VINEPULL FOLLOWS THE OZ FLOODS SOUTH

Symptomatic Week For Ozplonk
Hunter Vineyards Shrink By Half
Fosters Battles Wine Australia 
by PHILIP WHITE

It’s been a symptomatic week in Australian wine.

The biggest end of the Australian wine industry has a long record of ignoring the symptoms of its ailments. This week leaves the callow observer wondering just how crook it’ll let itself get.

First came the news that half the vines in the Hunter Valley have been uprooted in the last eighteen months.

Compared to the Barossa and McLaren Vale, the Hunter has never been a great player, depending historically on fruit from both those regions, and the big rivers, for its bulk products. While its best producers – usually long-term family wineries - can grow and make truly wonderful Semillon and Shiraz, the Hunter’s hardly ideal for viticulture, being sub-tropical, and would probably not be there if there was no Sydney. Nevertheless, the removal of 3250 hectares of vines is a big deal.

In the good old days Max Schubert (right) would flog his horny Rambler coupe – “she’ll sit on 140 MPH”, he’d say with a grin – from Penfolds at Magill to check the vintage at Penfolds’ Dalwood winery in the Hunter. Within years of his death, the Oatleys, founders of the mercurial Rosemount in the Upper Hunter, had raided Southcorp’s Penfolds, and flew regularly the other way in their private jet.

Their audacious 2001 reverse takeover saw Bob “Wild Oats” Oatley (below) paid $1.4 billion - $881 million cash and 94.3 million shares – which swelled beautifully by the time the monolith was “rationalized” and sold to Fosters in 2005.

Fosters soon butchered this prime wine business with further “rationalization”, confusing its management, marketing and sales with its beer sector, an entirely destructive process which it now professes to have successfully reversed in its disentanglement of both sides of the firm for sale.

In ten years it spent AUS$6.7 billion building an empire with a current book value of $3 billion.

Clever operators, the Oatleys. They knew the difference between barley and grapes. And coffee. They made their first fortune running plantations in Papua New Guinea. Of all the coffee-producing countries, it was the closest to the International Date Line, making it easier to influence daily international coffee prices as the sunrise moved west.

Now Rosemount’s iconic Roxburgh Vineyard is part of a coal mine, like an increasing amount of the Hunter. When I visited the region last year, the chopper flew into a thin layer of brown gas the moment we crossed the crest of the Brokenback Range. This was the colour and aroma of hydrogen sulphide, or rotten egg gas, one of the things you tend to get when you scratch open great swathes of lignite and coal shale.

It seems strange that in recent years, the owners of the region’s many thoroughbred studs have complained more loudly about the resultant health of their nags than the locals have about their children.

The coal business is a big employer.

Patriarchal winemaker Murray Tyrrell complained regularly to me about the industrialisation of his beloved Hunter in the ’eighties. At one point he suggested the pollutants in the air were as corrupting of his business as the corruption of the NSW Labor government, and said it was becoming increasingly difficult to fully ripen grapes.

The late Tyrrell (left), “The Mouth Of The Hunter”, once told a gathering of wine writers that with two other prominent Hunter winemakers, he visited Premier Neville Wran, slapped their sugar invoices on the table, and complained that the pollution had become so bad that some years they were forced to illegally chaptalise their wine to get to the point of “ripeness” the market demanded.

Adding sugar to fermenting must is permitted in cold countries like France, but not in Australia, where ripening is sometimes too easily achieved, and acid additions are permitted to bring the wines back into balance.

It says something about the compliant nature of wine criticism that I was the only reporter on that junket who reported Tyrrell’s claim.

Since then, government claims consequent regulations have restricted Hunter pollution, and winemakers say ripening is no longer such a problem.

Newcomers, largely opportunist short-term investors driven by the government’s stupid tax incentives, planted most of the industrial grapeyards which have just been uprooted. If you can stomach their current claims, it is these types of vineyards, and not seriously profitable products like Grange, that keep giant exporters of bottom-end discount plonk, like Fosters, in business.

This leaves the Hunter in the hands of the old families who’ve always been there, stoically growing quality grapes for their old-style wines.

‘‘Fifteen to 20 years ago the dream was to retire from Sydney and live in the Hunter making a wine that was better than Grange and it just hasn’t happened,’’ Tyrrell’s son Bruce (below) said this week.

‘‘There were many vines planted in the wrong place, for the wrong reasons and they will all have to come out.’’

In the same week another small symptom of a huge change: psychologist Karen Hutchison was named NSW Rural Woman of the year at a posh dinner in parliament house. Formerly CEO of the Murrumbidgee Horticulture Council, she currently works for Murrumbidgee Irrigation, which has been responsible for watering enormous vineyards that supply the sorts of wine Fosters exports in shipping containers stuffed with giant bladder packs.

Fair dink. A huge rubber bag is laid into each container, then pumped full of wine which is pumped back out after its voyage.

The current ruin of much of the vast vignoble of the Murray-Darling, through fungal disease and flood in the short-term, and the sudden government-imposed cessation of unsustainable, profligate, environmentally-destructive irrigation in the longer view, must see great reductions in the amount of rock bottom fruit these exporting discounters say they depend upon.

The Hunter diminishing by half is nothing on what’s happening in the Murray-Darling. In the Murrumbidgee catchment alone the draft basin plans irrigation cuts of up to 45 per cent leaving more water to flow into the Murray.

"I've come from the Snowy Mountains, so I've seen first-hand the power of water to build communities and also to change landscapes,” Hutchinson (below) said at her award bash. "I now find myself working in the irrigation industry at a time of fundamental change around water policy so I'm seeing the power of water to both divide communities and galvanise them.”

