CHARDONNAY CHOICEST AT COLES? CLOSE!

OAK FERMENTERS AT KOOYONG ON MORNINGTON PENINSULA

Vintage Cellars Cuts Mustard
Coles Cultists Killing ABC Slide
Hey Hey Hey - It’s Chardonnay
by PHILIP WHITE - A SHORTER VERSION OF THIS STORY APPEARED IN THE INDEPENDENT WEEKLY

Chardonnay took a long time to hit Australia. The earliest white settlers had brought the best grape varieties of Bordeaux, the French Mediterranean coast, Germany, Portugal and Spain, but perhaps wisely steered clear of the great white of Burgundy, where it snows.

Not many Australian wine regions get snow.

Sir Samuel Davenport (right), of Beaumont Cellars, recorded his belief that “Chardonet” would be a critical grape for South Australia, and perhaps planted it at Marble Hill and Macclesfield in the very early days; we do not know. His beautiful ampelography resides in the Adelaide Library, with his pencilled note from the earliest days of the colony.

The C word seemed hardly to be uttered again for 120 years.

It wasn’t until about 25 years ago that it was worth conducting a comparative tasting of Australian Chardonnays. These would come from Padthaway, Coonawarra, the Hunter, the Riverland, Barossa, McLaren Vale, and the Yarra Valley. They were largely terrible: oaked awkwardly with coarse American and Limousin wood; usually chips.

David Wynn’s Mountadam was also well underway then. Using cuttings from a single Marble Hill vine (destroyed in the Ash Wednesday bushfires in 1983) and the Hunter, and better wood from the Allier, Troncais and Vosges forests, his High Eden Ridge wines were very good from the start.

As were the early Tasmanians, Pipers Brook and Heemskerk.

Encouraged by Len Evans, the Petaluma chairman who controlled the show ciruit, Chardonnay suddenly grew everywhere from Berri to Bourke.

There’s a push now to reverse the wise ABC - “anything but Chardonnay” - trend of the past decade, but this appears to have been hijacked by that small cadre of terroiristes headed by Grant Ramage in Coles’ premium wines buying sector. They’ve decided to show us a thing or two by having some of our better cool district Chardonnay makers prepare 2009 wines which they sell exclusively through Vintage Cellars. There’s no expensive middle man, so the prices are lower.

And the wines are very good.

Starting at the top end for those of us with no money, the cheapest is Emma Woods’s Seppelt Grampians Chardonnay ($19; 88+ points), a tight, steely wine with little discernable oak but savoury twists of butterscotch, honeycomb toffee and cushioning charcuterie fats. It’s your-right-down-the-line salt and pepper squid accompaniment: a lot more satisfying than 95% of the current squinty flood of Kiwi savvy-Bs.

The only one from outside Victoria is the Alterum Adelaide Hills Chardonnay ($25; 92+ points) made by Martin Shaw, of Shaw and Smith. Compared to the sparse Grampians wine, it’s a big step up in complexity, soul and alcohol, the latter factor probably due to the warmer nature of the Adelaide Hills. Its fruit is fresh, fragrant, and tropical, with lovely, lightly smoky oak. The palate is authoritative and weighty; there’s a pleasant powdering of oatmealy tannin in the tail, and very firm, stony acidity. Cook a braised free range chook in a hotpot in cider with onion, capers, and live tarragon, and you’ll be just juicy.

Kooyong’s Sandro Mosele (left) firmly holds a place in my Australia top twenty winemakers, and it’s a reflection of the Coles/Vintage Cellars buying team’s acuity that they’ve squeezed the Ballewindi Vineyard Mornington Peninsula Chardonnay ($30; 91++) from him. It’s a tight, complex, stony wine to sniff, with rusty iron smells as much as refined, juicy pears: Bosc, Anjou and Rocha varieties come to mind. There’s also a pleasant layer of pancetta fat, perhaps from some malo-lactic fermentation. It finishes dusty, stony and appetizing, in a perfectly Mediterranean manner. Napolitan spaghetti vongole would sit it pretty!

To the Yarra Valley next, and Dave Bicknell’s Oakridge Parish Of Gruyere Yarra Valley Chardonnay ($33; 90++ points). This is sharp, acrid wine to sniff: carbide and cordite give leading edge to a wedge of crunchy fresh pear and pithy dried apple aromas. In the mouth, an aluminium-like acidity dominates the tapering fruit, making a receding wedge … while it lacks complexity, it would beat many a Chablis of this price into my anxious glass. It’s long, lean and appetizing; go bouillabaisse!

