CHARDONNAY CHOICEST AT COLES? CLOSE!

OAK FERMENTERS AT KOOYONG ON MORNINGTON PENINSULA

Vintage Cellars Cuts Mustard
Coles Cultists Killing ABC Slide
Hey Hey Hey - It’s Chardonnay
by PHILIP WHITE - A SHORTER VERSION OF THIS STORY APPEARED IN THE INDEPENDENT WEEKLY

Chardonnay took a long time to hit Australia. The earliest white settlers had brought the best grape varieties of Bordeaux, the French Mediterranean coast, Germany, Portugal and Spain, but perhaps wisely steered clear of the great white of Burgundy, where it snows.

Not many Australian wine regions get snow.

Sir Samuel Davenport (right), of Beaumont Cellars, recorded his belief that “Chardonet” would be a critical grape for South Australia, and perhaps planted it at Marble Hill and Macclesfield in the very early days; we do not know. His beautiful ampelography resides in the Adelaide Library, with his pencilled note from the earliest days of the colony.

The C word seemed hardly to be uttered again for 120 years.

It wasn’t until about 25 years ago that it was worth conducting a comparative tasting of Australian Chardonnays. These would come from Padthaway, Coonawarra, the Hunter, the Riverland, Barossa, McLaren Vale, and the Yarra Valley. They were largely terrible: oaked awkwardly with coarse American and Limousin wood; usually chips.

David Wynn’s Mountadam was also well underway then. Using cuttings from a single Marble Hill vine (destroyed in the Ash Wednesday bushfires in 1983) and the Hunter, and better wood from the Allier, Troncais and Vosges forests, his High Eden Ridge wines were very good from the start.

As were the early Tasmanians, Pipers Brook and Heemskerk.

Encouraged by Len Evans, the Petaluma chairman who controlled the show ciruit, Chardonnay suddenly grew everywhere from Berri to Bourke.

There’s a push now to reverse the wise ABC - “anything but Chardonnay” - trend of the past decade, but this appears to have been hijacked by that small cadre of terroiristes headed by Grant Ramage in Coles’ premium wines buying sector. They’ve decided to show us a thing or two by having some of our better cool district Chardonnay makers prepare 2009 wines which they sell exclusively through Vintage Cellars. There’s no expensive middle man, so the prices are lower.

And the wines are very good.

Starting at the top end for those of us with no money, the cheapest is Emma Woods’s Seppelt Grampians Chardonnay ($19; 88+ points), a tight, steely wine with little discernable oak but savoury twists of butterscotch, honeycomb toffee and cushioning charcuterie fats. It’s your-right-down-the-line salt and pepper squid accompaniment: a lot more satisfying than 95% of the current squinty flood of Kiwi savvy-Bs.

The only one from outside Victoria is the Alterum Adelaide Hills Chardonnay ($25; 92+ points) made by Martin Shaw, of Shaw and Smith. Compared to the sparse Grampians wine, it’s a big step up in complexity, soul and alcohol, the latter factor probably due to the warmer nature of the Adelaide Hills. Its fruit is fresh, fragrant, and tropical, with lovely, lightly smoky oak. The palate is authoritative and weighty; there’s a pleasant powdering of oatmealy tannin in the tail, and very firm, stony acidity. Cook a braised free range chook in a hotpot in cider with onion, capers, and live tarragon, and you’ll be just juicy.

Kooyong’s Sandro Mosele (left) firmly holds a place in my Australia top twenty winemakers, and it’s a reflection of the Coles/Vintage Cellars buying team’s acuity that they’ve squeezed the Ballewindi Vineyard Mornington Peninsula Chardonnay ($30; 91++) from him. It’s a tight, complex, stony wine to sniff, with rusty iron smells as much as refined, juicy pears: Bosc, Anjou and Rocha varieties come to mind. There’s also a pleasant layer of pancetta fat, perhaps from some malo-lactic fermentation. It finishes dusty, stony and appetizing, in a perfectly Mediterranean manner. Napolitan spaghetti vongole would sit it pretty!

