GRANGE MAN DOES IT AGAIN FOR PENFOLDS

PENFOLDS WINEMAKER PETER GAGO IN THE PRICELESS 1888 KALIMNA VINEYARD IN THE MOPPA, NORTH OF THE BAROSSA; THE OLDEST CABERNET SAUVIGNON ON EARTH IN CONTINUOUS PRODUCTION

Penfolds Lights Fosters Path ... Gago's New Grange All Go ... Gail Kicks Butt For Little Guys
by PHILIP WHITE - a version of this was published in The Independent Weekly

Busy week at the Gago household. One of the Honorable Gail’s five cabinet ministries is Consumer Affairs, so there she was cleaning up the liquor licensing act to make it easier for little guys to sell their wines and bar staff to refuse service to drunks in pubs. Very cool.

At the same time Peter was launching the new Penfold’s super-premiums at Magill, with every wino’s gimlets focused on the new Grange, the 2005.

They don’t need kids, these Gagos. Gail (right) raises smart legislations like offspring. And of the regular annual fixtures on the Casa Blanco calendar, none is better anticipated than the day Pete lines up his new tribe.

Which he did this year at the grand old Kalimna vineyard in the Barossa. Block 42 there is the oldest Cabernet sauvignon vineyard on Earth to be in continuous production. Planted in the Moppa – the flat triangle of alluvium north of the Barossa – in 1888, this is ten precious acres indeed. Grey wind-blown sands sit atop riverine alluvium, and the old grey trunks of the troopers always make me think of Napoleon’s army being snap frozen on the way home from St Petersberg. Biggest difference is, these guys are still fighting, and it’s drought and heat they’ve battled, and wave after wave of owners and corporate geniuses with bad ties.

Gago’s quietly determined restoration of the old farmhouse there looks precisely like the sort of thing you wouldn’t see too much of going on in the way of Fosters these days.

It’s a slomo revolution.

A few years back, Peter complained about how every year for twelve in a row he’d had to re-write his meaning of extreme vintage conditions. Since that alarming utterance, there’s been extreme records broken every year, so it’s almost divinely reassuring to sit down at a table heavy with such vinous reponsibilities and discover they are still mighty Penfolds wines.

“Authority and composure” are words which reappear through all my notes this year. No other big winery on Earth has such an authoritative and expansive range of treasures.

It normally takes four to six dozen wines for me to find something to recommend with more than ninety points. My average over a week of new releases is around seventy, often below. So to gaze confounded at these notes of about thirty wines, including unfinished and unbottled ones from recent years, and see that they fall below ninety on three occasions is, well, can I say comforting?

First wine on the table 94+++. 2005 Reserve Bin Riesling. Opulent, majestic wine more like a mighty Chablis than Germanic Riesling, even at only eleven per cent alcohol. 2009 Koonunga Hill Autumn Riesling, 93: the genteel, autumnal aromas of grannie’s handbag and strawberries in a pleasant off-dry old fashioned style to match the label. 2009 Bin 51 Eden Valley Reserve. Austere and steely: mighty stuff to dissolve that Austrian moustache wax. 93+++. All bases covered in the Riesling dept., see.

And on it went, variety after variety. All bases and styles worth noting are covered. In that unchallengable Penfold’s manner: there’s the sort of reassuring arrogance about them that you like to find in your monarch, especially when times are tough. These may be polite wines, but they’re not shy.

Tellingly, there is no Sauvignon blanc.

Harcore plonkies regard Chardonnay as a sort of gay brother of Riesling, but these four Chardonnays were a lot more Navratilova than Nureyev. Maybe the Thomas Hyland (92+) strayed over toward the younger Bardot, and the Yattarna’s a bit more Catherine the Great (95++), but the forearms are all Martina’s.






















The 08 Cellar Reserve Sangioivese (93+++) smelt like a Tuscan kitchen with a big wood oven; a forthcoming 09 Pinot, just bottled and not yet for release, smelt like Penfolds had exploded all over us. Try “black tea, aniseed balls, Choo Choo Bar, juniper, blueberry, beetroot, sour cream, borscht”.

Peter’s ongoing mission to moderate the raw American oak in brands which depended upon it, without letting them lose a splinter of their Penfold heritage, is best seen in the stunning new Bin 707 2007 (93+++), a totally Australian Cabernet of incredible intensity and finesse. The 06 Cellar Reserve Barossa Cabernet (94++) seemed even more woody, but it’s had 100% French oak. The superiority of 06 over the difficult 07 is most evident here.

