MURRAY MOUTH FAKES ONE LAST FLOW

WOODEN BOATS RACING BENEATH THE HINDMARSH ISLAND BRIDGE AT GOOLWA, WHERE THE MURRAY RIVER PREVIOUSLY FLOWED INTO THE GREAT SOUTHERN OCEAN ... photograph by KATE ELMES/INDEPENDENT WEEKLY

Turning Water Into Wine
Viticulture Helps Kill River

by PHILIP WHITE - a version of this first appeared in THE INDEPENDENT WEEKLY

Aquacaf is a great little seafood restaurant at Goolwa. It sits on the edge of the new fake lake the government’s made with its dam wall at Clayton. It now looks as if the Murray River once again flows into the sea. Where the Finniss waters would normally gush into the channel and make a sharp left hand turn to flow north into Lake Alexandrina, flushing, filling and oxygenating it, she now turns left and bounces off the new earthern wall, then sorta swirls around and back, filling Tom and Wendy’s boat thing, even spilling a little over the Goolwa Barrage into the Southern Ocean after the good rain.

There were a jolly lot of diners there last week, watching a fleet of classic wooden boats perform a polite race in the snot-green water. “Actually it’s more like khaki”, my fierce off-sider told her perfect gravadlax, which came on a wooden trencherboard.

Very ancient ritual, serving food on a trencher. I thought of the rough hands of the carpenter breaking bread for the rough hands of the fishermen at another meal in another epoch. They would have used trencherboards. I wondered how the Damascus rosé looked at that last strange supper; how it glinted in the light. How well it accompanied whatever they’d caught.

Aquacaf provides the perfect platform to gaze upon the Hindmarsh Island bridge. Its gentle bulging curve is easy on the eye, humping, as it does, from out of that old street of stone harbormaster’s offices, across the narrow channel to plunge straight into an aboriginal graveyard.

It’s an highly evocative place to sit, there at Aquacaf. Look north, across the bridge, towards Clayton and Langhorne Creek, and if your brain’s like mine it fizzes with rage and confusion about what the wine business has done to these waters. There was a good fresh aquifer there, but greed and ignorance saw it sucked until it turned too saline for use. More modest use of it has seen bits of it return to something like normal, but the Lake and the Bremer will never again be normal, although the Bremer actually flowed a little the other day, and I liked the thought that it might be putting what my Mum would call “goodness” back into the aquifer, and maybe even the poor buggered Lake.

I thought of the abandoned tailings dams at the old mines of Kanmantoo and Brukunga, then, and how much of their poison seeped downstream with the lovely rains. The wine in my hand came from the safer side of those headwaters, at Romney Park, between Hahndorf and Balhannah, where the water runs the other way, down the Onkaparinga and into the gulf accidentally named after the patron saint of viticulturers, Vincent.

That Hahndorf chardonnay is about as good and fine and precise a drink as the South Mount Ranges have produced thus far. It’s the perfect thing to have with such perfect dishes as Aquacaf’s squid and gravadlax.

While I wallowed in this repast, there with the bridge and the boats and the tupperware tuscany, I wandered back to the days of Premier Dean Brown, who moved some water allocation permits from upriver to Langhorne Creek, to feed the incredible explosion of viticulture that occurred there as soon as the tap came on. In 1991, there were 471 hectares of vineyard at Langhorne Creek: an area limited by the amount of available water coming down the Bremer, and the varying freshness of the aquifer.

The wine industry councils released their thirty year plan in 1995, outlining the amount of vineyards Australia would need to keep the world supplied through to 2025. Thanks to Premier Brown’s new water, the Langhorne Creek bit went very quickly. By mid 1997, there were about 2,500 hectares; by vintage 1999, there were 4317 hectares: a tenfold explosion in eight years.

In one $30 million hit, Vinescape Management Services, planted 320 hectares for the Guild Pharmacists’ superannuation fund, on completely unproven samphire country. It soon grew its own little salt pan, smack in the middle. I still keep the Orlando press release boasting of the size of its new planting: one vineyard with 200,000 trellis posts, 1,000 kilometres of drip line, and 50,000 kilometres of wire. Must be good eh? They planted riesling for Bacchus’ sake! That vineyard’s been on the market for years now.

Anyway, the mighty wine industry sure planted everything its thirty year plan outlined. In about five years. Not just in Langhorne Creek, but all along the Murray, and right across the nation. Nobody seemed to notice this unseemly haste.

