma-pine posts, nor the manufacturers of trellis wire.

I had been very lucky to grow up under the watchful eyes of such mentors as David Wynn, who had almost single-handedly resurrected Coonawarra as a vignoble when he bought John Riddoch’s old Coonawarra winery and the remnants of his vineyards from what what then called Chateau Comaum for £A22,000 in 1951.

The land was valued for the income one could expect from running sheep and cattle upon it. Most of the fruit had long been sent to distillation.

Typically, David immediately inserted an aggro young turk of a winemaker: Ian Hickinbotham, just out of Roseworthy, with a headful of radical ideas he was simply bustin’ to try. Like minimal sulphur.

Til then, wines were sulphured so brutally early in the piece that malo-lactic ferment could not possibly proceed. Hickinbotham was the first bloke on Earth to deliberately induce malo-lactic ferment and record its process. He’d listened to his elders talk about the ferments of 1945, when the wet summer, green fruit, and high malic acidity brought on a savage secondary; now he had the reins of a serious winery, he held the sulphur, then carefully monitored his malos, “an action percieved as neglect at the time, if known by superiors”.

I have been lucky to have drunk these cabernet-based wines on several occasions with David Wynn in the ’80s and ’90s, and both were reasonably sound, given the wiles of the dreaded Portuguese bark people habitually bash into the tops of their bottles.

But my favourite from the ’50s is the ’54 Wynns, made by Norm Walker the year after Hick left, when the rejuvenation work in the buggered old vineyard was beginning to kick in. Hick went with his spunky wife Jude to manage the Rising Sun pub in Penola. This ’54 was still drinking beautifully ten years ago ... there can’t be many bottles left, and my dear mentor David long ago returned to the Great Silence.

Norm, trained by his dad Hurtle, in turn trained by the Burgundian genius Edmund Mazure, was also a maker of premium fizz, so I’ve been very lucky to have had the ’54 shiraz in both flat and fizzy versions.

The latter model was last drunk at a grand shiraz luncheon I hosted in the Barossa Ranges to honour the visit of another dear mate and mentor, Gerard Jaboulet, of Paul Jaboulet on the Rhone, in 1989. Present were all my shiraz heroes: Wynn, Lehmann Sr. et Jr., Brady of Wendouree, O’Callaghan, Henschke, Waugh, Melton, Scholz, et al. Cheong Liew rattled them pots’n’pans with his usual dependable genius, in spite of the crap wood stove; Chris Ringland had never been heard of.

(It’s important to recognise that only that short time back, very very few Australian winemakers had ever been to France, home of the wines they had all been trained to copy, whether they knew this or not. None of their teachers had been there, either. With their new export grants, they’d all troop off to England to watch the cricket, and give shit to the poms. But they wouldn’t attend Vinexpo in Bordeaux. Nobody knew any French. Too scary. No savvy. Too bad! )

But back to that amazing lunch. Dear Gerard, long dead now, arrived, chain-smoking in a cardigan, with one dozen of his best vintages of La Chappelle “and one case of my worst. Merde!”

Nobody's seen an Australian winemaker do that.

The 1957 Wynns is another heroic Coonawarra cabernet-based blend.

After that we move to what is still Australia’s most revered wine, Max Schubert’s astonishing 1962 Penfold’s Bin 60A, which was a blend of Coonawarra old vine shiraz with cabernet from the famous Kalimna vineyard in the Moppa in the north Barossa. As far as I know, this includes the oldest producing cabernet vines – Block 42 is all mid-1880s plantings -- in this world.

And amongst the best.

Interestingly, in those days, Max thought Coonawarra shiraz was superior to its cabernet, the latter being far too unreliable.

But there’s no doubting that 60A. I drank it occasionally with Max through the ’eighties and into the 'nineties, from bottles that had never previously left his cellar. In those days, 60A was as close as Australia had got to Bordeaux in structure, and don’t snigger about the shiraz component. When we learned our reds in the early 1800s, Australians were quick to see the serious volumes of shiraz that went into the better Bordeaux crus. (See Cabernet: Pinch The Whole Damn Recipe! From the November archive.)

I last had 60A two years ago with Peter Gago. It was the best bottle – of that wine -- I’d shared for ten years. So it’s all up to the friggin’ Portuguese. That last one was bloody perfection.