And oh yes, the Shiraz. Oh Lawdy. A sicko-plush 06 St Henri (93+++) like a Hispano-Suiza J-12. The charcuterie blast of the 07’s: Magill Estate (92+++) and RWT Barossa (93+) the former with a lollyshop next door; the latter so disarmingly open and neat, like the bucherie of the great Max Noske in Hahndorf. (Sorry Barossa, but we got Germans down this end, too!)

And then, of course, the Big Cheese. Grange. You can read my praise of this marvel alongside, and more detailed notes of all the wines on drankster.blogspot.com. I only wish there was a Peter and Gail blog.


Penfolds Koonunga Hill Shiraz Cabernet sauvignon 2008
$9; screw cap; 13.5% alcohol; 80+ points
I simply cannot imagine why you’d risk fewer dollars on cleanskins of dubious provenance when you can buy this for the price of two schooners of beer. It’s an audacious, cheeky, sassy wine: a brash brat from the Bash Street Kids. The fruit cannot be contained. The stylish oak tries to wrap that fruit up, but it leaps off again and there you go after it, glass after glass. I thought at first the wine had been made like a Beaujolais, with carbonic maceration, but no, Peter assures me, it’s straight down the line conventional winemaking in the Penfolds style.

Penfolds Grange 2005
$650; cork; ??% alcohol; 95+++ points
I gave the 2004 Grange a point more than this, because of its seductive streamlining and silky feminine sheen: Morticia Addams stuff. This is more a cross-dressing Heathcliff. My notes: “Pretty Polly! Wet hessian. Sap: raw sawn wood. Cordite. Incredible bowl of fruits: currants, blackcurrants, red currants, raspberries, nectar, strawberries, cranberries, medlar berries, salmonberries and watermelon. Musk. Civet. Banana lollies. Paper. A chip off the old block. Shit. Cowshed. Milk. Chaos!! Perfection!! Fractal!! In this church, they’re still trying to recognize the congregation.” Which is not to say this wine will not eventually mellow to become one of the best ever.

CANNED WINE = CANNED MUSIC, WET

SOME THINGS DON'T BELONG IN A TIN

Sofia's Canned Sophistry
VinTins V. Bladder Pack
Penfolds Goes All Glassy

by PHILIP WHITE - a version of this first appeared in THE INDEPENDENT WEEKLY

Sceptically mumbling that there’s nothing new under the Sun, your thirsty correspondent was amused and bemused to hear that Sofia Coppola, the film-directing daughter of the famous film-directing Napa wine magnate Francis, had released a sweet blend of pinot blanc, sauvignon blanc and muscat called Blanc de Blancs California. In a pink tin. With a straw attached.

In a rare accurate use of the word, the press bumpf insists this is aimed squarely at the “sophisticated” market. (My Oxford On Historical Principles advises that sophisticated means “mixed with some foreign substance; adulterated; not pure or genuine; deprived of primitive simplicity or naturalness; rendered artificial; falsified ... ”)

This was a Californicated shot at the cute little splits of champagne popular in the sorts of night clubs your writer consistently fails to frequent. After all that utter codswallop about which shaped glass the precious makers of champagne insist their suds are best served in, they feel no quirks about putting it in cute little bottles with plastic stoppers so supermodels can suck it seductively through straws when they’re draped across bars. Lipstick don’t smudge with a straw, see.

Barokes, the South Melbourne winemaker, has had the Vinsafe Wine-in-a-Can on the market for a fairly unremarkable five years. They won something shiny for their canned chardonnay at a show in Singapore, which was fortuitous, because they’re aiming their tinny ordnance at Asian sophisticates, of which there are apparently quite a few.

As the wine glut continues to swill biliously back and forth across the sodden globe, plonkmongers are trying anything, everything, to attract attention and move juice. Most of these are being sold in a fashionably verdant light: the producers generally claim their allegedly new container is more environmentally-friendly. Stuff like like PET plastic bottles, new angles on the bladder pack, and Tetra Packs.

Don’t laugh. The first Tetra-Pak wine these eyes saw was in Robert O’Callaghan’s flash leather briefcase at the Mascot airport in the early eighties. Rocky had not yet learnt the marketing filip he'd get by getting all verdant, and Rockford was still as small as it can only pretend to be today. He’d been working, with adman Tony Parkinson, on a way of emptying the tanks of the old Angle Vale co-op winery. That was back before the arrival of the green angle, but kiddylikker issues were already fomenting, and Rocky’s Sydney promo trip was futile. Parky went on to invent such magnaminities as Black Chook, Timbuktu, and Woop Woop.

And now we’ve got the new aluminium bottle. Aluminium and wine don’t marry. Many metals affect the flavour of wine. Drink your favourite red from a pewter chalice and you’ll know what I mean: it tastes like silver paper stuck in an old amalgam filling. The Barokes folks claim they’re got this cured with their patented plastic film which lines the can, but the consequent flavours still fail to impress this gnarly hack.