Thence up bigtime in price to the rk Beechworth Chardonnay ($58; 93++). Giaconda is the grail of most Victorian chardomaniacs, who do tend to xenophobia. 09 being a difficult year, what with the horrid incineration of the alpine forests and all, this is the only Chardonnay Rick Kinzibrunner (below) will release from that vintage: Coles got it all.

Easily the best of this entire range, it shows true Giaconda form: the slightly peachy, cuddly, squishy fruit, seasoned with the peculiarly spicy Sirugue French oak favoured by this maker. But there’s beautiful astringency, too: an appetising string of acid and very dry red earth tannin that stretches the palate beautifully. It’s by no means cheap, but it’s more modestly-priced than your true blue Giaco. Stewed fowl with fresh herbs; goose cassoulet; anything from Richard Olney’s immaculate Provence The Beautiful cookbook will be perfect.

Such endorsement of the scary big Coles will make me no friends amongst the small local producers of Chardonnay. But they should rest assured that this fine suite of good-to-almost-great Chardonnays will help reawaken your Chardonnay receptors, which is in their interest if their wines are any good.

No other single company but Penfolds can table such a platoon of Chardonnays, but their prices are as mighty as their wines. In the case of these Coles wines, the prices are very good. If you buy a straight or mixed case, you get another 30% off!

Since Coles have “let go” Jeremy Stockman (right), who played a vital role in the selection and blending of these wines, it will be very interesting to see whether they can maintain this quality. Very few independent wine stores have a Chardonnay shelf as reliable and well-chosen as this tight-knit bunch. You’ll usually have to wade through dozens of very awkward wines to find anything like these.

Jeremy is now working as a consultant: most Australian Chardonnay makers would be better off using his blending skills, if these wines are anything to go by.

And they are. So go buy.

CHARDONNAY MONGERS' MEETING

SIR ARTHUR STREETON: 'FIR'ES ON' (LAPSTONE TUNNEL) 1891 - AUSTRALIA'S MOST AROMATIC PAINTING? CLICK ON IMAGE TO READ STREETON'S LETTER TO FRED McCUBBIN











The Look Of Smell
Sexy Sexton Stuffs
The Desert Weed

by PHILIP WHITE - A VERSION OF THIS APPEARED IN THE INDEPENDENT WEEKLY

They say the difference between drunks and alcoholics is alcoholics go to meetings. The chardonnay addicts have obviously had a meeting. But bugger their meeting: here I sit drinking chardonnay, gazing at an Arthur Streeton painting.

So what’s chardonnay got to do with Sir Arthur Streeton? Well, it has to do with the look of smell.

I can tell the chardonnay addicts – and I mean those addicted to growing and making the stuff - have had a meeting because everywhere I hear the breathless news that chardonnay is coming back. My e-mail is full of this naive hope. I find this advice rather telling, if not threatening. I even heard it, for Bacchus’ sake, at the McLaren Vale wine show. (McLaren Vale grows about 6000 tonnes of ordinary chardonnay a year, which is a drop in the total 444,000 tonnes Australian bucket.)

I’ve heard it all before. Len Evans, that old rogue who ran the wine show system for thirty years, preached incessantly that ‘chardonnay will become the vanilla of the Australian wine industry’. They took this variety from the snow and chalk of Champagne and Burgundy and planted it all over the desert and prayed that it would turn into vanilla. They told us it HAD turned into vanilla. And then they put caramelised oak chips and whatnot into it so it tasted more like vanilla. But it’s a thirsty weed in our desert: never even getting vaguely close to vanilla essence; much less the true and perfect vanilla bean.

THE LATE LEONARD P EVANS: LA-LA IN VANILLALAND

Industry leaders Dick Smart, Adrian Read and Ian Kidd even planted chardonnay at Bourke. Or got some other poor bugger to plant it, as a millennium PR stunt: the first wine on Earth to be picked in the new millennium. Read: ‘Kidding’, Smartypants.

One of the reasons our wine business is on the nose is that all the punters in the world will not, cannot, drink all the terrible chardonnay that Australia grows. If, like with albarino, they suddenly discovered it was really savignin or traminer or something they’d been passing off in ignorance, and they could rename it and relaunch it, even then it wouldn’t be drunk. Not for a profit.

There are about ten true estates in Australia making good chardonnay. Cullen, Lubiana, Leeuwin, Ashton Hills, Marchand and Burch, Tarrawarra, Romney Park, Montalto, Mountadam, Tallarook ... all reliable chardonnay makers.


