PATRITTI SWAPS PIEDMONTS: ITALY TO S.A.

GIOVANNI PATRITTI, LEFT: A VERY NEW AUSTRALIAN, SELLING ICE CREAM BY THE ADELAIDE BOTANIC GARDENS GATES IN THE LATE TWENTIES.

The Patrittis Throw A Top Party
Great New Tasting & Sales Suite
At Aussie's Oldest Italian Winery
by PHILIP WHITE

There was a special party in an ordinary little back street in Dover Gardens, Adelaide. The Patritti family had used some of the beautiful Jarrah hardwood from their old wine vats to make a stylish new sales and tasting suite at their suburban winery that hardly anybody knows about. Now it was complete they thought they’d have a bit of a knees-up with politicans and the mayor and their business colleagues, customers, and drinking mates.

A CELEBRATION AT THE SAME WINERY IN EARLIER YEARS: ITALIAN DANCE PARTY IN THE FIFTIES. CHECK THE DUDE IN THE SHADES AND PALE SUIT SECOND FROM RIGHT OGLING THE PRETTY GIRL'S DERRIEIRE ...

I stood outside the marquee to the side, brooding over a ravishing Patritti Barossa Saperavi 2009 ($14; 93+++ points), watching Ines Patritti take the microphone to welcome us. She was shy, and she was obviously moved, and her story was even more moving.

“My Father, Giovanni Patritti, arrived in Adelaide in 1925 at the age of 25 from Piedmont, Northern Italy,” Ines said with humble dignity. There were some sniffles, the big inhalation, recomposure, and a fresh start. You knew that what she was about to say would somehow explain how that mighty winery behind her grew there, and it was obvious she’d grown with it, and in it, that they were part of each other..

“We have no idea how he managed with no English and a community with few native countrymen. However, manage he did – initially doing odd jobs, even selling ice cream as you can see from the old photo taken in front of the gate at the Adelaide Botanic Gardens.

“He came to live in the Marion district around 1926. Making wine was second nature and through the production of wine for his own consumption came a business enterprise. As more Italians arrived in steady numbers, the demand for Italian style red also increased and the business began to flourish.”

Some big people in suits, and a lot of quite ordinary folk, stood in dead silence as they absorbed the weight of the Patritti story. Ines’s description of those long decades of sweat and toil emerged with its own patina in place. Her words had the same beige tint as the old family photos flickering on the screen.

Giovanni (right) leased some land to start with, and gradually purchased more, some of which was planted to old bush vines, as was much of the Adelaide Hills piedmont. There were vineyards from Skye right along the slope to Marion and hooking back north to Glenelg: very fine vineyards which were gradually devoured by mindless villa rash.

I have an etching from the late 1800s, made from somewhere around Skye, looking south across the Grange Hermitage and Romalo, down along that rich piedmont slope. Adelaide is a distant smoky village; the great swathe of vines fades gradually into the Gulf St Vincent, patron of vine growers, thirty kilometers away.

Some of the most recent vineyards to go, those last few hectares the Patrittis owned, were compulsorily acquired by the state government to build a school. The family decided to stay put with the winery, nevertheless, as modern transport made it very easy to truck grapes from over Flagstaff Hill around Morphett and McLaren Vales. Fully understanding that they were part of the population growth essential for the colony’s growth, they thought a school was the best idea, if indeed population growth meant their beloved vines had to go.

THE PATRITTI BROTHERS PAUSING FOR A STOCKTAKE IN THE LATE SIXTIES

But you see a bristle of quiet rage when you ask where the school is.

“After a few years they knocked the school down, sent the kids further away, sub-divided the land, and built more houses,” Ines’s big winemaker son, James Mungall, said later, eerily reflecting what the University of Adelaide plans to do with Glenthorne Farm, the 206ha research property it was granted for a dollar a decade ago, just over the ridge. How stupid we are to imagine that houses are more vital than productive gardens, education and research!