So we had another one, just to check.

Not too bad, thanks.

Next? Mildara’s amazing Peppermint Patty of 1963, was, and occasionally still is a stunning freak, given the fact that it’s all cabernet. If indeed it is.

After that, Coonawarra gives a long dearth of true brilliance through to Doug Bowen’s Quercus alba-driven beauties of the early ’eighties. As you might have read, I am now almost utterly allergic to American oak. But these wines of Douggie repeatedly won my best reds of Australia classes in The National Times in the 1980s.

Although during all this, those stoic ancient regime Coonawarrans, the Redmans, were consistently making very reluctant, slightly volatile reds of little variation in quality. When the young Philip White first approached the scarily pompous Owen Redman – he was the boss of the Freemasons – at a tasting in Sydney in the early ’eighties, and asked which was the best Redman vintage, he looked down and said “The oldest one in your cellar”.

That was sage advice. There is little better than a magnum of old Redmans to taste the Coonawarra ancien regime.

Then came the mighty kaboom of John Wade’s, the Wynn’s Coonawarra Estate John Riddoch Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon 1982. This, I think, is still the best Coonawarra cabernet. Good fresh puncheons is a large part of the mystery. Johnny Wade’s mystical determination is another.

Between malts, Hollick, Balnaves, them uvver Riddochs, Majella, and other very famous brands, have fought intensely to stay at the front of the cabernet races, often to huge critical acclaim. Generally, I’m not convinced. Even if you must wait fifteen years for the wines to be approachable – think petit Latour – I expect at least an indication of what Max called “soul ... a wine must have warmth”, he’d say, over and over and over.

I only wish I’d been big enough to taste the 60A upon its release, when I might have learnt precisely what Max then meant by “warmth” in Coonawarra, but in the ’sixties, I was still preaching on the streets, saving souls with my Dad, who was a king-hell temperance man.

No warmth on the street for a man with a King James Bible in his feverish young hand and an eye that couldn’t help ranging over the poddies.

So there’s my history. I have not liked much most of the cabernet sauvignon from Coonawarra since. I mean, okay, it’s a good drink, but it’s not Petrus. It’s not Ausone; Cheval Blanc nor the ’61 La Grange, which I used to buy for bugger all in 1980-82. And of course there's no reason on Earth why it should be. Coonawarra is not Bordeaux. But if you set out to emulate something, surely you should copy a bit more of the recipe: Australia has too few parfumiers in its cellars: there's not enough creative blending going down.

Then there's the hearty, earthy, soulful wines of Zema. This Italian family bought really old unirrigated bush vines beside Wynn’s in 1982, and have simply plugged away ever since, making “family wine” in the best of the old Calabrian spirit. Many of the blueblooded blue-blazered, blue-and-white-striped shirt men who felt they were the serious heart of Coonawarra were, how can I say, behind-the-hand, astounded at the audacity of the Zemas for their presumption. Now they can learn from their success with both cabernet and shiraz. And the other Bordeaux varieties.

The other standout through the last twenty years has been the quirky, determined organic wine of Highbank. Opposite Bowen, beside Leconfield, this little vineyard always produces exquisite drinks, if slow to bloom in your bottle. But that's cabernet. The tragically, but deservedly rare 1994 Highbank Merlot is still one of the greatest Australian versions of this misunderstood grape. They use skerricks of cabernet franc, too. And if you're planning a visit, the Highbank B&Bs are as simple, cosy and close as you can get to true terra rossa.

So if I could add anything to the Coonawarra vineyard, it'd be merlot, malbec, cabernet franc, petit verdot, carmenere, and as many different flavours of shiraz as I could muster.

Bugger neat cab. It's a base wine for magnificent blends.

Now, I’ve written all this in response to the blogster Doc Russ Kane, and his piece suggesting that a huge slab of Texas could easily do a Coonawarra. His scholarly piece is at vintagetexas.

My response is Coonawarra Dreamtime.

The Doc's right, of course: Texas can emulate south eastern Australia’s whole wine lake, from Coonawarra to Karadoc. It’s mostly ferruginous dirt over calcereous formations of one sort or another.

And sure, it’s probably perfect for cabernet. Texas can offer simulations of Australia's terra rossa, from the cool of Coona to the insufferable heat of the Mallee, where we've just gone totally cactus.