She has just converted her wine grape vineyards to Sultana production for table grapes.

Which is almost funny. It wasn’t that long ago that highly-irrigated, obscenely high-yielding Sultana was Australia’s most used white wine grape, and Fosters, and the preceding owner/managers of its wine group were amongst its worst addicts. Like, they had to realize that Cabernet franc, watered to crop at 12 tonnes an acre, trucked across two states then bleached, was no longer ideal for making things they called Champagne. At least sultanas are already white - they don’t need bleaching. And you can get forty tonnes of sully to the acre, given enough water.

At the insistence of companies like Fosters, the Murray-Darling growers soon replaced their dual-purpose Sultana with Chardonnay, which yielded just as well, was of a similar quality, and at least had a name you could put on the bottle or bag.

But you couldn’t sell it as food.

Another symptom of panic in the boardrooms is this sudden changing of names. Like Fosters recently rebranded its huge wine group with the name of one of Tony Bilson’s grand old restaurants, Treasury. Constellation took a UAS$1.6 billion dive flogging its Australian business to the investment group Champ, which also delves in mining, media and other industries, and promptly changed the name of its new monster baby to Accolade.

These sound like the names of Korean cars, which is another symptom, given their resale value.

And now that the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation has become Wine Australia, Foster’s Treasury has had a hissy fit and withdrawn its financial support for Wine Australia’s first big global promo push. Fosters says this campaign, called A+, fails to promote importer's “own labels”. These are the bottom-end Australian plonks exported and flogged under generic labels by supermarkets and the very same giant discounting retailers which have brought the Australian wine business to its knees.

Wine Australia was, in an unusually enlightened manner, attempting to promote the sorts of premium wines that have a home, a winery, a historic reputation, and a profit margin. Sustainable products. Like Grange, and its siblings at Penfolds, which may bear lesser appellations, but in both profit and quality are a serious step above the sort of plonk exported in those big bladders.

Which, incidentally, are bottled by foreign packagers with little of our wine quality control, but ridiculous complexities masquerading as occupational health safeguards.

Could it be that Fosters hasn’t really learned anything?

Or is its spat with Wine Australia a desperate grasp at increasing the value of the discount brands it expects to sell to another Champ in a bulk deal?

And I mean the brands, not the booze. The booze is worth almost nothing. But I suppose that because there’s such an ocean of it still to sell, Fosters’ attempt to outstare Wine Australia could be a last-gasp attempt to flog more grog at any price.

It must realise the Hunter uprooting is miniscule compared to the great vine pull which is working its way down the plagued river systems from the Murrumbidgee and Bourke to Blanchetown and beyond, and that the days are dying when they can pay less than cost price for grapes.

In the meantime, this ongoing devaluation of the once grand Brand Australia is of little consequence to a company which intends to be out of the business the minute it finds its Champ.

That’d leave it with lots of beer, a direct rival of cheap wine.

SOMMELIERS? BULLOCKIES, NOT SMELLERS

CHAMPAGNE LUNCH - LATE EIGHTIES/EARLY NINETIES AT NEDDY'S IN HUTT STREET, ADELAIDE; ONE OF THE BEST WINE WATERS OF THE DAY, MARTYN VERRYT, POURS FOR THE BASTION OF AUSTRALIAN FOOD WRITERS, HOWARD TWELFTREE, WHO HAS WRITTEN GASTRONOMY FOR OVER THIRTY YEARS UNDER THE PEN NAME JOHN McGRATH. NOTICE THAT THE AUTHOR'S BRACES MATCH TWELFTREE'S TIE. WE HUNTED IN A TWO-MAN PACK

 He's What? Master Sommelier? But He's Twenty Four Years Old! It Takes Four Decades, Sunshine 
by PHILIP WHITE

It happened again. The greying hack asked the innocent question about somebody’s son and got the smug return fire “Oh he’s a master sommelier now”.

Master sommelier? Bullshit! He’s twenty-four years old.

It’s a wonderful thing that sommeliers’ associations are blooming around Australia, and that so many enthusiastic people are holding structured tastings, and learning about the lure and lore of wine, and checking each other’s progress. It’s a tribal thing. It helps build a profession. It will be better for the diner.

But twenty-four years of age? The hack quotes his own mantra, something which in itself took decades to develop. This could be read as a mouldering has-been constantly re-inventing his self-importance in order to stay alive, but it here it goes:

“Until you’ve watched several great wines, from several great regions, vintages and varieties, fabulous years and foul, develop from the flowering of their vines, through their ferments and delinquent juvenility, to their prime, and on into the nether regions of the twilight zone, then that person cannot possibly speak with a master’s authority about such wines.”

Of course a younger critic can write in an opinionated entertaining way about wine; or a young sommelier reliably recommend and properly present good wines or reasonably judge their condition before presenting them to customers in the correct manner. But how long does it take to understand pinot noir? Good Burgundian pinot, for example?

Thirty years? Forty? Ask Gary Steel. Once you nail the time it took, then ask how much money it cost him. Ask him about the travel; the air tickets; the stress.

BORDEAUX WHITES AT THE FICOFI TASTING AT KAESLER WINES IN THE BAROSSA IN 2010. HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO UNDERSTAND THIS STUFF? HOW MUCH MONEY DOES IT COST? HOW MANY AIRFARES? photo LEO DAVIS

The S-word originates in the old Greek sattein, which means to pack, or stuff. The old French used sompter, or someter, for the truckie of the day: the driver of a pack horse, camel, mule or ox. The four-legged prime mover was the sauma or somier. Given the life expectancy , a twenty-four year-old truckie was probably half way through his working life then. A master sompter, at that braw age? Possible.

