JACOB'S CREEK SKIPPER LEAVES HIS TILLER

RETIRING WINEMAKER PHILIP LAFFER ON HIS BELOVED JACOB'S CREEK, WHICH STARTS ON MOUNTADAM AND RUNS DOWN PAST THE SCHILD FAMILY VINEYARDS INTO THE SOUTH PARA RIVER. IN A WORLD INCREASINGLY CURIOUS ABOUT TERROIR, ONLY A TINY VOLUME OF JACOB'S CREEK WINE COMES FROM ANYWHERE NEAR THIS TINY STREAM. LAFFER GOT IT ELSEWHERE.

Laffer's London Club Laugh-out How Tiny Creek Became Big River Slow Boat To China Next Big Back Whoosh
by PHILIP WHITE

Philip Laffer, 69, Group Chief Winemaker, Pernod Ricard Pacific, wound it back last week, announcing he’ll be spending a lot more time mucking about in boats, and it won’t be on his beloved Jacob’s Creek.

Affable, but stern, Laffer’s one of the most influential winemakers on Earth.

Like Peter Gago’s role at Penfolds, this is heady business. After vintage, it involves the supervision of the annual assemblage, when thousands of wines made by the small army of winemakers are blended to fit the company’s suite of brands.

The rest of the year’s spent filling passports with stamps and wearing out the R. M. Williams on endless promotional travel. So it was appropriate for Laffer to choose a London club for his valedictory. I hear that camp old panto stager-cum-wine star, Oz Clarke, delivered an enthusiastic roast.

I first encountered Laffer about thirty years back at Lindemans’ Karadoc winery near Mildura. His dad, a lecturer for a time at Roseworthy, had convinced him he wasn’t bright enough to be a vet, so after his Roseworthy studies he joined Lindemans in 1963.

Laffer was the first winemaker I’d struck in a hardhat and steel-caps; a shock until I realized the scale of Karadoc, with its million-litre tanks and overhead gantries cranking huge grape bins around. It was our first modern wine refinery, put together by Philip Shaw for the tobacco company, Philip Morris, Lindemans’ owner.

I’d hardly donned my Karadoc helmet than it became apparent that things would never be the same in the Australian wine business.

Somewhere out the back sweated a young Jeffrey Grosset; Barossa boy Philip John was there, too. Each winemaker seemed to guard their million litre tank, ensuring nothing went wrong until that great day of judgement, when the phone rang with the news that today was the day the gargantuan would be emptied, and its wine sucked down an underground pipe to fill silver pillows, pfffshhht, pfffshhht, pfffshhht.

But Lindemans was active in Coonawarra, too, where Laffer had been to establish vineyards in the mid-sixties. He built the Rouge Homme winery, which I visited to celebrate the win of the 1981 Jimmy Watson Trophy with the delicious 1980 Lindemans St George Cabernet Sauvignon. With viticulturer Barney Kidd, these pert dudes were determined to show the wine world a thing or two: they couldn’t wait to teach me about their new invention: minimal pruning.

This involved mechanically hedging towering vines, saving enormous amounts of money, and dramatically increasing crops. Coonawarra is still struggling to throw off this mantle: after some years it became apparent such viticulture required industrial levels of petrochemicals to control fungus, and a helluva lot more water to fill the berries.

Lindemans’ win of another Watson a few years later served only to extend the trend, but it soon became apparent the wines were becoming green and leafy commodities, in place of warming and soulful gastronomic luxuries.

Treated badly when Penfolds bought Lindemans in 1990, Laffer did a stint consulting, then joined Orlando Wyndham. In 1989, the giant Pernod Ricard, had bought the business, not so much for any recognition of the potential of Jacob’s Creek, but to distribute their pastis aperitifs in Australia.

Always a tad more strict and uncompromising than most of the daggy winemakers of the day, Laffer came home from the Harvard business college with an astronaut haircut and a new severity. He was ready to move.

As chief winemaker, he climbed aboard the Jacob’s Creek steed and charged the world markets with a fury. Orlando’s MD, Perry Gunner, had originally convinced a small British merchant, Caxton’s, to take one pallet of Jacob’s Creek; before long they were shipping a million cases.

Laffer restructured everything in the wine’s manufacture, from grape grading and purchasing, to building today’s stunning facility.

There were some fluffs, of course: a great swathe of vineyard they bunged into untried land near Langhorne Creek in the late ’90s was on the market within a decade of my receipt of the press release boasting of its 200,000 trellis posts, 1,000 kilometres of drip line, and 50,000 kilometres of wire.

It doesn’t seem all that long ago that Laffer, along with the likes of Constellation-Hardy’s MD Stephen Millar, were hollering about the Chardonnay shortage, begging growers to plant more. But last week he told the gentlemen in London that Australia now has enough, and that he won’t be dabbling in the wine business other than some consulting to Pernod Ricard.

'Australia doesn't need any more vineyards,' he said.