In the dark old vintage halls out the back, James, and his trusted buddy, winemaker Ben Heide, annually crushes around 1000 tonnes of grapes. With 500 tonnes crushed elsewhere, and brought in as must, they make fifty products, give or take a few.

GIOVANNI AND GEOFF PATRITTI WITH THE NEW VINTAGE FRUIT: NOTE THE HAND-MADE BRICKS IN THE WINERY WALLS: EVERYBODY CHIPPED IN TO MAKE THEM AFTER WORK AND ON WEEKENDS. WHEN THEY HAD SUFFICIENT, THEY'D BUILD A NEW WALL.

“The original buildings that had been constructed with corrugated iron - and seaweed for insulation - were slowly rebuilt with hand-made bricks that were manufactured on the winery premises,” Ines continued.

“Power was made available when Dad’s third son, Geoffrey was born in 1947 and this was when a 10 hp Blackstone motor drove the wooden Horwood & Bagshaw crusher.

“Dad met and married my mother, Giovanna Callegari, in Melbourne in 1938. Mum was a sister of one of his Melbourne-based customers. They went on to have three sons and a daughter (me), all of whom entered the family business.”

THE SECOND GENERATION OF AUSTRALIAN PATRITTIS: PETER, JOHN, GEOFF AND INES IN THE LONG-GONE DORADILLA VINEYARD AT DOVER GARDENS IN THE EARLY 70s

English Adelaide got a bit shy about its European immigrants during the wars. If you were German, or Italian, with the wrong attitude, or the wrong contacts back home, you were locked up for the duration of the war. But after the second war, influential people like winemakers Ian Hickinbotham (Kaiser Stuhl) and Colin Gramp (Orlando) made it fashionable, if not a little quaint, to be German in such a quaintly English settlement. People came to the Barossa to look at the Germans, listen to them, and try their food and wine.

There were, however, “New Australian” Italians quietly filling up backstreets and market gardens all that time, enduring the kind of loutish irrespect earlier settlers of this land habitually show the newest wave of immigrants, whatever their homeland. Life was tough for those we derided as Spags, Eye-ties, and Dagoes. It wasn’t cool to be wog in this town until those scarlet Ferraris screamed around the streets in the first Adelaide Formula One Grand Prix in 1986. After that it was compulsory.

Ines made no mention of any of this. She pressed on with the story of the family’s export success, explaining how their first cargo of barrels of red wine were sent by ship up the east coast of Australia to the Queensland cane fields in the ’forties. The tireless Italians who built a good deal of modern Australia need lots of good red wine.

Giovanni Amadio also knew this. He leased vineyards north along the Adelaide piedmont at East Marden, and sold his Amadio Dry Table Wine to the Australian government. This was served to Italian prisoners of war in the internment camps up the Murray - they were a happier lot with some good red wine at mealtimes. Surprise, surprise. And they were the enemy. We lock genuine refugees up in similar camps now. Imagine the outrage if their guards gave them a civilized glass of wine at the taxpayers’ expense!

Faithfully, but prematurely imagining that Australia was ready, in 1962 the Patrittis imported all the necessary machinery and built a state of the art pasta factory beside the winery. Patritti Pasta Gloria was rightfully adored by the few Australians in the know, but the rest of us knew proper spaghetti was squishy white worms in a tin of bad tomato sauce. The business struggled, faded, and ceased, just in time for the winery to require another shed. On things went. To commemorate that brave excursion into fine Italo-Australian cuisine, they now make an incredibly cheap Gloria range of premium wines, using the original pasta label.

GIOVANNI PATRITTI, PATRON OF JUVENTUS SOCCER CLUB, PRESENTS A TROPHY. JUVENTUS EVENTUALLY BECAME ADELAIDE CITY, THE CURRENT CLUB.

Ines went on describing the huge grape glut of the early ’seventies, when her brother Geoff had a brainwave.