Just how this term changed its shape to become the infant dude who pours your wine in a restaurant is a very important progression.

This old sompter, his mule loaded with scribble, was a baby once. He committed evil tricks, like maintaining a good set of empty Grange bottles from different vintages. Using Kaiser Stuhl Bold Red, a non-vintage blend from a flagon, he would fill a flight of great Granges and sit back to listen to the sophists explain the different years.

He was so bold as pull tricks on great men like David Wynn, who invented modern Coonawarra, and Max Schubert, who invented Grange.

In 1980 he attended a luncheon with these intensely competitive sages, and a spunky Pam Dunsford. Each guest was obliged to bring a mystery bottle. The young White took a bottle of Blue Nun, a cheap, sweet, German megablend, and a bottle of Yalumba’s Brandivino, a mixture of young brandy and sweet rosé. In the bathroom he blended half a bottle of Blue Nun with a fifth of a bottle of Brandivino, sprinkled it with some of Mrs. Potter’s perfume, which reminded him of something from Poland, filled it up with tap water, gave it a shake, poured it into a decanter and served it.

The sages agreed that it must have been a pale Chilean rosé. They even discussed varieties, and their Spanish and Portuguese origins. After all their deliberation, the culprit was terrified to think of how he would excuse his scam. Honesty worked. He may have just gotten away with it; there were giggles at the table. But the memory lingers, and if those men were alive they would remember, too. Not many whippersnappers took the piss outa blokes like those.

Were he to take that long strange haul all over again, this bullocky thinks he could slowly, through human discourse and experience in his trade, learn to discern which great house would prefer which product, how and where to find it in the market, how best to contain it and transport it, and maybe even stow it in the cellars of his client.

He would by necessity be first a farrier, animal husbandry expert, veterinary surgeon and wheelwright, just to keep his truck serviced and willing. He would, no doubt, be faced with the problem of diminishing quality usually meaning larger volumes, greater difficulties, and lower profits. And he’d learn that a little lugubrious fulsomness earned the better tip here, and some respectful austere distance the same thing somewhere else.

If he were a wine trucker, the task might eventually also involve him developing a refined, reliable palate, so he could never be tricked by a vendor flogging him Blue Nun, Brandivino and Mary Potter’s perfume mixed with Adelaide water. He might also work out a vocabulary to enable him to discuss his purchases more fluently and reliably.

He could also, very easily, become addicted to alcohol.

WINEMAKER BRIAN BARRY SPENT HIS ENTIRE LIFE DEVELOPING THE BEST NOSE I HAVE ENCOUNTERED IN AUSTRALIA. HE CAN BE MY SOMMELIER ANYTIME!

If he managed all that with elan and respect, he would be a sommelier. If he became a master of that craft, he might be called a master sommelier.

But he could also be stuck in the mud somewhere, trying to extract a team of oxen without busting one keg.

Today the oxen might be electric, instant or digital, and the cart might be one huge refrigerator.

The, er, the other bit will still take thirty or forty years. Or more.

PENFOLDS KICKS FOSTERS HUGE ARSE

PENFOLDS' CHIEF WINEMAKER PETER GAGO

















Fosters Aside, Penfolds Has Never Looked Better
Gago's Golden Boys Press On Regardless
by PHILIP WHITE - A SHORTER VERSION OF THIS WAS PUBLISHED IN THE INDEPENDENT WEEKLY ON 06 MAR 09

Of all the wry ironies of agriculture, the weirdest lies right now in that gargantuan stack of contradictions we politely call Fosters.

Fosters, of course, is a monstrous secondary and tertiary industrial body, but it depends completely upon humble primary producers: barley and hop growers, and grape farmers.

So now that it’s decided that it wants to be in the wine industry, again, why would it simultæneously decide to shop its own incredible library of vineyards, and chase profit by ensuring its huge Bilyara wine refinery at Nuriootpa works at full capacity, twelve months of the year? This, surely, is a straightforward application of beer-brewing mentality to winemaking, the precise antithesis of what Peter Gago and his team do at Penfolds, which must be Fosters’ most profitable brand. It is certainly its most revered.

The purchase-amalagamate-and-shrink dogma imposed by determined, Thatcherite wine economic rationalists, like Randolph Bowen, is nearing the end of another cycle in the homogenisation of the Fosters portfolio. Bowen was part of the team that hired an oil refinery engineer to design the Bilyara refinery, years after I’d got constant flack from Southcorp and Fosters for calling their big wineries refineries. His entry in the last Wine Industry Directory to list him before his departure two years back, says “Beringer Blass Wine Estates t/a Foster’s Wine Estates and Southcorp Wines t/a Foster’s Wine Estates VIC”. I think he was really called Vice President Global Supply Chain.

I spent a morning tasting at the original suburban Penfolds winery at Magill with Peter Gago recently, and at its conclusion, was delighted to announce that of every grand tasting I’d ever had at any grand winery, from the first growths of Bordeaux, through the hallowed halls of Burgundy and Champagne, to the full breadth of Australia, none could match Peter’s Penfolds for quality, amazing range, and sheer shimmering gastronomic brilliance.

How he’s managed to do it in that vicious melee beats me. But that’s not all he’s done. He’s managed to improve it, to add to its incredible brocade of luxury product, and make the whole damn thing more distinctive in itself, whilst rendering its products even more accurate reflections of their many diverse sources. And he’s done all that whilst bringing the most sacred chalices back to the styles of their traditions.

