CHARDONNAY CHOICEST AT COLES? CLOSE!

OAK FERMENTERS AT KOOYONG ON MORNINGTON PENINSULA

Vintage Cellars Cuts Mustard
Coles Cultists Killing ABC Slide
Hey Hey Hey - It’s Chardonnay
by PHILIP WHITE - A SHORTER VERSION OF THIS STORY APPEARED IN THE INDEPENDENT WEEKLY

Chardonnay took a long time to hit Australia. The earliest white settlers had brought the best grape varieties of Bordeaux, the French Mediterranean coast, Germany, Portugal and Spain, but perhaps wisely steered clear of the great white of Burgundy, where it snows.

Not many Australian wine regions get snow.

Sir Samuel Davenport (right), of Beaumont Cellars, recorded his belief that “Chardonet” would be a critical grape for South Australia, and perhaps planted it at Marble Hill and Macclesfield in the very early days; we do not know. His beautiful ampelography resides in the Adelaide Library, with his pencilled note from the earliest days of the colony.

The C word seemed hardly to be uttered again for 120 years.

It wasn’t until about 25 years ago that it was worth conducting a comparative tasting of Australian Chardonnays. These would come from Padthaway, Coonawarra, the Hunter, the Riverland, Barossa, McLaren Vale, and the Yarra Valley. They were largely terrible: oaked awkwardly with coarse American and Limousin wood; usually chips.

David Wynn’s Mountadam was also well underway then. Using cuttings from a single Marble Hill vine (destroyed in the Ash Wednesday bushfires in 1983) and the Hunter, and better wood from the Allier, Troncais and Vosges forests, his High Eden Ridge wines were very good from the start.

As were the early Tasmanians, Pipers Brook and Heemskerk.

Encouraged by Len Evans, the Petaluma chairman who controlled the show ciruit, Chardonnay suddenly grew everywhere from Berri to Bourke.

There’s a push now to reverse the wise ABC - “anything but Chardonnay” - trend of the past decade, but this appears to have been hijacked by that small cadre of terroiristes headed by Grant Ramage in Coles’ premium wines buying sector. They’ve decided to show us a thing or two by having some of our better cool district Chardonnay makers prepare 2009 wines which they sell exclusively through Vintage Cellars. There’s no expensive middle man, so the prices are lower.

And the wines are very good.

Starting at the top end for those of us with no money, the cheapest is Emma Woods’s Seppelt Grampians Chardonnay ($19; 88+ points), a tight, steely wine with little discernable oak but savoury twists of butterscotch, honeycomb toffee and cushioning charcuterie fats. It’s your-right-down-the-line salt and pepper squid accompaniment: a lot more satisfying than 95% of the current squinty flood of Kiwi savvy-Bs.

The only one from outside Victoria is the Alterum Adelaide Hills Chardonnay ($25; 92+ points) made by Martin Shaw, of Shaw and Smith. Compared to the sparse Grampians wine, it’s a big step up in complexity, soul and alcohol, the latter factor probably due to the warmer nature of the Adelaide Hills. Its fruit is fresh, fragrant, and tropical, with lovely, lightly smoky oak. The palate is authoritative and weighty; there’s a pleasant powdering of oatmealy tannin in the tail, and very firm, stony acidity. Cook a braised free range chook in a hotpot in cider with onion, capers, and live tarragon, and you’ll be just juicy.

Kooyong’s Sandro Mosele (left) firmly holds a place in my Australia top twenty winemakers, and it’s a reflection of the Coles/Vintage Cellars buying team’s acuity that they’ve squeezed the Ballewindi Vineyard Mornington Peninsula Chardonnay ($30; 91++) from him. It’s a tight, complex, stony wine to sniff, with rusty iron smells as much as refined, juicy pears: Bosc, Anjou and Rocha varieties come to mind. There’s also a pleasant layer of pancetta fat, perhaps from some malo-lactic fermentation. It finishes dusty, stony and appetizing, in a perfectly Mediterranean manner. Napolitan spaghetti vongole would sit it pretty!

