BILSON KNOCKS INTO THREE COCKED HATS

TETSUYA WAKUDA, TONY BILSON AND NEIL PERRY ... THE AUTHOR FIRST MET THE NOW GREAT TETS WHEN HE WAS MAKING SUSHI AND COOKING BURGHERS IN BILSON'S LEGENDARY KINSELAS, A THREE-STOREY EMPORIUM FOR HUNGER, THIRST AND THEATRE IN TAYLOR SQUARE, SYDNEY, AROUND 1985 ... PERRY HAS NEVER BEEN ON THE BILSON TEAM, BUT MAKES A FAIR GO OF IT WITH HIS FISH

FROM the blackest extremes of his dark moody gizzards, the DRINKSTER congratulates a beloved lifelong friend and colleague, Tony Bilson, for this week regaining his Three Hats in the Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide awards, and a fortnight back winning the 2011 National Award for Best Restaurant from the Australian Hotels Association, the hotel industry’s highest award for culinary perfection.

This follows his triumphant Penfolds dinner at the Australian embassy in Paris, with incredible Penfolds classics selected by co-host and sponsor, Penfolds chief winemaker, Peter Gago. The dish below is Nick Haselgrove's phone deleriousness of Bilson's Manjimup Truffles, Foie Gras, Fig and Brioche. Western Australian truffles!

Click on the image to see the entire menu and wine list.

Bilson’s restaurant history is a formidable and persistent skyrocket, at the head of Australian cuisine for over forty years. A tad spitty, maybe, when all the money in the world suddenly vanishes, and customers withdraw their tease. But Bilson was never a gastronomic fizzer, and he never goes away. From cooking chops in a pub in South Melbourne, through Johnny Walker’s steakhouse in the Sydney CBD, to, in some sort of order, Tony’s Bon Gout, Berowra Waters Inn, Kinselas, Bilson’s on Circular Quay, Tony’s Fine Bouche, The Treasury, Ampersand, Tony Bilson’s Canard, Bilson’s at the Radisson Blu, Number One Wine Bar and The Royal Exchange (the latter three which he runs simultæneously, now), this amazing man, and his family, has never ever given up, through economic slump and boom, and the odd personal health and wealth pisser that would erase lesser mortals.

From Bon Gout on, I recall great meals in each of those restaurants: dining with Bocuse in that astounding Bilson's in the International Passenger Terminal on Circular Quay; with Richard Olney at The Treasury; with Stephen Hickinbotham and David Hohnen at Berowra; with Gretel and Steggers at Kinselas; don't get me started.

AMANDA BILSON, PAUL HAMLIN BOOK EDITOR, WIFE OF TONY, AND MOTHER OF LILY AND EDWARD, THEIR RESPECTFUL BOHAUTE RESTAURANT INSURRECTIONIST OFFSPRING ... RED BERRIES IN KIRSCH AND THE AUTHOR, IN TONY'S FINE BOUCHE, CA 1990 ... THE WALLS WERE HUNG WITH PERFECTLY SENSUAL CARDBOARD COLLAGES BY PETER POWDITCH




To see the current wine list at Bilson’s at the Radisson Blu, click here. To perve on the funky bohaute cuisine of Number One, click here. To join the fustier clubland of The Royal Exchange, click here.

For a recent profile, click here, understanding the journalist’s regular mistake - there was no divorce of Gay and Tony – they never married: she changed her name by deed poll from Cheeseman to Bilson, which was easier when they had their children, Morgan and Sido.

Gleefully married to Amanda for 24 years, grrr, of recent years Bilson's been working hard with the people in the Bawaka homelands, East Arnhem Land, trustfully swapping seeps of knowledge. They're thinking of a modern industrial kitchen to swap and merge their stuff. You watch the graduates of this school!

Bilson has also been busy in Bangla Desh, building essential cultural connections through the friendship of cuisine.

In the Winegrowers' Diary introduction written by the great Walter James for David Wynn in 1970, there lies a very frank paragraph:

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

This did not apply to David Wynn, and will never apply to the fearless Bilson.