But let’s stop. What’s cabernet? It’s only a part of the ingredients of an ancient recipe the New World copied from the Bordelaise a coupla centuries ago. Due to it having the thickest skin, cabernet was soon recognised as the easiest to grow by early Ockers, so we dropped all the other ingredients of the recipe at our vast risk.

In recent years, Coonawarra, like the rest of the Murray Basin sedimentary vignoble, has simply served to pump Australia’s tanks with too much ordinary plonk, at the expense of our subterranean water supplies in Coonawarra’s case; the poor buggered River in the latter.

If Texas has a long cool look at the two billion litres of unsold wine currently going off in Australian tanks, and has a long slow chew of the statistics of the world’s current oversupply, then it might be in a position to replace the booms of yore with something that can really actually do something constructive to that great lone star state.

But hey, Texas, don't copy us.

The Japs will come in through Hawaii, straight to your best California cabernet patch.

They'll need to water their troops.

But then they'll suddenly be looking for blends in balance, not straight varietals made for ... well, what reason?

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LIBERTY ATTACKS FRENCH WINOS

Time To Hit The Streets

by PHILIP WHITE

“One day we shall be so angry about it that we are going to do a demonstration in the street only the French can do and the government will have to listen to us this time!”

So says my winemaker friend from Bordeaux, Jacques Lurton.

I’d sent him an AFP article posted from Bordeaux on Christmas eve, “Sour grapes for French wine in 2008”. This sad account of the neo-wowsers eroding the basic cultural nature of wine in France deserved a rapid response.

Jacques is the man.

Savage demonstrations are indeed due. If the French fall, Australia’s wowser interferist exclusive Brethren pinko humanist Ruddy do-gooders will have a field day. That lot are already on the march. Against the wine lover.

The AFP article claimed wine, “a once proud symbol of the nation's identity, is now swirling in a cocktail of alcohol abuse legislation. Long viewed as a quintessential part of the French lifestyle, along with fine foods and good living, wine is slumping so low in the national esteem that winemakers have even complained of being treated like drug dealers by the government, and their websites put on a par with porn.

“One recent survey highlighting the change in popular attitudes to wine showed that 51 percent of people now considered the national drink ‘risky’.”

“It is a very well documented article and yes it is true”, Jacques shot back. “When you look at it from the angle of a foreign reader it looks like this is a nightmare situation!

“But in France people who want to get drunk never use wine as it is considered a drink to pair with food. Only if you go to a wine producer’s place for dinner or lunch you will be asked if you’d like a glass of wine for an aperitif but in every other private house or at the bar people drink other kinds of alcoholic beverages.”


Raphael Berger, of the statistics centre on living conditions, CREDOC, which issued the study, said "Wine in France used to escape the negative perceptions of being an alcoholic drink ... much of the change in attitude was related to ongoing government efforts to control alcoholism and abuse”.

France's Health Ministry has been reasonably successful in its recent blitz on drink drivers, and “spent much of 2008 preparing new laws to curb teenage binge drinking and alcohol abuse”.

This year will see the legal age for purchasing alcohol increased from 16 to 18, a ban on happy hours and open bars (with a flat fee to drink as much as possible withing a limited time), and a possible prohibition on free wine tastings.

“While French doctors once tolerated a few glasses of champagne during pregnancies” AFP said, “new legislation now obliges producers to print a ‘no drinking during pregnancy’ logo on bottles”.

This new low for quality French producers was previously the domain of the USA alone, which the French had found quaintly ridiculous.

“We all know that 90% of road accident due to alcohol drinking is not caused by wine but vodka and other strong alcohol beverages” Jacques retorted.

“Have you ever seen a young French drinking wine in a night club? If you look at what people buy in supermarkets for parties this is never wine but cheap whiskies, vodkas, cocktails etc. ... mixed with Schweppes”.

"Instead of encouraging moderate drinking, we are frightening people and demonising wine," Georges Haushalter, head of Bordeaux's Wine Merchant Union, told AFP.

France’s wine consumption has slid steadily to 64 litres per person a year from 75 litres in the early 1990s. While this margin was once easily mopped up by export, South America, South Africa and Australia have invaded those low-price markets traditionally regarded as safe property by the French, leaving the monetary collapse of 2008 to savage the upper end of the French portfolio.

