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!"

INTUITION: SANITARY SCIENCE LACKS SOUL

CASTAGNA WINERY AND VINEYARD AT BEECHWORTH ON THE NORTHERN SIDE OF THE VICTORIAN ALPS: JULIAN AND CAROLANN CASTAGNA HAVE JUST WATCHED YET ANOTHER HUGE BUSHFIRE FROM THEIR RIDGE

More Old Drunks Than Old Doctors

Castagna Cleans Up Without Poison

by PHILIP WHITE - THIS STORY WAS WRITTEN FOR THE INDEPENDENT WEEKLY ON 30 JAN 09

When I started in this racket, back in the precambrian, a few lunies professed to make natural wines.

Gil Wahlquist made wines which would crawl outa the bottle all by ’emselves at his cobwebbed vineyard at Mudgee. In McLaren Vale, Gabor Berenyi almost equalled Gil with some of the most feral tinctures ever. If you didn’t let em out, they’d eat straight through the side of the bottle.

Through the ’eighties, and into the ’nineties, there were several characters who plied more intuition than wine science. Some even remembered what their grandfather had taught them about the draw of the moon. But they’d never admit such dangerous tendencies. Basically, everyone made hyper-sanitary wine like Brian Croser’s. That was the only way to get a trophy.

The petrochem industry, which grew from the explosives and nerve gas industry after the First World War, ruled the wine business. They’ve learned to switch back to explosives and gas when the demand’s there, but they, well, you know ... a man’s still gotta make a buck when peace breaks out.

Then, in 2000, I was half way down a row of two or three hundred masked shiraz bottles in my annual Top 100 tasting, when a wine exploded in my face. Vibrancy, intensity and vigour.

Disbelieving, I had my crew first check that it was Australian. Yep. They put it another bag with another number, further down the long row. It whacked me again. And again. As the day wore by, the damned thing just got more and more audacious, alarming and cheeky.

Once it had eventually earned the highest points of the whole tasting, all varieties, I rang the maker, who’d just got home from LA or somewhere, where he’d been directing a theatre ad for BMW or somebody, which is what he did to pay for everything. His name was Julian Castagna. He was a bit puffy from running to the phone, but his breath soon settled when I congratulated him and told him what had happened. I then asked his secret.

“Do you really want to know?” he asked ... perfect theatrical pause ... “It’s biodynamic.”

Castagna wines, of Beechworth in the Victorian Alps, went on to win that competition, or get in the top three, for years. He even won it with a rosé. Eventually he staged a conference of biodynamicists from all over the world, and many Australians who attended came back convinced.

Even David Paxton, who had been a relentless pursuer of yields came back to McLaren Vale, turned off the tap, and turned on the moonjuice.

You can drink the results in the Paxton bottles now: more intensity; more depth; more raw sex; more ethereal sensuality.

“It’s not the fact that you’re doing it”, he told me of his change of career, “but the resultant wine that hooked me, from vines which are all in balance – their natural ability to resist disease is enhanced.

“It’s about the density of the cells. The fruit is more naturally expressed. The true flavour is enhanced ... the further we go, the more we get into it. And surprisingly, it’s cheaper!”

Given the current allegation that bio-D is being used by charlatans as a marketing tool, I am the first to agree that you can make bad bio-D booze as easily as you make decrepit plonk the scientific way. But just as there are lot more old drunks than old doctors, there’s a lot more execrable swill being made by the scientists than the moon swooners, and always will be.

“Biodynamics for me is intuitive” Castagna wrote recently, “a craft rather than a science”. But he went on to cite the findings of Professor Stuart B. Hill, formerly of the Department of Entomology at McGill University, Canada, but now in the Department of Social Ecology at the University of Western Sydney-Hawkesbury.

"Biodynamics tends to be presented with a high level of mythology and talk of etheric forces and so on, but if you analyse the preparations you find they are in fact, if properly made, highly concentrated inoculums containing high levels of trace elements and a variety of micro-organisms" Hill said.

"A purely scientific approach does not allow for the intuitive understanding of the ‘good’ farmer” he continued. “Most people, including scientists, make decisions partly based on ‘feelings’ and intuitions, probably more often than they recognise, but science makes no allowance for that.

“In fact, most aspects of science are in denial about the phenomenon, and scientists set up experiments which ignore it. Those feelings or intuitions are, in fact, based on readings of inputs we don’t consciously recognise.”

Back to Castagna: “I wonder if the criticism now being levelled at Australian wine of ‘sameness’ would be tempered if our highly-skilled, highly-trained, science-based winemakers listened to their inner-self, their intuition, a little more often”, he asks.

Do they have any? I ask.

.