HINDMARSH ISLAND BRIDGE ... photo by KATES ELMES/INDEPENDENT WEEKLY

As the waters of the Finniss gradually wear their way through the sinking dam our government has built to seal the fate of our greatest river system, I wonder what wise counsel Dean Brown offers Ms Maywald and Mike Rann today?

What punishment would this mob of rack ’em, pack ’em and stack ’em bullies deal out if this destruction had been wrought by, say, a gang of unemployed thugs from Murray Bridge?
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Zin is in, in a primitivo way

by PHILIP WHITE - from The Indepedendent Weekly 22 August 2008

Kevin and Helen O’Brien, of Kangarilla Road, hosted a brave tasting at The Lion last week. It’s always risky, presenting your wines on the blind, against direct rivals, but doing it with confounding and difficult varieties like zinfandel and primitivo is a real gamble. These ancients are so deep in tradition, contradiction and mystery, that they make that elusive will-o-the-wisp, pinot noir, look easy.

When I was Sex Pistol-whipped punk with ripple soles and no respect, I was amused by this new zin thing from California. But it took more than a “ZIN IS IN” badge and a set of papal purple lips to unlock the secrets of such an ancient freak. California told us that zinfandel was a Spanish mission grape which had morphed or mutated or whatever in the stiff chill of the High Sierra, and was therefore unique to California.

It was a surprise to soon discover Cambrai, in McLaren Vale, made zin. It was in Western Australia, too, which seemed as far away as California thirty quick years ago.

Winemakers were scared of zin: it regularly grows grapes of widely-ranging ripeness. When cabernet grows dead reliably, like weeds, well, why would you worry with something so hard to grow, difficult to pick, weird to vinify, and nearly impossible to sell. When I eventually found some zin in Margaret River, I was astonished to discover bunches with great fat sweet berries as big as table grapes, nestled there beside normal sized ones and others like bitter little lentils.

This presents real problems when deciding when to pick: some of the bunch has almost obscene sugar, the rest is tight with bitter acid. So it’s possible to get wines which seem like a blend of jam and lemon juice.

At Cape Mentelle, David Hohnen gradually beat his zin into something resembling submission, and I recall recommending one sixteen or seventeen per cent brute that tasted like “King Kong in Manolo Blahnik stilettos”. That pleased the Mentelle PR lady no end: that style was their goal.

Eventually Chris Ringland went off to Puglia, Italy’s heel, and made very successful La Corte primitivo, which by then was thought to be zinfandel, and was indeed the most prolifically-grown grape in Calabria. This, and other cult items, like the A-Mano, made by American Mark Shannon in Italy’s south, began to appear on lists like the off-the-wall fruitcake of the Exeter.

Fruitcake’s the word for primitivo, too. You can get wine which tastes as complex and fruity as fruitcake, but soused in acid and alcohol that could be kirsch and lemon juice. Otherwise, the wines tend to be too big, strong, fat and dumb, like the strange beasts we were offered from the Adelaide Hills during recent years: prematurely aging, leathery, sweet-and-dry reds.

Helen O’Brien’s research now shows that primitivo has thousands of years of history, while zinfandel doesn’t quite stretch back two centuries. We do know now that both, if indeed they are much different, descended from the ultra-rare crljenak kasteljanski of Croatia. The thirsty seafarers of the Mediterranean had it growing all over Italy’s sole way back in antiquity; but, true to form, the Italian agricultural bureaucracy never mentioned primitivo until forty years after zinfandel was first documented in the USA, around 1870.

Of the sextet of primitivo presented at The Lion, my highest points went to the Layer Cake 2006 (13.4%; $20; 92+) made in Puglia by Jayson Woodbridge. Its lower alcohol gave it vibrant ozone and blueberry tones; its tannins crunchy and rough. On the other hand, the ancient Italian house, Feudi di San Gregorio/Tenuata Ognissole’s Primitivo di Manduria 2006 (14.4%; $22; 92+) seemed very tidy and well-formed, with delicious ripe raspberry, like grenache, and zingy, sherbety acid. The Kangarilla Road Fleurieu Primitivo 2006 ($22; 16%; 88++ points) seemed not quite ready, with its incredible iron/cassis/framboise explosion of fruit suddenly leaving me with persistent, challenging tannin that made me yearn for large amounts of hearty Italian tucker.