To the Yarra Valley next, and Dave Bicknell’s Oakridge Parish Of Gruyere Yarra Valley Chardonnay ($33; 90++ points). This is sharp, acrid wine to sniff: carbide and cordite give leading edge to a wedge of crunchy fresh pear and pithy dried apple aromas. In the mouth, an aluminium-like acidity dominates the tapering fruit, making a receding wedge … while it lacks complexity, it would beat many a Chablis of this price into my anxious glass. It’s long, lean and appetizing; go bouillabaisse!

Thence up bigtime in price to the rk Beechworth Chardonnay ($58; 93++). Giaconda is the grail of most Victorian chardomaniacs, who do tend to xenophobia. 09 being a difficult year, what with the horrid incineration of the alpine forests and all, this is the only Chardonnay Rick Kinzibrunner (below) will release from that vintage: Coles got it all.

Easily the best of this entire range, it shows true Giaconda form: the slightly peachy, cuddly, squishy fruit, seasoned with the peculiarly spicy Sirugue French oak favoured by this maker. But there’s beautiful astringency, too: an appetising string of acid and very dry red earth tannin that stretches the palate beautifully. It’s by no means cheap, but it’s more modestly-priced than your true blue Giaco. Stewed fowl with fresh herbs; goose cassoulet; anything from Richard Olney’s immaculate Provence The Beautiful cookbook will be perfect.

Such endorsement of the scary big Coles will make me no friends amongst the small local producers of Chardonnay. But they should rest assured that this fine suite of good-to-almost-great Chardonnays will help reawaken your Chardonnay receptors, which is in their interest if their wines are any good.

No other single company but Penfolds can table such a platoon of Chardonnays, but their prices are as mighty as their wines. In the case of these Coles wines, the prices are very good. If you buy a straight or mixed case, you get another 30% off!

Since Coles have “let go” Jeremy Stockman (right), who played a vital role in the selection and blending of these wines, it will be very interesting to see whether they can maintain this quality. Very few independent wine stores have a Chardonnay shelf as reliable and well-chosen as this tight-knit bunch. You’ll usually have to wade through dozens of very awkward wines to find anything like these.

Jeremy is now working as a consultant: most Australian Chardonnay makers would be better off using his blending skills, if these wines are anything to go by.

And they are. So go buy.

WINE EXPO'S WAR WITH GLOBALISED SWILL

COULD YOU BUY A GLOBAL WINE FROM THIS MAN? UH-HUH ... NONE IN THE SHOP. ROBERTO AT WINE EXPO IN SANTA MONICA

Barraged By Forces Of Evil Food, Drink, And Arsewipes Coles Duo Sees Light Down Under
by PHILIP WHITE

In the great Harry Dean Stanton movie, Repo Man, the punk Emilio Estevez works in a supermarket whose shelves are stacked with cans labeled only “FOOD” or DRINK”. I thought that was funny in 1984.

Unless you have been trapped in the yuppie ghetto of Port Willunga, where winemakers concentrate at times like this, to perve on each other’s partners and pass Burgundy and Ribero del Duero around the Star of Greece while their own vineyards roast, you’ve probably learned a lot about the blander corners of your Coles or Woolies grogfloggery. As the holiday moneys wane, the cleanskins and bladder packs look more savoury.

Until the winelake seeps through the community kidneys, we’ll see again how oversupply leads to a sickening slump in quality. The wine industry trains its customers to accept and expect plonk of ever-diminishing provenance. Soon, what we drank at the end of the holidays becomes acceptable day-to-day. We learn what our great wine industrialists expect the rest of the world to drink.

EMILIO DUMPS GENERIC BEER IN REPO MAN

Flick for an illo to Wine Expo, Santa Monica, California: a liquor store with sassitude, customers to match, and a battle royal against “globalised wine”.