Fosters and Constellation can do it well with bought fruit, but they make lakes of the worst stuff, too. And as the chardonnay gets worse, fatter or thinner, so does the dodgy intellect of those who persist with it at the swill end of the market.

Who do they think we are?

Which leads me to the 24 year old Arthur Streeton, in the Blue Mountains in 1891, painting the colour of the air above the Lapstone Tunnel, an excavation the navvies were making for the new trainline. There was an explosion, and a man lost his life. So Streeton painted the faintest wisp of blue smoke over his perfectly-measured air, there in the dry eucalypt bush with the sweat and the horses and the broken hearts and stone and gunpowder. This could be Australia’s most aromatic painting.

I am tasting five successive vintages of Giant Steps Yarra Valley Sexton Vineyard Chardonnay, made by that Merlin, Steve Flamsteed, and Dave McIntosh. These are distinctive and beautiful wines to sniff, because they do not resemble vanilla. They have a range of fruity esters that spread from the smell of Kingston Black cider apples, through stewed to fresh crunchy pear, maybe quince paste, then lemon juice and ginger, to the very edge of oxalis, like the whiff of rhubarb pie, or the taste of a soursob stalk, and on almost to methoxypyrazine, the smell of a tomato leaf, or sauvignon blanc. They are lean, naturally acidic sentinels of great longevity, almost carved from stone. And each one, to varying degrees, also has the acrid, nostril-twitching aroma of Arthur Streeton’s ‘Fire’s On’, (Lapstone Tunnel) 1891, which you can disappear into at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

These wines are grown without poison sprays, and made with the yeasts of the air. They need no shovelled acid; only a drinker patient enough to realise their beauty is not always overt, like the old peach syrup/Dolly Parton chardonnays of Rosemount’s Roxburgh, a vineyard which has just been bought by BHP-Billiton, who can smell coal.

The Giant Steps chardonnays do have a little of the chubby fatty acids that often mark the best Burgundian versions, but these simply make these staunch wines more wholesome. The 2008 version has about as much butter as the thinnest layer of flake pastry, as if all the abovementioned fruits were on a lightly-cooked tart.

Despite them regularly winning major shiny at the Royal Melbourne, these pristine, honest wines, from an honest, lovingly-tended garden, are not the sort of chardonnays those refinery managers decided to persist with at their meeting. I’ve already drunk glumly to that.

FOOTNOTE: After publishing this, the author discovered there had indeed been a meeting to stir the troops to get chardonnay back on the shelves in place of the dreaded Kiwi savvy-B. Fosters called the meeting. The wine show judges promptly obeyed!

SAUVIGNON KING LEAVES CLOUDY BAY

KEVIN JUDD will be spending a lot more time on his brilliant photography. Check out his work by clicking on this image.

Juddy Mosies On

1984. Kevin Judd, probably the quietest man in the wine business, walked into my office grinning like a giant clam and said he was into this new thing with David Hohnen of Cape Mentelle. But New Zealand? Yep. A place called Marlborough.

“We’re gonna plant sauvignon blanc”, he gurgled through his smoke. “Best place for it.”

I liked two sauvignons blanc: one yellow softy made at Angle Vale by Rocky O’Callaghan; the other was Hardy’s tawny fortified made from Bob Hardy’s ancient vines at upper Tintara. Wolf Blass had been buggering about with some, blended with riesling and aged in mostly American oak(!).

Then came the radical Vales blitzkriegs Iain Riggs made in ’81 and ’82, at Hazelmere Estate (now Serafino Maglieri’s). Riggsy used fruit from the Edge Dennis vineyard that d’Arenberg has just bought. He picked it into milk crates so the grapes wouldn’t squash and oxidise, chilled it, then gave it the Oenotech treatment devised by Dr. Tony Jordan and Brian Croser, using their distinctive R2 yeast. The wine was a blast: crisp, grassy and fresh as a lemon, with all those alarming R2 whiffs of banana and passionfruit.

R2 had been isolated by Croser at Chateau Rahoul near Sauternes in Bordeaux, where Len Evans was spending Peter Fox’s money. But the financially-challenged Fox solved his Adelaide Holdings problems by driving his Ferrari flat out into a concrete wall, and Peter Vinding-Diers bought Rahoul, to make exquisitely fine, almost brittle sauvignon blanc. The savvy-B explosion ignited, and soon Rob and Michael Hill Smith had a great lunch at Yalumba, where they served Vinding-Diers’ inspiration: “Y”, the dry savvy-B from the mighty home of sticky, Chateau d’Yquem, in Sauternes.

