ORGANIC FIREBRAND HAS BIG BIO-D SPRAY

RUDOLPH STEINER






Hilliard Rains On Rudolph's Parade
Walks Straight In; Turns Music Down

by PHILIP WHITE – A VERSION OF THIS WAS PUBLISHED IN THE INDEPENDENT WEEKLY ON 30 JAN 2009

I don’t know John Hilliard. Never met him. I’d never heard of his pretty vineyard in Lompoc, California. Never had his wine. Yet there he is, splattered all over the internet with a bitter philippic on biodynamics.

I don’t know what his star sign is, but I’ll bet John is a perfect example of it. He sounds like the sort of person who walks uninvited into your home, goes straight to the stereo, and turns your music down.

He puts the boot into silly old Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), the hero of the biodynamicists, by suggesting he believed in “Lemuria and Atlantis, nine classes of supernatural beings, seven epochs of history, 12 constellations that correspond to 12 parts of the body, and four elements of human temperaments.

“He believed that the heart does not pump blood”, Hilliard continues, “and had a very un-Newtonian concept of the planets moving through the sky, not to mention that he pays attention to only seven planets ... but includes the moon ... my own mass affects the vine somewhere in the order of 60,000 times greater than the moon’s effects on the vine”.

“I ask what scientific truth has been credited to Steiner?” he rants. “It seems that Steiner’s foolishness has to wait to be exposed after the thrill and trendiness of biodynamics wears down, and the marketing edge that biodynamics offers is replaced with some new way to excite buyers.”

You get his drift.

I’ve attended a few intensive Steinerite gatherings. To do with vineyards, mainly. I’ve read his lectures, essays and books. I leave sniggering, but respectful.

I have shovelled the cement mixer full of properly fermented cowshit, and made a mulch heap that completely digested a whole sheep, including bones, horns and wool, in a couple of months. You shoulda seen what that mulch did to the bony buggered field to which it was applied.

I have buried horns full of bacteria from cows’ gizzards, and made a spray from burnt starlings.

And you know what?

The starlings stayed away. The vineyards improved.

Steinerites are like the Exclusive Brethren: even to the point of being a bunch of pious and sanctimonious shits.

But, just as I've never heard of a Bretho going broke, the Steiner lunies generally make better wine than anybody else, from Burgundy to Lysergic-Blissbombcentral.

Have you read the back of the tin of shitcan poison you last sprayed on your garden?

Since the vineyard in which I live began to replace the general petrochem regime with a few bio-D preps, by my modest birdism, I reckon the amount of local native birdlife - particularly the essential stuff at the end of the foodchain: the raptors, has constantly improved.

The insects have certainly come back in the skrillion. If you have no sick insects, you have no sick birds, see? And raptors scare the birds that eat grapes.

The vineyards are just schmick.

When we did the photography for McLaren Vale - Trott’s View, in 2000, with four top snappers working for a year, the only photo we got of local indigenous feathered fauna was a top knot sitting on a post.

Apart from far too many corellas, native birds were scarce.

Since so many of the McLaren Vale growers have cut back their rote petrochem, many going bio-D, the birds have returned.

I never taste wine on root days, because my palate's dodgy.

I always feel shitty on nodes.

I learned these patterns through the biodynamic calendar, which magically predicts the cycles of cattle chewing cud, or grazing, to within a day, years in advance.

And I am not alone.

For four years, in an annual three week blind tasting of three or four thousand wines, the winner and/or runner-up in my Top 100 were made by biodynamicists.

Hilliard’s impassioned bleat may be worth a giggle at the Sceptics’ Club, but it’s not what the vine gardens need.

I’d much prefer a molecule of Shakespeare.

Steiner was indeed a nut. But he didn't dream all this stuff up. He was a reluctant evangelist who condensed whole epochs of old wives’ gardening tales and had the guts to promote them.

A bit like another famous nut, Jesus Christ, he tried to get his converts to get on with whichever degree of his philosophy they could manage without ranting too much about it. He felt the results would do the talking.

Which, on my experience, they do indeed.

By their works ye shall know them.

I like the music of many great musicians I’ve worked with or know, and the poems of Coleridge. I could go on. But I don't have to go as far into the addictions of those poor buggers to savour their work.

Neither do I have to wonder too hard about what sort of agriculture Hilliard would be practising if he’d born in 1861; or what sort of philosophy Steiner would be pursuing if he was born in 1961.

A little passion and idiosyncracy, a little more attention to detail, a little deeper the disrespect of the rote norm, a little sharper the rejection of the flock dogma, the better off we'll all be, I reckon.

When an earthquake threatens, the animals disperse.

.