“Geoff revels in new ideas and is a constant advocate for the development of new products,” she said. “After considerable thought, the development of the non-alcoholic juice production went ahead and he and my brother John produced the first batch of juice in 1974. After all – what did they have to lose? At worst it could always be turned into wine! What was produced and bottled during that 1974 vintage proved to be so popular it sold out very quickly. In the 1975 vintage, the quantity of juice produced was quadrupled and also sold out prior to the next vintage.”

Once again, Ines sidestepped a scary reality: 1974 was the wettest vintage in Australian history, when the destructive moulds were akin to the ruin of the second wettest, 2011. When nobody else could produce anything worth drinking, Patrittis made unfermented pasteurized juice at a profit. The secret lay in their modern technology: sanitary pressurized bottling and careful pasteurization, as had just been perfected by Ian Hickinbotham, Wolf Blass, and Colin Gramp.

“The juices went into green pressure Riesling bottles with screw caps,” Ines explained. “The range included a Sparkling Grenache, Sparkling Golden Muscatel and Sparkling Pedro. In following vintages, a Sparkling Shiraz grape juice was added. Bottling took place as soon as the juice was stabilized. As it is now, the juice is in-bottle pasteurized. In those days it meant that my brothers, Geoff and John, would spend long into the night making sure that pasteurisation took place correctly as it was done in batches using tanks with two or three batches at a time, whereas now bottling is continuous using a tunnel pasteurizer.

“The 20,000 units (1.5 containers) produced then must have seemed an enormous quantity,” she continued. “When John was telling me about these early times - still with the excitement of the achievement of producing 5,000 units and going on to quadruple it, I was thinking to myself – but that was only 1.5 containers; now only a morning’s work!”

PATRITTI MEN MAKING AN EXPORT DELIVERY IN THE EARLY DAYS

She talked about exporting juice to Canada, about getting Halal certification, which only upset the USA given its tetchiness about Islam, and about how the ’eighties Gulf War saw their sales to Saudi Arabia stop dead. But other sales picked up in the ’nineties, and Patritti opened other markets in Sweden, New Zealand, Malaysia, and India.

Ines recalled her phone ringing in the street in Glenelg. Somebody in Vietnam wanted seven containers of sparkling juice for the Chinese New Year. She ripped back to the winery, everybody dropped everything and they got those containers packed and delivered on deadline in six weeks. Last year they sold 37 containers of Patritti juices in Vietnam.

But not without a hiccup. Literally. Instead of copying Grange, some genius with “close links to the Vietnamese army” launched a counterfeit Patritti Non-alcoholic Sparkling Apple Juice there, but at 11% alcohol. Their agent was wisely tremulous at the thought of legal action, so they pumped some promo money into a big print campaign advising people of the difference and the danger. The true blue no-alc Patritti won the sympathy of the ’Nam punters, and they sold everything before the Chinese New Year. Back to packin’ ships from Dover Gardens.

The Patritti Chinese exercise is fascinating. They sold juices to China; then lower-end reds. And already they’re getting Chinese enthusiasts working from their bladder packs into the lower-priced bottles, and then up toward the top end, where my hypnotizing Saperavi smugly sits at $14.

GIOVANNI PATRITTI, FAMILY AND FRIENDS AT THE VISIT OF PRIMO 'THE AMBLING ALP" CARNERA. AT 197CM AND 129KG, CARNERA WAS THE HEAVIEST WORLD CHAMPION BOXER IN HISTORY. HE BEAT MOST OPPONENTS BY KNOCKOUT, AND ATTRACTED WHAT SEEMED TO BE THE ENTIRE ADELAIDE ITALIAN COMMUNITY TO PATRITTI. BACK IN NEW YORK HE KILLED ERNIE SHCAAF BY KO IN MADISON SQUARE GARDEN, AND WENT ON BECOME A HEAVYWEIGHT WRESTLER AND ACTOR. HE APPEARED FAMOUSLY IN MIGHTY JOE YOUNG, A BIG APE MOVIE WHICH AFICIONADOS REGARD AS SUPERIOR TO KING KONG IN THE QUALITY OF ITS SPECIAL EFFECTS.