“Once you guys succeed in making all wine taste the same, what will you do for a living?” Manager Roberto demanded in last week’s newsletter. He complains of being “absolutely barraged by the forces of evil (well, severely misguided, focus group driven winemaking and marketing at least) ... It seems the consensus ... is that Americans want wines from all over the world with fanciful names and long histories as long as they all taste the same and don't have any disconcerting ‘ethnic’ character.

“So, do we just give up and roll over? NO!!!!!!”, he concludes. “We continue to champion wines with true personality, regional style (or even outright idiosyncrasies) and a distinctive point of view while reminding those in the supply chain that those wines are huge crowd favorites at OUR ‘focus groups’ where we offer true diversity instead of merely different brands of the same old things.”


Australia’s two supermarketeers - count ’em, one, two - rank communities on their spending power, and stock the shelves accordingly. The McLaren Vale Coles is in the same district as the perverse villa rash of the down-at-heel coast, for example, so its shelves are stocked to suit the battered Datsun drivers, who outnumber the 4WD Benz and Bimmer blomos who get their fromage at Blessed Cheese, their fruitaveg at the Willunga Market, and their lovers next door. So stuff like my favourite biscuits, Vita Wheats – hardly a posh gastronomic investment, but mostly free of sugar and fat – gradually work their way to the bottom shelves as their space is taken by Coles crap, and eventually they disappear.

I learned this whilst editing Wine and Spirit Buying Guide in Sydney in the early ’eighties. Australia’s leading wine magazine, it had been bought by John David, so he could corner the Australia distribution of these new things that were called boutique wineries. John and his brother and sister owned David’s Holdings and Australian Liquor Marketers, huge, hyper-efficient trucking businesses that specialised in supplying supermarkets with food and booze. The three of them turned over a billion dollars the first year I worked there. This was partly due to their invention of the virtual Black and Gold brand. The staircase outside my office was always jammed with furtive lugubrious swarthies trying to sell shiploads of unlabelled canned beans, spaghetti, soup, lavatory paper and whatnot so Davids could wrap it in their handsome black and yellow livery and take up shelf space by undercutting hard-working Australian suppliers who branded their own products and tended not to leave too many band-aids in the beans.

While I was laughing at Estevez, this was happening under my nose.

There’s a bright duo at Coles who are bravely fighting to reverse this trend in their Vintage Cellars and 1st Choice stores. True wine lovers Jeremy Stockman and Grant Ramage scour the world – and, increasingly, Australia - for inexpensive wines with personality, regional style, outright idiosyncrasies and distinction. These offer a bright contrast to the endless shelves of crap which might just as well be labelled Dan Murphy’s DRINK or Black and Gold DRINK. Go, peruse.

This is not the time to sacrifice your last cubic centimetres of functioning liver drinking supermarket plonk for Australia. If you’re feeling nationalistic, take a drive to the Barossa, Clare or the Fleurieu and fill the boot with premium stuff from your favourite honest strugglers. These guys are doing it really tough. But shop for your daily drinkers in the imports section of VC and 1stC, and join my campaign to force, as part of the planning approval process, all new supermarkets make their roofspace available for free community vegetable and herb gardens. More of us may then tend to stray into their rotten cavernous rip-off acres of FOOD, DRINK, and arsewipes.

THE CONSTANT TEMPTATION FOR AUSTRALIA'S INDUSTRIALIST WINEMAKERS IS TO ATTEMPT TO EMULATE EVERYTHING EUROPE HAS TO OFFER. SOMEBODY SHOULD TELL THEM ABOUT THE DESERT.

THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY

Philip White Sees Encircling Gloom in 2009

a version of this story appeared in The Independent Weekly on 19 DEC 08

Next year? Next year’s already been buggered by this year.