Speaking of chalices, Peter’s even conspired with Jamie Sach, who’s mysteriously called Penfolds Ambassador, to renovate the neat little pressed tin-lined private tasting room that had fallen to bits outside Jeffrey Penfold Hyland’s office. Without any budget from Fosters, They paid for the significant renovation from their own pockets, although Jamie’s Dad, Randall, a glass-blower who does a spot of plastic surgery to help pay for his hobby, contributed the spittoons, which look like they’ve been blown by René Lalique.

ONE OF RANDALL SACH'S BEAUTIFUL MOUTH-BLOWN GLASS SPITTOONS IN THE NEW PENFOLD'S TASTING ROOM. THAT'S ONE OF JOHN BIRD'S RETIREMENT WATCHES ON THE LEFT.

Even the lowly Koonunga Hill has had a lurch toward gastronomy. Peter has released two wines of this brand bearing their original labels from the early ’seventies. These are for sale at cellar door ($17 and $18), in restaurants and duty free stores only, and are exquisite. The white, called Autumn Riesling after Max Schubert’s 1971 Riesling Traminer, and the trophy-winning red, called Seventy Six, after the vintage of Don Ditter’s first red from what was then a new vineyard, are spectacular value for money, and a serious improvement on the standard bottle-o Koonunga wines which are made in much larger volumes. I can see Peter drawing these divergencies together, increasing the quality of the standard lines.

The lower-end numbered bin wines, too, are looking better than ever. The Bin 51 Eden Valley Riesling (92+++), from vineyards either side of the High Eden Ridge, is a beautifully balanced measure of Germanic austerity and refinement; the Bin 311 Tumbarumba Chardonnay (92+++) a similar exercise in the same mood, but Chablisienne. This latter wine is a brilliant entry to the two higher tiers of chardonnay, the Trophy winning 07A from the Adelaide Hills, and the royal Yattarna, both of which will be released and reviewed on May 1.

The entry-level numbered bin reds are also improving apace. From the classic Barossa chocolate of the 2007 Bin 138 GMS (reviewed last week; 93+++), through the tight sandy sparsity of the 2006 Bin 28 Kalimna Shiraz (94+++), and the lighter, more twee 2007 Bin 128 Coonawarra Shiraz (88++) to the incredible perfume of the 2006 Bin 407 Cabernet blend (93+++), these wines are almost disgustingly good value at their recommended prices, which are generally discounted so brutally by the trade that it’s not worth mentioning the numbers on the official Penfolds cellar door list.

Then comes what some naively used to call The Baby Grange: the 2006 Bin 389 Cabernet Shiraz (92+++), to whose score I’d like to add another couple of pluses, but that would set a silly precedent. These symbols are indicators of how many more points the wine may score if properly cellared, and this most Australian wonder, painstakingly assembled from fruit from Barossa, Langhorne, Coonawarra, McLaren Vale, Robe and Clare, had me scribbling “Jesus! Penfolds gets a facial!” This wine’s stunning freshness and intensity somehow sees it brazenly walking the tightwire between the past and future of Penfolds. Rarely have I seen such a brew of modern and ancient. It would make Max giggle, and then go on to grow for thirty years in the dungeon.

Honourably, Peter declined to tell me which of these source vineyards would now be mothballed or sold.

Then, the obvious exclusions aside – I swear to an embargo at this annual tasting, promising not to publish reviews of the next Grange et al until they’re made available for select public tasting late in April – there were many incredible trial wines and barrel samples that I’d be stupid not to report.

Prominent among these were wines from vintage 2008, which, as we all know, included the longest hottest spell on record until 2009.

There was, for example, a pinot noir that was picked in the first week of that heat, in the Adelaide Hills. It looked like Sandro Mosel had been invited to sculpt Miss Piggy from pinot. But given the Gago team and its nous, this wine will end up with the Penfolds’ mark all over it.

I saw two McLaren Vale tempranillos from Don Oliver’s vineyard that are sure to change Australia’s ranking of its temps extant. The 07 smelled like Charlotte Rampling in a bloke’s tux, soused with Deprez Bal à Versailles; the 08 better: no Charlotte; no Zorro; all bull. “But Señor, sometimes ze bull wins!”

McLAREN VALE, NEAR OLIVER'S TEMPRANILLO VINEYARD. THE VALES ARE RIFE WITH RUMOURS OF THE POSSIBLE CLOSURE OF FOSTER'S LOCAL REFINERY, ROSEMOUNT. PHOTO BY MILTON WORDLEY (CLICK FOR GALLERY)

The 08 sangiovese, mainly from the Georgiadis family’s vineyard at Marananga, Barossa, looks even better – more vibrant and intense - than the stunning 2006 (reviewed in DRANKSTER).

There were two breathtaking old vine Barossa cabernets, 06 and 08, which were made completely in French oak, putting them in the cabernet side of the RWT slot, but apparently they’ll cost more than 707. And so they should: they have French oak, which is much better.

To balance the mighty ship of state – SA has no other – there’s a Marananga shiraz which echoes the drift of all big companies to get vineyards closer to Greenock Creek, and when you taste it you can see why; and, yes, a 2008 Bin 620 Coonawarra cabernet shiraz, which was good enough to have me scribbling: “50 years under screw – a condescending dream of a wine”.

“So”, I asked. “What? No 2008 60A?”

“Oh”, said Gago. “We do have a Cellar Reserve”.

I felt like asking what his name was.

But, fair dinkum, Penfolds has never looked better. The bewildering muckabouts of Fosters aside, the Penfolds team has slaved away beneath the haphazard influences of decades of the selfish ignorant foolishness of top management, and are now running an incredible tight ship of utter dream wines.