“We believe it’s the wide variety of packaging options that we can offer that’s helped provide starting points for these export customers,” Ines said. “The Indian market has embraced our de-alcoholised wines and some juices. Once again, we negociated with our clients and the labels were modified to suit their requirements. Because we have our own production and packaging facility, we’re able to tailor the products and packaging requests to suit the client.”

As it grew, Patritti remained self-contained, an incredible rarity for wineries today. Not only do they have their own packaging and labeling lines, but they can make just about any type of sparkling anything and bottle it to order at your price. I was surprised to find they didn’t own a printing press. Check the Patritti website and marvel at how cheaply you can sell wines if you do everything in-house.

And when you consider how they turned the botrytis disaster of 1974 into good money with modern technology, you can bet Patritti will be the one winery to make the most of this year’s mess after another 37 years of perfecting the old Hick/Blass/Gramp technology. Not many wineries boast a continuous pasteuriser!

THE ANCIENT PATRITTI BUSH-VINE GRENACHE VINEYARD SOUTH OF THE SUBURBS AT TATACHILLA IN McLAREN VALE IS GRADUALLY BEING REJUVENATED.

Finally, to really rip the strings of this sultry heart, the Patrittis have taken over the management of the council-owned Marion Vineyard on Oaklands Road. Surrounded completely by houses and light industry, this final single hectare of the great southern suburban vignoble was planted to Grenache and Shiraz in 1907. Saved from conversion to a fast food wasteland for obese taggers by my Adelaide Vines project, and Brian Miller in 1989, it had once again been let fall into disrepair. Council decided in 2006 to invite the Patrittis to look after it in exchange for its precious fruit, which they are doing with fastidious skill. Their first release from the rejuvenated vines is the delicious 2008; each vintage the pressings go into a special fortified, yet to be released.

Along with the remnant of the Grange Hermitage Vineyard now called Magill Estate, and the tiny 1932 Montmartre Vineyard in Paris, this is the most significant suburban vineyard on Earth. Traffic should be forced to slow down as it passes, and learn some respect. It has the earliest vines, and at last it’s in appropriate hands: the oldest Italian family-owned winery in Australia. I could think of no more appropriate, nor delicious Adelaide souvenir to give foreign guests or new Australians.

But make yourself a gift: go visit Patritti. Be astonished. You won’t need much money, and you’ll leave with a freshly-warmed heart.

OLD OAK VATS AT PATRITTI: STILL LOVINGLY MAINTAINED FOR WINE STORAGE

TOM ANGOVE DIES AT 92 YEARS

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




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

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


Tom Angove did not invent the bladder pack.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MODERN CANARY ISLAND WINE SKIN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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"!

HICKINBOTHAM CASTS A VINEGARY SPELL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back to Hick and the vinegar.

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

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

INFECTING REDS WITH ROT? WHAT ROT!

STEPHEN HICKINBOTHAM: THE AUSTRALIAN, KIWI, AND INDIAN WINE INDUSTRIES WOULD BE VERY DIFFERENT IF HE WAS STILL WITH US

Where Are Today's Young Wine Radicals?
This Dude Used Botrytis On His Reds!

by PHILIP WHITE

In the early 1980s, there was a dramatic change of guard in the Australian wine industry.

Feisty young blue bloods like Brian Croser were suddenly everywhere, in everybody’s face, changing the way everything worked.

Professing that only they knew how to do it.

Adam Wynn was back from duxing Bordeaux university, taking the reins of Mountadam, Australia’s first big high country chardonnay and pinot vineyard.

And in Victoria, the fearless, questioning intellect of Stephen Hickinbotham was kicking all the old inbred Australian shibboleths in the head.