To the Yarra Valley next, and Dave Bicknell’s Oakridge Parish Of Gruyere Yarra Valley Chardonnay ($33; 90++ points). This is sharp, acrid wine to sniff: carbide and cordite give leading edge to a wedge of crunchy fresh pear and pithy dried apple aromas. In the mouth, an aluminium-like acidity dominates the tapering fruit, making a receding wedge … while it lacks complexity, it would beat many a Chablis of this price into my anxious glass. It’s long, lean and appetizing; go bouillabaisse!

Thence up bigtime in price to the rk Beechworth Chardonnay ($58; 93++). Giaconda is the grail of most Victorian chardomaniacs, who do tend to xenophobia. 09 being a difficult year, what with the horrid incineration of the alpine forests and all, this is the only Chardonnay Rick Kinzibrunner (below) will release from that vintage: Coles got it all.

Easily the best of this entire range, it shows true Giaconda form: the slightly peachy, cuddly, squishy fruit, seasoned with the peculiarly spicy Sirugue French oak favoured by this maker. But there’s beautiful astringency, too: an appetising string of acid and very dry red earth tannin that stretches the palate beautifully. It’s by no means cheap, but it’s more modestly-priced than your true blue Giaco. Stewed fowl with fresh herbs; goose cassoulet; anything from Richard Olney’s immaculate Provence The Beautiful cookbook will be perfect.

Such endorsement of the scary big Coles will make me no friends amongst the small local producers of Chardonnay. But they should rest assured that this fine suite of good-to-almost-great Chardonnays will help reawaken your Chardonnay receptors, which is in their interest if their wines are any good.

No other single company but Penfolds can table such a platoon of Chardonnays, but their prices are as mighty as their wines. In the case of these Coles wines, the prices are very good. If you buy a straight or mixed case, you get another 30% off!

Since Coles have “let go” Jeremy Stockman (right), who played a vital role in the selection and blending of these wines, it will be very interesting to see whether they can maintain this quality. Very few independent wine stores have a Chardonnay shelf as reliable and well-chosen as this tight-knit bunch. You’ll usually have to wade through dozens of very awkward wines to find anything like these.

Jeremy is now working as a consultant: most Australian Chardonnay makers would be better off using his blending skills, if these wines are anything to go by.

And they are. So go buy.

WINE EXPO'S WAR WITH GLOBALISED SWILL

COULD YOU BUY A GLOBAL WINE FROM THIS MAN? UH-HUH ... NONE IN THE SHOP. ROBERTO AT WINE EXPO IN SANTA MONICA

Barraged By Forces Of Evil Food, Drink, And Arsewipes Coles Duo Sees Light Down Under
by PHILIP WHITE

In the great Harry Dean Stanton movie, Repo Man, the punk Emilio Estevez works in a supermarket whose shelves are stacked with cans labeled only “FOOD” or DRINK”. I thought that was funny in 1984.

Unless you have been trapped in the yuppie ghetto of Port Willunga, where winemakers concentrate at times like this, to perve on each other’s partners and pass Burgundy and Ribero del Duero around the Star of Greece while their own vineyards roast, you’ve probably learned a lot about the blander corners of your Coles or Woolies grogfloggery. As the holiday moneys wane, the cleanskins and bladder packs look more savoury.

Until the winelake seeps through the community kidneys, we’ll see again how oversupply leads to a sickening slump in quality. The wine industry trains its customers to accept and expect plonk of ever-diminishing provenance. Soon, what we drank at the end of the holidays becomes acceptable day-to-day. We learn what our great wine industrialists expect the rest of the world to drink.

EMILIO DUMPS GENERIC BEER IN REPO MAN

Flick for an illo to Wine Expo, Santa Monica, California: a liquor store with sassitude, customers to match, and a battle royal against “globalised wine”.

