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

82 NOTCHES ON BRIAN BARRY'S CORKSCREW

BRIAN BARRY PHOTOGRAPHED BY KATE ELMES FOR THE INDEPENDENT WEEKLY, WHERE A VERSION OF THIS STORY WAS PUBLISHED LAST WEEK.










Brian Barry Pours His Watson Winner
Our Greatest Palate Still Sniffs Em Out
by PHILIP WHITE

When winemaking friends marvel at the mad slurp and crash that mark my repetitive passage from squalid depression to brittle ecstasy, I tell ’em the columnist has at least one deadline per week, whilst the winemaker has just one per year.

Not that I seek sympathy. The wiles of vintage aside, the wine business has been a fairly reliable clock, bringing a skeleton of longer-term rhythm to my irregular life. So far.

Winemakers have added various repetitive milestones to their cycle. They go to the Royal Adelaide Wine Show, for example, at the same time each year. Then there’s the London Wine Trade Fair, regular as clockwork, coincident with cricket. And bottling, and the bloody bank, and the interminable PR/sales tours.

Many, whose properties are now on the block, will never know that cycle again.

My fear of deadlines – which are inevitably met, if bent - feeds my addiction to any irregularity I can get, so I avoid most of these groundhog winebiz fixtures.

But there are some which are annual treasures beyond belief. Like the day, just before vintage, when I lunch with Brian Barry OA, to celebrate his birthday. Apart from this horror vintage being almost over before the birthday, his 82nd went pretty much like the others: me marvelling at his amazing history of service; both of us marvelling at the old glories he pours on the day; a little private chortling at the antics of the odd pretender, and more at the miracle of our survival.

Brian was born in 1927. He was dux of Roseworthy in 1948, and chairman of judges at the Royal Adelaide from 1974-79. He blessed many other shows with his amazing sensories. He was the Chairman at the inaugural National Wine Show in Canberra in 1976, and presided there for many influential years.

He has the best palate I’ve encountered in Australia: intensely intellectual and analytical, but priceless in its ability to name the sensual delights good wine unveils.

Brian quit wine shows a decade back. At his 73rd birthday lunch, he said “It’s extremely disappointing now. Faulty wines get awards, and very high quality ones are overlooked. The classes have become so huge, and time is so restricted, that the judges can’t possibly do all the wines justice”.

His 1999 Jud’s Hill Clare Riesling had just come in equal first (94++ points) in my 1999 Top 100 tasting. “That wine’s truly beautiful”, said Ernie Loosen when I poured one for him in The Exeter. “It would look beautiful anywhere in the world.”

But the Adelaide Wine Show judges gave it only 15.2/20, indicating a faulty wine unworthy of bronze. At the same show, Joe Grilli entered his colombard in another class prescribed for riesling and carried off one of the two gold medals awarded to that class!

“For twenty years or so, we entered our colombards in the colombard class at Adelaide”, Joe said at the time, “and it was never awarded. The judges seemed to feel that no colombard could ever win gold, because they regarded it as such a second-class variety”.

So they awarded a colombard gold, thinking it was a good riesling, and begrudged a seriously good riesling any medal at all, because they thought it was faulty.

This year, Brian poured a Jud’s Hill Clare Riesling 2001, which unravelled one’s socks before stringing them on the lightglobe. Which it had failed to do when I first tasted it, almost immediately after bottling, in that year’s Top 100. But in the next year, I awarded it 93+++, and Brian re-entered the show circuit with it.

Back then, on the occasion of his 75th birthday, I suggested we should direct ourselves forthwith to The Exeter Thirst Emporium for the odd celebratory ingestion.

“Thanks, but I’ve already had a few”, he confessed without contrition. “They reckoned I oughta head up to Sydney for the Wine Show lunch, and I’ve just come back with four trophies. Not a bad birthday present!”

We attended The Exeter anyway.

And now, he poured that eight year old birthday present again. It absolutely sang: bright, crunchy and fresh, reeking of roses and citrus, with formidable acidity and length and that tantalising, unlikely mixture of sassy tease and austere Germanic authority. It’ll live another twenty beneath that trusty screw cap.

And so, too, will the rieslings he’s released since.

But while riesling’s the king of all grapes, Brian has earned great success with sorts much more lowly.

In 1972 he was winemaker, with offsider Orgy Williams, at the Berri co-op on the Murray. Orgy was at lunch, too. They made a 50-50 shiraz cabernet using the radical cold settling method Brian had been working on. By leaving the chilled juice to sit quietly, he permitted the delicate water-soluble aromatics – the florals: violets and lavendar etc. – to dissolve into the wine before the alcohol-soluble aromatics - the coarser tars, lignins, licorices and whatnot – took over during ferment.