Ignoring a few modest-scale exquisities, like the early-picked rieslings of Clare and Eden, 2008 was a disgusting vintage. Even the degree of industrial accidents soared as winery workers endured impossible shifts, trying to get everything turned into wine before the heat turned it to currants.

But in spite of the empty river and the drought, Australia’s crop was up one third on last year, and yields per hectare went up by a quarter. Where the water came from beats me. Then, export volumes went down 9%; and domestic sales down 5%, leaving us with 2 billion litres of wine to drink.

To put that in scale, Italy’s just beaten France to become the world’s biggest winemaker, its production up 8 percent to 4.7 billion litres. While Italy has reduced its vineyard area, its quality is steadily increasing. To add insult to alcohol producers everywhere, French heart specialist Dr Olivier Ameisen, 55, is claiming that by taking a muscle-relaxant called baclofen, he’s lost his desire for alcohol, and wants his theories tested on more thirsty people.

And now I hear the price of temporary water from the River is less than half the price it was last November. I know where that’ll be going.

There will be plenty of wine to drink next year, and a lot of utter swill from that heatwave, industrially corrected to varying degrees of digestibility.

But in the face of increasing large-scale vineyard plantings, and grape prices at rock bottom, many, many family-scale specialist grapegrowers will hit the wall. As Foster’s disappears and Constellation withdraws, towns will empty.

Nevertheless, 2009 will be the year the lumpen mass will wallow in lousy cheap wine at the expense of the Australian countryside, setting alcohol-related public health costs through the roof. Those of the rest us who miss out on Dr Ameisen’s tests will be furiously trying to drink our favourite specialist wineries through the crisis. Small, high-quality producers will need faithful support like never before.

We will see the continuing, phenomenal rise of China as a player in the wine market. The first paper to report those Italian figures, for example, was the Shanghai Daily. They’re onto it, and they’re increasingly getting into it.

As for the little matter of all the money in the world suddenly disappearing, Tony Bilson says his three-star temple of gastronomy in the Radisson in Sydney is still packed with tourists at dinner, but the business gamblers who’d filled it for years each lunch - at, what? $200-$500 a head? - are now down at his Number 1 wine bar on Circular Quay, hassling the staff about the price of cleanskins.

We will see the continuing tightening of control of restaurant outlets, with wine lists being bought and chopped up by one or two of the transnationals, who might then allow a big family show, like Yalumba, Taylors, Angove's or McWilliams in to add a bit of colour. Unless you can buy your way in, new producers with wines over $25 can pretty much forget it. That, of course, will include hundreds of brands which are hobby or vanity additions to family vineyards planted in the wrong places to the wrong varieties for all the wrong reasons of fashion and whimsy.

The liquor retail world will continue to constrict as Coles and Woolworths ruthlessly undercut the indies with their share of that 2 billion litres. Desperate money’s flying everywhere in retail, as floor and shelf space goes to the highest bidders. Check out the brochure Yalumba’s just produced for The Edinburgh – there’ll be more of that. If you have a specialist wine store that stocks your favourite littlies, coddle it.

Which is not to say that the big guys are limited to swill: the phenomenal cheapie imports Jeremy Stockman buys for Vintage Cellars and 1st Choice have staggered me this year for their range and quality. The exotica they’re bringing in should inspire our winemakers, providing lots of ideas for new flavours.

In the kiddylikker sector, expect a return to the original coolers of the late ’eighties, when they were made from denatured or disguised wine bases rather than spirits, and tasted pretty much the same.

In the premium regions, led by McLaren Vale, we will see more determined replacement of the old petrochemical spray regimes with an internationally-unprecedented wave of rigorous organic and bio-dynamic techniques. Margaret River, Clare, the Victorian Alps ... more and more regions are seeing this beautifully healthy and brave conversion.

And, fittingly, 2008 will see McLaren Vale – Trott’s View sell out. You can buy the last copies at Wakefield Press in Kent Town. This beautiful volume of photographs of the late Trott’s favourite folks, events and locations is our last glimpse of the Vales that used to be.