Hickie’s grandfather, Hick, had founded the Roseworthy winemaking college; his father Ian was a formidable wine scientist and wine maker – the first bloke on earth to deliberately, scientifically, induce and manage malo-lactic fermentations when he worked for Adam Wynn’s father David at Coonawarra in 1952 and 53.

Ian once told me he deliberately named his first son Stephen because it was the “only name we could find with pH in the middle”.

Stephen was oenologist at his family’s winery and vineyard on the slopes of a volcano cone at Anakie, near Geelong, Victoria. An inventor, passionate theorist, and rigorous intellectual, he studied at Bordeaux University, where he also made wine for the Rothschilds. He worked for a while in a government wine research laboratory in Alsace, then at Bollinger and Mumm, and did vintages at Rutherglen, Barossa, Mildura, the Hunter Valley and Great Western. He made the first great modern reds from Tasmania, flying grapes from Meadowbank to Anakie, made some of the earliest Adelaide Hills wines at his uncle Allan's vineyard at Clarendon, and was an anchorman par excellence in the many tastings I conducted at Winestate, Wine And Spirit Buying Guide, and The National Times.

Hickie advised the Indian government on viticulture and winemaking, and was probably the first to realise the potential of sauvignon blanc in Marlborough, New Zealand, as it was he who teased David Hohnen into developing Cloudy Bay.

Not a bad innings for a 1955 vintage lad.

Put very simply, he turned my brain on.

When Stephen was killed, with his partner Jenny O’Regan,and five other good friends from Melbourne, in a plane crash at Cairns in 1986, he took an encyclopædic headful of ideas and knowledge with him.

The Australian wine industry would be very different today had he survived.

I narrowly missed catching that plane.

In those early ’eighties, it suddenly became highly fashionable to make botrytis-affected wines after the styles of Sauternes, Barsac and Germany. Many of these early experiments were dreadful.

The Alsatian wizard, Michel Dietrich, arrived in Clare in 1982, brought in by Francois Henri to manage Remy Martin’s new acquisition, Quelltaler, the grand old headquarters of Buring and Sobels almost a century earlier.

He was immediately bemused to discover two of the local hotshot winemakers, Tim Knappstein and Tim Adams, had begun deliberately infesting riesling grapes with laboratory-grown botrytis in specially constructed and humidified cellars where the grapes were laid on racks and sprayed with spores.

Michel had literally caught a plane in a blizzard in Alsace, disembarked in Adelaide in a 42 degree heatwave, hired a car and driven to Clare. He raised the French tricolour over his new charge, as if to purge it of any traces of Germany, took one look at the vineyards along the creekline at Watervale and announced that this was a good place for botrytis.

The locals were incredulous.

Michel let those grapes hang in that humid little microclimate and made a ravishing and revolutionary botrytis-infected semillon.

The locals accused him of cultivating the spores on V8 vegetable juice, as they had done, then stealing into the vineyard at night to spray it on the vines!

Hickie was already making great controversial stickies at Anakie.

Adam Wynn also made exquisite botrytised rieslings from one of highest blocks on Mountadam.

I was there once, after vintage, trying to take photographs in the frigid, swirling, highland mist. I heard a sound that made me think "bear!".

I'll never know why I thought it may have been a bear, because there are no bears in Australia, and the only bears I've seen have been imprisoned in solitary confinement in Guantanamo things they politely call zoos.

Sure enough, through the mist, there was a large dark figure, about the size of a bear, beneath the vines.

Silly enough to approach, I got closer.

It was David Wynn, wearing an oilskin Drizabone duster, on his hands and knees, studying the ground.

I said "Hullo David".

"Oh hullo Philip", he said, staring back at the sodden ground.

"This is awful", he said. "Terrible. Look at this terrible waste!"

The riesling that Adam had left hanging had got botrytis in its stalks, and the bunches were falling to the ground.

Adam picked, and picked up, that rizza into a wheelbarrow, and made a stunning sticky.

The four of us: Hickie, Michel, Adam and me, had many weekend summits where we rewrote the future, blending bottled wines from all over Australia's exciting new vignobles, just to see.

