EXCISE IDEA COULD DESTROY BLADDER BIZ

AN EXCISE WOULD SEE THE PRICE OF EXPENSIVE WINES LIKE THESE TUMBLE WHILE BLADDER PACKS WOULD DOUBLE. photo LEO DAVIS

Rudd Money Man Wants Excise WET Rebate May Dry Up Lobbied Pollies In Abject Panic

by PHILIP WHITE - a shorter version of this story appeared in The Independent Weekly

Treasury wallah Ken Henry has thrown a very tricky handful of marbles under the feet of the wine industry with his recommendation that the current scramble of alcohol taxes be replaced with a simple excise. For seasoning, he’s thrown another handful under the political dries who want to tax kiddylikker - and spirits - to oblivion. With state and federal elections brewing, we’re in for a spat of extreme panic in Pollyville, as the mighty grog lobbies get to their nefarious work.

Henry is a favoured apparatchik of Labour Prime Minster Kevin Rudd, who faces an election soon, in the midst of insurmountable difficulties in attempting to manage the dimishing waters of the Murray Darling Basin. Two Australian states also face elections, six quick weeks from now. One of these, Tasmania, which is sinking in good water, has a premium wine industry but no discount bin plonk production; South Australia produces the most of both types of wine, with much of the business dependent on Murray River water, of which there is none.

Although general political commentators have so far failed to realise the full implications of Henry's proposal, State Labour leaders like South Australia's Mick Rann will soon be forced to announce the attitude they'll take when lobbying their federal counterpart.

WHILE THE TAX WOULD BE A NATIONAL IMPOST, SOUTH AUSTRALIAN PREMIER MICK RAM HAS ONLY DAYS TO MAKE A STAND ON THE EXCISE WHICH HIS FEDERAL COUNTERPARTS ARE CONSIDERING.

Wine is currently taxed on the value of the unit sold, be it bottle or bladder. Under an excise, which is a tax on the total alcohol each unit contains, the cost of a $14 bladder pack would double, to $31.07, while a $30 bottle would fall to $27.53. These KPMG figures would see your favourite boutiques boom, and the Murray-Darling Basin wine industry collapse.

HARD LIQUOR PRICES WILL TUMBLE UNDER THE EXCISE PROPOSAL

Never before has the gap between the polarised wings of the wine business looked wider. But industry bodies, like the Australian Wine And Brandy Corporation, which is partly funded by the taxpayer, are obliged to represent everybody in the business, so will have to protect the bladder boyos, who produce half the wine consumed, if not made, in Australia.

These two ends of the business have always been at war. It was Brian Croser who went to Canberra at the onset of the GST and current messy regime and organised the Wine Equalisation Tax, which offered newly disadvantaged small producers an annual rebate.

This writer argued contentiously at that time that an excise was the only clean, logical manner of taxing alcohol. It was a classic Aries vs. Virgo reposte. Croser came home touting his deal as a great victory for the entire industry. I argued that it was terribly messy, and would only postpone the inevitable collapse of the discount bin business.

WINE AND BRANDY CORPORATION BOSS ANDREW CHEESEMAN WAS BRIAN CROSER'S ACCOUNTANT AT PETALUMA

Croser’s band-aid would simply keep the huge irrigating industrialists on side with the tax-dodging doctors and lawyers with ill-conceived hobby vineyards. No doubt he had discussed this at great length over many Bridgewater Mill lunches with the likes of Alexander Downer, the former Liberal government's Minister of Foreign Affairs. Not to mention folks like Amanda Vanstone (Immigration Minister under the same conservative regime) and Robert Hill (Defence Minister who became Ambassador to the United Nations), who co-owned the relatively tiny Amicus brand with Walter Clappis. These guys had a very heavy pull on John Howard’s wine taxation philosophy.

An open, far-sighted mind might see Henry’s proposal as the perfect opportunity to cleanse the big rivers of the scourge of an industry which is in such gross, nay, grotesque, oversupply to the extent that it’s collapsing anyway. This would release water to the Murray Mouth, and remove the source of much of the grog consumed as an alternative to sniffed petrol in aboriginal communities.

HENRY'S EXCISE WOULD SEE A BLADDER PACK SOAR FROM $14 TO $31, AND THE COLLAPSE OF THE IRRIGATING DISCOUNT WINE BUSINESS, LEAVING A LOT MORE WATER TO RUN DOWN THE MURRAY. GOOLWA IMAGE BELOW BY KATE ELMES.

It would also, according to the Winemakers’ Federation of Australia, result in the loss of 12,000 jobs.

Whilst the cynic might argue that these jobs are going anyway, the idea of the new tax will fill many country electorates with even more fear and depression. The milder sceptic could suggest that the discount wine industry is in permanently deep merde as long as the international wine glut continues, and that any movement which might lead to its dimunition is something healthy which much be addressed.

Apparently Henry has stepped his excise numbers: the brackets would be 3.5 per cent alcohol and below, then up to 5 per cent, 7 per cent, 10 per cent, 15 per cent, and above 22 per cent.

