BUGGER THESE SPEEDFREAK MULETEERS

BACK BEFORE SOMMELIERS, WE HAD WINE WAITERS. THEY WERE POLITE, HELPFUL PEOPLE WITH CLEAN NOSES. THIS ONE WAS GOOD. HE'S SERVING THE GREAT FOOD CRITIC, JOHN McGRATH. THE DUDE WITH THE RED BRACES IS A STROPPY, PRECOCIOUS, PRESUMPTUOUS, UTTERLY COCKY WHITEY. FORGIVE ME PLEASE. photo MILTON WORDLEY
 

Matters Of Youth And the Lack Of It: Shortening Tendons; Lengthening Teeth
by PHILIP WHITE 

Sorry to go on so much about the Frogs, but they’ve let me down again.

When they threatened Australia with court actions and trade sanctions over our use of their words, like Champagne and Burgundy, they should have outlawed all Australian sommeliers.

If I get one more smarmy little spike-haired ponce sommelier - in a restaurant in which he/she/it could not afford to eat without selling drugs – telling me I’ve got a wine wrong, or that so-and-so makes the best this or that, or that this is so-and-so’s best wine by far, and not the one I want, I shall begin to write about them.

Sommelier is an old French word that comes from sompter, or someter, which is the driver of a pack horse, camel, mule or ox. That beast, the quadruped one, was called a sauma or somier. A sompter hors drove a pack horse. These mouthsful of air fell down from the old Greek sattein, which means to pack, or stuff.

I do believe that some our new breed of sompters are well-trained and actually pretty good at tipping a drink into a glass without first appraising it by jamming the bottle up their snotty, well-powdered noses right at your elbow, but fewer of them fail to knowingly snort the cork then nod sagely after they’ve poured your glass, and bugger all of them manage to serve a bloke without some form of abysmally presumptuous condescension.

Which is a bit of a stretch of the old elastic for a delivery kid with a mule.

Cocaine is not the drug for servants. Nor, in fact, is speed. Then comes the eccy gen, who are lasciviously over-intimate and presumptuous when they have absolutely no right to be.

Sattein them!

Rather than waste ten minutes continuing this diatribe, I shall reflect upon a letter I sent, four years ago, to that glimmering tower of vanity publishing, WBM, which in my case is an acronym for Won’t Bullshit Me.

It went a bit like this:

“… the Australian wine press has a decidedly Dad’s Army look about it, which is a bit of a worry considering taste buds don’t last forever, and when the industry is always looking for ways to better connect with young people … few could argue the average age of our wine scribes is a little on the high side.”

So wrote Anthony Madigan in WBM (“Rising Stock – an hour with Nick Stock”) in the June 2005 issue.

Before such ageism – terrible word – disappears from the shrinking list of acceptable behaviours, this matter of the lengthening of wine critic’s teeth deserves discussion.

At the ripe and juicy age of fifty-three, I finally feel sufficiently experienced in the arcane world of wine to suspect that my respect for Nick Stock is well founded.

But think: he claims the best wine he has tasted is the 1978 La Tache Domaine de la Romanee Conti, which he has had “a couple of times”.

Provided Nick first drank it legally at eighteen, the wine was already twelve years old. While nobody should begrudge his awe, he had missed its first transformation from the stiff awkwardness of its youth to the supple, voluminous majesty of its middle age. I have no doubt he would enjoy it now, as it reaches its peak, but how could he reflect on its infant structure when he missed it?

Which is not to say a younger critic cannot write in an opinionated entertaining way about wine; or a young sommelier cannot reliably recommend and properly present good wines or reasonably judge their condition before presenting them to customers in the correct manner. It’s just that their opinion cannot be trusted as deeply as the opinion of critics who have the advantage of some years of immediate experience on their side. How many years? In the event of great Burgundy, thirty years? Forty?

Middle age, in other words, is where a wine critic can FIRST begin to reliably reflect on the quality of wines.

Until you’ve watched several great wines, from several great regions, vintages and varieties, 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 genuine authority about such wines.

Sure, we’ve gotta start somewhere; there’s as much room for kiddy lit as there’s need for kiddy likker.

I’m a writer. I want more people to learn to read. And I’m a drinker, who needs more people to sit and drink with. And I’m growing older, so I need more younger people to excite me and fang me and show me the stuff I missed or forgot.

But consider: while my favourite wine varies as much as my mood or location, probably the one I quote most is the Paul Jaboulet La Chappelle Hermitage 1961. I’ve been extraordinarily lucky to have drunk this on four occasions, from six bottles, two of which were magnums. While I haven’t had my kisser in a glass of it for seven years now, I could still dictate the tasting notes with ease. I was thirty when I first had it (with Gerard Jaboulet), and it was 21. So while I’d missed its youth, like Nick’s La Tache, I knew - before it went from my eager young hooter to my lips - that this was a thing of utter beauty.

Precisely what made it great has taken me another 23 years to appreciate, including pilgrimages, in good years and bad, to the vineyard to sniff its air and taste its dirt and discuss it and its siblings with its makers and their neighbouring rivals. I trust I have at least another 23 years in me to watch it fade.

The La Chappelle 1978 is another matter. I have nuzzled it numerous times since its birth, which I almost attended.

In Jancis Robinson's Vintage Timecharts, Gerard predicted that wine would cruise right on past now and well into the future. To convince me, he autographed the book and sent it to me. He was right: that '78 just sings on and on and on. It may well outlast me, but it's too expensive for these battered pockets.