Just for the record, they are Peter Gago (twenty years with Penfolds), Steve Lienert (31 years), John Bird (50 years), Andrew Baldwin (24 years), Kym Schroeter (23 years) and Tom Riley (two years).

They might look desperate, but they still look like they’re having fun.

I tell you, I certainly have fun when I make my annual visit. And I'm desperate.

GO TO DRANKSTER FOR MORE PENFOLDS REVIEWS

INFECTING REDS WITH ROT? WHAT ROT!

STEPHEN HICKINBOTHAM: THE AUSTRALIAN, KIWI, AND INDIAN WINE INDUSTRIES WOULD BE VERY DIFFERENT IF HE WAS STILL WITH US

Where Are Today's Young Wine Radicals?
This Dude Used Botrytis On His Reds!

by PHILIP WHITE

In the early 1980s, there was a dramatic change of guard in the Australian wine industry.

Feisty young blue bloods like Brian Croser were suddenly everywhere, in everybody’s face, changing the way everything worked.

Professing that only they knew how to do it.

Adam Wynn was back from duxing Bordeaux university, taking the reins of Mountadam, Australia’s first big high country chardonnay and pinot vineyard.

And in Victoria, the fearless, questioning intellect of Stephen Hickinbotham was kicking all the old inbred Australian shibboleths in the head.

Hickie’s grandfather, Hick, had founded the Roseworthy winemaking college; his father Ian was a formidable wine scientist and wine maker – the first bloke on earth to deliberately, scientifically, induce and manage malo-lactic fermentations when he worked for Adam Wynn’s father David at Coonawarra in 1952 and 53.

Ian once told me he deliberately named his first son Stephen because it was the “only name we could find with pH in the middle”.

Stephen was oenologist at his family’s winery and vineyard on the slopes of a volcano cone at Anakie, near Geelong, Victoria. An inventor, passionate theorist, and rigorous intellectual, he studied at Bordeaux University, where he also made wine for the Rothschilds. He worked for a while in a government wine research laboratory in Alsace, then at Bollinger and Mumm, and did vintages at Rutherglen, Barossa, Mildura, the Hunter Valley and Great Western. He made the first great modern reds from Tasmania, flying grapes from Meadowbank to Anakie, made some of the earliest Adelaide Hills wines at his uncle Allan's vineyard at Clarendon, and was an anchorman par excellence in the many tastings I conducted at Winestate, Wine And Spirit Buying Guide, and The National Times.

Hickie advised the Indian government on viticulture and winemaking, and was probably the first to realise the potential of sauvignon blanc in Marlborough, New Zealand, as it was he who teased David Hohnen into developing Cloudy Bay.

Not a bad innings for a 1955 vintage lad.

Put very simply, he turned my brain on.

When Stephen was killed, with his partner Jenny O’Regan,and five other good friends from Melbourne, in a plane crash at Cairns in 1986, he took an encyclopædic headful of ideas and knowledge with him.

The Australian wine industry would be very different today had he survived.

I narrowly missed catching that plane.

In those early ’eighties, it suddenly became highly fashionable to make botrytis-affected wines after the styles of Sauternes, Barsac and Germany. Many of these early experiments were dreadful.

The Alsatian wizard, Michel Dietrich, arrived in Clare in 1982, brought in by Francois Henri to manage Remy Martin’s new acquisition, Quelltaler, the grand old headquarters of Buring and Sobels almost a century earlier.

He was immediately bemused to discover two of the local hotshot winemakers, Tim Knappstein and Tim Adams, had begun deliberately infesting riesling grapes with laboratory-grown botrytis in specially constructed and humidified cellars where the grapes were laid on racks and sprayed with spores.

Michel had literally caught a plane in a blizzard in Alsace, disembarked in Adelaide in a 42 degree heatwave, hired a car and driven to Clare. He raised the French tricolour over his new charge, as if to purge it of any traces of Germany, took one look at the vineyards along the creekline at Watervale and announced that this was a good place for botrytis.

The locals were incredulous.

Michel let those grapes hang in that humid little microclimate and made a ravishing and revolutionary botrytis-infected semillon.

The locals accused him of cultivating the spores on V8 vegetable juice, as they had done, then stealing into the vineyard at night to spray it on the vines!

Hickie was already making great controversial stickies at Anakie.

Adam Wynn also made exquisite botrytised rieslings from one of highest blocks on Mountadam.

I was there once, after vintage, trying to take photographs in the frigid, swirling, highland mist. I heard a sound that made me think "bear!".

I'll never know why I thought it may have been a bear, because there are no bears in Australia, and the only bears I've seen have been imprisoned in solitary confinement in Guantanamo things they politely call zoos.

Sure enough, through the mist, there was a large dark figure, about the size of a bear, beneath the vines.

Silly enough to approach, I got closer.

It was David Wynn, wearing an oilskin Drizabone duster, on his hands and knees, studying the ground.

I said "Hullo David".

"Oh hullo Philip", he said, staring back at the sodden ground.

"This is awful", he said. "Terrible. Look at this terrible waste!"

The riesling that Adam had left hanging had got botrytis in its stalks, and the bunches were falling to the ground.

Adam picked, and picked up, that rizza into a wheelbarrow, and made a stunning sticky.

The four of us: Hickie, Michel, Adam and me, had many weekend summits where we rewrote the future, blending bottled wines from all over Australia's exciting new vignobles, just to see.

We spent a lot of time making the perfect pink. The base was usually Hickie's amazing dry botrytised rieslings from Anakie, with Michell's wood-aged Clare semillon, with red bits from Hickie's Meadowbank, Tassie cabernet, Adam's pinot, and some 1979 Petaluma Coonawarra shiraz.