What the new USA users of various shapes of aluminium bottles are using to solve this problem is a mystery. Perhaps they imagine there is no problem.

Then, if you're talking about carbon footprint, the cost of smelting aluminium in Australia far outweighs the cost of doing it in nuclear-powered countries: Australia's electricity unfortunately comes from burning coal.

The glass container, for storage and serving, remains the preferred tankard at Casa Blanco. And now, it seems, it may also become the preferred seal.

PENFOLD'S GRANGE MAKER PETER GAGO

For many years, Peter Gago, Grangemaker, has fantasised about somehow having a glass bottle with a glass closure. Not like the natty Vino-Lok glass stoppers gradually appearing now; these have a polyvinyl chloride o-ring seal: the same stuff used in the thin film over the sealing wafer of a screw cap. What Peter dreamt of was a glass-on-glass closure, an emulation of the old apothecary’s bottle, with the machined glass tapered stopper in a tapered, machined glass neck.

This is, of course, impossibly expensive for a modern bottler.

But Peter’s nearly got it, shall we say, cracked. He’s found a machine that can shave the opening of a standard bottle so that its top edge is to all extents and purposes, perfectly flat. Upon this sits a special glass disk, also flat. In prototype trials your writer has observed at Magill, this can be held in place with a ceramic clip or a screw cap yet to be perfected. It is indeed glass-on-glass: no plastic touching wine.

“We know the PVC in the screw cap holds white wine stable for decades without taint”, Peter said, “but red wine? We won’t know until the same sort of time scale has passed. Glass-on-glass will remove any such concern.”

The Grange trials are borderline hush-hush, but they continue. For those wanting more oxygen in their wine – like, say, a cork would admit over time – psuedo-sintered glass is available, meaning the bottler can offer a range of disks with the capacity to admit varying degrees of oxygen ingress without the wine seeping out. So the Grange buyer could take a case in which four bottles will live for almost ever with minimal oxidation; four bottles with, say the degree of oxidation generally achieved with screw caps, and four with the same sort of oxidation you’d get with cork. And no faults.

Totally unsophisticated, see.

HICKINBOTHAM SPEECH RILES WINE POLICE

CASTAGNA'S BIODYNAMIC WINERY AT BEECHWORTH; BEAUTIFUL WINE REFUSED EXPORT APPROVAL

Great Aussie Plonky At Fault With Fault Obsessives
Letting The Wrong Crap Out And The Wrong Crap In
by PHILIP WHITE - A VERSION OF THIS STORY APPEARED IN THE INDEPENDENT WEEKLY

The Ian Hickinbotham speech I quoted last week grew legs. Hick addressed the Sydney International Wine Competition, talking about bacterial diseases in wine, and human tolerance to them. He wondered whether the export approval tasters employed by the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation were “actually stultifying individualism in our winemakers” by occasionally refusing export approvals to wines unfamiliar to them. His insinuation was that they imagined too many wines had bacterial spoilage.

Hick’s point was that the forensic scrutiny with which judges seek faults eliminates many interesting wines with organoleptic characters which they mistake as faults. He said that there are no bacteria in modern finished wines, implying that everybody should relax a little, and that maybe we don’t need these approval tastings at all. Huon Hooke reported this in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Steve Guy, who manages the export tastings, quickly reassured his troops that Hick was out of touch: things have changed; systems improved. But beautiful wines – Grange, Castagna, Torbreck etc. - have been refused approval in past years. These judgings have been like our wine shows: powerful levellers that can lop the eccentric, brave, and strange, and reinforce the industrial status quo which writers and drinkers all over the Old World are rejecting. They’ve approved thousands of dead flat boring crap plonks plastered with dot paintings and weird beasties, then denied the likes of Castagna et al an export approval because they thought they could smell something funny in one of his biodymanic beauties.

Having had one wine refused approval by two tasting panels, Julian Castagna told the authorities he would take the wine to London, call a press conference with television and all the wine critics who'd been suggesting Australian wines were all too boring and show them the quaklity of wines that we were not permitted to export. He suddenly got his approval.

Hick also took a typically obtuse swipe at writers who recommend wines which smell of lychees. “This disease is a consequence of bacteria attacking grape sugar during some stage of fermentation”, he said.

Lychee is an aroma, and flavour, I often find in gerwurztraminer. I like it there. Gewurz can also have lovely musk aromas, and rosewater, or turkish delight. Very few Australians have mastered this grape: this country is too hot for something that comes from the colder reaches of Alpine Europe.

Gewurztraminer succeeds in parts of New Zealand and Tasmania, but you need a hillbilly winemaker. Wild yeast, old oak, disdainful treatment is what it loves. No hard hats or safety glasses required.