We spent a lot of time making the perfect pink. The base was usually Hickie's amazing dry botrytised rieslings from Anakie, with Michell's wood-aged Clare semillon, with red bits from Hickie's Meadowbank, Tassie cabernet, Adam's pinot, and some 1979 Petaluma Coonawarra shiraz.

We just had to have some Brian in there.

To encourage some public discussion about these heady botrytis developments, I ran a series of interviews in Wine And Spirit Buying Guide in 1984.

While most contributors knew only of botrytis on white grapes, Hickie immediately threw petrol on the discussion by claiming he deliberately used botrytis on his ravishing reds.

In fact, he said, he never made red wine without botrytis.

The wine business was, once again, incredulous.

“I think it was about 1896 when Louis Pasteur published his amazing study Les Maladies du Vin”, Hickie told me in 1984.

“It was a monumental work, but it was flawed. After studying many bad table wines, Pasteur determined that their malaise was due to these tiny single-celled organisms called bacteria. What he did wrong was to extrapolate on this finding, and he declared that all bacteria were bad. He invented pasteurisation as a means of destroying bacteria in wine.

“Now, if Pasteur’s well-intentioned advice was heeded by all the French vignerons, we’d have no great French wines today. Pasteur neglected to study great wines, and he never came to realise that if they were properly controlled, the same bacteria would, or could, have some highly desirable effects, like conducting the malolactic fermentation which is common to so many great French wines.

“The role that noble rot can play in making red wines has been obscured for several reasons. Certain ill effects found in red wines have been attributed to noble rot because the original grapes were noble rot infected. The great, healthy wines have never really been studied, and because researchers often have so little practical winemaking experience, the role botrytis can play in red wine making has been ignored. That’s pretty simple.

“Carefully controlled noble rot can contribute great complexity to red wines. Many of Bordeaux’s greatest red wines were from grapes infected by botrytis – ask Roy Moorfield about the ’61 Montrose we had.

"Anyone who says it can’t be done is wrong. In winemaking, there are a lot of nuances between the black and the white, and too many people aren’t sensitive to them.”

My experience of Hickie’s love affair with botrytis began in 1982, when he was blending the first Cab Mac, a carbonique maceration red he’d made using his revolutionary sealed pallet bags, for which patents were pending.

The cabernet sauvignon he’d selected from the Goulburn Valley, Victoria, was botrytis infected. He said he’d deliberately botrytised the fruit to pass some complexity and body to the wine.

When I reported this, the broadacre response from other winemakers was a guffaw followed by a loud “Bullshit!”

The main reason for this response centered on the widespread belief that in red fruit, botrytis gave rise to laccase, an oxidase enzyme which turns red wine milky when exposed to oxygen.

I asked Dr. Terry Lee, the NSW food scientist who’d just taken over the boss role at the Australian Wine Research Institute, about his experience with botrytis infected reds.

“We got involved with botrytis when some of the reds in Coonawarra became infected last year”, he said of the 1983 vintage, which was all fire then flood.

“If you get a bit of unwanted botrytis in reds they can go brown as soon as they’re exposed to air or oxygen.

“Chris Summers did most of the work.

“It wasn’t exactly noble rot, though, it was a real zoo growing on those grapes. We had to look for ways and means of preventing deterioration in the wines once they were exposed to air. We were mainly concerned with the bad effects of the wrong kinds of botrytis mixed with a lot of other moulds.

“Stephen Hickinbotham’s had a lot of experience in Bordeaux. I’m sure there’s quite a lot of botrytis in Bordeaux reds. The whole Bordeaux area has a significant level of botrytis: the conditions are right for it. He’s most probably right.

“There are a few components produced when botrytis gets in the grape berry. You get increased glycerol levels. You also get the production of an acid called gluconic acid. The presence of this acid is a fairly good indicator of botrytis infection.