The fight to retain what’s left will reach fever pitch in 2009.

.

The Olympics were corked

by PHILIP WHITE - This was published as "Put A Cork In It" in The Independent Weekly on 29 August 2008

Amorim, the transnational rubber trader which ships more cork bark than anyone else, is smarting. Having lost Australia’s wine market to the superior screw cap - meaning the dominoes of Britain and the USA will also inevitably fall - the fat Portuguese outfit used the Olympics in a desperate attempt to secure the Chinese wine market.

Obsessed with European tradition it can copy, if not simply purchase, the fledgling Chinese wine industry still loves the romance of cork. Exporters of Australian wines must step backwards to enter China: wines sold safely under screwcaps in the rest of the world are not acceptable to the Chinese unless they’re corked. Which is temporary, given China’s incredible advancements in the packaging of other foods and beverages.

China grows more grapes than Australia. If it finds the water to replace our evaporating Chateau Murray-Darling, China will soon be selling cheap wine to Australia. It will then learn the advantages of screw caps, because we won’t want cork unless it’s in platform shoes.

Our heroic Coles is teaching this lesson to the Old World, by purchasing larger volumes of wine provided it’s under screw. The best value sangiovese available here is Vintage Cellars’ “Chalk Board” $15 chianti - the first wine from that huge region to be screwcapped. To reward the producer’s investment in the bottling technology, the opening order was 2000 dozen. Similarly, the first Rioja screwcaps are on the water. This is just the beginning.

Amorim did a sweaty deal with China, through its biggest winery, Great Wall, to ensure all wine served at the Olympics was sealed with “natural cork”. Swarming, no doubt, with all manner of completely natural greeblies, cork being the spongiform bark of the oak, Quercus suber, which structurally resembles a multi-story five-star hotel for microscopic vermin. Unless, of course, the cork is chlorine-bleached, which converts some of those tiny varmints to the dreaded cat-piss/rat’s nest cork taint appropriately called trichloranisole. Amorim consistently claims to have put an end to this infection, but none of the corked wines and whiskies I taste swab clean.

Amorim claims cork is an environmental triumph, preaching on TV ads and the internet that screwcaps threaten the arcadian bliss of the cork groves of the western Mediterranean, and the serene, pristine peasants who tend them. Not to mention the sacred habitat of the blessed lesser-spotted cork dotterel and the freckled pigmy plug sloth.

“One of the world’s greatest examples of sustainable development” Amorim calls the cork racket.... “wine producers looking to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions can address these aspects as a matter of priority”. So screw caps trigger farting? Pull the other one. Given Portugal’s history of specialization in such delicacies as conquering and colonisation, one may wonder whether Amorim envies China’s attitude to human rights and censorship.

The beer industry used the Olympics to stage a collision of the great tectonic plates of suds. Anheuser-Busch is America’s biggest brewer. It makes 48.5 percent of US beer, and owns Budweiser, the world’s biggest-selling beer. Not to mention 50 percent of Grupo Modelo, Mexico's biggest brewer (with Corona, number five globally), and 27 percent of Tsingtao, China’s biggest. Budweiser was a major Olympics sponsor. Like Chinese beer, Bud’s made from rice as much as barley, so it’s lighter and simpler and suited to markets that accept only corked wines or beer you can’t drink without jamming a chunk of lemon down its neck.

On a greenbucks clutch equal to Amorim’s, Budweiser boasts of being the world's largest recycler of aluminum cans. It’s like Banrock Station saving the Murray. I’m green, therefore I deserve.

InBev, the Belgian brewer which set up shop in 1366, is the biggest global brewer, with over 200 brands, like Stella Artois, Beck’s, Leffe, Hoegaarden, Skol, Quilmes, Brahma, Staropramen, Sibirskaya Korona, Chernigivske, Sedrin, Cass, Jupiler and whatnot. It’s now adding Anheuser-Busch to its list. Anheuser-Busch Inbev will own the thirst of China, USA, Russia, Brazil and Germany.