It seems he’ll keep an eye on Pernod Ricard’s big vineyard in far north China, and continue his interest in their Spanish growth.

But he leaves the brand - first launched in 1976 - as Australia’s most popular, currently selling more than 8 million cases in 65 countries.

One wonders what William Jacob would think.

NEW JACOB'S CREEK REFINERY BOSS, BERNARD HICKIN, AT THE BENCH

Wine and the War On Drugs

by PHILIP WHITE - This was first published in The Advertiser in 2005

As paranoid chatter about Australia’s two-plus billion litres of unsold wine rises to delirium, and new experts appear daily to have their two bob’s worth in the media, maybe it’s time we began a conversation the wine business doesn’t particularly want us to have.

The industry itself seems dumbstruck by this stupid, utterly predictable situation. All their baying voices that talked it up are suddenly dumb. Those of us who were shunned for our bleats of warning over recent years could be forgiven for now feeling smug. But I feel sick. Sick at the inexcusable extravagant waste in field, stream, and home.

Wine hasn’t been mentioned yet in the War on Drugs, but maybe it’s time we sat back as a community and had a hard think about the total amount of recreational drugs we should collectively ingest each year. This must include alcohol. Learn to manage drug consumption as a whole. Get honest. Admit the war is lost. Start again.

Instead of following this sickening downward spiral toward cheaper, inferior, stronger, more dangerous wines, we should now, more than ever before, consider the nature and end use of most of the wine made in Australia.

When the Vine Pull words are uttered, people think of cute little ivy-draped cellars full of lovely old shiraz, pioneer couple weeping out the back, like a McCubbin tryptich. In reality, most of our wine is ruthlessly, skillfully grown and manufactured to compete at the bottom of the market, where profit evaporates. Broadacre, monocultural, water-wasting grapeyards. Sugar quarries for industrial refineries.

Much of the trouble with the voluble Riverland growers stems from the hyperactive response to the 2025 viticulture plan of the Winemakers Federation. This fairly conservative 1995 initiative was supposed to guarantee sufficient grapes to fuel the next thirty years of constant growth. But it included no pressure valve or review mechanism to measure new plantings or wine in stock, and the full quota was reached within just a few years. There is still no national vineyard or stock register.

There’s been so much planting in what they rather stupidly call “the cool regions”- by which they mean everywhere but the River and Griffith - that the big buyers are using more of that fruit once its price falls enough. Cool is better than hot.

Cut to Nepenthe boss James Tweddell, at his promotional dinner in his Hahndorf Vineyard last year. When I commented on the magnificent triffid aggro of his vines, he proudly pronounced two telling words. Jacob’s Creek. I could hear a big ouch up the River.

So, apart from a few dozen exceptional cheap brands, what exactly do these hot areas produce? Are they alcoholic commodities that could be better made from other sugar from other sources at lower prices? If, as a society, rather than an economy, we decide that we really do need all this alcohol, for us or for export, should it necessarily involve grapes?

What if the sugar needed for the production of all this alcohol could be more cheaply grown, with less abuse of environment and water resources, somewhere else? On the big, complete picture, could Queensland sugar cane replace most of our contentious grapes? Or palm sugar, on the Ord? Should precious Adelaide Hills land – our lushest food garden – be used to make barely profitable gourmet drug refreshments, for export to markets that don’t give a fig for its source, but buy purely on price? They could be drinking Andes Ridge or Amazon Creek tomorrow.

The incredible popularity of alco-pops stems partly from their lower strength and convenience, but largely from their wide range of flavours. One fridge offers a rainbow of whisky, gin, vodka, ouzo, brandy, bourbon and coffee and cream liqueurs pre-mixed with lemonade, squash, dry ginger, neutral beer, cola and tonic. Small bottles. Screw caps. Lower alcohol.

Compare that lolly box with the sea of half-hearted wine currently made in Australia. White. Red. Sweet. Dry. Wooded. Not wooded. Too alcoholic. You have be a tripper, or an uncomfortable nit-picking Virgo like your correspondent, to spot a difference in any of it outside of those few dull, endlessly repetitive parameters.

Different sugars can crop almost continuously in the tropics, meaning the manufacture could be spread more efficiently over the year, doing away with much of this vintage panic and the sickening lurches of perfectly natural vintage variation. Leave that difficult bit to the committed specialist artisans who make the wine we’d all prefer to drink.

Give the River a break. Distil a neutral alcohol, add antioxidants, fructose, water and the minerals and vitamins essential for keeping alcoholics alive, fruit it up, fizz it, screw cap it in small bottles, and sell it priced according to its alcoholic strength, with a hearty slice of the excise dedicated to the restoration of the health of the locals and their environment.

Research even healthier ways of chilling out or getting smashed. Maybe save even more resources and replace the alcohol with a safer drug that triggers less aggro; I know many mothers, fathers, police and health workers who’d suggest that was music to their ears. And some who won’t.