While even the Chinese felt wine to be a safe investment haven, the last few months have seen the Liv-ex, the leading fine wine exchange, get big-time jitters, in October recording its largest fall – 12.4% - since its inception in 2001. Liv-ex fell another 5.5% in November, while Bordeaux prices fell 25%.

In value terms, the director of the Federation of Wine and Spirit Exporters (FEVS), Renaud Gaillard, told AFP he sees “a zero increase for the end of 2008 ... The potent mix of negative conditions for 2009 is even more worrying, he said. "There is no indicator we will be coming out of this crisis quickly."

As if all that wasn’t bad enough, 2008 was a difficult vintage in Bordeaux, throwing frosts, hail, torrential rains, and resultant mildew and botrytis at producers. While some winemakers are almost happy, the “vintage was expensive and one of the lowest on record, leading to supply problems and shortages of certain products such as Bordeaux whites”.

Apparently learning from China’s skills in stifling political discussion on the internet, France continues to fail to legally legitimise the Internet as a medium for alcohol publicity. AFP reports “draft legislation leaked to the press earlier this year, which attempted to legalise wine ads, proposed limiting access to wine sites to certain hours -- the same regulations proposed for pornographic sites” ... and, it continues, “self-censorship is rife since Heineken, Moet and Le Parisien have all been convicted of “promoting wine drinking.

“A national magazine article about a Books and Wine fair, which carried the fair's wineglass logo, was also forced to carry a government health warning ... and the Ubifrance 2008 report on exports concludes with a warning that reads ‘This is not intended to incite consumption of alcoholic drinks’."

In October, winemakers in Bordeaux, Champagne and Burgundy painted over road signs pointing to their regions as a protest against wine censorship, and the new wine tax.

“Alleged government hostility to wine reached such proportions in 2008” AFP continued, “that two prominent wine journalists accused the government of hindering wine consumption to boost sales of anti-depressants in order to pander to the stronger pharmaceuticals lobby ... winemakers claim they have been relegated to the category of dealers and angrily complain that France's leading export is no longer trumpeted by the government”.

"Viticulture products are placed in the same category as drugs," Jean-Charles Tastavy, an independent wine producer and member of the Council for Moderation and Prevention, recently said.

The outlook for the future is not bright despite good demand for his wines, Thomas Duroux, director of Chateau Palmer, told AFP.

"In terms of communication, 2008 has been a horrible year," he said. "France is the world's most important wine producer, and we have the most restrictive advertising legislation. Is this because (President Nicholas) Sarkozy doesn't drink, or because our system of (anti-alcohol) lobbies is too strong?"

Sarko? Doesn't drink? Bullshit! Click on his name - that was the second image Google suggested when I asked for "French people drinking".

Back to our friend Jacques.

“It’s a crazy situation” he said, “and nonsense, as wine is so much part of our culture. The wine industry brought more money into the external French balance last year than the entire Airbus business. This has nothing to do with our actual president as this anti wine campaign started long ago when we had a socialist prime minister and Chirac as a president.

“I must say our president wants to help the wine industry to export” he continued “but he is not showing strong signs of changes on the domestic market because it is not a popular subject.

Agriculture in France is less than 7% of the active population and we are seen as people living on subsidies or we are considered very wealthy if you own a chateau so our image is not good enough for the politics to show us as victim. It is true the French wine industry has been too long subsidised and some producers - mostly from the south of France - have given our industry a bad image.

“At the moment the French market remains the largest in the world and there is still possibilities to sell wines in France” Jacques said.

“The problem is more for the large negociants, with their big brands, and champagne producers, who have came to the point of a very expensive product due to grape price, assisted by the export market buying at any price.

“But if you talk to a little producer who cultivates relationships with his clients in France by visiting them an serving them directly? He is still selling wine!

“Another aspect which hasn't helped our wines to be exported is the euro currency which has been too strong for too long against every other currency. Now things are better but it is too late as the world collapse has slowed every thing down.”

Take Some Essence Of Oak Chips, Add Weeds And Vanilla ...

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

“Chardonnay will be the vanilla of the Australian wine industry”, the late Len Evans, OBE, preached for thirty years.

Who? This feisty ex-Mt Isa Mines storeman eventually ran Rothbury Estate, owned Evans Family Wines, chaired Petaluma, controlled the national wine show ring, became a highly influential mentor to hundreds of adoring winemakers and critics, et al. Like Sir John Falstaff, Evans smudged the boundary between ebullient and bumptious, and, after port, was borborygmic.

