GRANGE MAN DOES IT AGAIN FOR PENFOLDS

PENFOLDS WINEMAKER PETER GAGO IN THE PRICELESS 1888 KALIMNA VINEYARD IN THE MOPPA, NORTH OF THE BAROSSA; THE OLDEST CABERNET SAUVIGNON ON EARTH IN CONTINUOUS PRODUCTION

Penfolds Lights Fosters Path ... Gago's New Grange All Go ... Gail Kicks Butt For Little Guys
by PHILIP WHITE - a version of this was published in The Independent Weekly

Busy week at the Gago household. One of the Honorable Gail’s five cabinet ministries is Consumer Affairs, so there she was cleaning up the liquor licensing act to make it easier for little guys to sell their wines and bar staff to refuse service to drunks in pubs. Very cool.

At the same time Peter was launching the new Penfold’s super-premiums at Magill, with every wino’s gimlets focused on the new Grange, the 2005.

They don’t need kids, these Gagos. Gail (right) raises smart legislations like offspring. And of the regular annual fixtures on the Casa Blanco calendar, none is better anticipated than the day Pete lines up his new tribe.

Which he did this year at the grand old Kalimna vineyard in the Barossa. Block 42 there is the oldest Cabernet sauvignon vineyard on Earth to be in continuous production. Planted in the Moppa – the flat triangle of alluvium north of the Barossa – in 1888, this is ten precious acres indeed. Grey wind-blown sands sit atop riverine alluvium, and the old grey trunks of the troopers always make me think of Napoleon’s army being snap frozen on the way home from St Petersberg. Biggest difference is, these guys are still fighting, and it’s drought and heat they’ve battled, and wave after wave of owners and corporate geniuses with bad ties.

Gago’s quietly determined restoration of the old farmhouse there looks precisely like the sort of thing you wouldn’t see too much of going on in the way of Fosters these days.

It’s a slomo revolution.

A few years back, Peter complained about how every year for twelve in a row he’d had to re-write his meaning of extreme vintage conditions. Since that alarming utterance, there’s been extreme records broken every year, so it’s almost divinely reassuring to sit down at a table heavy with such vinous reponsibilities and discover they are still mighty Penfolds wines.

“Authority and composure” are words which reappear through all my notes this year. No other big winery on Earth has such an authoritative and expansive range of treasures.

It normally takes four to six dozen wines for me to find something to recommend with more than ninety points. My average over a week of new releases is around seventy, often below. So to gaze confounded at these notes of about thirty wines, including unfinished and unbottled ones from recent years, and see that they fall below ninety on three occasions is, well, can I say comforting?

First wine on the table 94+++. 2005 Reserve Bin Riesling. Opulent, majestic wine more like a mighty Chablis than Germanic Riesling, even at only eleven per cent alcohol. 2009 Koonunga Hill Autumn Riesling, 93: the genteel, autumnal aromas of grannie’s handbag and strawberries in a pleasant off-dry old fashioned style to match the label. 2009 Bin 51 Eden Valley Reserve. Austere and steely: mighty stuff to dissolve that Austrian moustache wax. 93+++. All bases covered in the Riesling dept., see.

And on it went, variety after variety. All bases and styles worth noting are covered. In that unchallengable Penfold’s manner: there’s the sort of reassuring arrogance about them that you like to find in your monarch, especially when times are tough. These may be polite wines, but they’re not shy.

Tellingly, there is no Sauvignon blanc.

Harcore plonkies regard Chardonnay as a sort of gay brother of Riesling, but these four Chardonnays were a lot more Navratilova than Nureyev. Maybe the Thomas Hyland (92+) strayed over toward the younger Bardot, and the Yattarna’s a bit more Catherine the Great (95++), but the forearms are all Martina’s.






















The 08 Cellar Reserve Sangioivese (93+++) smelt like a Tuscan kitchen with a big wood oven; a forthcoming 09 Pinot, just bottled and not yet for release, smelt like Penfolds had exploded all over us. Try “black tea, aniseed balls, Choo Choo Bar, juniper, blueberry, beetroot, sour cream, borscht”.

Peter’s ongoing mission to moderate the raw American oak in brands which depended upon it, without letting them lose a splinter of their Penfold heritage, is best seen in the stunning new Bin 707 2007 (93+++), a totally Australian Cabernet of incredible intensity and finesse. The 06 Cellar Reserve Barossa Cabernet (94++) seemed even more woody, but it’s had 100% French oak. The superiority of 06 over the difficult 07 is most evident here.

And oh yes, the Shiraz. Oh Lawdy. A sicko-plush 06 St Henri (93+++) like a Hispano-Suiza J-12. The charcuterie blast of the 07’s: Magill Estate (92+++) and RWT Barossa (93+) the former with a lollyshop next door; the latter so disarmingly open and neat, like the bucherie of the great Max Noske in Hahndorf. (Sorry Barossa, but we got Germans down this end, too!)

And then, of course, the Big Cheese. Grange. You can read my praise of this marvel alongside, and more detailed notes of all the wines on drankster.blogspot.com. I only wish there was a Peter and Gail blog.