We just had to have some Brian in there.

To encourage some public discussion about these heady botrytis developments, I ran a series of interviews in Wine And Spirit Buying Guide in 1984.

While most contributors knew only of botrytis on white grapes, Hickie immediately threw petrol on the discussion by claiming he deliberately used botrytis on his ravishing reds.

In fact, he said, he never made red wine without botrytis.

The wine business was, once again, incredulous.

“I think it was about 1896 when Louis Pasteur published his amazing study Les Maladies du Vin”, Hickie told me in 1984.

“It was a monumental work, but it was flawed. After studying many bad table wines, Pasteur determined that their malaise was due to these tiny single-celled organisms called bacteria. What he did wrong was to extrapolate on this finding, and he declared that all bacteria were bad. He invented pasteurisation as a means of destroying bacteria in wine.

“Now, if Pasteur’s well-intentioned advice was heeded by all the French vignerons, we’d have no great French wines today. Pasteur neglected to study great wines, and he never came to realise that if they were properly controlled, the same bacteria would, or could, have some highly desirable effects, like conducting the malolactic fermentation which is common to so many great French wines.

“The role that noble rot can play in making red wines has been obscured for several reasons. Certain ill effects found in red wines have been attributed to noble rot because the original grapes were noble rot infected. The great, healthy wines have never really been studied, and because researchers often have so little practical winemaking experience, the role botrytis can play in red wine making has been ignored. That’s pretty simple.

“Carefully controlled noble rot can contribute great complexity to red wines. Many of Bordeaux’s greatest red wines were from grapes infected by botrytis – ask Roy Moorfield about the ’61 Montrose we had.

"Anyone who says it can’t be done is wrong. In winemaking, there are a lot of nuances between the black and the white, and too many people aren’t sensitive to them.”

My experience of Hickie’s love affair with botrytis began in 1982, when he was blending the first Cab Mac, a carbonique maceration red he’d made using his revolutionary sealed pallet bags, for which patents were pending.

The cabernet sauvignon he’d selected from the Goulburn Valley, Victoria, was botrytis infected. He said he’d deliberately botrytised the fruit to pass some complexity and body to the wine.

When I reported this, the broadacre response from other winemakers was a guffaw followed by a loud “Bullshit!”

The main reason for this response centered on the widespread belief that in red fruit, botrytis gave rise to laccase, an oxidase enzyme which turns red wine milky when exposed to oxygen.

I asked Dr. Terry Lee, the NSW food scientist who’d just taken over the boss role at the Australian Wine Research Institute, about his experience with botrytis infected reds.

“We got involved with botrytis when some of the reds in Coonawarra became infected last year”, he said of the 1983 vintage, which was all fire then flood.

“If you get a bit of unwanted botrytis in reds they can go brown as soon as they’re exposed to air or oxygen.

“Chris Summers did most of the work.

“It wasn’t exactly noble rot, though, it was a real zoo growing on those grapes. We had to look for ways and means of preventing deterioration in the wines once they were exposed to air. We were mainly concerned with the bad effects of the wrong kinds of botrytis mixed with a lot of other moulds.

“Stephen Hickinbotham’s had a lot of experience in Bordeaux. I’m sure there’s quite a lot of botrytis in Bordeaux reds. The whole Bordeaux area has a significant level of botrytis: the conditions are right for it. He’s most probably right.

“There are a few components produced when botrytis gets in the grape berry. You get increased glycerol levels. You also get the production of an acid called gluconic acid. The presence of this acid is a fairly good indicator of botrytis infection.

“I think you’ve got to appreciate that Stephen’s trying to get a small botrytis infection as a complexing agent on his reds –- he’s certainly not trying to make sweet reds!”

Eventually Hickie made a couple of small batches of cabernet sauvignon that was deliberately infected with botrytis. He imported the test enzyme from Bordeaux to have the Wine Research Institute check these for gluconic acid, using the same techniques the Bordelaise use when testing sauternes for botrytis.

I arranged a tasting of these wines in Adelaide, and invited several fellows who had said quite distinctly and unequivocally that you couldn’t make red wine from botrytised fruit.

If you knew the big cheeses of those days, you'd be able to name the detractors and disbelievers. They're still here.

Once the wines were poured, and the and the wine sat there in the glasses, glowering red and jolly, totally devoid of anything vaguely resembling milkiness or cloudiness, the noses came down and the discussions began, but there was still a genuine air of disbelief.

The only fellow who didn’t detract from the Hickinbotham achievement was the most senior of the winemakers present, Max Schubert, who happened to be the fellow who created Grange Hermitage.

Max said the wines were good and interesting, and said they reminded him of the days when he used flor yeast on red juice to make “nice complex mother wines”, the bases for his famous blends.

“Nobody really believed I did that either”, Max chuckled.

“I had to get used to keeping my mouth shut.”

Back to Dr. Terry Lee.

“There’s not really such a big mystery about handling botrytis in reds”, he said.

“You can handle it with heat treatment”.

Presto! While Hickie never actually admitted he pasteurised his wines, it’s worth remembering that his father, Ian, had left Coonawarra to work in the Barossa, where he converted the foundering old grape-growers’ co-op to the phenomenally successful Kaiser Stuhl.

Part of this success was his adoption of pasteurisation of sparkling wines under pressure, stabilising them to a degree otherwise unknown in those years.

“I read a letter in an American magazine” Ian wrote in Australian Plonky, his autobiography.