My average score for the six zinfandels was a full ten points short of the primitivos. The Seghesio Home Ranch Sonoma 2006 ($32; 15.5%, 88) from an 1895 planting, was the best Californian, with just enough deep cherry to counterplay its abrasive, hunger-provoking tannin. Locally, the Kabminye Barossa 2006 ($38; 16.3%; 88+) seemed similar - in its vibrant ozone freshness - to the Layer Cake, despite the large alcohol difference, and its weird counterpoint of cassis and prune syrup with lemon juice and hot alcohol.

Then the Kangarilla Road Black St Peter’s 2006 ($34; 15.5%; 88+), from those 1975 plantings of Cambrai, which the O’Brien’s bought eleven years ago, was classic schizozin: an entertaining see-saw of fruit liqueur, licorice and lemons, finishing, of course, with that omnipresent, staunch tannin.

Visit O’Brien’s cellar soon, and talk all this stuff over. Or you can e-mail them with queries: kangarillaroad@bigpond.com. Time to commit some zin.

The Wellington evaporation pan

by PHILIP WHITE - This was published in The Independent Weekly in April 2007

There were grim faces around the table at Langhorne Creek the other night. Mike Farmilo, Nick Stock and your writer had just spent a day nudging the snifters at the annual Showcase Judging, where the six best local wines are chosen for inclusion in The Langhorne Creek Showcase Selection.

It’s not called a wine show, and no trophies or medals are awarded, but it’s still judged pretty much like a standard wine show, with three judges and an associate, tasting blind and averaging their scores. The rankings are still graded from no award (below 15.5 points out of 20) to bronze (15.5 – 16.9), silver (17 – 18.4), and gold (18.5 – 20), and we chose a Champion Wine of the Showcase.

The sombre mood at that dinner table had little to do with the quality of the delicious selections we made. Uh-huh. This was about water. Drought. The New Heat. Langhorne Creek was the first Australian wine district to be told its irrigation water allocation is now zero. And if Premier Rann’s huge evaporation pan goes ahead at Wellington, their allocation could well be zero for some years to come.

Unless, of course, there’s huge rain up the Bremer Valley, from Salem to Harrogate, and the traditional Bremer flood gushes through, watering the old eucalypty mudflat vineyards closest to the River. These floods submerge whole vineyards, and rarely come at the best time, but might save sufficient vineyards for the district to survive, as it did before modern irrigation. Although not even this primitive system is perfect: the upstream vignerons always take as much water as they like, and decide whether to let anyone downstream have any.

Enough will never be enough, of course. Larncrk - as the frogs and local humans pronounce it - has become a very big district. In 1991, there were 471 hectares of those traditional floodplain vineyards. Their limit was determined by the extent of the flooding, as the aquifer which they had used for supplementary irrigation was cactus: finally too salty for vines.

So Premier Dean Brown arranged new irrigation permits to allow huge-scale pumping from Lake Alexandrina for new vineyards well away from that original flooding mudflat, with its distinctive minty eucalyptols and amazing hoard of Jimmy Watson and Montgomery Trophies, most of which sat on John Glaetzer’s desk at Wolf Blass.

So by mid 1997, there were about 2,500 hectares, most planted by outsiders and newcomers in untried soil away from the Bremer. Key locals thought that might double again in the five years to 2002, to around 5,000 hectares. But in two years there were already 4,317 hectares. At the end of the 2006 vintage, the figure was about 5,800 hectares bearing, with another 332 hectares yet to bear a berry.

One reliable measure of the feverish gold rush mentality which drove this ridiculous, and now obviously unsustainable growth, was a press release from Orlando, boasting that its new planting involved 200,000 trellis posts, 1,000 kilometres of drip line, and 50,000 kilometres of wire.

Larncrk was becoming a kind of Coonawarra Lite: cheaper coolish area fruit grown much closer to the big refineries of the Barossa and McLaren Vale. Fruit whose source would rarely be acknowledged.

In one daring hit, Peter Pargeter, of Vinescape Management Services, planted 320 hectares for the Guild Pharmacists’ superannuation fund, on completely unproven, in fact dubious, samphire country, that grew its own salt lake as quickly as it grew vines.

So suddenly there’s no water other than a little saved up here and there, and the possibility that heavy rains might send another flood or two down the Bremer. That will, of course, flood only those original 471 hectares, and a few newies that have squeezed in on the moody mudflats. Unless five or six years of good rain fills the Murray Basin again, and the Lake begins to flow, all those monster upland prospects will gradually die of thirst. Or salt.

