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Tasting the dirt

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

Now that the vintage Band-aids are coming off, it was a great treat last week to taste a sweeping selection of the Barossa’s 2008 shiraz. All were single-barrel samples, so anything could happen on the blender’s bench between now and the bottle.

I say Band-aids, because never before have I witnessed so many industrial accidents during a vintage. Knuckles, fingertips, toes, feet, noggins - all bore the brunt of humans working utterly ridiculous hours under totally unfair pressure in close proximity to great big things made from steel, many of which move.

But the Band-aids are coming off the wines, too: it’s now much easier to see the true nature of these woody babies. And while this tasting did NOT include much wine picked after the arrival of the worst heat wave on record, it certainly included fifty or so of the best of those picked in the sublime cool before that heat, and they’re very good.

The tasting was also a ground-breaker in that we poured the wines in groups according to their geological sources. I’ve gone on a lot lately about geology, but suddenly, in the local haute couture of wine, geology is the New Black. Even James Halliday was quoting what sounded like precise geological ages, reporting Brian Croser’s wines in The Weekend Australian last Saturday.

There’d been constant opposition to organizing a Barossa tasting on geological bases since I first suggested it in 1983. People thought it would become an appellation which they did not want; others obviously would do anything to avoid discovering that their geology wasn’t everybody’s favourite. My response has always been to suggest that this delineation is not a man-made imposition or regulation, because it is, very simply, already in the ground. It is there. Why not consider it? That’s what we did at Yalumba last week, and I don’t think things will ever be the same.

To those who are reluctant to admit to a direct influence on wine flavour from geology, which includes soils, subsoils, bedrock and whatever, I suggest they mount a similar tasting and look for the taste of salt. Salt is, of course, just one of the many compounds which come from geology, and, through the roots of the plant, very directly influences the flavour of the wine. Each year, more and more of the vineyards along the Barossa’s creek lines produce salty flavours.

This happens, too, in Clare, Padthaway, McLaren Vale, Langhorne Creek and just about everywhere. Australia is, after all, mainly comprised of ancient sea beds. It’s full of salt.

Just as wine is eighty per cent water. And water is, as John Gilbert wisely pointed out last week, “the ultimate solvent”. This becomes sap, which becomes juice. Then, apart from all the glycerols, fragrances, polyalcohols and other alcohols, on top of the thirty or forty organic acids in wine, as well as all the nitrogenous stuff, like the amino acids, apart from all the polyphenols and tannins, the pigments and vitamins, come the mineral salts of chlorides, phosphates and sulphates, locked onto calcium, magnesium, potassium, and sodium – all through the water, the sap – before you begin thinking about the trace elements: fluorine, boron, iodine, silicon, zinc, iron, manganese and what not.

So as we tasted our way through, and across, the Barossa’s natural history, we discovered little glimpses of this pretty flavour and that common to certain sub-regions. This infernally complex wave of new knowledge will snowball as more such tastings produce more intelligence, eventually making it much easier for blenders to produce better wine, and much easier for those single-vineyard producers with truly unique geology to win praise for their distinction.

Call such a technology an appellation if you will, but at least realise that it’s coming up from beneath. It was here first.

And if we’re really about to tackle the very best of France and the Old World, instead of drowning in the sickening downward gurgle of the discount gutter, we shall have to very quickly learn about our geology, just as the French have learned theirs for many centuries, and have regulated their plantings accordingly.

There will be many spats. Former geologist and tea and liquor merchant, David Farmer, is obviously exciting some Barossa winemakers with his theorizing, and he seems keen to prove the map I promoted here last week, W. A. Fairburn’s learned work from PIRSA, is wrong, which brings the Coonawarra boundary dispute to mind, but, you know, oh well. Get published; get it all approved by your peers, and on we’ll go.

The day after this tasting, I was greatly pleasured to taste the 2008 barrels of Greenock Creek Vineyards and Cellars according to the various local geologies, and suggest they are the most profoundly stimulating wines I have seen yet from 2008. Not the slightest hint of Band-aid.

Hold 'em wiv a rag

by PHILIP WHITE - THis was first published in The Independent Weekly in December 2007

Like newspaper columnists, wine merchants sometimes effect a pompous, thespian brand of vanity. A band of Netherlands buyers featured recently with a pernickety attitude to the temperature of their drinks. Each glass of red was to be accompanied by a second glass of ice, with a spoon. They’d hold an ice block in the glass with the spoon, attempting to cool the wine without diluting it.

The great Peter Lehmann has an easier method. Pour your wine into a glass and bung in a big ice block. This works on everything from port to riesling. To avoid dilution, drink the wine.

At the other end of the scale, one frigid night the colourful Hills winemaking identity John Gilbert handed me a glass of red he’d just blasted with a blowtorch. “Chambrer!”, he said, meaning room temperature.

Bugger room temperature. While Australian homes no longer have cellars, we’ve forgotten cellar temperature - roughly twelve degrees C to sixteen. This is perfect for most wines. Fizz, rizza and sauvignon can go in the freezer or ice bucket for fifteen minutes to chill them further; big tannic reds can warm up a little in the glass as you absorb them. It’s more fun, watching them unfold.

I irritated arrogant Sydney waiters in the ’eighties insisting on whites straight from the box in storage, and not the fridge, and into the ice bucket; my reds the same. Nearly all the red wines served there were far too hot at storage temperature, while all the whites were far too cold from the freezing fridges. Common stuff.

After thirty years of worrying about this, I’ve pared my serving temperature philosophy down to three basic tenets.

First: Too Hot. My brother Stephen, Dogger on The Fence, asked me once to bring him some big bottles of Cooper’s Sparkling Ale. I intercepted him at the Tarcoola races. After hours of red hot bulldust, our ute pulled into the back of what could most politely be called a Drinking Shelter at a mid-morning temperature of about fifty two degrees C. “Bewdy mate, where’s the Coopers?” was the eager query from the dusty dags within, who seemed tired of the chilled Victorian keg they’d been working on.

I said the Coopers was in the sun on back of the ute, and would be far too hot to drink. “Hot?” he sniggered. “Hot? They’re not hot ’til you have to hold ’em wiv a rag!”

The lads then went to work on that frothing Ale, sans serviettes.

Moving straight along to Too Cold: in that swanky city whose taxis smell either of dirty toilets or toilet cleaner, I caught a beautifully warm aroma-neutral cab one arctic evening on the Melbourne docks. “Jeez mate she’s freezing!” I shivered to the welcome cabbie. “Mate”, he said, “mate, she’s so friggin’ cold you’d need yer stubbie holder to stop your hand stickin’ to the tin. Hop in.”

For the Medium Zone, we go to where the Scottish Highlands hit the North Sea, and nobody needs a fridge. Chris Hackett, hungover Aussie wine merchant, walked into an Inverness deli and asked for a cold Coke. The bloke pointed to the row of Coke cans on a shelf that ran right around the walls. “Nah mate, I’d like a cold one please”, Hack persisted.

“Take one from near the door”, said the Scotsman.

On top of those hard years spent on diligent field research, this slab of advice has taken me three stubbies of Coopers Ale to recall, consider, and compose. It’s been very slow going, not because of the insufferable heat, but because the Ale is only gradually melting after I’d left it in the freezer overnight. Chambrer, see. Shoulda stuck to cellar temperature. Aussie cellar? OK. Back wall. Away from the door.