Sometimes d’Yquem picks its sauvignon early in the vintage to make a dry wine, rather than letting it botrytise with the semillon and go into the mighty sticky for which that Chateau is revered. There have been only 23 vintages of “Y” since the first in 1959.

So we guzzled our “Y” while the Smiths quizzed us over the chance of dry savvy-B becoming the next chardonnay. Rob eventually went in the viognier direction, and while I have a tape recording of Michael deriding savvy-B that day, he went on to make it a stalwart at Shaw and Smith. There was much discussion of the cat’s piss grassiness of the variety, which comes from its natural methoxypyrazines (3-isobutyl-2-methoxypyrazine and 3-isopropyl-2-methoxypyrazine). These compounds are common to cabernet sauvignon, soursob, rhubarb, tomato leaves, and grass. Hemp, and jute, or hessian, is full of it, and sometimes austere sauvignons smell rather like superphosphate sacks, which combine the remnant methoxypyrazine with the smell of guano, which I reckon comes from combinations of sulphur, soil, and yeast.

Humans detect methoxypyrazine at around one part per trillion, which is like smelling one grape in the entire Australian crush. The grape manufactures it to deter predators, and only when the pip is ripe enough for germination does the vine suddenly cease its production and instead pumps sugar to attract said predators, which become incubators for those seeds.

Vignerons panic if they can’t get their savvy-B off quick enough in heatwaves, as the plants quite abruptly cease manufacturing this compound. On a hot day, the value of a crop can plummet in hours. The winery wants the methoxypyrazine for its distinction, but suddenly it disappears, leaving the grower with a grapeyard full of sugar but devoid of character and smothered in birds.

“I knew Stephen Hickinbotham was sniffing around Marlborough - he knew sauvignon had a future there”, Hohnen says. “He was first into everything. Kiwi sauvignon had the eyebrow factor: nose in the glass and up goes the eyebrows. But it was all too sweet and too acidic.

“Juddy instinctively knew what to do. He’d worked four vintages with Merrill at Reynella, then went to Selacks in New Zealand. We found three or four growers with 120 tonnes. They didn’t know what to do with it. Juddy made it after work. We built Cloudy Bay in ’86, and off it went.”

Kiwi savvy-B is now an international hit. Hohnen sold Cloudy Bay to Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessey in 2000. In the twelve months to October, Australia drank 26 million litres ($206 million worth) of Kiwi white, most of it sauvignon blanc. Like Hohnen, Juddy’s off to make a little wine for himself, and get on with his first love, photography.

I would have liked to talk to Juddy about all this, but at the time of writing the Cloudy Bay people haven't responded to my enquiries.

You couldn’t squeeze another grape onto the Marlborough plain now - the vineyards are climbing over the hills. Google Yealands and you’ll get my drift. But too much of it’s mean greed, all acid and sugar, devoid of soul or balance. Same old tale.

At home, the world’s biggest wine company, Constellation, just won the top sauvignon blanc gong in the Adelaide Hills show with Oomoo, and while Rob Hill Smith’s waiting for viognier to become the next chardonnay, he still imports d’Yquem and, when they make one, the crunchy “Y”. They’re only $685.

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Take Some Essence Of Oak Chips, Add Weeds And Vanilla ...

by PHILIP WHITE - This first appeared in The Independent Weekly in May 2008

“Chardonnay will be the vanilla of the Australian wine industry”, the late Len Evans, OBE, preached for thirty years.

Who? This feisty ex-Mt Isa Mines storeman eventually ran Rothbury Estate, owned Evans Family Wines, chaired Petaluma, controlled the national wine show ring, became a highly influential mentor to hundreds of adoring winemakers and critics, et al. Like Sir John Falstaff, Evans smudged the boundary between ebullient and bumptious, and, after port, was borborygmic.

In Champagne, chardonnay’s used for champagne; in Chablis it makes lean, unoaked chablis, and in Burgundy, it’s used to make creamy, extravagantly oaked white burgundy. Like chardonnay, all these words sound nice, and while it was all fabulously expensive, fabulist Len loved shunning expense at the table.

But it snows in those places. Apart from bits of Tassie, like the Upper Tamar, and tiny slices of the mainland - high Orange or Tumbarumba - we could never grow chardonnay vaguely like the great French vignobles. So why chardonnay? It doesn’t snow along the Murray. Then, Len never drank much Murray.

Locally, Romney Park proves that on one tiny ridge near Hahndorf, you can make delicious chardonnay, as Ashton Hills does near Summertown. Penfolds makes mighty stuff from other Hills vineyards. Mountadam’s returning from a ten year slump. There’s Evans’ ex-pet, Lion Nathan’s Petaluma, with its alluring bunch of Riverland doradillo on the front label. After that I’m scratching.