While the aquifer will never cope with another walloping like it had, and will never feed all the new vineyards, it is gradually healing under the new controls. So the winemakers’ logo, a traditional Aussie windmill, may eventually make sense again The Langhorne Creek Showcase Selection will be announced on 4^th May and be available for tasting with the other 99 entrants for $10 per head at the Langhorne Creek Memorial Hall on the afternoon of Saturday 5^th May.

Labor suicides by water-boarding

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

It was politicians who put the soldier settlers up the River. Poor buggers would just get back from the battles and horrors they’d never forget and they’d send ’em straight up the river with a shovel, a bundle of cuttings and an irrigation permit. Mine the Mallee for sugar; turn the water into wine, export it at the price of Coca Cola. Since then, until now, nobody’s had a second thought about the River. Anybody’d think the Chaffey Brothers still ran the entire basin.

Kevin Rudd certainly isn’t running it. COAG isn’t running it. Mike Rann’s not running it. Karlene and Penny aren’t in the race. Jock Harvey might just as well run it. He’s the chair of the McLaren Vale Grape, Wine and Tourism Association.

Having just left a meeting with the Federal Minister for Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, The Hon Tony Burke MP, Jock had a big spray, like most of the rest us did, anywhere we could, after the COAG collapse.

“There widespread support for the Federal Government taking control of the entire Murray River system through the compulsory acquisition of all water entitlements and then re-allocating water on a sustainable basis similar to the approach advocated by the Wentworth Group and scientist Mike Young”, was Jock’s first salvo.

Then it just kept coming:

“We are specifically concerned that instead of acquiring water entitlements, investing in infrastructure and efficiencies upstream will ultimately result in expanded plantings upstream and less or no water in the river downstream”, he said.

“The imminent collapse of the Murray River system is a national emergency requiring immediate federal government action”, he said.

“The Coorong is designated as a World Heritage Area because of its importance to the world’s ecology, not just the ecology of SA”, he continued.

“As the southern reaches of the Murray River system die, so to will the Coorong. As one of the richest countries in the world, how Australia solves this crisis will have a dramatic impact on SA and Australia’s standing in the world community, and on our leverage in making and keeping international commitments.

“The Government has the power to take these actions under the Corporations Act and we believe they must act now', he concluded.

Former Labor Party Senator Chris Schacht was at the meeting too. He should be running the River. He’s smart enough to warn that “every Federal Labor seat in South Australia except one was vulnerable to falling at the next election if the federal Government did not take immediate steps to take complete control of the river system”.

Paul Clancy, Chairman of the Wine Grape Council, should be running it. He’s ballistic about the amount of new vineyard planting still underway, in the face of gross oversupply and dwindling water resources.

“These damned Managed Investment Scheme plantings are continuing apace!”, he said last week. “200 plus new acres at Loxton. 200 plus at Lake Cullulleraine. 1200 plus in the Barossa. 200 plus at Wentworth. 200 plus at Ballarat. That’s only the start. Where’s the water coming from?

“This drought and the irrigation restrictions are simply masking the massive over-supply of grapes”, he said. “This industry needs 1.6 million tonnes of grapes to meet current demand and projected growth. We grew 2.1 million tonnes in 2006 and the prices collapsed. How much water will be wasted growing another 500,000 plus tonnes of grapes we can’t sell?

“There is, pure and simple, no potential for the industry to absorb this over-supply. The whole world is awash with oversupply, and the exchange rate is dead against Australia selling into that full market. Industry and government can no longer turn their backs on the grounds that this is free enterprise at work and that market forces will address this problem.”

While the big companies are still urging further plantings, they admit there’s a big glut of chardonnay: big enough for the price of those grapes to fall to $300 a tonne. So what’s the new deal? Now they want people to plant pinot noir and pinot gris because they’re the new buzz words. Apart from a tiny proportion of the Adelaide Hills and the Southern Fleurieu, there is no land in South Australia suitable for these difficult cool climate wine types.

Calling for mass plantings of such varieties, as Foster’s seems to desire, is about as dumb as taking fresh water from Tailem Bend and piping it to Langhorne Creek. Given one full day of stiff sou-easterly, the brine and sulphuric acid waters of the lakes will be well beyond Wellington and slurping neatly into the intake of the new pipe. Another twenty four hours of wind and the lakes shandy will reach Murray Bridge, where the Mount Bold pipe does its slurping. Another day of wind will see the same poisonous muck entering the intake of the Mannum Adelaide pipe. Duh!