While Beck’s is brewed here by Lion Nathan (whose foray into the wine business is not completely cool), Stella is brewed by Fosters. Like the local Heineken, they’re not European at all. So scour the atlas of the new leviathan’s holdings. Jeez, look Ma, there’s a great big hole here called Australia! Since it was still Interbrew, years ago, InBev has ogled the Fosters apple. So why would you let Fosters make your prime product taste like Melbourne beer when you could simply buy it - Fosters - whip up its dull suds, and ensure your Aussie Stella tastes more like a racy Belgian premium?

If/when Anheuser-Busch Inbev buys Fosters, which it may well do on its way home from China, it will reverse our dumb brewers’ disastrous forays into wine. There’ll be feathers all over the chookhouse when Fosters’ wineries hit the block.

COMMENTS

These comments were left on The Independent Weekly site. You can add comments direct to this blog by hitting the comment button below.

How much this "writer" has received from the screw cap producers? For me this is not an exempt article. Related to the sustainability matters i prefer to "save Miguel". You can "save Miguel" to in http://www.savemiguel.com/ Miguel is cork oak tree, go and see.

Posted by José Lopes on 4/09/2008 12:36:45 AM

(Jose Lopes works for Amorim.)

Brilliant article! Though not the perfect solution, screw caps are the best closure currently available. Patrick Stowe Rimu Grove Winery

Posted by pinotman10 on 4/09/2008 10:03:25 AM

There sure will becasue Constellation's wineries will hit the block first. Maybe the resulting rerating of the production facilities values might make wine profitable again....

Posted by MiketheWineGuy on 4/09/2008 11:29:10 AM

Thanks Jose for that carefully worded and intelligent comment and accusation. Another smart move by Amorim!

Posted by AndrewG on 4/09/2008 12:15:41 PM

I love it when someone like Philip White lays it into these bark floggers - the idea that cork is tradition and that tradition is good; ergo bark is good needs to be laid to rest. Cork bark belongs with other grand traditions like drowning witches, stonings and absolute monarchs. Using cork bark to stopper a bottle is like burning coal to make power, whereas a screwcap is akin to a nice clean and modern solar panel.

Posted by Awinelover on 4/09/2008 12:44:30 PM

Without any reference to AWRI taste trials or other objective measures, this rant completely ignores the Australian invention - Pro Cork. This closure uses the benefits of cork in aging wines and the prophylactic properties of a cellulose barrier to prevent TCA. A great closure and market appreciated all in one. Get up to scratch Mr White!

Posted by Bachanaussie on 4/09/2008 1:13:17 PM

yesterday we opened a bottle of expensive Chardonnay under a Diam cork, a glued together product, it was as badly cork tainted as I have seen - the sooner we get over corks the better. Perhaps we could save Miguel's ancestors by going all the way back to sticking a wax soaked stick in the bottle!

Posted by Gazza in vic on 4/09/2008 5:49:29 PM

Independent weekly? Pfft.. don't kid me!! "Superior screwcaps" yes, that's a very independent statement. "The cork racket"?!?! What is cork some kind of mob deal? Obviously Philip White is well paid by Stelvin and The Independent Weekly is not quite as independent as it thought.

Posted by Luke on 4/09/2008 7:41:18 PM

Regarding the postings on your website commenting an article referring Amorim, we want to immediately clarify that it is not Amorim & Irmaos position that the opinions – albeit misinformed – expressed by the article’s author are anything more than just that. The author is, of course, entitled to his views and to express them freely, and the same applies to any of the postings’ authors. If indeed any of our thousands of employees made a comment on this site, that will be a representation of his or hers private views. It cannot and should not be interpreted as anything resembling the company’s official views. Carlos de Jesus Director, Marketing & Communications Amorim & Irmaos SA

Posted by Carlos de Jesus on 4/09/2008 9:31:33 PM

Jose, what the writer has received from screw cap producers is untainted wine, which is far more environmentally friendly than having to send twice the amount of sample stock.