LONG DRY ROUTE TO THE KING OF THE RIVER

The author waits for Tony Bilson's magnificent repast at Trevor Knaggs' La Dolce Vita lunch at King River Estate

by PHILIP WHITE - A version of this story appeared in The Independent Weekly on 28 NOV 08

Horsham, drought, late afternoon. The sky is spectacular with thunderclouds: thousands of tonnes of water, stubbornly refusing to fall. Well-dressed farmers sit at footpath tables, glimpsing up, drinking coffee. There’s not much else to do. For hundreds of kilometres, every farm gate has a tractor or two for sale; a harvester; a favourite ute. There is no stock other than the odd scrawny sheep gnawing at what was supposed to be wheat, and a few bony cattle.

The roads have run down. Every village building needs paint. All those Wimmera streams that run north into the Murray are bone dry. I ask for more chilli on my chook burrito. The disbelieving lass produces a bowl of slightly mustard-coloured powder which rips the nose apart. Monosodium glutamate sprayed with Mace. It takes two beers to erase. Where’s the butcher? I ask, dreaming of edible food. Where’s the fruitaveg? “Coles”, she says.

Shops which once housed the butchers and greengrocers now brim with bric-a-brac: home-made artworks, trinkets, and useless caucasian artefacts that householders have chosen to live without.

On the hilltop west of St Arnaud, a quick thunderstorm has left one puddle. I report this to the nearest publican. “Fair dinkum”, she says. “You shoulda took a photograph of it. We coulda used it on a postcard!”

Further east, the Goulburn looks almost hearty. And so it should, if Melbourne’s new pipeline is to deliver. Across the Hume Highway the countryside turns lush green. We wind up the King Valley to Edi, where the tobacco farmers were, but now spread shooting vineyards, ash trees, oaks; creeklines thick with willow and hawthorn. Out of the car at King River Estate. “Jeez mate, this country’s looking good”, I say to winemaker Trevor Knaggs. “We get forty inches”, he says.

Perversely, the purpose of this journey is the annual La Dolce Vita Lunch. Trevor’s beautiful King River Estate wines, and a repast cooked by the great Tony Bilson, who makes the annual pilgrimage from Bilson’s at the Radisson in Sydney to King River, where he cooks for 120 in an old cowshed.

“Talk to Tony”, Trevor says. “Choose the wines. We’re proud of them. We’re going biodynamic.” A sexy tenor sax tootles away as the first diners arrive; waiters don shirts that say “Conserve water. Drink wine”. The first dish is from ancient Rome: almond gazpacho beneath a thin layer of oil. It comes with a croüton smothered in foie gras. Trevor’s 06 verdelho does it perfectly, with its faint hints of kernel supporting rather than contrasting. The duet’s ravishing.

“Now” says Tony. “This lobster tail will come out with fresh shelled oysters and seawater jelly”. The fumé, fennel and cream cheese of the 08 sauvignon blanc does the oysters and salty jelly perfectly, once again supportive rather than contrasting, just as the carambola and drying tannins of the 08 vermentino wrap that hearty lobster.

Somebody had promised to shoot some deer. No deer volunteer, and the 40 kilos of fillet Tony rattled up at the last minute in Sydney gets lost, so local venison turns up anyway. Tony roasts it and serves it in a sauce poivrade with chocolate, foie gras and juniper berries, with asparagus and a purée of potato and celeriac. The mighty King River Reserves, an 06 cabernet sauvignon and 05 merlot nail that dainty: in their different ways, both wines are chocolaty to some extent, and while the maturing chicory greens of the cabernet suit the celeriac side of the dish and the asparagus, the mossy, earthy, merlot nearly brings that Bambi back to life.

The Milawa Cheese Company presents a cheeseboard that just a decade back could be found only in Burgundy or Champagne. So we serve two unusual reds: a sweet 06 merlot, the result of a stuck ferment and some inspired tidying up, and the dry, unfortified - but tawny - 99 Nancy’s Shiraz, named after Trevor’s deceased Mum. “We gotta have this” Trevor says. “Mum’d love this”.

Tony’s mousse of chocolate with walnut cream, red berry salad and balsamic vinegar is a dryish, very adult affair, so we throw the dry 05 barbera at it. You oughta hear ’em slurp. This is one of the most utterly beautiful meals.

Coming home along the River, we first traverse hundreds of open channels gushing with water. They’re about the same width as the roads, and they’re using the new government grants to rubber-line them, but not enclose them. The chandlers are doing well in the drought: every fifty metres, there’s a neat little steel cable mariner’s ladder so critters can climb out if they slip on the rubber. But there’s only a glum puddle of a River at Echuca. From there to Swan Hill the anabranches are all dry, and there are millions of dead trees. There are no birds left on the road to Ouyen, and at Pinnaroo they’re irrigating potatoes with overhead sprinklers.