“It was an important Professor Marsh, who was pondering why sparkling winemakers didn’t pasteurise in the bottle as did the spumante makers of Italy.

“Pasteurising was, and still is almost a dirty word in our wine industry and was dismissed because of the association with the cheap wines of Europe.

“However, the thrust of the argument was that, because of the gas content in sparkling wines, the temperature needed to achieve pasteurisation was quite low. I decided to trial the technique.”

Using the Kupke-Trinne team of Roseworthy College, Ian built a machine that pasteurised the Kaiser Stuhl Sparkling Rhinegold at only 63 degrees centigrade, “therefore not damaging the quality”, he wrote.

“In fact, in our experiments we had found that the heat treatment helped ‘round’ the taste, meaning the wine was more drinkable immediately.”

(Winemakers can now hire an Agmaster pasteurising machine that fits on a trailer, and processes very slowly, -- 2,000 to 4,000 litres per hour -- so the required temperature can be minimised, avoiding thermal damage to the wine.)

The resultant popularity of that Kaiser Stuhl Sparkling Rhinegold wine made necessary a full-time sparkling expert to manage the manufactory, and develop other products, like the first real kiddylikker alco-pop, Pineapple Pearl, which was packaged in a little pineapple-shaped bottle with a panoply of green plastic which resembled the foliage at the top of the pineapple, and twisted off to open the bottle.

The appointment? An eager young German from Avery’s of Bristol, one Wolfgang Blass.

Kaiser Stuhl sales went from £160,000 in 1955 to £740,000 in 1962.

Wolfie still has a row of Pineapple Pearl bottles along the top of his bar, sitting there like browning hand grenades.

Which is simply to say that Stephen Hickinbotham had a very learned advisor in matters concerning the pasteurisation of wine.

I miss Stephen -- with a pH -- dreadfully. But if you’re lucky enough to try his reds now, given a merciful cork, you’ll find them breathtakingly beautiful.

That’s getting close to eternal life.

And, just for the record, I should say that dear Max heat treated his flor-infected mother wines.

He learned to keep schtum about that, too.

MAYNARD DOES A PHOENIX IN ARIZONA

MAYNARD JAMES KEENAN SCREAMING FOR HIS SUPPER

Tool Man Is Wine's Cool Man

by PHILIP WHITE

This Christmas, one of the Tuscon, Arizona newspapers ran a disbelieving piece about getting an e-mail from Maynard, the mysterious reclusive rockstar winemaker from up in the hills smack dab there in the middle of northern Arizona.

The editors were incredulous. Maynard was warning them about his visits to a few wine stores, where he’d be autographing his newly-released wines.

After years out in the web-free badlands, I now live near the internet, so I squashed Tool’s ode to Maynard’s lovely departed Mum, 10,000 Days, into the CD spinner, wound it up to eight, and got onto CADUCEUS.

Stick by stick, Maynard’s put a very serious, individual vineyard-based premium winery together. With his mates, and saints and angels. CADUCEUS is now the best wine website I’ve seen: every step of the long pioneering process described in a reverential, astonished whisper; every contributor carefully acknowledged; every insect, ridge and stone painstakingly recorded.

Along with his account of that tasting at Magill.

It contains nothing about broadacre monocultural petrochem Nazi grapeyards that strobe as you drive past and make your friggin' brain strobe as you try to kidney filter their fruit.

It is all about painstaking, wholesome goodness.

I turned Tool off, and vaporised into the mystic mountain whoosh of the music on CADUCEUS.

The texts begin with a prayer of awe to Max Schubert.

Everybody in this madhouse can learn from Maynard James Keenan.

Good Time Charlie’s Got The Booze

Graham "Charlie" Melton of Charles Melton Wines

by PHILIP WHITE – This was published in The Advertiser in 1992

These are very strange times. Strange times indeed.

Vintage has started, right? Right. Because of that, and the forthcoming Barossa Vintage Festival, the Barossa boys have been pretty quiet in the promotion ring, right? Yep. The wine industry’s in a nosedive anyway, sos there’s not much money going into the promotion of anything, right? Unfortunately, yes. Right. Charlie Melton runs one of the smallest wineries in the state, right? Yes, of course. If not the state, then most certainly it’s the smallest in the Barossa. Right. So he’d be the last bloke you’d expect to be campaigning his brands through the wineshops of Melbourne like he was running for Presidency of the United States, wouldn’t you say? Well, sure. So what am I doing in Melbourne, at Charlie’s expense, sitting back with the fat Melbourne food and wine prophets and scribes, chin-deep in fabulous tucker and completely awash in French wine?

Why? Launching the new releases of Charlie Melton’s Nine Popes, dunderhead.

Strange times indeed.

This is a true story. And, it turns out, a story of success.

We’re in a lovely grotty pub in the backblocks of Richmond, see, surrounded by terrible high-rise apartments crammed chock full of Vietnamese. This pub, the All Nations, is Richmond’s version of the Exeter, see. Charlie, who’s really called Graham, and never Charles, which is written boldly across his bottles, is nervous. He gets nervous when there’s Big Stuff afoot, as anyone’s who’s caught sight of him on the eve of things like the Barossa Classic Gourmet will guarantee. And here is, trapped in the All Nations, a long, long way from home. The more hardened members of the Fourth Estate are tipping in freezing beers with the Fifth Columnists, the back-biters and syndicators at the pock-marked bar, while the more prissy of the pressfolk hover warily in the background. Charlie’s pacing up and down.

“Well”, he says, “well I might have a beer with youse and then, well, some of us might like to go through for the tasting ... well, it’s just a bit of a tasting I’ve set up.”