Posted by Christophe P on 5/09/2008 11:45:11 AM

Its amazing how emotional this debate is! What happened to objective and sound information based on technical facts?! It would be good to see White focus on what really counts - how to ensure the end consumer receives the wine in perfect condition! A good closure solution should provide a consistent and taint free seal and be suitable for the wine style. This includes ensuring oxygen ingress over the closure match the intended sensory profile of the wine. Alternative closures are becoming increasingly popular in todays wine world as they have a lot to offer, but its interesting to note that on a global scale more wines are sealed with synthetic closures than with screw caps.

Posted by Mai Nygaard on 5/09/2008 12:40:14 PM

(Mai Nygaard is Business Development Manager at Nomacorc LLC)

Phil, Get an education before you try to pontificate, maybe even do some research. Your ignorant perception of how TCA is formed is matched by your ignorance of the Chinese wine market. For examples, Great Wall is not the 'biggest Chinese winery'...Changyu is much bigger. Secondly, China only grows more wine grapes than Australia if you include all the table varieties as used for wine, which Chinese winemakers do, so you are only technically correct. And most grapes are grown in places even less suitable than the Hunter Valley, where it regularly pisses down just before vintage, so mouldy grapes are the norm. The only thing they do right is insist on cork, which is environmentally a more responsible closure than screw caps, no matter which way you try to spin it. Screw caps cannot match natural cork for regulated oxygenation during maturation in the bottle, essential to develop complexity in a quality red wine, and unattainable with a metal widget.

Posted by Dingo on 5/09/2008 1:35:02 PM

Phil, TCA is present in water. Drink some Adelaide water and let me know what you think about it. Put the fault in cork is very easy. To be clear, I don't care about the closure. I drink wine because like the experience, the brand the stlye, etc, not because of the closure. Corks have problems, as screwcap have. What is your reaction when you open a bottle of white wine and you feel a strong suphides odour coming out ? Do you complaint about the screwcap ?

Posted by Abagail korouplis on 8/09/2008 1:03:37 PM

The comments from Abagail Korouplis and Gazza from Vic relate to each other in that TCA in wine can have other sources than just the cork. The chlorine component of TCA can come from water or any number of chemical compounds present in the environment which might have somehow got in contact with the wine at any point during the production process from the vineyard on. On at least some occasions cork might be unfairly getting the blame for tainted wine. On wine maturation, wines can mature and develop perfectly well under screwcap, but when a cork does what is is supposed to it can be considered part of the aging process in itself, like a barrel, making a unique contribution to the aged wine.

Posted by TM on 10/09/2008 10:25:03 AM

Dear Phillip White, First, I would like to know how much is the screwcaps lobby paying you. It is not that what you have written is mostly bullshit and non-scientifically based, but the tone in which you write must mean that even being paid, you are powerless against nature. Yes, because there is a war being faught between alternative closures (not substitues) and natural ones. ALWAYS PREFER WHAT IS NATURAL! So, if you defend your positions that fiercly (even though they are false), I wonder how much is your reputation worth in dollars... Unfortunately, you also do not know anything at all about China: 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. Even at humannity's highest level like Olympics, this has been recognised. How can you argue with that? Poor you, frustrated writer without any level at all... Thanks God Australia is a proven failure as a wine producer in the World, keep producing your soda kind of drink, and let the world enjoy the real pleasures in life. Ah, and again: get a job and a life, Mr. White!

Posted by The the on 17/09/2008 12:37:40 AM

Anonymous said... If you want to see how desperate the corkistas are becoming with all this environment nonsense, have a look at this "unbiased" BBC report: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7623912.stm ...It seems to me the environment would be very well without men going about tearing the bark from trees.