In Champagne, chardonnay’s used for champagne; in Chablis it makes lean, unoaked chablis, and in Burgundy, it’s used to make creamy, extravagantly oaked white burgundy. Like chardonnay, all these words sound nice, and while it was all fabulously expensive, fabulist Len loved shunning expense at the table.

But it snows in those places. Apart from bits of Tassie, like the Upper Tamar, and tiny slices of the mainland - high Orange or Tumbarumba - we could never grow chardonnay vaguely like the great French vignobles. So why chardonnay? It doesn’t snow along the Murray. Then, Len never drank much Murray.

Locally, Romney Park proves that on one tiny ridge near Hahndorf, you can make delicious chardonnay, as Ashton Hills does near Summertown. Penfolds makes mighty stuff from other Hills vineyards. Mountadam’s returning from a ten year slump. There’s Evans’ ex-pet, Lion Nathan’s Petaluma, with its alluring bunch of Riverland doradillo on the front label. After that I’m scratching.

Scarce cool country is not the only problem with Australian chardonnay. From the start, back labels invariably claimed this new variety was lovingly fermented and matured in new French oak, oak being the only thing available to legally impart vanillin. But as I wrote in 1991, when Len’s sermon was reaching crescendo, France typically harvested enough oak to make only about 250,000 new barrels – about 800,000 short of the amount of Burgundy-sized barrels needed to contain the juice of our 20,000 freshly-planted hectares of chardonnay. If indeed they eventually grew a berry. Forget barrels for the reds, or for the rest of the world. Or for the French, for that matter.

Luckily, Len had an attitude to oak that didn’t always require barrels. At a tasting at Rothbury in May 1983, I sidled out for a smoke when a courier arrived with four large plastic drums of liquid. Rather than interrupt my host, who was inside preaching, I signed for it, then read the chit, which said “Essence Of Oak Chips”. That’s cheaper than chips!

Evans’ acolytes and disciples always rather contentiously insisted that the customer demand for chardonnay was insatiable. Only a few years back blokes like Phil Laffer and Stephen Millar, bosses of Pernod-Ricard/Orlando/Jacob’s Creek and Constellation’s BRL-Hardy, were urging more plantings.

As these come into production, we now have 32,151 hectares, mostly in the wrong places. We might as well irrigate weeds. Constellation’s retreating from the River, and Fosters and Pernod Ricard have just told growers there that demand for the vanilla of Australia is plummeting. So the punter is not a mug.

Chardonnay’s not dead: Penfolds paid $5000 a tonne this year for cool district grapes for its top example, the Yattarna, and Chablis and Burgundy sales are soaring. Champagne’s so popular they’ve just made the district bigger. But while their new price for River chardonnay, $300 a tonne, might be rather fortuitous for the transnational winemakers, it won’t cover the grower’s costs.

One of the world’s oldest wine merchants, Berry Brothers and Rudd, last week released a report suggesting the Murray-Darling will soon be too hot for fine wine production, and - surprise, surprise - that the future lies in expensive luxuries from cool places like Tassie. This was timed to lob explosively in the middle of the London Wine Trade Fair.

Even more practically destructive was the CSIRO’s announcement that our own Rudd’s budgetry idiocy will close the vital Murray Valley viticulture research establishment, just when Stephen Strachan, boss of the Winemakers’ Federation, was busy reassuring everyone that “the industry’s doing a lot of research around climate change”.

The poor old River couldn’t take deadlier hits below the waterline. Alley juice for our bladder packs is already coming from third world vineyards where wages are miniscule and environmental controls non-existent; now our bottom-end bottles are threatened.

As for Berry Brothers and Rudd’s forecast that China will be the world’s major wine supplier in fifty years? Anyone who’s believed my musings since Remi Martin helped China plant its Dynasty vineyard - in a place where it snows - way back when Len began his vanilla sermon, would have to agree that the real number’s now about ten years.

I don’t gloat over the agonies of the gullible and unfortunate, but it’s becoming increasingly tempting to say “I told you so”. If only the Chinese had planted chardonnay and oak, Australia could have avoided much terrible grief. And saved quite a lot of water.