“Gorn Charlie you’re jokin’ arncha? Not a masked tasting!” the brutes guffaw, and Charlie says “well it’s a bit of a tasting” so we up and down the beers on Carlie’s tab and head through to the tasting where our man has masked a string of bottles which include several medium-to-good Chateauneuf reds, a wicked little Italian dolcetto, and his own Nine Popes from 1989 and 1990.

Now Nine Popes is so named because that is what Charlie thought neuf-du-pape meant, and he makes the black, wickedly sinful stuff more or less from the grenache grape, which is the prominent red berry in that veritable zoo of weird grapes which they run in the lumpy limestone of the Chateauneuf-du-pape region of France’s Rhone delta.

Grenache has also been a very widely planted variety in places like the Barossa and McLaren Vale, where in days gone by it was the staple red for blending with shiraz. The advent of the steely-eyed wine technologist, however, saw this rather farmyardy workhourse berry fall from favour, and things like the notorious Vine Pull Scheme sentenced swillions of lovely old grenache vines to death by dozer.

Remembering the agricultural majesty of those grand reds from the past - Max Schubert says he happily used grenache in the odd Grange – and observing both the continuing significance of the grape in France and its fall from grace in Australia, Charlie quite correctly saw it as a cheap way of getting back to the heartland of traditional Aussie wine lore, while offering his customers something warming and unusual along the way.

It worked. Nine Popes became a cult item. But here on the bench at the back of the All Nations in Richmond, the more callow of the hacks began mumbling that Charlie had gone too far, putting his booze up against the expensive Frogs.

But these are strange times, remember. To a bitch, sorry, woman, the Melbourne winos and foodists, who are not only the nation’s fattest, most precious, and certainly most parochial and parsimonious, voted Charlie’s Nine Popes 1990 the best tot on the table. Not just the best, but the best by about six furlongs. And a nose. The Barossa boy triumphed.

They all take these things with great reverence and seriousness in Melbourne, so during the meal, the guests stood, one by one, and offered their testimonials and judgements and their admirations of Melton, and I have to tell you, it gave me a little gooey rush of pride for our side of the border and latter-day pioneers like Charlie.

There is some irony in that while doffing his hat to the smelly old Aussie grenache wines, and the smelly old Chateauneuf-du-pape red wines, Charlie makes very modern, clean grenache under his Nine Popes label, and it seems this perhaps accidental major doffing of the Melton hat to squeaky cleanness and stainless technology is what attracted the palates of Melbourne’s press.

Being more of a traditionalist in the true barnyard sense, I was much kinder to many of the imported wines, and when my turn came for testimony, I suggested there was some tragedy in the ruthlessness with which my esteemed colleagues beheaded the brews which showed all those lovely whiffs of cowsheds and meatsafes and unwashed children and isovaleric acid.

These, I believe, are the very smells which make many of the greatest wines great, the not so great wines good, and, of course, many of the worst wines awful. They are not, in themselves, a sinful act. They are simply there, like the red colour, or the wetness. The mob sniggered at this blasphemy, so I sat down, and let Charlie enjoy his day.

While I completely agree that the Nine Popes 1990 is a good wine, I suspect that its reliance on grenache alone makes it more straightforward than the Chateauneuf-du-pape wines, which usually include a further fruitsalad of varieties like cinsault, mourvedre, muscardin, vaccarese, cournoise and shiraz. It is also common for the French to add measures of the white varieties piccardin, roussanne, terret noir and bourboulenc to the reds.

Few of these varieties are grown in Australia, and, until they are, close comparisons of such blends to wine like the estimable Nine Popes, or indeed the Rockford Dry Country Grenache, are of little value other than to satisfy curiosity, and, I suppose, as seemed to be the case in Melbourne, opportunities to reinforce old prejudices.

I must say that Nine Popes aside, I found the Clos du Papes 1984 great fun because of its naughty turned French pungency and long, teasing finish; the ’83 Jaboulet Chateauneuf deeply satisfying because of its profound toasted chocolate and leather; and the ’85 Guigal Chateauneuf-du-pape fascinating for its impenetrable, taut nose, a common indicator of astonishing longevity in many of these warm climate reds. All these were purchased in Melbourne shops for around $25-$30.

The other unsung star of the day was the Charles Melton Cabernet Sauvignon 1989: a taut, big, silky, simmering wine; sweet and long and jumping with a lovely whiff of violets in there among all the darker stuff. It needs at least five years in bottle, perhaps ten, and sells for about $15. It costs less, of course, at Charlie’s cellar door. In a sense, this clean, sharp mod was closer in style and gastronomic intelligence to the Nine Popes than any of the funky imported punksters.

Anyway, we burbled and bubbled and frothed the afternoon away in the All Nations, and only when the Melbourne lot began to fall did Charlie suggest we try another establishment for the quiet cleanser. One bright spark said he’d take us to a Spanish pub, because the Spanish have grenache, and we zig-zagged through the cobbled backlanes of four or five suburbs and drew up outside a noteworthy thirst emporium prominently labeled The Robert Burns Hotel. Inside, its walls alternated from big swathes of tartan to white Spanish stucco, and, yes, the place was overflowing with Spaniards. This of course played a major role in me missing my aeroplane, my being vigorously frisked, nay, rough-handled at the aerodrome, my being finally placed in a seat surrounded by silent Moslem women, and my consequent whiling away of the hour aloft listening to a team of rather brimming footballers chatter quite loudly about the possibility of these hooded women being on a suicide mission while Charlie emptied his red ute of the wines he had for sale and drove himself back to the Barossa .

Strange times. Strange times and perilous.

.