“Once you guys succeed in making all wine taste the same, what will you do for a living?” Manager Roberto demanded in last week’s newsletter. He complains of being “absolutely barraged by the forces of evil (well, severely misguided, focus group driven winemaking and marketing at least) ... It seems the consensus ... is that Americans want wines from all over the world with fanciful names and long histories as long as they all taste the same and don't have any disconcerting ‘ethnic’ character.

“So, do we just give up and roll over? NO!!!!!!”, he concludes. “We continue to champion wines with true personality, regional style (or even outright idiosyncrasies) and a distinctive point of view while reminding those in the supply chain that those wines are huge crowd favorites at OUR ‘focus groups’ where we offer true diversity instead of merely different brands of the same old things.”


Australia’s two supermarketeers - count ’em, one, two - rank communities on their spending power, and stock the shelves accordingly. The McLaren Vale Coles is in the same district as the perverse villa rash of the down-at-heel coast, for example, so its shelves are stocked to suit the battered Datsun drivers, who outnumber the 4WD Benz and Bimmer blomos who get their fromage at Blessed Cheese, their fruitaveg at the Willunga Market, and their lovers next door. So stuff like my favourite biscuits, Vita Wheats – hardly a posh gastronomic investment, but mostly free of sugar and fat – gradually work their way to the bottom shelves as their space is taken by Coles crap, and eventually they disappear.

I learned this whilst editing Wine and Spirit Buying Guide in Sydney in the early ’eighties. Australia’s leading wine magazine, it had been bought by John David, so he could corner the Australia distribution of these new things that were called boutique wineries. John and his brother and sister owned David’s Holdings and Australian Liquor Marketers, huge, hyper-efficient trucking businesses that specialised in supplying supermarkets with food and booze. The three of them turned over a billion dollars the first year I worked there. This was partly due to their invention of the virtual Black and Gold brand. The staircase outside my office was always jammed with furtive lugubrious swarthies trying to sell shiploads of unlabelled canned beans, spaghetti, soup, lavatory paper and whatnot so Davids could wrap it in their handsome black and yellow livery and take up shelf space by undercutting hard-working Australian suppliers who branded their own products and tended not to leave too many band-aids in the beans.

While I was laughing at Estevez, this was happening under my nose.

There’s a bright duo at Coles who are bravely fighting to reverse this trend in their Vintage Cellars and 1st Choice stores. True wine lovers Jeremy Stockman and Grant Ramage scour the world – and, increasingly, Australia - for inexpensive wines with personality, regional style, outright idiosyncrasies and distinction. These offer a bright contrast to the endless shelves of crap which might just as well be labelled Dan Murphy’s DRINK or Black and Gold DRINK. Go, peruse.

This is not the time to sacrifice your last cubic centimetres of functioning liver drinking supermarket plonk for Australia. If you’re feeling nationalistic, take a drive to the Barossa, Clare or the Fleurieu and fill the boot with premium stuff from your favourite honest strugglers. These guys are doing it really tough. But shop for your daily drinkers in the imports section of VC and 1stC, and join my campaign to force, as part of the planning approval process, all new supermarkets make their roofspace available for free community vegetable and herb gardens. More of us may then tend to stray into their rotten cavernous rip-off acres of FOOD, DRINK, and arsewipes.

THE CONSTANT TEMPTATION FOR AUSTRALIA'S INDUSTRIALIST WINEMAKERS IS TO ATTEMPT TO EMULATE EVERYTHING EUROPE HAS TO OFFER. SOMEBODY SHOULD TELL THEM ABOUT THE DESERT.

THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY

Philip White Sees Encircling Gloom in 2009

a version of this story appeared in The Independent Weekly on 19 DEC 08

Next year? Next year’s already been buggered by this year.

Ignoring a few modest-scale exquisities, like the early-picked rieslings of Clare and Eden, 2008 was a disgusting vintage. Even the degree of industrial accidents soared as winery workers endured impossible shifts, trying to get everything turned into wine before the heat turned it to currants.