In the early ’eighties, I learned to love the Reserve and Vendage Tardive gewurztraminer of Hugel, and my Alsace mate, Michel Dietrich, taught me how to drink this variety with his father’s Dietrich of Kaiserberg wines, with choucroute, the Alsace sauerkraut. You serve a great steaming plate of pickled cabbage with dollops of hot mustard and grilled smoked sausages of pork or game packed with chili and black pepper and you drink gallons of flinty, musky gewurztraminer.

Now, if gewurztraminer is not the ideal grape for this baked slab of country, I cannot imagine why on Earth anybody’d gamble for success with traminer, the original alpine white from which the slightly pink gewurztraminer mutated.

So why are Australian winemakers who have never worked in Alpine Europe suddenly growing, making, and marketing, traminer? They don’t attempt gewurztraminer. So why its awkward grandfather? And why are they calling it albariño?

Because they were sold a dud, that's why.

In the desperate search for new flavours, somebody in Australia decided that the punters would just love alboriño, the acidic thick-skinned white from Galacia and northern Portugal, where it’s called alvarinho. The CSIRO, in response to persistent demands, imported some, put it through the serpentine wiles of the government's quarantine process, and grew a scrillion cuttings, which they sold. These have been planted along the dead River, and everywhere from Orange to Clare, the Barossa, and McLaren Vale.

I expected it would take our winemakers a few vintages to work out what to do with the new baby. They seemed oilier, somehow thicker than expected. “They’ll work it out” I told myself thoughtfully. You can check my reviews by searching for alboriño on DRANKSTER. But it suddenly appears that the stuff they bought is savignin blanc B, a Tyrolean grape that also grows in Jura.

Even forgetting the freezing alpine nature of these places, which we do not emulate anywhere, it would be fair to say that the “yellow wines” which are where most European savignin ends up, are not too much in the way of your standard Australian industrial export-approved sort of a thing, if you get my drift. Try the Jura Vin Jaune recipe: six years in old untopped barrels, where a yeast like flor grows on the meniscus, slowing oxidation, to make a sort of unfortified sherry.

Savignin blanc B is traminer. Their DNA matches, like zinfandel and primitivo. Same diff. We may well see some respected albariños suddenly becoming savignin blanc B, much to the embarrassment of those critics who raved fulsomely about their quality and promise. To do their savignin blanc B justice, all Australian regions might have to sprout a snow-peaked mountain like the one on the Seaview bottle. Pity the whitecoats hadn’t done a little import checking and sniffed the cuttings for lychee.

But the lawyers will make up for them. This’ll take years.

COMMENT FROM IAN HICKINBOTHAM:

"I should tell you that the lychee smell of 'disease' is not that of Gewuerztraminer. It is possible you have never seen it, but it is most likely to occur in Chardonnay (where it does not 'over-lap' the pleasant lychee smell associated with that fragrant variety).

"Interestingly, Gewuerztraminer still only constitutes 0.5% of German vineyards (in spite of its name). People tire of it!"

HICKINBOTHAM SAYS PASTEUR WAS WRONG

Is Oz Too Obsessed With Germs?
Great Aussie Plonky Gets Volatile

Controversial Keynote Speech Delivered by Ian Hickinbotham RD Oe OAM at the Sydney International Wine Competition's Awards & Trophies Presentation Banquet 2009

Pasteur's pronouncement regarding wine was — and I say it slowly with Anglicised 'pronunciation' — if bacteria are present, 'le mal existait'. As the first Australian oenologist to 'allow' bacteria to grow in wine (to do the malo-lactic fermentation and at a time when an oenologist was sacked for not adding sulphur dioxide to prevent any secondary fermentation), perhaps I have a duty.

IAN HICKINBOTHAM RD Oe OAM - CLICK IMAGE FOR A REVIEW OF HIS ASTONISHING AUTOBIOGRAPHY

There is a trade story from the days when Penfolds Grange was Grange Hermitage. Seems the Australian Wine Board's powerful tasting panel rejected the great wine for export on the grounds that the wine was volatile! To the credit of Penfolds and indeed, the wine industry itself (if true) the story was kept 'in house'.

'Volatility' is an all-embracing word: it means 'too much vinegar in a wine' — in various forms — and is invariably the consequence of bacterial activity.

There are commendable movements to revert to more natural ways and the word 'biodynamic' is much bandied, while last year at this august event, wine writer, Max Allen, expounded the biodynamic viticulture movement, mentioning the mystical cow's horn filled with manure, to be emptied onto the vineyard when the moon is in the right phase! Significantly, these attempts at embracing the old ways concern the 'growing' phase. My subject concerns the 'winemaking' phase — a natural extension, surely!

