WET: DUDLEY BROWN CLEARS THE WATER

DUDLEY BROWN AT WORK AT INKWELL WINES ... CLICK IMAGE TO SEE A VIDEO OF HIS PRESENTATION AT TedX DUBBO

Wine Water Tax And Politics
Dudley Brown At TedX Dubbo
Pity He Didn't Mention Religion

Below is the full text of the former Chairman of the McLaren Vale Grape Wine and Tourism Association's speech at the recent TedX Dubbo conference

My name is Dudley Brown. I am a wine grape grower and winemaker in McLaren Vale, South Australia. Please ignore the accent, its Australian. I’m just a bit confused. In fact, I’m a lot confused. That is how I ended up speaking at Tedx. They actually invited me to share my confusion with you.

Before I became a farmer, I was in recruiting for start-ups in California. As my business education was in wealth creation and not wealth redistribution, I was poorly prepared to understand the politics of agriculture in Australia.

I moved to Australia in 2003 not long after I realized that my three biggest expenses in California were my mortgage, property taxes and wine. The idea was to raise my kids in a beautiful place and eliminate my biggest expenses by buying a vineyard and drinking my own wine. What could go wrong?

I considered three wine regions in California and five in Australia. I hired a viticultural expert and researched grape and wine quality, soils, climate and water before choosing McLaren Vale above all others.

My plan was to eke out a living selling grapes and building a very small high-end wine brand to support my family.

After arriving, I worked as a laborer in my vineyard for three years improving so-so vines into some of Australia’s best using principles we now call sustainable farming.

In 2005, the risk of water shortages resulting from the drought made me realize that I could be driven out of business and lose my life savings. Mains water then cost about $900 per megalitre. It’s now approaching $2500 per ML – high enough to have put me out of business.

The good news was that I had an alternative – a privately owned reclaimed water system was nearby. The bad news was that it would cost $100,000 just to connect to it.

Reclaimed irrigation water has two advantages for the world:

1) It decreases demand for drinking water

2) It reduces the amount of pollution that flows into the ocean.

I helped start a plan with other small farmers to ask our governments to match investments made by us to substitute our irrigation source. Our approach was market based – the government’s investment would be about the market price for permanent river water rights at the time. The pollution we prevented was a bonus.

We pitched state and federal politicians on the idea but our plan became a “policy issue” to be studied by the bureaucracy. In short, it went nowhere.

In the lead up to the 2007 election, Anthony Albanese’s advisor called me out of the blue one day to ask for a meeting with Anthony the next day. After the announcement that Labor supported our plan, a political bidding war broke out that resulted in $4 million in funding from the state and federal governments for our plan. That was when I learned something big.

Big idea #1 – Politics matter more than policies. Policies don’t change until politicians need to win an election.

Four years on, we have permanently substituted around 500 million litres of drinking water – enough for 2000 households - per year and we are only halfway done.

This little project initiated my un-holy descent into the politics of agriculture in Australia.

Hopefully, you’ll understand why I was slow to catch on to my Big Idea #2. It may come as a serious shock to some of you too.

Big Idea #2: Wine is not Food.

Australia does not need more wine. It does need more food.

These two Big Ideas inform my view of three policy areas that impact the wine and grape industry – water, tax and land use.

My confusion is local in nature but has national importance. As Tip O’Neill famously said, “All politics are local.”

The wine grape industry is in long-term oversupply. Approximately 1/3 of the wine grapes grown in Australia are not required by wineries for wine. Because most grapes are substitutable for grapes from other regions, the effect of this is to drive down grape prices in all regions.

As a guy with pretty strong free market beliefs, I know that low prices drive out inefficient and unprofitable producers. But confusingly, in Australian, they don’t. Why?

In discussing this problem with those in government, their stock response is: “we’re not in the business of picking winners.” This led me to big idea # 3:

Big Idea #3:

Government policies pick winners - whether they do something new or not and whether they mean to or not.

Current taxation of wine in Australia is done on the basis of the value of the wine, not on the amount of ethanol it contains.

The rest of the ethanol industry – beer, spirits, etc - is taxed on the amount of ethanol it contains. The effect of the current tax policy is to make low priced wine – particularly cask wine - the cheapest way to get drunk in Australia.

Ethanol is a dangerous and addictive. Those with the least money and biggest thirst for ethanol logically buy cask wine. Despite their logic, these folks need help, not cheap booze.

The outcome of current policy can be most visibly seen scattered across the outback in the form of empty casks, ruined lives and decimated communities – particularly Aboriginal ones. However, the costs are spread across the entire population in the form of healthcare costs, broken families, crime, drunk driving deaths and homelessness to the tune of many billions per year.

While the wine industry isn’t solely to blame for this, it insists on maintaining its tax-advantaged status as Australia’s low cost provider of ethanol. On the other hand, it asserts that wine is a hedonic product – that we buy and drink wine because we enjoy its flavor and alcoholic properties and that overwhelmingly, we do so responsibly. Fair enough. My confusion is this: if wine tastes better and is taxed the same as other forms of ethanol, why is the wine industry worried about competition?

The second aspect of the current tax is the 31% WET rebate. The intent of this policy is to refund taxes paid by small wine producers – who generally produce higher priced wines – to compensate them for the high expense of the value based rate of tax they pay. Yea, I know – it’s confusing!

As growers have found winery buyers of grapes vanishing, they are increasingly lending their grapes to middlemen who offer the grower the proceeds from making their grapes into bulk wine a few months later less the cost of production. What could go wrong?

But, crucially, the middleman then pockets the 31% WET rebate on the sale price. This money is earned with almost no capital invested and no risk while the people who have invested their lives in their vineyard just get even lower prices the next year because the wine glut grows.