“I think you’ve got to appreciate that Stephen’s trying to get a small botrytis infection as a complexing agent on his reds –- he’s certainly not trying to make sweet reds!”

Eventually Hickie made a couple of small batches of cabernet sauvignon that was deliberately infected with botrytis. He imported the test enzyme from Bordeaux to have the Wine Research Institute check these for gluconic acid, using the same techniques the Bordelaise use when testing sauternes for botrytis.

I arranged a tasting of these wines in Adelaide, and invited several fellows who had said quite distinctly and unequivocally that you couldn’t make red wine from botrytised fruit.

If you knew the big cheeses of those days, you'd be able to name the detractors and disbelievers. They're still here.

Once the wines were poured, and the and the wine sat there in the glasses, glowering red and jolly, totally devoid of anything vaguely resembling milkiness or cloudiness, the noses came down and the discussions began, but there was still a genuine air of disbelief.

The only fellow who didn’t detract from the Hickinbotham achievement was the most senior of the winemakers present, Max Schubert, who happened to be the fellow who created Grange Hermitage.

Max said the wines were good and interesting, and said they reminded him of the days when he used flor yeast on red juice to make “nice complex mother wines”, the bases for his famous blends.

“Nobody really believed I did that either”, Max chuckled.

“I had to get used to keeping my mouth shut.”

Back to Dr. Terry Lee.

“There’s not really such a big mystery about handling botrytis in reds”, he said.

“You can handle it with heat treatment”.

Presto! While Hickie never actually admitted he pasteurised his wines, it’s worth remembering that his father, Ian, had left Coonawarra to work in the Barossa, where he converted the foundering old grape-growers’ co-op to the phenomenally successful Kaiser Stuhl.

Part of this success was his adoption of pasteurisation of sparkling wines under pressure, stabilising them to a degree otherwise unknown in those years.

“I read a letter in an American magazine” Ian wrote in Australian Plonky, his autobiography.

“It was an important Professor Marsh, who was pondering why sparkling winemakers didn’t pasteurise in the bottle as did the spumante makers of Italy.

“Pasteurising was, and still is almost a dirty word in our wine industry and was dismissed because of the association with the cheap wines of Europe.

“However, the thrust of the argument was that, because of the gas content in sparkling wines, the temperature needed to achieve pasteurisation was quite low. I decided to trial the technique.”

Using the Kupke-Trinne team of Roseworthy College, Ian built a machine that pasteurised the Kaiser Stuhl Sparkling Rhinegold at only 63 degrees centigrade, “therefore not damaging the quality”, he wrote.

“In fact, in our experiments we had found that the heat treatment helped ‘round’ the taste, meaning the wine was more drinkable immediately.”

(Winemakers can now hire an Agmaster pasteurising machine that fits on a trailer, and processes very slowly, -- 2,000 to 4,000 litres per hour -- so the required temperature can be minimised, avoiding thermal damage to the wine.)

The resultant popularity of that Kaiser Stuhl Sparkling Rhinegold wine made necessary a full-time sparkling expert to manage the manufactory, and develop other products, like the first real kiddylikker alco-pop, Pineapple Pearl, which was packaged in a little pineapple-shaped bottle with a panoply of green plastic which resembled the foliage at the top of the pineapple, and twisted off to open the bottle.

The appointment? An eager young German from Avery’s of Bristol, one Wolfgang Blass.

Kaiser Stuhl sales went from £160,000 in 1955 to £740,000 in 1962.

Wolfie still has a row of Pineapple Pearl bottles along the top of his bar, sitting there like browning hand grenades.

Which is simply to say that Stephen Hickinbotham had a very learned advisor in matters concerning the pasteurisation of wine.

I miss Stephen -- with a pH -- dreadfully. But if you’re lucky enough to try his reds now, given a merciful cork, you’ll find them breathtakingly beautiful.

That’s getting close to eternal life.

And, just for the record, I should say that dear Max heat treated his flor-infected mother wines.

He learned to keep schtum about that, too.