“Mick Auld rang and said he’d got some good Barossa-cured German oak” Brian said, as if that were yesterday. “You’d have to be bloody stupid to say no ... oooh boy, you could put your nose in the bung and it was bloody beautiful!”

“The co-op bosses wanted me to start showing our wines at Melbourne so I resigned from judging there and the other judges gave my Berri wine the Jimmy Watson Trophy! We were selling it for 89 cents! It won many, many awards!

It was already on the market when we won”, he reminded us, offering a stark contrast to the way the trophy these days goes generally to barrel samples. “Because of the nature of the fruit, it was possible to release it very early. It was an experimental cold-ferment wine: the same technique the winners often use these days. The runner-up was ours, too: a straight cabernet made the same way.

“And here it is”, he said, pouring that old winner.

That’s the only time the auld Watson mug’s visited the River, which is little wonder when you consider the industrial crap they tend to make these days in the tortured desert of our biggest valley. And there we were, drinking the last bottle in captivity from that trophy-winning batch, thirty-seven years later. Tired, but dignified ’neath its soused cork, it rose for a final fragile bow after thirty minutes’ air, gave us one fleeting glimpse of its pretty primary fruit, and departed.

It would have been breathtaking under a screw cap.

If you have any Brian Barry locked up anywhere, liberate one now. The ’03 riesling’s undressing as we speak.

Bad Boys

Photograph of PETER LEHMANN at his weighbridge by MILTON WORDLEY. Story by PHILIP WHITE – This first appeared in The Sydney Daily Telegraph in 1990

Twilight, somewhere near Tibooburra. I am hurtling across the desert with Peter Lehmann in his 1927 Buick ragtop. There have been enormous rains, so everything is sopping; covered in mud. It’s in our underpants and eyes, under the brims of our hats, and in our boots. It destroyed our primitive brakes days ago, a thousand miles back, but we are not stopping. Were are on our way to Alice Springs. In a hurry. We are competing in a Redex Rally.

As navigator, and occasional driver – unless he’s dead or crazy, Lehmann won’t let anyone else have the wheel – my job is to keep a pitifully small patch of the windscreen translucent by tipping water from a port bottle through a tear in the roof, so the wind and tiny manual windscreen wiper slops more mud back through the hole in the roof and into our faces. I regret wearing a shirt with pockets. They are both full of mud.

We are working on another bottle. Peter likes some help with that. And while the evening sky’s last silver reflection fades from the long skinny puddle which is the road, it becomes obvious the old headlamps have gone on strike. Again.

When total darkness settles, Lehmann throttles off marginally to let another car through. It’s a full-bore modern European rallying machine: blaring air horns, more lights than New York City, five aerials, open exhausts, ’roo bars, roll cage: all the macho stuff. Windscreen washers, for Chrissake! It roars and lurches and slews sickeningly across the dribbling mud pie which is the middle of Australia, and we are right up his quoit in the dark, two tonnes of 1927 iron, sixty-five miles an hour in the old money, no lights, no brakes, no mike on the two-way to discourage the poor bastards from slowing down too quickly. No sense. No safety. Sheer fear of death keeps me stone silent, wide awake, and passing the thirty year old Peter Lehmann port. I’m glad I can’t see through my side of the windscreen, which glows a low mud red from the tail lights of that poor unsuspecting idiot in front of us. The port is called Old Redemption, after a hymn book.

Three hours later, that car, totally unaware of our presence, just a length in front of us, disappears. The hole must be very deep. We follow it in at top speed, and I can tell it’s bounced out and moved on because when we hit the bottom there’s no metallic crunch. There’s a bounce, mind you, that flips our sodden swags over to join us in the front, and twists the chassis sufficiently to buck all four doors open so the port and the torch and the wet toilet rolls fall out and the roof disconnects from the windscreen and flips back to let more mud and the big black sky in. But we do not hit. Neither do we stop. And our headlights, the whole two candlepower of them, come back on. The driver ahead shrieks vicious curses over the radio, demanding to know where we have come from and who the hell we are and screaming “get back you bastards you’re far too close!”

We never get the chance to tell him we’ve been there for two hundred kilometres. No mike.

But there in the newly-dim flicker of the dashlight Lehmann grins across at me like some wild, wet terra cotta Buddha-Bacchus to say “There you are White. What you English don’t understand is Barossadeutscher stubbornness. Now where’s that port?”

And that’s Lehmann. In a valley full of conservative Silesian peasants conditioned to being downtrodden for generations by their English managers, locked up each time we go to war with Germany, and called free settlers when in fact they were South Australia’s special line of particularly well-behaved convicts, he is a very rare bird because he has that slugging, pig-headed stolidity with the ability to speak out loud and lead. Especially when the headlights come back on.

