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

SOUTH EAST OF OZ CONTINUES TO FRY

FIRES BLAZING IN GIPPSLAND, VICTORIA, LAST NIGHT THREATENED KEY LA TROBE VALLEY POWER STATIONS AND BURNED MANY HOUSES TO THE GROUND

Victoria’s Gippsland Ablaze

Picking Begins In Intolerable Heat

by PHILIP WHITE

In spite of two slightly cooler, breezy nights in the ranges, South Australia’s vignerons have started to pick what’s left of a horrible harvest.

2009 looks like being the earliest vintage on record.

As vulnerable people are dying in this unprecedented fiery furnace, the Bureau of Meteorology has begun issuing a new warning atop the usual ultra-violet warnings, blackout forecasts, and pollen counts for asthmatics and allergics: this is called the Heat Health Warning.

The Adelaide interstate bus terminal, which is air-conditioned, has opened its doors to offer the homeless some cool respite on its concrete, cold drinks from its faucets, and a shower in its travellers’ amenities.

In the fledgeling cool-climate viticulture region of Gippsland, east of Melbourne, Victoria, bushfires are threatening the power supply lines and generating stations as the precious cool-climate rainforests of the Strzlecki Ranges explode in flames.

We expect another day over 40°C today (Sunday 1^st February), and consistent high thirties or forties through the next few days. The optimist may believe forecasts of mid-thirties temperatures later in the week, but optimism is thin on the ground this vintage.

Old unirrigated bushvines, the heart and soul of much of South Australia’s super-premium fruit, are taking the record heatwave very badly. Common misunderstanding about the resilience of the oldest strugglers includes the notion that such vines are somehow tougher than modern, trellised, irrigated vineyards.

The hellish heat of the summer of 2009 puts paid to such naive shibboleths: many of the grandest old vineyards have fruit that’s cooked and shrivelling before they even reached veraison.

The ones that might survive with tolerable quality are those with the best balance of leaf and fruit; carefully-managed canopies for shade, a modest supply of water, and an aspect that shelters them to some degree from the worst afternoon heat.

Breezes that move the leaves are good, as the leaf surfaces don’t simply take the full blast of the sun at the same angle all day, but then the horrid northerlies that have been blasting in from the vast central desert simply dehydrate everything they hit, and quickly.

Vineyards in reflective soils are the worst hit: the grapes are being roasted top and bottom as leaves roll, droop and fade. In normal conditions, such reflective soils are a boon, ensuring smooth, even ripening.

Heat susceptible varieties, like viognier, are unlikely to be picked. Growers of chardonnay in anything other than very cool places are wondering whether to bother picking at all.

Newly-planted vines are perishing in their grow tubes.

My bellwether vineyard, opposite the cool Salopian Inn in McLaren Vale, this vintage had budburst a fortnight earlier than the previous year, when harvest was the earliest on record and a fifteen-day heatwave blitzed everything that wasn’t picked early.

This year, as DRINKSTER then predicted, harvest is yet another fortnight earlier.

There is little traditional Aussie humour on the grape receival aprons and hoppers; stoic sobriety hangs over the whole wine industry. This will be a year when depression is as big a threat to vignerons as financial stress and the usual vintage exhaustion.

But before breakfast, I called Michael Waugh, of Greenock Creek in the Barossa, and he’s still showing his usual droll digger’s wit.

“We’re not crying in our beer”, he chuckled. “There’s nothing we can do about it. But, you know better than anybody, all our vineyards are on different soil types and they’re not all reacting terribly badly. And we only grow reds, which are tougher.

“The sauvignon blanc next door looks dead, but then sauvignon blanc in the Barossa never made much sense to me.

“The modern vineyards that are generally over-watered are carking it – they spoil them with too much coddling and the poor vines have no physiological resistance to conditions like these. They just fall over.

“But, you know, our acids are holding – last week that was all we had, bloody acid – and later this week they reckon it’s going to cool down.

“So, no panic here.”

Michael promises to report later today, once he’s done a thorough inspection of his priceless suite of vineyards, so watch for a later post.

Another wry exception to the fact of this stressed-out, deeply-shocked and exhausted community came by SMS yesterday. My mate Pat Conlon, the wine-loving Minister for Transport and Infrastructure, who has no reason to laugh as his systems grind to a halt in the heat, sent me the following message:

“The Premier has urged people to make sure they check on elderly friends in this heat. So. You OK?”

This came to my phone five hours before the message to which he referred.

“For urgent assistance”, it said, “phone 000. Do not reply to this message. IMPORTANT SA GOVERNMENT HEAT HEALTH WARNING: Heat Stress Can Kill; Stay Cool; Stay Inside; Drink plenty of water; Check the safety of vulnerable neighbours; Listen to your radio.”

STOP PRESS

NOSES TO THE WINESTONE: DRINKSTER BODYGUARD PETER PAYE, (L), WITH PHILIP WHITE AND PENFOLDS WINEMAKER PETER GAGO (R) IN VINTAGE 2008, WHICH WAS EXTREME, BUT NOT AS EXTREME AS 2009.

Last year, Penfolds winemaker Peter Gago told DRINKSTER that for the last fifteen vintages, he’d had to annually readjust his definition of extreme weather.

He’s just done it again.

“We start fermenting at Magill on Tuesday”, he told DRINKSTER this morning.

“Not unexpectedly, this is the earliest vintage on record.

“We had some shrivel in the most stressed vineyards yesterday, but miraculously, it’s not excessive.

“Even though the heat has been hauntingly constant, we’re seeing quite a lot of variation between vineyards.”

Typical of Peter's usual calm politeness, this matter of "quite a lot of variation" leads me to wonder just how far the winebiz spindoctors will go in their attempts to suggest things aren't as bad as they initially said.

Various regions are already sending out the message that they're on top of it, or that they're not beaten yet. The more brazen tuggers will soon be saying it's a great year for this or that for whatever magical reason.

Such fey blatherings will of course backfire when the same people later attempt to get financial assistance from government, as grain farmers do with drought relief. Mallee wheatboys never pull any punches when they know their season's cactus.

Winemakers could learn something from the disarming honesty of the graziers, pastoralists and grain cockies, but I doubt it'll happen this year. Just depends on how bad things really get.

But Peter Gago's guarded optimism - or hint of it - echoes Michael Waugh’s Greenock Creek report. Check back later today for Michael's full round-up.