BILSON: EASTER BREAKFAST AT WHITEY'S, BAROSSA RANGES, ABOUT 1989

For Jancis Robinson's review of the Paris dinner, click here.

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.

SOMMELIERS? BULLOCKIES, NOT SMELLERS

CHAMPAGNE LUNCH - LATE EIGHTIES/EARLY NINETIES AT NEDDY'S IN HUTT STREET, ADELAIDE; ONE OF THE BEST WINE WATERS OF THE DAY, MARTYN VERRYT, POURS FOR THE BASTION OF AUSTRALIAN FOOD WRITERS, HOWARD TWELFTREE, WHO HAS WRITTEN GASTRONOMY FOR OVER THIRTY YEARS UNDER THE PEN NAME JOHN McGRATH. NOTICE THAT THE AUTHOR'S BRACES MATCH TWELFTREE'S TIE. WE HUNTED IN A TWO-MAN PACK

 He's What? Master Sommelier? But He's Twenty Four Years Old! It Takes Four Decades, Sunshine 
by PHILIP WHITE

It happened again. The greying hack asked the innocent question about somebody’s son and got the smug return fire “Oh he’s a master sommelier now”.

Master sommelier? Bullshit! He’s twenty-four years old.

It’s a wonderful thing that sommeliers’ associations are blooming around Australia, and that so many enthusiastic people are holding structured tastings, and learning about the lure and lore of wine, and checking each other’s progress. It’s a tribal thing. It helps build a profession. It will be better for the diner.

But twenty-four years of age? The hack quotes his own mantra, something which in itself took decades to develop. This could be read as a mouldering has-been constantly re-inventing his self-importance in order to stay alive, but it here it goes:

“Until you’ve watched several great wines, from several great regions, vintages and varieties, fabulous years and foul, develop from the flowering of their vines, through their ferments and delinquent juvenility, to their prime, and on into the nether regions of the twilight zone, then that person cannot possibly speak with a master’s authority about such wines.”

Of course a younger critic can write in an opinionated entertaining way about wine; or a young sommelier reliably recommend and properly present good wines or reasonably judge their condition before presenting them to customers in the correct manner. But how long does it take to understand pinot noir? Good Burgundian pinot, for example?

Thirty years? Forty? Ask Gary Steel. Once you nail the time it took, then ask how much money it cost him. Ask him about the travel; the air tickets; the stress.

BORDEAUX WHITES AT THE FICOFI TASTING AT KAESLER WINES IN THE BAROSSA IN 2010. HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO UNDERSTAND THIS STUFF? HOW MUCH MONEY DOES IT COST? HOW MANY AIRFARES? photo LEO DAVIS

The S-word originates in the old Greek sattein, which means to pack, or stuff. The old French used sompter, or someter, for the truckie of the day: the driver of a pack horse, camel, mule or ox. The four-legged prime mover was the sauma or somier. Given the life expectancy , a twenty-four year-old truckie was probably half way through his working life then. A master sompter, at that braw age? Possible.

Just how this term changed its shape to become the infant dude who pours your wine in a restaurant is a very important progression.

This old sompter, his mule loaded with scribble, was a baby once. He committed evil tricks, like maintaining a good set of empty Grange bottles from different vintages. Using Kaiser Stuhl Bold Red, a non-vintage blend from a flagon, he would fill a flight of great Granges and sit back to listen to the sophists explain the different years.

He was so bold as pull tricks on great men like David Wynn, who invented modern Coonawarra, and Max Schubert, who invented Grange.

In 1980 he attended a luncheon with these intensely competitive sages, and a spunky Pam Dunsford. Each guest was obliged to bring a mystery bottle. The young White took a bottle of Blue Nun, a cheap, sweet, German megablend, and a bottle of Yalumba’s Brandivino, a mixture of young brandy and sweet rosé. In the bathroom he blended half a bottle of Blue Nun with a fifth of a bottle of Brandivino, sprinkled it with some of Mrs. Potter’s perfume, which reminded him of something from Poland, filled it up with tap water, gave it a shake, poured it into a decanter and served it.