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Cork Wars: Australian Putsch Bottles Up Portuguese Rear

by PHILIP WHITE - This story appeared in The Independent Weekly as "Cork Comes Unscrewed" on 3 October 08

If I suddenly disappear, it’ll probably be the Portuguese. Silly buggers haven’t learnt much in our thirty years of warfare.

When José Lopez, of the Portuguese company, Amorim, opened fire on my recent spray against cork on The Independent Weekly website his first shot was a complete fizzer. Amorim’s the world’s biggest rubber and cork trader. José suggested I’m on the take from the screwcappers. Read The Olympics Were Corked in the September archive below and you’ll get the whole grim PR disaster.

The screwcappers have no reason to pay me. I support them for free. Screwcaps are a zillion percent better for keeping wine fresh, and my responsibility is to my readers, who deserve the best. So I hate cork. I hate its trichloranisole taint, which arises when the chlorine used to beautify and sanitise it reacts with microbes living naturally within it. And I dislike the way cork lets wine oxidise.

I’ve been this dangerously subversive since Coca Cola abandoned the cork wafers beneath its crown seals in the ’sixties. The pharmaceutical business soon followed suit. Corky soft drink and cough medicine may still be available in Portugal, but we’ve had none here for thirty years. Although Adelaideans smell TCA most times they take a shower, thanks probably to chlorination.

There was more incoming. Mai Nygaard lobbed a big grenade, but forgot to say she’s Business Development Manager of Normacorc. Then I thought they’d subbed Carlos the Jackal to wipe me, but it turned out to be Carlos de Jesus, José’s boss at Amorim, with a glib disclaimer. Perhaps he’d read up a touch of Australian libel law, or remembered that Amorim had for years employed Brian Croser (deputy chancellor of the University of Adelaide, which runs our wine education and research) and Len Evans, who was chairman of Croser’s Petaluma. Both were doyens of Australia’s wine show system for decades.

Some synthetic plugs are improvements on cork, but they still don’t get it. I want to carry a corkscrew/bottle opener everywhere about as much as a friggin crank handle. Even the Portuguese sardine industry worked out decades ago that they couldn’t expect fish lovers to carry a special tool around just to get the fish out of the tin. Aussie brewers were next to abandon the tool kit.

If you’re a blingster who just loves something clunky to jangle on your keys, I reckon the Diam compound cork is the best excuse to carry a mechanical tugger. In many thousands, I’ve found only a few Diams to be duds, and this was mainly due to irregularities in the bottle neck. Much stiffer than corks, Diam plugs sit tight, but don’t swell as well to fill depressions or seams within imperfect necks, so wine gets out and oxygen gets in. And they’re so hard to get off the worm, somebody should invent another gadget to help with that.

Of course TCA comes from sources other than corks. Pat Conlon’s new trams smelled corked when they were new, probably something to do with the aircon filters being sanitised with chlorine. The international entry lounge at Darwin airport was corked for thirty years, probably due to well-intentioned cleaners ensuring there was no tropical mould in the carpet. I always thought of Portugal when I came through. Some cheese is corky, too. Chlorine is used to sanitise cheese factories, and the French wrapping used to package white rind cheese is often bleached with chlorine compounds.

Cork lovers who preach about natural always being better should abandon the chlorine completely and leave the poor old cork trees alone. Respect the sacred ecology of the natural microfauna in the bark. Get straight back to the old wine skin. Pig is best. You seal ’em with a leather thong. I don’t know whether St. Matthew was a practising Jew, but remember his advice from God’s Word: “Neither do men put new wine into old skins: else the skins break, and the wine runneth out”.

Dislike overt sulphur? Anyone who seals a wine high in sulphur beneath screwcaps will soon learn they’re so effective they preserve faults as well as attributes. Want cork because you desire the sort of oxidation cork permits? Winemakers who seek oxidation should permit a little oxygen in the headspace below whichever closure they choose. But for me, polymerisation without oxidation, please. Screw it!

When me old China suggested Australia's "a proven failure as a wine producer, producing a soda kind of drink", I almost sympathised. Like China, we still use table grapes for wine production. And as for China being "the milenar culture which privileges natural material for the food product whose consumption is developing most in the last years is indeed a deep, intelligent one"? Mate, pull out the cork and have a nice big glass of milk, there's a dear.

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