There are about 8 recognised diseases of wine, but you may never see any of them due to Australian oenology probably — not possibly — probably being the best in the world! I actually ponder if our wines are too clean now! English critics (who really lead the world) have been saying this another way, by asserting that our wines are bland, that they all taste the same and consequently have no reflection of 'place': they lack 'terroir'.

In 50 vintages, I saw 'graisse' in a wine once and it was indeed an experience — and spectacular. The wine was viscous: when poured from one glass into another, 'plopping' was quite audible! (In viscosity, it was more viscous than olive oil.) The event was the subject of recent correspondence to 'Wine International' magazine: we had missed adding sulphur dioxide to the new wine. French technical literature gave us the definition 'graisse', which can be loosely translated into our word 'fat'.

True, the content of sulphur dioxide in wine is a tenth of the amount added to some foods, especially commercial smorgasbord type salads, but even Japanese would not buy black apricots! Importantly, it is commendable that when I started as an apprentice, 400 parts per million was a normal dosage to Riesling wines, but a quarter of that addition would be considered quite excessive by current oenologists.

Another disease I saw in the 1950s afflicted a million litres of dry red made from Shiraz and Grenache that was undrinkable because of intense bitterness of taste, a consequence of unbridled activity by some bacteria!

Again, the remedy turned on judicious use of sulphur dioxide and clarification. The bitterness had resulted from bacteria attacking the natural glycerine of the wine: the French define the disease as amertume. (It is not generally known that glycerine is about the 4th natural component of table wines, after water, alcohol and acid.) Significantly, that wine became the second Australian dry red to win an international Gold medal!

LOUIS PASTEUR: WRONG?

Still another disease (and one you may well have seen without knowing) is 'tourne', which was described by Louis Pasteur himself. As the name implies, it turns dry red brown in colour with loss in desirable fruitiness when only months old. The disease is caused by bacteria attacking the natural tartaric acid in dry red wine, but such wine is at least drinkable!

Also drinkable, and actually appreciated by some (including some wine writers) are white wines that develop the distinctive smell of lychee fruit. This disease is a consequence of bacteria attacking grape sugar during some stage of fermentation.

Current winemakers have their own scourge in the form of Brettanomyces, commonly known as "brett". This wayward yeast affects dry red wine and 'metallic taste' seems to be the common descriptor. Prevention centres on increased use of sulphur dioxide, while oenologists are almost blamed for being all too sedulous, thereby bringing the scourge upon themselves!

Ancient civilisations drank increasingly acescent wines during the year, just because they could not keep their wine away from air and the ever-present bacteria progressively turned all of their table wines to vinegar. Vintage festivals are a reminder: they were the wonderful celebration of the new wine, which really meant – no more having to drink near vinegar: indeed at eleven months the ancients were drinking almost straight vinegar. Tourists in Europe today are still heartened to see the telltale bush affixed to the winemaker's door to inform the traveller that the new wine is ready.

It was only some 300 years ago (not long in the 10,000 year saga) that the English made better bottles, that lead to the use of cork, which neatly compensated for the small differences in bottle mouth dimensions and protected wine from air somewhat.

When I trained as an oenologist in 1950, an inordinate amount of time was spent teaching us to recognise acescence. Indeed we were actually trained to decrease our thresholds of perception, with wines containing decreasing volatile acidity! Importantly, it was instilled into us that if a wine displayed traces of volatile acidity, then it would assuredly get worse. Volatile acidity would inevitably increase with aging. So the official tasting panel of the Australian Wine Board (now the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation) rejected wines with trace amounts of volatile acidity. Today, that assertion is no longer valid, because for at least 20 years, oenologists can remove every bacterium that could increase the volatile acidity in wines!

Remembering that Grange has a relatively high volatile acidity — deliberately — and the official tasting panel is charged with approving every wine intended for export, the panel comprises tasters who live near Adelaide. Further, given that the task is voluntary and panellists are called at short notice (often so the wine can be loaded onto a departing ship), panellists are generally retired wine industry executives — who — importantly, were trained in detection of miniscule amounts of volatile acidity in wines. Add to that normal human competitiveness — who can detect the lowest threshold amount of Volatile Acidity — and we have panels that are hell-bent on detecting volatile acidity — and rejecting them for export. Contrary to the out-dated entrenched opinion, though such a modern wines may contain traces of volatile acidity — its amount will not increase: there are no bacteria in such modern bottled wines!

So we do not need the official tasting panel of the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation? Perhaps they are actually stultifying individualism in our winemakers.

Our two sons went to Bordeaux and Burgundy universities. Stephen told me that at Bordeaux University they actually teach that bacteria and moulds on grapes contribute something to the final wine!