The sages agreed that it must have been a pale Chilean rosé. They even discussed varieties, and their Spanish and Portuguese origins. After all their deliberation, the culprit was terrified to think of how he would excuse his scam. Honesty worked. He may have just gotten away with it; there were giggles at the table. But the memory lingers, and if those men were alive they would remember, too. Not many whippersnappers took the piss outa blokes like those.

Were he to take that long strange haul all over again, this bullocky thinks he could slowly, through human discourse and experience in his trade, learn to discern which great house would prefer which product, how and where to find it in the market, how best to contain it and transport it, and maybe even stow it in the cellars of his client.

He would by necessity be first a farrier, animal husbandry expert, veterinary surgeon and wheelwright, just to keep his truck serviced and willing. He would, no doubt, be faced with the problem of diminishing quality usually meaning larger volumes, greater difficulties, and lower profits. And he’d learn that a little lugubrious fulsomness earned the better tip here, and some respectful austere distance the same thing somewhere else.

If he were a wine trucker, the task might eventually also involve him developing a refined, reliable palate, so he could never be tricked by a vendor flogging him Blue Nun, Brandivino and Mary Potter’s perfume mixed with Adelaide water. He might also work out a vocabulary to enable him to discuss his purchases more fluently and reliably.

He could also, very easily, become addicted to alcohol.

WINEMAKER BRIAN BARRY SPENT HIS ENTIRE LIFE DEVELOPING THE BEST NOSE I HAVE ENCOUNTERED IN AUSTRALIA. HE CAN BE MY SOMMELIER ANYTIME!

If he managed all that with elan and respect, he would be a sommelier. If he became a master of that craft, he might be called a master sommelier.

But he could also be stuck in the mud somewhere, trying to extract a team of oxen without busting one keg.

Today the oxen might be electric, instant or digital, and the cart might be one huge refrigerator.

The, er, the other bit will still take thirty or forty years. Or more.

TOM ANGOVE DIES AT 92 YEARS

TOM ANGOVE: A GREAT WINE MAN, BUT HARDLY THE INVENTOR OF THE BLADDER PACK.




Irrigation Hero Dies In The Riverland ... Great Innovator And Motivator ... But He Did Not Invent The Bladder Pack

by PHILIP WHITE ... a version of this story appeared in The Independent Weekly


Tom Angove did not invent the bladder pack.

The great Tom died in a Riverland nursing home last week, after ninety-two astounding years. He was a fierce fellow; a clever inventor, relentless innovator and a mighty proponent of the irrigated vineyards whose fruit has since filled billions of chrome handbags and silver pillows.

Tom’s role in shaping the modern Australian wine industry is at least as significant as the Chaffey brothers: they developed the irrigation systems; he showed the world how to plant vines: if you stand in the middle of his Nanya vineyard at Renmark, you cannot see the ends of the rows.

He was also a pioneer in the use of stainless steel for large wine tanks.

But the plastic bladder pack had been a common vinegar container in Europe twenty years before Tom plonked it on Australian tables in 1965. About half Australia’s wine is still drunk from much refined versions of his prototype, which didn’t even have a tap.

All these containers evolved from the wine skin of ages past: the South Australian museum has a fine example in its astonishing Aboriginal collection, made from the hide of kangaroo, and used for carrying water. One can’t help wondering how different campfire life would be if the shiny modern replacement contained only water.

In the early ’fifties, another brilliant winemaker, Ian Hickinbotham, left, had played with the notion of using giant plastic bags to line the 30,900 litre wine tanks he’d inherited at the South Australian Grapegrowers’ Co-operative Limited, which he wisely renamed Kaiser Stuhl. These concrete tanks were fine for storing fortified wines: to an extent, their high alcohol prevented overt oxidation. But when the trend to finer, drier table wines took hold, oxidation became a much more confronting problem.