This would also favour the premium wine lover who has spectacularly, internationally, turned away from the sorts of dead-head alcohol bombs we’ve been rotely making in the twelve years since one American critic, Robert Parker Junior, began to tout them. While the wine blog explosion has seen Parker lose some power, the notion of an increased tax on wines above 15 per cent would surely be a strong incentive to Australian winemakers to return to healthier alcohols. Sales of more modestly balanced alcoholic wines should increase internationally.

In the meantime, a relaxing of the stifling tax laws and regulations on distillation could see a great deal of the wine glut converted to industrial alcohol, the income from which could perhaps be devoted to funding the next vine-pull scheme, which seems increasingly imminent, and would be likely to see a permanent cessation of irrigating to produce wines which sell for less than the price of bottled water.

As for the price of alcopops falling from $3.30 per unit to $2.42, well. At the risk of adding complexity to Mr. Henry’s pristine simplicity, perhaps the excise should be extended in the case of premixed drinks to include an extra charge on sugar and other sweeteners when mixed with alcohol. If caffeine was also included in this kiddylikker, another hike could be imposed. Banning such cocktails is futile: anybody can whup down three or four stiff short blacks between sessions in the boozer.

BASH OUT A QUICK VINTAGE ROUNDUP, SON

Time To Hit The Tiles Big Time

Blogger Burns Out With Deep Vintage Misery

The Year Of Schizo Zin

by PHILIP WHITE

I’ve been out on the slash. The time was up. Enough cabin fever, cowering inside like a fizzer limpet. The time came when a man just had to gird his loins, resin up his bow, take a large bag of gold from the coffer, and hit the Gilded Palace Of Sin.

In other words, your bad correspondent is suffering a severe dose of organ rejection.

Morning sickness. Central nervous system fusion. But he feels better. He can see the evidence in his little camera.

I couldn’t write once the fires started. Like many other Australians, I have been in shock.

This is Wednesday 18th February.

He tells himself ernestly.

It’s interesting, if only with a morbid anthropological fascination, to look back over the last three weeks’ work.

On the morning of Wednesday 28th January I wrote 2009: Another Torrid Vintage Hits – You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

That day, South Australia endured its second day above 44 degrees Centigrade (111.2 degrees Fahrenheit). In the shade.

The Bureau Of Meteorology from Adelaide that morning advised Radio National’s Fran Kelly in Sydney that the heat wave which had just begun its blitz of south-eastern Australia would likely be hotter overall than last year’s fifteen-day record-breaker.

“Daily maxima will be higher”, the BoM said, “and evening temperatures will not offer the respite Australia had last year: nights will be hotter, too”.

With a lump in my guts, I concluded “The implications for the wine industry are horrendous ... It’s obvious. It’s not a wind, it’s a blistering sandblast, and it’s all coming from the vast northern deserts, laden with positive ions, dust, and relentless austral severity”.

On that evening, I wrote Hell on Earth as vintners sweat; winemakers hold their breath. A bloke recorded 54.4^oC (130^oF) under his back verandah, under a spreading shade tree, just over the range at Strathalbyn. It was 50^oC a little further down the Fleurieu Peninsula at Finniss.

As we all know, everything got worse.

The problem ceased to be a vintage niggle, or a base economic threat. It became an unnaturally savage threat to the nature of life in Australia. The thought that this heat coincided with widespread floods in the far north simply served to render things worse, perversely.

Fireys had extinguished over 750 fires in the tiny state of Victoria on the 26^th and 27^th, but the Strzlecki Ranges remained ablaze.

I spent my first decade in the Strzlecki Ranges. They are home. Before the fires, they looked like the photograph below. This was taken by my good cousin John. It’s his dog smiling at him in the rear vision mirror of his water truck. He was a water-carter. Just perchance, he was shot dead by a psycho drug fiend before Christmas, leaving a wife and four kids to dodge the other sort of fire on that woody hilltop.

The murderer went home and suicided. What a hero.

From Monday 2^nd, the “wine industry bodies” began to suggest things weren’t as bad as it seemed, and various regional representatives showed irritation that I had slated the entire vintage far too harshly. They must have the same virus that got Fosters.

That night of the 2nd, as South Australia cooled mercifully, and grape farmers steeled themselves for the rude task of going out to evaluate the heat damage in the morning, Victoria exploded.

The wireless began to announce the death toll.

Those who’d been through anything like this before knew it would tick inexorably upwards for weeks.

In the bits that weren’t on fire, the heat rolled on anyway, falling below the brutal 40^oC a few times, but not by much.

Here, it seemed quite cool for a week. I wore a sweater one day; there was a fine drizzle on another. The heatwave forecast for last weekend didn’t happen, so all our fireys who came back from Victoria to save us if these hills caught ablaze could have stayed there.

You could hear the vineyards inhaling at night.

Now, it’s been in the highish thirties the last two days. Just hot enough to maintain the depression and make the head throb duller.

Somehow, Victoria is still ticking, with fires still blazing, although the Police are saying they don’t expect to find many more dead.