Renowned English critic, Michael Broadbent, wrote in 'Decanter' Magazine in 2006:

“All were aware that Robert Parker had given the 1990 100 points. The fault is brettanomyces. Like volatile acidity it is often present, can even enhance the smell and taste. But over a certain level of noticeability, it is a fault. The day I was drafting this article I telephoned Farr Vintners, ‘when did you last sell 1990 Montrose?’ ‘We sold a case this morning: £2,200 in bond’.”

Finally, let's consider the famous pronouncement of the French professor long ago:

"If we did not interfere in the winemaking process, we would be drinking vinegar — not wine — as vinegar is the end product of Nature's glorious scheme"!

Foster's: two bill too big

by PHILIP WHITE
This was first published in The Independent Weekly in February 2008

They just don’t get it. Between them, The Australian Financial Review and The Australian published a virtual novella about Foster’s CEO Trevor O’Hoy in one recent week. I mean novella in the number of words, but it applies in another way. Let me explain.

The Fin Review scooped everyone with a folksy piece about the former St. Kilda footballer and economics grad, concluding that he’s not demonstrative or flamboyant, but deeply cerebral and committed, and that he feels that some see his humility as a weakness. Jeez.

But the guts of the story was Trev’s humble back-flip over his purchase of Southcorp. After thirty years slavery in the bowels of Carlton & United Breweries, he’d ascended the throne of CUB’s umbrella, Foster’s, promising shareholders there’d “be no big acquisitions on his watch”. Six months later, after a brief chat with chairman Frank Swan – three minutes after – he approved the $3.7 billion takeover. Which Merrill Lynch analyst David Errington agrees was $2 billion too big.

So somebody kicked some arse at The Australian. Out came the me-too scribble. Matthew Stevens called O’Hoy “just a tad gloomy”, and “wry, personable and approachable”, if showing “slightly disturbing honesty” in recent “engagements with the media”, meaning the AFR yarn.

In the same Business section, The Australian’s John Durie was a little less romantic in his “Foster’s chiefs must deliver or go”.

The takeover was a disaster. Showing devastating ignorance of the wine market, O’Hoy attempted to slash costs by having his new premium wine brands, like Penfold’s, distributed and sold by the same dudes who flogged his ordinary beer.

So you run a medium-sized pub. You sell a lake of Cooper’s and a fairly big dam of premium red, and have a couple of vintages of Grange on your list, which came from your private collection, because you don’t sell enough Koonunga Hill to earn yourself a Grange allocation. In comes the Foster’s rep, wanting you to switch taps to Foster’s and Carlton, and replace your precious boutique hand-made red listings with industrial plonk from a portfolio containing 100 brands and two or three thousand products.

So you put down your bar cloth, forget about your lunch customers, and help the sweaty beer rep through his great big friggin’ book? Uh-huh.

Both newspapers talked about the sacking of the three or four thousand, and how O’Hoy eventually repented his error, and appointed seventy wine apostles to sell, well, wine. Their brilliant plan is to “mosaic” customers, a new verb meaning “think about what they buy, then push equivalent bar codes from the thousands in your book”.

Given Southcorp’s history with computer systems and information networks, I’d avoid being mosaicked. The more lugubrious retailers claim service has improved; humble O’Hoy says the worst is over.

But that’s not my point. My point is the two gaping holes in these reports justify the second implication of “novella”. Neither mentions premium wine as a gastronomic item. It’s a commodity, tied like Gulliver with the infernal strings of percentages of this and targets of that and returns of so many per cent or even less. And fair enough, for this is business, and this writer is no expert at that. But this writer is expert at recognizing the difference between an industrial product made in a refinery by industrial chemists wearing steel-capped boots, hard hats and safety glasses, and a wholesome, organic drink made with minimal irrigation, bugger all chemicals, and a whole lotta love, by someone in thongs, with a soulful understanding of the gastronomic rewards implicit in such luxury.

He’s more Country Road than thongs, but think Peter Gago and his Grange. Therein lies value. And shareholder return.

The other hole’s bigger. It’s called water.

Do these people – O’Hoy, Foster’s, and the business hacks – know something I don’t?

The arid land irrigation which pumped up nearly all Southcorp’s grapes is over. No matter that the cotton fields and the rice paddies and the dairy cattlemen waste more water than the grape cockies, who happen to waste shocking amounts anyway. And why not? They pay bugger all.

But such sugar mining is over. It can’t continue. Even if the Queensland rain did fill the River for a month, the time it will take to convert all Murray Valley irrigators from overhead sprinklers and open channels to pipes and drippers will be long enough to get us to the next normal drought, and by then, it’ll be over. Again. Still.