While he left Kaiser Stuhl without perfecting this idea, others certainly finished the job: enormous volumes of Australian wine are now exported in huge bladders within standard shipping containers. In a method fraught with the danger of the product being diluted with poorer, cheaper wine from elsewhere, this is then bottled in Britain or North America and promoted as being more environmentally responsible, trimming the carbon footprint of transporting heavy glass.

MODERN CANARY ISLAND WINE SKIN

In the mid-’sixties, once he’d accepted Max Schubert’s invitation to manage Penfolds in Victoria, Hickinbotham put his mind once again to the bag-in-the-box. He’d been in touch with Waddington Duval, the English company which manufactured the plastic taps used in the European vinegar containers, so this company hired Diemolders of Geelong to work with him. In his memoir, Australian Plonky, Hickinbotham praises the ingenious Charles Malpas: “I was astounded at how quickly [he] could make a new prototype tap: we could have a discussion in my office in the afternoon, tossing ideas around, and he would return with a sample next day.”

While he was eternally frustrated that Penfolds “just could not grasp the importance of the venture” Hickinbotham was keen to use the bladder pack for super-premium wines, even Grange. His proposed box was the same proportion as a house brick: “height was twice width, which was one-and-a-half times depth … that formula was retained for table casks for years”.

In those early days, the actual bag was the biggest problem: ICI seemed incapable of making a film which did not leak. Rather than pursue a superior film, Penfolds launched their “wine cask” in a can about the size of a large paint tin, painted to resemble a barrel, which horrified Hickinbotham. This was to avoid damages claims from people with stained carpets and tablecloths. Nevertheless, the venture was short-lived, and within a few months, Penfolds ceased manufacturing the new product.

At which point another wine genius, David Wynn, entered the picture. Hickinbotham had worked for Wynn at Coonawarra, making the world’s first deliberately-induced and managed malo-lactic fermentations in 1952, so Wynn was aware of Hickinbotham’s ingenuity, and had been following the bladder pack evolution.

Wynn was quick to abandon the ICI film, replacing it with a superior product from Japan. With the driving nous of Tony Herbert, Wynns’ technical manager, they then developed the first sandwich film, further reducing the oxidation of the wine.

Tom Angove certainly rewrote history by giving us his take on the bladder pack, but the story’s not over yet. The next step is to develop film that will not release polyvinyl chloride, will not degrade in UV light, and will not taint the wine over time.

And then, of course, we have to learn to fill these containers with a better product. The thought of a fresh trickle of water entering the Murray, only to be sucked through the roots of billions of vines, siphoned to the berries, and jammed through stark refineries to be pumped mindlessly into silver pillows, somehow seems not quite the celebration all that ingenuity and acuity deserves.

As for intelligent reviews of bladder packs, forget it. There is never any guarantee that the bladder I taste comes from the same tank as the bladder you buy.

BASS PHILLIP DANCES TANGO IN EXETER

THE TWO PHILS GETTING FULL OF BASS PHILLIP DURING JONESEY'S PHILIPPIC IN THE EX ... all photography MILTON WORDLEY

Phillip (sic) Jones Brings Bass Phillip (sic) To Fill Up Philip The Pinot Sicko ... One L Of A Night In The X
by PHILIP WHITE

Phillip Jones came to The Exeter for a few slow quiet ones last week. An engineer who fell in love with pinot noir is a scarce beast. An engineer who so frequently masters the mystical and confounding nature of such an ethereal drinking genie is an absolute rarity. For Jones is a passionate and erudite man, and makes his wines with the flesh of his hands and feet rather than employing anything as harsh and brash as a pump.

I first suspected this man had studied and practised engineering purely to eventually focus all his engineering skills upon one critical job: the disconnection of his brains from his heart, as he seems to run most of his life with the latter organ. Which is, as any cardio surgeon will tell you, a lot more visceral and gentle on the life-juice than your average open-throat mono pump made of steel. And which is never to say Jones is not an highly captivating and rewarding conversationalist. After an evening wallowing in his estimable company, one could only wonder what in the hell his engineering was like. You don’t get sensual engineers.