In the meantime, all I could do to maintain a blog was to peel out a few old jokes. Bacchus only knows what I’ve written in the newspapers. There’s no point in wailing about a bad vintage when hundreds of people are being incinerated.

I thought my colleagues in the hack media did a good job of their reportage of this horror. They seemed to fairly quickly understand that all they could do was respectfully wait for the survivors to find their voices, and report their sayings, their memories and pleas and warnings, accurately, and with an eternal sensitivity.

Which is not what I can say about my fellow bloggers. There’s been a lot of indulgent muck on the internet, as amateur busybodies everywhere tried to get their own angle on the tragedy. They’re still at it. I suppose that’s the nature of the new rapid-transfer international shock the internet transmits. People, generally are well-intentioned. But when there’s mass grief up for grabs, everybody wants a slice.

I thought our politicians made utter shits of themselves. Ranty twerps like Rudd and Rann couldn’t help their little macho selves accuse alleged firebugs of things like “mass murder”, meaning the fomenting Laura Norder lumpens will seethe with the same vengeance as the uniformed classes, and those charged will never get a fair trial.

The lynching is never far from the top of Australia's polly swill.

Fact is, successive waves of politicians have wound Australia’s mental health system back into the dark ages.

Anybody who lights a fire when it’s 45^oC is obviously mentally ill. Nuts. Irrevocably cactus in the Jesus Box. Roos loose in the top forty acre. Sandwich short of a picnic. Mad. Like the poor devil who shot my cousin, these people need really good psychiatric care and powerful medication long before they commit their incredible crimes. The paltry mental health budget our smarmy tough guy politicians have struggled to constrict to oblivion now pales into insignificance when compared to the cost of the fires.

We have become a nation of pathetic self-medicating amateurs since mental health assistance has become largely unattainable for most of our sick.

And our tiny, cocky, faux macho politicians are quite happy to leave the mentally ill to the police to manage, which keeps the crime rate nice and up, the community nice and scared, the votes tipping into the bucket, and the rellies of the sick preparing to take up arms to defend their ill kin from government, which, after all, with all its uniformed resources, finds the mentally sick very easy to chase down and nail.

A great blow for Laura Norder, see?

Schizophrenia? You got life, son.

And watch out. One day we'll have another vote on the death penalty.

As for the wine industry? It’s obviously a hellish vintage, although my mates in Western Australia say things are looking good so far. There’ll be a lot of Westralian fruit coming east. Some of it might even find its way into Queensland tanks: Bacchus only knows what the rain’s done to the Queensland vintage.

It’s remarkable how much South Australian fruit survived. Clare seems pretty good, for example. But survive is the word: most of the SA crop looks like it just walked across the Nullarbor by itself.

My dear friend Tony Bilson, the famed Sydney chef, gave it perfectly simple clarity when we toured the vineyard yesterday. It was quite hot: into the thirties.

“But jeez, it WAS hot”, I said, attempting to explain the shrivelled grenache.

“Of course it was hot”, he said. “It was twenty degrees hotter than this!”

Everybody went quiet.

The most common ailment is what my viti guru, James Hooke, calls interrupted veraison. When that first day of 44+^oC hit, on the 27^th, it seems any vines that were undergoing veraison took the biggest hit.

Berries still green and barely-formed tended to survive; those already past veraison turned to jam. But those bunches or berries trapped in the interim, with their skins changing colour and their sugar production commencing, fell into schizophrenic heaps.

The matter of smoke taint aside, it’ll be what I call a zinfandel year: like extreme zin, the bunches have a difficult mixture of totally dried-out skins, raisins and currants, big ripe juicy balloons, and totally unripe pellets the size of lentils. So we’ll have must that’s a weird combination of jam and acid, with sufficient lignin to render barrels redundant.

The bunch below is an extreme example, but it illustrates my point. There are many vineyards with bunches like this.

There are mad success stories, of course. Just as miracle yarns of impossible luck and valour beyond understanding emerge from the bushfires, there are blocks of fruit here and there that seem determined to disprove all naysayers. There’s shiraz and roussanne on this property, for example, that look like nothing’s happened.

It’s the same in other districts. Of course some good wine will be made.

And the really really big story? You mean Fosters? Of course they’ve withheld the wine arm from sale. What is it with wineries and arms? Could this one be Bubba's? It gets smaller every day, by itself. Endogenous shrinkage, you could call it; rather than anything as exciting as spontæneous combustion. Few in Fosters seem to know what to sell, because the size and shape of it changes every day as it shrinks.

Similarly, nobody quite knows what to buy, if indeed bits of it were for sale, and anybody had the money. It’s like the awkward chaos that plagued the preparation of Seppeltsfield for sale, and the consequent dealings. But this one’s infinitely more complex and infuriating for everyone concerned.

Penfolds, of course, is the jewel. The world’s biggest boutique, continuously extant for two reasons. One is Peter Gago. The other is the autonomy Peter Gago valiantly manages to secure for his charge through very hard, persistent, intelligent work.

Damage that, and you might just as well sit back and surrender to the New Heat.