Scarce cool country is not the only problem with Australian chardonnay. From the start, back labels invariably claimed this new variety was lovingly fermented and matured in new French oak, oak being the only thing available to legally impart vanillin. But as I wrote in 1991, when Len’s sermon was reaching crescendo, France typically harvested enough oak to make only about 250,000 new barrels – about 800,000 short of the amount of Burgundy-sized barrels needed to contain the juice of our 20,000 freshly-planted hectares of chardonnay. If indeed they eventually grew a berry. Forget barrels for the reds, or for the rest of the world. Or for the French, for that matter.

Luckily, Len had an attitude to oak that didn’t always require barrels. At a tasting at Rothbury in May 1983, I sidled out for a smoke when a courier arrived with four large plastic drums of liquid. Rather than interrupt my host, who was inside preaching, I signed for it, then read the chit, which said “Essence Of Oak Chips”. That’s cheaper than chips!

Evans’ acolytes and disciples always rather contentiously insisted that the customer demand for chardonnay was insatiable. Only a few years back blokes like Phil Laffer and Stephen Millar, bosses of Pernod-Ricard/Orlando/Jacob’s Creek and Constellation’s BRL-Hardy, were urging more plantings.

As these come into production, we now have 32,151 hectares, mostly in the wrong places. We might as well irrigate weeds. Constellation’s retreating from the River, and Fosters and Pernod Ricard have just told growers there that demand for the vanilla of Australia is plummeting. So the punter is not a mug.

Chardonnay’s not dead: Penfolds paid $5000 a tonne this year for cool district grapes for its top example, the Yattarna, and Chablis and Burgundy sales are soaring. Champagne’s so popular they’ve just made the district bigger. But while their new price for River chardonnay, $300 a tonne, might be rather fortuitous for the transnational winemakers, it won’t cover the grower’s costs.

One of the world’s oldest wine merchants, Berry Brothers and Rudd, last week released a report suggesting the Murray-Darling will soon be too hot for fine wine production, and - surprise, surprise - that the future lies in expensive luxuries from cool places like Tassie. This was timed to lob explosively in the middle of the London Wine Trade Fair.

Even more practically destructive was the CSIRO’s announcement that our own Rudd’s budgetry idiocy will close the vital Murray Valley viticulture research establishment, just when Stephen Strachan, boss of the Winemakers’ Federation, was busy reassuring everyone that “the industry’s doing a lot of research around climate change”.

The poor old River couldn’t take deadlier hits below the waterline. Alley juice for our bladder packs is already coming from third world vineyards where wages are miniscule and environmental controls non-existent; now our bottom-end bottles are threatened.

As for Berry Brothers and Rudd’s forecast that China will be the world’s major wine supplier in fifty years? Anyone who’s believed my musings since Remi Martin helped China plant its Dynasty vineyard - in a place where it snows - way back when Len began his vanilla sermon, would have to agree that the real number’s now about ten years.

I don’t gloat over the agonies of the gullible and unfortunate, but it’s becoming increasingly tempting to say “I told you so”. If only the Chinese had planted chardonnay and oak, Australia could have avoided much terrible grief. And saved quite a lot of water.

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East Coast Glossy Joins Mega Discount Plonkmonger To Shine Up Sunny South Winos

by PHILIP WHITE

Australia’s Gourmet Traveller WINE, a shiny gastroporn monthly, in association with the enormous Sydney-based liquor discounter, Kemenys, has awarded three South Australians in its annual Winemaker of the Year Awards.

The Winemaker of the Year 2008 award, “which recognises excellence in the Australian wine industry”, went to Louisa Rose of Yalumba in the Barossa.

The Kemenys Medal, which “encourages up-and-coming winemakers in the pursuit of excellence”, was awarded to Helen McCarthy of Taylors in the Clare district.

The Len Evans Award, “celebrating the importance of leadership in the industry” was presented to Robert Hill Smith, the owner and chief executive of Yalumba.

“South Australia is a force to be reckoned with when it comes to good winemaking, so it’s particularly fitting that all three winners hail from the southern state,” said Judy Sarris, editor of Gourmet Traveller WINE. "We’re absolutely thrilled to celebrate the outstanding creativity and hard work of these people who help make Australian wine among the very best in the world.”

Louisa Rose was selected for “impeccable quality of her flagship viognier, Yalumba The Virgilius, and Pewsey Vale The Contours Riesling ... Louisa has been experimenting with shiraz – looking at the impact of site, variety and clone – and releasing some single vineyard wines”, the Gourmet flak said.