Away back in the ’seventies, when Jones began his errant vineyard dreaming, there was bugger all of this weird Burgundian variety about. Murray Tyrrell had a patch in the Hunter; having tired of the frustrating monoculture and frosts of Coonawarra, David Wynn was planting it at Mountadam on the High Eden Ridge. The most common one was the Hardy’s Keppoch, a vast-volume cheapy made from a huge monoclonal vineyard near Padthaway. And that clone was in fact a sparkling wine model, so the chances of it being a great red pinot were remote. That wasn’t what Jones had in mind.

Although he started out growing Bordeaux varieties, he sought somewhere as cold and damp and humid as Burgundy, south-east of Melbourne. He passed the outbreak of Jaguar XJ12s of the Yarra Valley, and even the Ferrari and Porsche appellation of Mornington Peninsula. This obsession was no hobby. He went to Leongatha, away down near Victoria’s southernmost point, Wilson’s Promontory, at the bottom corner of wet old Gippsland.


Leongatha’s wetter than Burgundy. Mainly dairy and onion country, it gets over 1000 millimetres a year. It rains roughly every second day from April through October. The average daily maximum temperature peaks at 26 in January and February, but through June and August it’s all twelves and thirteens. The critical mean’s 18.2.

So much water is not much of a problem: the extremely deep loose soils south of the mountain ash country of the Strzelecki Ranges just soaks it up. “It’s so absorbent there are hardly any rivers”, Jones tells his glass disbelievingly. “But jeez the rain brings the moulds. I can’t spray 500 in the ripening season.” He refers here to the biodynamic preparation which encourages white fungal tendrils to sprout in the soil, where they perform a healthy enlivening function, and somehow assist the vine roots to better extract every hint of mineral. “Unfortunately, 500 also encourages moulds in the foliage when it’s so wet,” he said. “There’s so much cloud that light management is more critical: I fine tune it with 501. It’s all about canopy and light management.” 501 is the silica-based biodynamic preparation which works as a light diffuser.

Jones now takes his fruit from four sites spread over 24 kilometres of country. “Every site is different,” he said. “Like the ferric soils require a different approach and give different flavours to the ferrous.”

Because he wanted low yields – hard to get in such prosperous country – he planted his vines very, very close: 9000 vines per hectare. Most of Australia’s vineyards sit on about 2000. He thins everything: leaves, tendrils and bunches, to limit his yields to 250-350 grams of grapes per vine. Then his winemaking is more like a lyrical slither than anything industrial. And his wines? Sloppy, stupefying, seductive dances all. Make that dancers.

Constant high humidity, as in Burgundy at vintage, does something to the tannins of grapes, which are highly concentrated around the skin’s pores, which constantly transpire water. A single variety grown to a certain ripeness in a dry place will generally be harder of tannin than the humid model, perhaps due to the background humidity limiting the amount of transpiration. Jones’s Bass Phillip pinots show this to the extreme. “In older vineyards, the humidity really brings out the provocative aromatics,” he said. They also seem softer, plumper, and wetter. Freakishly Burgundian. Yet below each peculiar beauty, there is the tickling piquancy of the soil and the rock from whence it came.

Away down at the bottom of Australia, Bacchus and Pan do the tango, held up by the Norman Lindsay lasses, the Rubens mob having occupied every couch. Soused in Guerlain’s Jicky, of course.

Bass Phillip Estate 21 Gippsland Pinot Noir 2006
$53.75; 12.8% alcohol; cork; 93+++ points
This, the twenty-first vintage, came from a difficult year, in which Phillip Jones says he “blended everything” to make this wondrous confrontation. It smells like maraschino cherries soused in lemon juice, with a whole barrage of other stuff coming in soon after: the potato sack earth, the gingery oak, the plump dancing girls. In fact, my notes are specific about the lass here in question: it’s Vanessa Redgrave’s Isadora: dancing like a giraffe, then too keen to leap into the deadly Bugatti, the silk scarf immediately dragging the neck t’wards the beautifully spoked wheel. Give it six years, breath in, accelerate. (All my other Bass Phillip notes were stolen in the Great Bag Heist of 09)