More than any other Barossadeutscher hero, and there not many, Lehmann has dedicated his wine-making years to the appreciation, maintenance and preservation of the quiet, hidden life which makes this big wine valley special.

When Saltram, the wine company for which he’d slaved for decades was bought out by an absentee landlord who ordered the immediate sacking of the hundreds of peasant-scale family vignerons from whom he bought his grapes, Lehmann walked out with his beloved growers, borrowed money from the few mates who had any, built a new winery, and promised the growers that if they’d wait ’til he’d sold the wine, he’d pay for those grapes and save their families from ruin. It was a genuine, wildy risky Moses act that took years to work properly, but it worked.

Lehmann called his spartan new joint Masterson, after Damon Runyon’s stoic, gambling private dick, and, for a while at least, the ancient peasant-scale Barossa vineyard, unique in Australia, was saved from the bulldozer blade.

A decade later, in 1989, when grape prices were soaring to heights never before seen here, and competing companies hounded the growers with higher and higher bids, Lehmann called his throng together at the annual Growers’ Picnic, and told them he’d be paying lower rates than most companies because the new prices were ridiculous. The growers stuck with him.

This relationship has to be seen to be understood. At vintage, which takes three months, Lehmann drops all else to man his weighbridge. In trucks and tractors, utes and trolleys of divers ages and sizes come the growers. They queue from first light to last, taking their turn on the bridge. As they wait to be weighed, they come in and chat with Peter, to share a smoke and a schlück or three of port. According to Barossa tradition, it’s cold tawny, taken by the flagon from the ’fridge. There’s always a mountain of fresh crusty bread - from the bakers Linke or Fechner - there on the redgum bench, and delicious gum-smoked meats and dill pickles to munch.

Lehmann remembers the names of several hundred of these folks’ businesses. He has, after all, been buying their grapes for over forty years. “Hahn, W. G. and L. G.” he says, sliding the polished weights along the scale arm. “That looks like good shiraz. Have a schlück. Heuppaff, E. H. and B. M.. Lovely. Look at that quality Whitey. Two and a half tonnes. Saegenschnitter Brothers. Scholz. Jeez, I can remember that old truck sitting in the vineyard with North Para floodwaters lapping round its windows. Have some ham. Seeliger – what is it? That’s right, W. A. and M. A.. Cabernet. Better than last year. Pech, L. W. J. and B. Y. ... how’s the family, Leo?”

The growers mill about and joke, and play tricks on the unsuspecting newcomer. “See that mettwürst there on the back of the door already”, they’ll say, “Peder keeps that on there for not to eat but for to keep our eyes off the scale while he weighs our grapes. Haw, haw haw!”

The little weighbridge room is decorated with photographs of Damon Runyon and Lehmann’s father’s graduation class from the Lutheran seminary in Minnesota.. He was a favourite local preacher for the duration of his life, and the first Lutheran in the Barossa to preach in English. It’s a room from another age; another time, when life meant more than it does today, and pace was something seen only at the Kapunda trots or Redex Rallies.

So this year, at the close of the best vintage for Barossa red since the great year of 1971, many souls were sobered when the news spread that Peter Lehmann was in hospital with bowel cancer. The first operation was complex and long, and more followed. The tumor was removed, but infection set in and one of the other things they took out was a kidney. Thousands of South Australians held their breath. Lehmann lost five stone.

The rustics in the Nuriootpa Snakepit stared glumly into their schooners of cold port and made sage announcements like “Poor old Peder. Too much mettwürst, not enough port”. The winter was cold and dull.

But as the months wound by, Lehmann, P. L. and M., Peter The Rock, Peder the Preacher’s Kid, Mr. Stubborn Barossa himself, gradually shook off his ailments and slowly, surely grew healthy again. He has been cleared of the cancer, and on Thursday, the day his 1989 was to win the Jimmy Watson Trophy, he took his first glass of Old Redemption for many months. Then he took another. And another.

And at ten thirty at night, he telephoned me from the Barossa with a wicked gurgle in his raspy gambler’s voice. “Lehmann”, I said, instantly worried, totally forgetting the function then underway in the Melbourne show hall. “Is everything okay? Are you alright?”

“White” he said triumphantly, “not only are you talking to a man who can drive in the dark, but to a Barossa winemaker who in this same year has won the top red trophy in the Brisbane show with his cabernet blend AND the Jimmy Watson Trophy with a traditional 1989 Barossa shiraz".

Tomorrow, or yesterday your time, is Lehmann's birthday. I can promise you there will be an unholy degree of schlücking and schnabelling at the weighbridge, and late, when the jazz has finally played right out, Norty Schluter, Baker Linke, Peder and Dingo will play ten dollar poker until there's no need to keep the lights on.

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