Constellation clings to swamp

by PHILIP WHITE - This was first published in The Independent Weekly on 15 AUG 2008

“What does this mean for the image of the wine industry?” asked Tony McCarthy. The Baldies, from the ABC breakfast program, had woken me to discuss the continuing retreat from South Australia of Constellation, the world’s biggest wine company. I didn’t really answer his question.

Constellation, which managed to absorb Hardy’s, which had absorbed Chateau Reynella before being absorbed by the big Riverland duet, Berri-Renmano, knows more than most the true value of green bucks. These are the guys, remember, with the wetlands.

Banrock Station is a perfect example of how you use salty irrigation water on arid land to grow vines which produce little bags of sugar, from which you can legally make alcohol, which brings sufficient profits to fund a swamp along the river from which your humungous pumps took the water for the vineyard. Until it all goes cactus and you put your hand out to the government to help you keep it all looking tickety-boo for a little longer. Which can also be sold as a good news yarn for all concerned. Once or twice.

This is about tweaking the image of the true nature of your business. Green bucks. When John Grant, the President, yep, President, of Constellation Wines Australia, sent out his triumphant press release about how his winery closures and vineyard sales was a deft response “to the difficult global environment by taking steps designed to benefit the company over the long term and, by so doing, help strengthen Australia’s wine sector”, he mentioned the environment, but not Banrock Station. This is because the River is on the nose, but not yet sufficiently stinky to sacrifice Banrock, which might come in handy if the Murray gets better.

“World’s Biggest Wine Company Heals Aussie River”… I can hear it. “We’ll blame this hiccup on the Ngarrindjeri Curse: the disturbed dead of Ngurunderi taking their revenge. Storm Boy has prostrate cancer; old Gulpilil’s pissed in the cane grass; white man’s firewater saves sick river … just a touch more oboe behind the baby ducks, please Boris...”

But image-wise, internationally, the Murray, and its estuary, is quickly becoming our equivalent of the Amazon Basin. A posh pleasure industry based on the totally unnecessary luxury commodity, wine, doesn’t want to be associated with destroying the Amazon Basin. But that’s what it’s done.

In the same news bulletins that reported the Constellation retreat, Dean Brown was on, spraying big time about how us citizens don’t appreciate the hard work Mike Rann and Karlene Maywald are putting into the River. The Brown Man can flush red and lecture, believe me. But suddenly he was doing it for Robin and Catwoman.

Not long ago it was Premier Brown arranging some water rights for his mates in the wine biz who saw Langhorne Creek as a little Coonawarra conveniently close to Adelaide. The vineyards increased from 471 hectares to 4700 within a few years, and now there’s no water and many tears. This sudden lapse coincides with Mr. Brown becoming Mike Rann’s Droughtmeister, not to mention Chairman of Hillgrove, the miner who’s about to dig the biggest pit this side of Roxby at Kanmantoo.

But open pits are thirsty. No worries. Fill the sails of Mount Barker Council and The Courier with bumptious self-congratulatory bullshit about the mining boom being good for the Hills, thus justifying the construction of another one or two thousand villas to house all the lucky employees.

This presents a crisis: what are we gonna do with all this grey water this new Tupperware Tuscany has produced? Easy. Put in a nice little wetland to keep the kiddies and the greens happy with a few shags, coots and ducklings, and flog the overflow to the mine. An environmental triumph matched only by Banrock!

But this is where Dino becomes the Joker: riparian rights. Any effluent from Mount Barker should flow straight to Langhorne Creek, which has no water in the Brown pipes. This may help replace the water they took out of the river a little upstream to supply Mount Barker’s Villa Rash/Greywater Factory so they can fill the kiddies’ wetlands and keep the miners happy. Whew!

The hubris of prospective winegrape investors is similarly malignant: they’re doing soil tests at Langhorne Creek for new big plantings. Now. These, no doubt, intend to take water from one of the private pipes being run past the forthcoming Wellington Weir to catch the last drops of fresh water that managed to get past the Mount Barker pipe. Just think. A few years back it would have run down there to Langhorne Creek, through the Lake, all by itself.

I know many of you think this column should be about wine. But Thirst is thirst, and water is an important gastronomic item. Constellation knows Adelaide is approaching the point where it must choose whether it wants water or wine. The whole world is watching.