The Len Evans Award went to Louisa’s boss, Robert, for his “era of remarkable growth and innovation ... His highly assured leadership is what drives Yalumba and the other entities that fall within his reign, especially Hill Smith Family Vineyards and Negociants International. Within this large organisation, teamwork is considered vital and decisions are the result of consensus rather than being handed down unilaterally. The leadership shown by Hill Smith and Yalumba in releasing their Old Vine and Reserve charters in 2007 is all too rare in the industry. By entering the realm of practical philosophy, they sought to promote discussion and address consumer confusion that arose from the loose use of the terms.”

For DRINKSTER’S opinions on or discussions of any of the above, hit Len Evans in the search box above, read Reserved For Whom? or check the viognier file on DRANKSTER.

The Kemenys Medal went to Helen McCarthy, who worked at Barossa Valley Estate and Penfolds before becoming senior winemaker at Taylors.

“McCarthy has made an excellent start with wine judging too – she’s accurate, confident and ready to defend her opinions” said the flak.

The awards were judged by the magazine’s regular contributors, Huon Hooke, Andrew Caillard MW, Nick Bulleid MW, Peter Bourne, Sophie Otton and Peter Forrestal (Chairman).

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Cork Wars: Australian Putsch Bottles Up Portuguese Rear

by PHILIP WHITE - This story appeared in The Independent Weekly as "Cork Comes Unscrewed" on 3 October 08

If I suddenly disappear, it’ll probably be the Portuguese. Silly buggers haven’t learnt much in our thirty years of warfare.

When José Lopez, of the Portuguese company, Amorim, opened fire on my recent spray against cork on The Independent Weekly website his first shot was a complete fizzer. Amorim’s the world’s biggest rubber and cork trader. José suggested I’m on the take from the screwcappers. Read The Olympics Were Corked in the September archive below and you’ll get the whole grim PR disaster.

The screwcappers have no reason to pay me. I support them for free. Screwcaps are a zillion percent better for keeping wine fresh, and my responsibility is to my readers, who deserve the best. So I hate cork. I hate its trichloranisole taint, which arises when the chlorine used to beautify and sanitise it reacts with microbes living naturally within it. And I dislike the way cork lets wine oxidise.

I’ve been this dangerously subversive since Coca Cola abandoned the cork wafers beneath its crown seals in the ’sixties. The pharmaceutical business soon followed suit. Corky soft drink and cough medicine may still be available in Portugal, but we’ve had none here for thirty years. Although Adelaideans smell TCA most times they take a shower, thanks probably to chlorination.

There was more incoming. Mai Nygaard lobbed a big grenade, but forgot to say she’s Business Development Manager of Normacorc. Then I thought they’d subbed Carlos the Jackal to wipe me, but it turned out to be Carlos de Jesus, José’s boss at Amorim, with a glib disclaimer. Perhaps he’d read up a touch of Australian libel law, or remembered that Amorim had for years employed Brian Croser (deputy chancellor of the University of Adelaide, which runs our wine education and research) and Len Evans, who was chairman of Croser’s Petaluma. Both were doyens of Australia’s wine show system for decades.

Some synthetic plugs are improvements on cork, but they still don’t get it. I want to carry a corkscrew/bottle opener everywhere about as much as a friggin crank handle. Even the Portuguese sardine industry worked out decades ago that they couldn’t expect fish lovers to carry a special tool around just to get the fish out of the tin. Aussie brewers were next to abandon the tool kit.

If you’re a blingster who just loves something clunky to jangle on your keys, I reckon the Diam compound cork is the best excuse to carry a mechanical tugger. In many thousands, I’ve found only a few Diams to be duds, and this was mainly due to irregularities in the bottle neck. Much stiffer than corks, Diam plugs sit tight, but don’t swell as well to fill depressions or seams within imperfect necks, so wine gets out and oxygen gets in. And they’re so hard to get off the worm, somebody should invent another gadget to help with that.

Of course TCA comes from sources other than corks. Pat Conlon’s new trams smelled corked when they were new, probably something to do with the aircon filters being sanitised with chlorine. The international entry lounge at Darwin airport was corked for thirty years, probably due to well-intentioned cleaners ensuring there was no tropical mould in the carpet. I always thought of Portugal when I came through. Some cheese is corky, too. Chlorine is used to sanitise cheese factories, and the French wrapping used to package white rind cheese is often bleached with chlorine compounds.