Not to mention salt.

Add to this the strangulations Karlene Maywald has clamped on the Murray water irrigators of Clare, the Barossa, Langhorne Creek and even the recycling experts, McLaren Vale, who use no Murray, and you’ve got a problem that’s much bigger than Trevor O’Hoy’s cerebral humility.

It’s a ruder, truer measure of the real value of Foster’s.

A textbook life

by PHILIP WHITE
This was first published in The Independent Weekly in March 2008

It was a shock to finally meet Ian Hickinbotham. I’d read his perky, provocative wine criticism for years in the Financial Review, The Age and Epicurean. As a brattish young wine hack loose amongst the bullshitting colonels, I lived in awe of his venerable knowledge of biochemistry, his incredible winemaking history, and his fearless, forensic attacks on the fusty conservatism which dominated winery boardrooms in 1980.

He eventually arrived in the flesh: stocky and abrupt, bright-eyed and particular, leading with that Burt Lancaster/George Clooney jaw that marks the Hickinbothams. In a day when great wine men were rarely seen without suits or blazers beneath their lab jackets, he sported an outrageous open-necked check shirt, and curly grey hair down to his shoulders.

Born in 1929, Hick grew up at Roseworthy, where his father had founded the wine science, or oenology, course. At twelve he had his “first practical chemistry lesson”, when, by titration, he analysed the “strength” of various popular soaps. In his essential autobiography, Australian Plonky, just published by The Adelaide University Barr Smith Press, he boasts of still washing with Velvet soap instead of the trendier brands, “appreciating that the practical lesson … was to ensure that young scientists understood the power of advertising”.

Hick’s first vintage was in the Barossa at Hardy’s Dorrien – now Siegersdorf - where, as a sixteen year old, he “revelled in the body-building aspect” of shoveling skins. As captain, his grandfather Dave led Geelong through the 1886 footy season undefeated, and later became that club’s first coach. Hick lists his own football and cricket achievements with as much cocky pride as he reminds us of his amazing winemaking record.

And amazing it is. After Dorrien, he worked at Hardy’s Mile End “champagne” cellars, began studying soil science, and moved back to the Barossa to the SA Grape Growers Co-operative Limited.

In 1949, in his second year at Roseworthy, he began work on untangling the biochemical mysteries of the malo-lactic fermentation. As oenologist at David Wynn’s Coonawarra Estate, in 1952, the year of the first release of Max Schubert’s Grange (the volatile acidity of which seemed to bemuse Hick from the start), he was the first winemaker on Earth to deliberately induce, manage, and understand a malo-lactic fermentation.

Until then, French winemakers knew that after the initial ferment, where yeast converted sugar to alcohol, some sort of mumbo-jumbo happened in their cellars. They never understood how this secondary ferment involved bacteria converting the harsh malic acid of grapes – the sharp acid of apples – to the soothing, milky, lactic acid we first taste from our mothers’ nipples.

Hick had just written his thesis on “malo”, and it was the keen enlightenment of David Wynn that let him proceed in practice. In those days, Australian winemakers added sulphur dioxide in such enormous quantities that no bacterium could live comfortably in the wine after its primary ferment, and most, like the Roseworthy eminence, Dr. Bryce Rankine, believed malo-lactic ferments simply did not occur in Australia.

Wynn, on the other hand, was an angel of enlightenment. When at Wynn’s Melbourne home for his interview, Hick recalls a poet reading to the dinner group, “while the ballerina, Sally Gilmour, lay on the carpet”. He was hypnotized by her pointy feet. Wynn was the first to use the word “estate” on his label, and perfected the bladder pack – then called the “table cask” – that Hick copied from an imperfect Italian vinegar container.

And on he went. With his wife, Judith, Hick ran the Penola pub, where all Coonawarra winemakers drank, then the famous Gini’s restaurant in Toorak for a decade, employing young winemakers like John Wade and Gary Baldwin as waiters. Knowing the Barossa to be home to numerous Nazi sympathisers, some of whom he thinks may have supplied German U-boats with fresh food off our coast in the dead of night, he convinced the paranoid Barossans to change the very Australian name of their co-op to the outrageously Hunnish Kaiser Stuhl. As manager there, he increased sales from £160,000 in 1955 to £740,000 by 1962. He brought Wolf Blass to Australia. He was the first Australian to pasteurise wine. He was the first on Earth to use a centrifuge to stop fermentation. He invented and perfected many of the processes used in the production of commercial sparkling wines. He was a pioneer in the use of stainless steel, insulation, screw caps, and, in The Bulletin of 28 August, 1984, he was credited for initiating one quarter of Australia’s 25 top-selling wines.