If I had the money, we could go down together, that '78 and me. Right on through to be with dear Gerard.

But this obsession with age alone takes our attention from other aspects of my argument which are more important to both writers and readers. My criticism of others in this business is more concerned with their writing ability than their age. Who talks of any wine critic’s ability to write in a way which is as engaging and inspiring as it is authoritative and educational?

Before becoming a wine critic, I wrote about various other subjects in a wide range of media. A decade reviewing rock music was most valuable in my crossover to wine. But it’s one thing to create or report stars of one’s own age for readers of the same ilk, and another to write to a broader, less-informed, and certainly less confident and opinionated audience in a way that wins their trust and regular attention. I habitually read the music press to compare my style to writers that much younger people read and respect, and try, as best I can, to keep some street cred in my crit without talking like a chipmunk.

And that, after all, is the primary responsibility of the hired pen. We’re not there to sell wine, but papers. If we can’t sell newspapers for their owners, what are we doing hogging space in their pages? We’re certainly not there working for the wine industry. We’re there to examine it, consider it and discuss it intelligently in an entertaining and reliably honest manner. Once we attract and hold readers by deft manipulation of those complex and hard-won skills, and we're selling lots of newspapers, then we might earn sufficient respect for our readers to buy some of the wine we recommend.

That’s always secondary to selling newspapers, but once the readers who buy the newspapers to read your work begin to trust your recommendations and buy more of them because they find they agree with you and talk about all this with their mates more newspapers get sold and only then more wine.

In a town like Adelaide, you must presume that nearly all of your readers already know more about wine than your editor does. You try recommending bullshit booze to Adelaideans, and not only do they immediately cease buying newspapers, but they'll take your editor to lunch and tell him to sack you.

Which he'll relish.

So you never talk down, you write the truth, and you only ever recommend wines that you know you'd like to drink more of. If the readers take your advice, the winemaker makes some money, and you're already on ahead looking for the next discovery.

Funny thing is, not many editors I’ve worked for have ever understood this. Dumb fucks.

One called me his squirt writer. He called my column the Squirt column. We never even met. Then he was moved along.

Sommeliers are there to sell the restaurant by pleasing customers, not push wines for a rake-off. Not to humiliate and condescend or be sickeningly over-familiar flogging something whose makers paper the flogger's pocket, or powder its nose.

This leads to another key problem that few address. Partly due to the dearth of good writing and reliable criticism, the time when every newspaper and most magazines had an experienced wine writer with a certain amount of skill and space is nearly gone. All over the world, wine columns are shrinking, while more space goes to novices.

And why should a publication with no bread column, or no fruit column, have a wine column? Because there’s less advertising in bread and fruit. And who advertises wine? The monopolist liquor chains who sell mainly wines that no serious critic could write honestly about and still be published without litigation.

There is little light in this tunnel. That’s where those editors imagine their wine writer should be: recommending Two Buck Chuck.

Then, when I read the glossy reams of gastroporn that seem to have made food something to photograph rather than devour, I spew.

People cannot seem to be recognised for their immense gastronomic skill unless they get on friggin television. Enough fat cooks eating with their mouths full on television!

If those endless volumes of psuedo-gastronomic published pap were seriously examined by, say, the judges of the Booker Prize, would any of us win a gong? No way. Could any of us write a piece that Q or Wallpaper or New Yorker would publish? I doubt it.

How could we? By going beyond the simple cant of recommending hundreds of products which barely have a point of difference. How many wine writers mention the intense social and health problems booze causes?

How many mention the massive environmental destruction caused by the wine industry’s monocultural fixations and abuse of our limited water resources?

How many have bothered to seriously research the geology below that gives the earth and its fruit its flavour?

Fascinating yarns be here.

Things to read.

This may even take some pressure off those wine writers who aren’t millionaires. There’s always an intrinsic conflict of interest in a relationship where we critics can only learn our stuff by guzzling free samples of many thousands of wines. How much did my palate cost me to train? Twenty-eight years of extremely low wages, for a start. But, in replacement prices, it cost the business which I critique three or four million bucks worth of wine.

So who owes who?

Doesn’t make sense. Maybe my grandmother was right. We shared a birthday party; she was 100, I was forty. “And how old are you?” she asked, in her Norse Shetland lilt.

“Forty, Sarah”, I said.

“Och”, she retorted, “Ye’re not to be trusted!”

“Why not?”

“Too frae removed from the mysteries o’ berrith and death to be terrustworthy”, she said.

She spent the next three and a half years becoming a baby again.

I’m still lost in the middle, and I know I must struggle to be in the company of the very young and the very old, lest I cloy.

I don’t want my youth back. When they say that youth is wasted on the young, I snigger, disbelieving. It’s horrible, and confusing, and deeply scarring, and I reckon the little bastards deserve every minute of it.

There’s a story about the ninety-something years old Groucho Marx complaining to his Doctor.

“But Mr. Marx”, pled the Doc, “I can’t possibly give you your youth back!”

“I don’t want my youth back”, Marx said... “your job is to make me older and older and older!”

I’m with Groucho.

And whatter we gonna call these punks when the French take sommelier back?

Smellers'll do.

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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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Men of Category

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

by PHILIP WHITE – Wednesday 27 March 2002

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thankyou very much.

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