PHILLIP JONES CLINKS PINOTS WITH EXETER PUBLICAN KEVIN GREG ... IN BACKGROUND, WRITER LANCE CAMPBELL (LEFT), WITH WINE MERCHANT PAUL JAMES. all photography: MILTON WORDLEY

HICKINBOTHAM CASTS A VINEGARY SPELL

AFTER THE QANA WEDDING, JESUS AND HIS BOYS SHOOT SOME HOOPS - CLICK IMAGE FOR LINK TO DIVINE PHOTOGRAPHER LI WEI

Having Pinched His Recipe For Fresh Amarone Frizzante Rosé,
The Italians Give Jesus Vinegar!
by PHILIP WHITE - a version of this appeared in The Independent Weekly

Easter is the weekend reserved for the commemoration of some dirty deeds done a long time ago to the world’s most famous fine wine maker, Jesus Christ.

It’s important to remember that when this self-confessed “winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners” called for a drink during the horrors of crucifixion, the Italians gave him vinegar. And, by the way, it’s likely he was crucified on a saltire, shaped like the X towards the end of that terrible crucifixion word; like the tail of the early Christian fish gaffito.

Jesus did woodwork before oenology. Thirty years in the carpenter’s shop, and he didn’t think of the barrel. Must be a lesson there. It was way over the other end of the Romans’ Empire that the Celts taught them the art of the cooper. They’d invented the smooth carvel hull and didn’t take long to work out that if the technology kept water out, it would probably keep wine in.

When he did the miracle vintage at the Qana wedding, my belief is that Jesus made an amarone. Every village had a cool store of grain, honey, and dried fruits – a grange – in which the water pots were stored. Add raisins, currants and sultanas, maybe even a fig or two, and bring the jugs out into the sun. Hot wild ferment: bingo! Fresh rosé. Frizzante!

Whether he learnt this from the Italian invaders or they learnt it from the locals beats me, but I suspect the latter is the case.

Before the First World War, Samuel Wynn – then Weintraub: wine merchant – made kosher wine in the Polish ghetto from dried grapes he’d travel to purchase in Odessa, on the Black Sea. Upon arrival in Melbourne, he was delighted to discover an abundance of fresh grapes, and set about building the Wynn empire.

It was an emigration clerk, by the way, who couldn’t spell Weintraub. He asked what it meant, and said “then we’ll call you Sam Wine”, and mispelled that, too.

Ian Hickinbotham, who conducted the first deliberate, controlled malo-lactic ferment in Australia, and probably the world - he’s shy about the second bit - when he worked for Sam’s son David at Coonawarra in 1952, has sent me a copy of a speech he’d just made at the Sydney International Wine Competition.
.
“Ancient civilisations”, he said, “drank increasingly acescent (vinegary) wines during the year, just because they couldn’t keep their wines away from air, and the ever-present bacteria progressively turned all of their table wines to vinegar ... indeed at eleven months the ancients were drinking almost straight vinegar.”

This no doubt encouraged the ancient habit of adding water, even seawater, to wine. If Jesus had made an amarone without so much water, the guests would probably have added it anyway. Strong wine was a no-no.

“Woman, what Have I to do with thee?” he says to his Mum, who’s waiting in the road for him and his gang.

She obviously knows his skill, and he’s grumpy, but he does the job. Having just walked all the way up from Galilee, the lads would have preferred to get stuck into the refreshments immediately. Weddings went for days.

Back to Hick and the vinegar.

“Vintage festivals are a reminder”, he says. “They were the wonderful celebration of the new wine, which really meant no more having to drink near-vinegar.”

Like the Barossa Vintage Festival, which cannot commence til the end of Lent, when everyone rather quickly makes up for their period of abstinence.

BIG BOB McLEAN: BACK UP THE HIGHLANDS

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

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

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

Anyway, they did wear out, and McLean shrunk.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

.