But in spite of the empty river and the drought, Australia’s crop was up one third on last year, and yields per hectare went up by a quarter. Where the water came from beats me. Then, export volumes went down 9%; and domestic sales down 5%, leaving us with 2 billion litres of wine to drink.

To put that in scale, Italy’s just beaten France to become the world’s biggest winemaker, its production up 8 percent to 4.7 billion litres. While Italy has reduced its vineyard area, its quality is steadily increasing. To add insult to alcohol producers everywhere, French heart specialist Dr Olivier Ameisen, 55, is claiming that by taking a muscle-relaxant called baclofen, he’s lost his desire for alcohol, and wants his theories tested on more thirsty people.

And now I hear the price of temporary water from the River is less than half the price it was last November. I know where that’ll be going.

There will be plenty of wine to drink next year, and a lot of utter swill from that heatwave, industrially corrected to varying degrees of digestibility.

But in the face of increasing large-scale vineyard plantings, and grape prices at rock bottom, many, many family-scale specialist grapegrowers will hit the wall. As Foster’s disappears and Constellation withdraws, towns will empty.

Nevertheless, 2009 will be the year the lumpen mass will wallow in lousy cheap wine at the expense of the Australian countryside, setting alcohol-related public health costs through the roof. Those of the rest us who miss out on Dr Ameisen’s tests will be furiously trying to drink our favourite specialist wineries through the crisis. Small, high-quality producers will need faithful support like never before.

We will see the continuing, phenomenal rise of China as a player in the wine market. The first paper to report those Italian figures, for example, was the Shanghai Daily. They’re onto it, and they’re increasingly getting into it.

As for the little matter of all the money in the world suddenly disappearing, Tony Bilson says his three-star temple of gastronomy in the Radisson in Sydney is still packed with tourists at dinner, but the business gamblers who’d filled it for years each lunch - at, what? $200-$500 a head? - are now down at his Number 1 wine bar on Circular Quay, hassling the staff about the price of cleanskins.

We will see the continuing tightening of control of restaurant outlets, with wine lists being bought and chopped up by one or two of the transnationals, who might then allow a big family show, like Yalumba, Taylors, Angove's or McWilliams in to add a bit of colour. Unless you can buy your way in, new producers with wines over $25 can pretty much forget it. That, of course, will include hundreds of brands which are hobby or vanity additions to family vineyards planted in the wrong places to the wrong varieties for all the wrong reasons of fashion and whimsy.

The liquor retail world will continue to constrict as Coles and Woolworths ruthlessly undercut the indies with their share of that 2 billion litres. Desperate money’s flying everywhere in retail, as floor and shelf space goes to the highest bidders. Check out the brochure Yalumba’s just produced for The Edinburgh – there’ll be more of that. If you have a specialist wine store that stocks your favourite littlies, coddle it.

Which is not to say that the big guys are limited to swill: the phenomenal cheapie imports Jeremy Stockman buys for Vintage Cellars and 1st Choice have staggered me this year for their range and quality. The exotica they’re bringing in should inspire our winemakers, providing lots of ideas for new flavours.

In the kiddylikker sector, expect a return to the original coolers of the late ’eighties, when they were made from denatured or disguised wine bases rather than spirits, and tasted pretty much the same.

In the premium regions, led by McLaren Vale, we will see more determined replacement of the old petrochemical spray regimes with an internationally-unprecedented wave of rigorous organic and bio-dynamic techniques. Margaret River, Clare, the Victorian Alps ... more and more regions are seeing this beautifully healthy and brave conversion.

And, fittingly, 2008 will see McLaren Vale – Trott’s View sell out. You can buy the last copies at Wakefield Press in Kent Town. This beautiful volume of photographs of the late Trott’s favourite folks, events and locations is our last glimpse of the Vales that used to be.

The fight to retain what’s left will reach fever pitch in 2009.

.