Cork lovers who preach about natural always being better should abandon the chlorine completely and leave the poor old cork trees alone. Respect the sacred ecology of the natural microfauna in the bark. Get straight back to the old wine skin. Pig is best. You seal ’em with a leather thong. I don’t know whether St. Matthew was a practising Jew, but remember his advice from God’s Word: “Neither do men put new wine into old skins: else the skins break, and the wine runneth out”.

Dislike overt sulphur? Anyone who seals a wine high in sulphur beneath screwcaps will soon learn they’re so effective they preserve faults as well as attributes. Want cork because you desire the sort of oxidation cork permits? Winemakers who seek oxidation should permit a little oxygen in the headspace below whichever closure they choose. But for me, polymerisation without oxidation, please. Screw it!

When me old China suggested Australia's "a proven failure as a wine producer, producing a soda kind of drink", I almost sympathised. Like China, we still use table grapes for wine production. And as for China being "the milenar culture which privileges natural material for the food product whose consumption is developing most in the last years is indeed a deep, intelligent one"? Mate, pull out the cork and have a nice big glass of milk, there's a dear.

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Through the past, darkly

by PHILIP WHITE - This was published in The Independent Weekly on 5 September 2008

Around 1982, I was pleasured to conduct a preliminary tasting of the fifty or so wines assembled from the Yalumba Museum for that year’s Museum Tasting. Michael Broadbent, the impeccably besuited gentleman wine scribe from London’s port-and-stilton clubland, and Len Evans, his opposite number in more ways than one, were my co-tasters.

Amongst the treasures on display was an old Australian red I quite loved. It was not in perfect condition, but it delighted me. In his round-up of our opinions, delivered instructively from a lecturn to the lucky throng who were about to do the same tasting, Evans shat on me for my appreciation of the wine, suggesting I could not see volatile acidity should I drown in it.

“Young White”, he’d always say. “Not a bad writer, but we’ll have to get him up to the Hunter to teach him a thing or two about wine”. He never missed such an opportunity. Broadbent, by the way, seemed to like the wine as much as I did.

It was a Caldwell red from 1937, a blend of Barossa shiraz and a Hunter component, probably made by the great Maurice O’Shea. Two bottles were for sale at the next day’s auction. The bidding went ballistic, but I prevailed. I had never spent so much on two bottles of wine.

I settled them, and drank them a week later at the Uraidla Aristologist. One bottle was poor, but still quite drinkable, the other in quite good nick for a forty-five year old.

A few weeks later I was in Western Australia with the winemakers of Hardy’s, and Bill Hardy raided the cellar at Houghton to find some old glories to be served, blind, at dinner. One bottle immediately rang my bells. “It’s not the same, but it reminds me of the Caldwell I recently bought at the Barossa vintage auction”, I said.

Bill was incredulous. This was a Western Australian red, from, I think, 1938.

“It’s from the other side of the country, Whitey”, he said. “But it’s made by Charlie Kelly, the same winemaker who blended that Caldwell in Sydney the year before.” Snap.

After working at Caldwell, an old-style negociant and blending house, Charles W. Kelly went to the West to make the wines at Valencia, where Bill worked with him before Kelly’s retirement in 1977. He was the grandson of Dr. A. C. Kelly, one of the first owners of Tintara, and author of the 1867 E. S. Wigg publication, Winegrowing in Australia, one of the colony’s first viticulture bibles.

A few weeks ago, I feasted at Norberto’s house of meat in Hutt Street, with Peter Gago, Patrick Conlon and Peter Vaughan. The latter, a fearsome wine collector, brought two rare bottles; Gago, of course, had dug deep as well.

Vaughan’s first offering was immediately recognised: the 1937 Caldwell, now gnarled and obviously very old, perhaps a little volatile, but certainly not poisonous. What a thrill to put such a slice of history into the gizzards!

“Best looking 71 year old in the country” Patrick gurgled. “Sweet and full of vinegar, but lush, live and lovely”, my notes enthuse.

Vaughan’s next offering was in near perfect condition. It was Maurice O’Shea’s Mount Pleasant Light Dry Red from the legendary Stephen hermitage vineyard, from 1952, my birth vintage. This was exquisite wine, in no worse condition than, say a five-year-old Bass Phillip, and certainly in better nick than many of the hyper-expensive Clarendon Hills offerings much beloved of Robert Parker Jr..

“Utterly wondrous!” I scribbled.... “Olives, bread, caramel, fudge, mealy tannin....96 points....looks much better than me!”.