While no winelover will fail to be fascinated by it, there are many sanctimonious plonkmongers who will be very shitty with this book: insiders will recognize their charlatan-shaped omissions. Hick is, after all, a Hickinbotham. One wonders what Australia would look like if he’d gone into the villa rash business with his big brother.

Home on the Grange

by PHILIP WHITE
This was first published in The Independent Weekly in April 2008


I spent the ANZAC weekend reading A. J. Liebling’s inimitable New Yorker dispatches from the North African front in World War Two. What a godforsaken mess! And there in the midst of it was Grange maker Max Schubert. Shivering with Liebling and a glass of 389 in my ancient blacksmith’s cottage, I felt very close to my old friend Max, who grew up in a blacksmith’s cottage at Moculta.

Much is made of Max’s second international trip, when he studied the great wines of France in 1950, and came home with the recipe of Grange fermenting in his mind. But his first big trip had been ten years earlier, when he served in Libya, Egypt, Greece, Crete, Palestine, Libya and Syria before spending two years in New Guinea. In one terrible action near Mount Olympus, Stuka dive bombers blew his truck to smithereens about him, killing two of his off-siders, and another two hundred hapless infantrymen a little further along the track.

“I never enjoyed the army” he told Huon Hooke in Max Schubert – Winemaker. “I volunteered, because I wanted to prove that I was one hundred per cent Australian … I did my job … there’s absolutely no bloody future in wars.”

Max never met the great Liebling, but as a committed gourmand who covered the war from dining tables in trenches and bars as much as fine restaurants, I’m sure Liebling would have had much in common with our Max, who loved little more than getting his knees under a well-laden table once the impossible work was done.

What a pity that Max did not live to see the triumph Peter Gago has made of the Penfold’s premiums!

In spite of takeovers, booms and busts, the stubborn persistence and continual striving for improvement that marked Max’s winemaking career carry on seamlessly under Peter’s husbandry.

I spent a vintage day with him recently at his beloved Magill cellars, which must have been Australia’s poshest in the early Grange days. Peter has them sparkling like new, and still makes all the Penfold’s super premium reds there, pretty much in the old way. Of course vast improvements in biochemistry, cooperage, available varieties and vineyard selection make it easier than it was in the early days of Max and the likes of the great chemist, Ray Beckwith, but nevertheless, to the untrained eye, things go on pretty much as always.

The heatwave had not yet hit when I called. Peter was finishing his pinot ferments and beginning to accept perfect shiraz, continuously evaluating each precious parcel, adjusting his winemaking this way or that as he aimed each batch at a different end product.

“This one’s for 389”, he’ll murmer, sniffing a glassful of heartily fermenting must. “And this … oooh this? This is headed for St. Henri…”

Some august body of European gourmands had just announced the 1971 St Henri to be worth a perfect score, so he opened another, just to check. It was an astonishing symphony of orange chocolate, pickled lemon, caramel, silk, and Bal a Versailles perfume.

“I woulda bracketed that with 62 and 69 personally” said veteran Grange maker John Bird, as I tried to summarise that sumptuous tincture in my sort of English. I gave it 98 points – the highest I’ve ever awarded an Australian red.

But the new wines were the real reason for this tasting, and let me tell you, there will be some 98 pointers amongst them when they get through the awkwardness of their yoof, not that it’ll take forty years.

Like the Reserve Bin 06A 2006 chardonnay: a long, savage, crunchy beast from the Adelaide Hills – 94 points, easily. In deliberately untidy counterpoint to the staunch, reserved Yattarna 2005, which looks like an Exclusive Brethren in comparison. Same points, but more later.

The 06 Cellar Reserve Adelaide Hills Pinot is Peter’s best one yet, with its mint and bitter cherries, wild yeast and long-haul tannins. 94+++. And his Cellar Reserve Sangiovese 06 plays similar music with its feral heartiness and unfettered natural verve. 94+.

There were two mind-boggling Cellar Reserve Barossa cabernets, the 05 (94++) due for possible release in September; the 06 (95++) impossibly youthfully brash and brilliant, and, as my notes say, “if you must have American oak, have this”, meaning the drop dead gorgeous 05 Bin 707 (94+++).

Shiraz? The newly released St Henri 04 (95+++) “… perfectly formed slender silky juicy dry red...” will give the 71 a run for its money; the 05 Magill Estate “..another 05 that breaks all the rules – just wait…” 94+++; the 05 RWT “…Sophia Loren…” 95++.

All great trips and adventures, these wines. In promoting them, Peter Gago travels the world in a way that would make Joe Liebling and Max Schubert wince. But imagine being half way through all this and feeling sudden obligation to dash off and do your bit dodging Stukas in the north African desert.

For more reviews visit http://drankster.blogspot.com