Penfolds Koonunga Hill Shiraz Cabernet sauvignon 2008
$9; screw cap; 13.5% alcohol; 80+ points
I simply cannot imagine why you’d risk fewer dollars on cleanskins of dubious provenance when you can buy this for the price of two schooners of beer. It’s an audacious, cheeky, sassy wine: a brash brat from the Bash Street Kids. The fruit cannot be contained. The stylish oak tries to wrap that fruit up, but it leaps off again and there you go after it, glass after glass. I thought at first the wine had been made like a Beaujolais, with carbonic maceration, but no, Peter assures me, it’s straight down the line conventional winemaking in the Penfolds style.

Penfolds Grange 2005
$650; cork; ??% alcohol; 95+++ points
I gave the 2004 Grange a point more than this, because of its seductive streamlining and silky feminine sheen: Morticia Addams stuff. This is more a cross-dressing Heathcliff. My notes: “Pretty Polly! Wet hessian. Sap: raw sawn wood. Cordite. Incredible bowl of fruits: currants, blackcurrants, red currants, raspberries, nectar, strawberries, cranberries, medlar berries, salmonberries and watermelon. Musk. Civet. Banana lollies. Paper. A chip off the old block. Shit. Cowshed. Milk. Chaos!! Perfection!! Fractal!! In this church, they’re still trying to recognize the congregation.” Which is not to say this wine will not eventually mellow to become one of the best ever.

Foster's: two bill too big

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

They just don’t get it. Between them, The Australian Financial Review and The Australian published a virtual novella about Foster’s CEO Trevor O’Hoy in one recent week. I mean novella in the number of words, but it applies in another way. Let me explain.

The Fin Review scooped everyone with a folksy piece about the former St. Kilda footballer and economics grad, concluding that he’s not demonstrative or flamboyant, but deeply cerebral and committed, and that he feels that some see his humility as a weakness. Jeez.

But the guts of the story was Trev’s humble back-flip over his purchase of Southcorp. After thirty years slavery in the bowels of Carlton & United Breweries, he’d ascended the throne of CUB’s umbrella, Foster’s, promising shareholders there’d “be no big acquisitions on his watch”. Six months later, after a brief chat with chairman Frank Swan – three minutes after – he approved the $3.7 billion takeover. Which Merrill Lynch analyst David Errington agrees was $2 billion too big.

So somebody kicked some arse at The Australian. Out came the me-too scribble. Matthew Stevens called O’Hoy “just a tad gloomy”, and “wry, personable and approachable”, if showing “slightly disturbing honesty” in recent “engagements with the media”, meaning the AFR yarn.

In the same Business section, The Australian’s John Durie was a little less romantic in his “Foster’s chiefs must deliver or go”.

The takeover was a disaster. Showing devastating ignorance of the wine market, O’Hoy attempted to slash costs by having his new premium wine brands, like Penfold’s, distributed and sold by the same dudes who flogged his ordinary beer.

So you run a medium-sized pub. You sell a lake of Cooper’s and a fairly big dam of premium red, and have a couple of vintages of Grange on your list, which came from your private collection, because you don’t sell enough Koonunga Hill to earn yourself a Grange allocation. In comes the Foster’s rep, wanting you to switch taps to Foster’s and Carlton, and replace your precious boutique hand-made red listings with industrial plonk from a portfolio containing 100 brands and two or three thousand products.

So you put down your bar cloth, forget about your lunch customers, and help the sweaty beer rep through his great big friggin’ book? Uh-huh.

Both newspapers talked about the sacking of the three or four thousand, and how O’Hoy eventually repented his error, and appointed seventy wine apostles to sell, well, wine. Their brilliant plan is to “mosaic” customers, a new verb meaning “think about what they buy, then push equivalent bar codes from the thousands in your book”.

Given Southcorp’s history with computer systems and information networks, I’d avoid being mosaicked. The more lugubrious retailers claim service has improved; humble O’Hoy says the worst is over.

But that’s not my point. My point is the two gaping holes in these reports justify the second implication of “novella”. Neither mentions premium wine as a gastronomic item. It’s a commodity, tied like Gulliver with the infernal strings of percentages of this and targets of that and returns of so many per cent or even less. And fair enough, for this is business, and this writer is no expert at that. But this writer is expert at recognizing the difference between an industrial product made in a refinery by industrial chemists wearing steel-capped boots, hard hats and safety glasses, and a wholesome, organic drink made with minimal irrigation, bugger all chemicals, and a whole lotta love, by someone in thongs, with a soulful understanding of the gastronomic rewards implicit in such luxury.

He’s more Country Road than thongs, but think Peter Gago and his Grange. Therein lies value. And shareholder return.

The other hole’s bigger. It’s called water.

Do these people – O’Hoy, Foster’s, and the business hacks – know something I don’t?

The arid land irrigation which pumped up nearly all Southcorp’s grapes is over. No matter that the cotton fields and the rice paddies and the dairy cattlemen waste more water than the grape cockies, who happen to waste shocking amounts anyway. And why not? They pay bugger all.

But such sugar mining is over. It can’t continue. Even if the Queensland rain did fill the River for a month, the time it will take to convert all Murray Valley irrigators from overhead sprinklers and open channels to pipes and drippers will be long enough to get us to the next normal drought, and by then, it’ll be over. Again. Still.

Not to mention salt.

Add to this the strangulations Karlene Maywald has clamped on the Murray water irrigators of Clare, the Barossa, Langhorne Creek and even the recycling experts, McLaren Vale, who use no Murray, and you’ve got a problem that’s much bigger than Trevor O’Hoy’s cerebral humility.

It’s a ruder, truer measure of the real value of Foster’s.