Gago then poured Max Schubert’s crowning glory, the 1962 Bin 60A blend of Coonawarra shiraz and Kalimna cabernet. I’d had this wine many times with Max, and had feared that since his death, any fresh bottles with good corks had all gone. But this one, virtually straight from the cellar it had occupied since the day of its bottling, was alarmingly fresh and saucy in a “so whatter you lookin at?” manner.

The fascinating thing about it, however, was its preponderance of raw American oak. In the days when I drank such wonders with Max, nearly all of our top reds were covered in sappy, coconutty American oak, so the 60A never appeared outstanding for its wood. Compared to many, in fact, it always seemed perfectly balanced. But now, since we’ve moved on to much more suitable, finer-grained oaks from the cooler forests of France, the poor old thing was more of an audacious, out-of-fashion artefact, if indeed delicious and still cheeky. 96 points, two of them for emotion.

So never believe the winemaker who tells you “it’s pretty woody now with that spicy American, but it’ll assimilate with time”. American oak has no more chance of assimilating than the lumps of amber sap that have bobbed around the Baltic for millions of years.

Romney Park Barossa Shiraz 2006

$48; 14.5% alcohol; Diam cork; 94++ points

From the deep red dirt over the clay, bluestone and schist of the Barossa piedmont near Bethany, this rare, priceless wine is worth stocking up, since some boofhead who had no right to them put a mechanical harvester over the old bush vines this year, and simply headed off with the grapes. We know who he is. This is classic piedmont fruit: all deep and mysterious, with dried prune, stewed blackberry, mulberry and blueberry; a twist of carob bean; a lick of aniseed balls; a shot of mint; beetroot … and even while its finish is bone dry and schisty rather than slenderly tannic, it’s still elegant. Rostbif. 0439 398 366

Grosset Polish Hill Clare Riesling 2008

$44; 13% alcohol; screw cap; 93++ points

Deceptively reluctant to emerge at first – don’t chill it; cool it - this wine eventually exudes a pleasing, teasing whiff of nashi pear and a certain creaminess, like ly-chee. It gradually builds up a wet flagstone base note, giving it an almost Austrian authority, like some Salomon. Similarly, the palate’s creamy and lush, with a longer, more comforting finish than that slaty bouquet promised. Then you disturb a severe wall of lemon-and-lime acidity and sombre stone, and begin to realise this is a wine for very long-term cellaring indeed. It’s a beauty. Choucroute with parsnips and smoky speck. www.grosset.com

Petaluma Clare Valley Riesling 2008

$30; 12.5% alcohol; screw cap; 93++ points

Brrrrr. Here’s another ravishing example of the outstanding rieslings made in Clare before the heatwave turned everything to Aeroplane Jelly. I know, I know you’ve heard the descriptor before, but there are no other words for it: this smells like flagstone soaked in lime juice. It’s a scrumptious, unctuous, confounding wine: huge in force and presence, but still impeccably elegant and reserved. It has fresh healthy fruit spongily wrapped around a chassis of rapier acidity, with phenolics and tannins that resemble the Hanlin’s Hill rock, with maybe just a little tease of strawberry pith. One of Petal’s best. Salmon confit.

Morillon Port Phillip Estate Tete du Cuvée Mornington Peninsula Pinot Noir 2006

$??; 13.5% alcohol; Diam cork; $93++ points

I spose if you’re copying a wine style from France you might also copy their ling. This coulda bin called sumpin different. But it doesn’t jam in my craw, the ling. Nor does the wine. I like the fact that it’s not a juicy fruity pinot, filling the Port Phil’s top bot, nor is it a big tannic bugger, pretending it contains shiraz but not really. This is perfectly balanced, perfectly formed young pinot, understated in almost every way. But add all that understatement together, and you’ve got a simple, humble, plainly crafted antipodean wine that should have the haunches of all Burgundy ashiverin. Nice knock. Spare ribs. www.portphillip.net

Romney Park Adelaide Hills Merlot 2005

$25; 14.5% alcohol Diam cork; 93++ points

Real merlot’s freaky - it likes to keep its roots wet. So this vineyard’s as happy as a swine in the mire, on the banks of the Onkaparinga at Balhannah. It’s delightful, highly stylish wine, intense but sublimely elegant, with that heady, dark smell of swamp myrtle, with its waxy leaves. Blackberry vines, too, with ripe fruit. Unless you’re used to Petrus or La Pin, forget everything you’ve heard about merlot: this strapping, highly appetising bargain IS NOT MELLOW. With enough fine tannin to ensure at least a decade’s dungeon, it’s utterly scrumptious now. Juicy cutlets and reduced spinach. Call 0439 398 366

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