The net of this is that the taxpayer is funding middlemen who have no capital at risk and grape growers with unviable businesses to make our very worst grapes into wine to be sold around the world with “Made in Australia” stamped on every bottle for as little as 50 cents per litre. Which winner has the government picked? Do they even know?

In the 2011 vintage, it is believed that about 900,000 tonnes of wine-worthy (this means disease free) grapes were harvestable for table wine this year. Despite this, Australia processed over 1.6 million tonnes of grapes. This means that as much as 45 million cases of truly awful wine was made and added to the oversupply.

The only “demand” for bad fruit in 2011 was from rent seeking middlemen who made common cause with desperate farmers to take taxpayers’ money legally. Unintended consequences are called unintended for a reason. They’re unintended! Is this outcome what taxpayers’ want?

In the grape growing industry today, inland regions use seven to ten times more irrigation water to grow one dollars worth of grapes than coastal regions like the Barossa or McLaren Vale. If you factor in reclaimed water usage, inland regions today use up to 25 times the amount of drinking water to grow one dollar’s worth of grapes as in McLaren Vale.

Twenty years ago, McLaren Vale produced similar yields of grapes with similar amounts of irrigation to many inland regions today. But, we realized we were destroying our aquifer in the process. To protect our long-term sustainability, we limited water extraction in the nation’s first managed basin. The effects were:

1) Prices for McLaren Vale grapes rose as quality rose

2) Growers suddenly owned water rights worth $15,000 per megalitre instead of nothing

3) Our aquifer is re-charging, even in drought years

4) Water restrictions wrecked our lower value almond growing industry

This step change in water management led me to:

Big Idea #4:

Regulatory changes can be a good thing as long as they are applied broadly and equally.

The saying on the River Murray is “if you’re downstream, you are dirty with everyone upstream.”

To understand inland water usage, up to 1000 litres of river water are required to produce one litre of wine that sells for less money than one litre of bottled water in the UK or the USA. Confused yet?

Here’s a silly idea - why don’t we cut out the winegrower and make some real money selling a thousand bottles of water?

The peak bodies of the wine industry have defined the industry in terms of cool climate coastal regions vs. warm climate inland regions. But, the consumer doesn’t care about the climate of the region of production – they value price and quality.

But, if we extend this industry definition to the analysis of serious data, what we discover is that the highest value coastal regions create 4.3 times as much economic value and 5.5 times as many jobs “per grape” as low value inland regions.

Now, I want you to think like a business owner for a minute - if you owned Australia, would you want to invest in those that create more value, jobs and trade from wine or less? Would you use your scarcest resources to grow food or un-needed wine?

As it stands, SA Water is entitled to extract 200 GL – that’s two billion litres - of water from the River Murray for free every year. Even in drought years, Adelaide didn’t need a lot more than this because of local catchments.

Now, SA Water is building a 200 GL desalination plant to “drought proof” Adelaide for $1.8 billion plus annual operating costs in the hundreds of millions, whether the plant is in use or not. On top of that, South Australia has had to build new gas fired generators to make up for the expensive “green energy” that the de-sal plant bought. Most folks up the river think these are responsible ideas.

Instead of a de-sal plant, the government could have invested the same amount by buying water licenses totaling 200GL from unprofitable grape farmers in the Murray Darling basin by paying them above market rates of $2500 per megalitre for their permanent water entitlements.

Under this approach, these farmers would have been able to retire in dignity with their mortgages paid off or been able to purchase annual water to grow food on their land.

The entire national grape surplus of 500,000 tonnes of annual production could have been wiped out and the wine industry restored to a profitable level of production.

Australia would not have lost one calorie of food production.

And Adelaide’s water needs would have been met in perpetuity.

Now, here’s the pointy bit – after buying these water rights and solving the wine industries problems, the government would have still had $1.3 billion left over. This is almost enough to build the new Royal Adelaide Hospital without Macquarie Bank’s assistance. But, governments would have had to pick a winner.

So, whether you care about the wine industry, CO2 emissions, inland communities, the water supply, the health of the river, banker’s profits, better health care or your tax dollars, these choices matter.

The truth is that there has always been plenty of water in the river – we’ve just let the government allocate it very poorly. As Ronald Reagan once said, “if we put the government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years we’d have a shortage of sand.”

Which leads me to:

Big idea #5 - let the government do what it does best – collect taxes – and let the market do what it does best – allocate resources.

For instance - what if we put a $50 per megalitre levy on all water extracted from the Murray Darling system and put the money into a trust fund? If this seems like a lot of money, remember in Adelaide we pay $2500 per megalitre for city water.

Then the government could hold auctions where water license owners voluntarily tendered their water entitlements to be bought by the fund until permanent environmental flows were guaranteed on the river.

The levy would immediately drive the most inefficient and unprofitable water users to sell entitlements for the most efficient price, while those who stay on the land would have a permanent guaranteed water supply as well as incentives to invest in efficiency and quality.

The caveat to this would be for flood based crops like rice and cotton - we could give them free water in flood years. And, because water would be in the river all the time, floods would be more frequent and more water available for annual purchase.

This approach offers pain and gain for everyone. Everyone would have an equal incentive to be more efficient while guaranteeing Australia’s long-term food supply and the health of the river.

The reactions to proposals for step changes to current policies are predictable: “we’ll bankrupt farmers and destroy communities” and “we don’t pick winners.”

The short answer is this - we’ll get these outcomes anyhow – just more slowly and less rationally and with worse outcomes for taxpayers, the rest of the agricultural industry and the environment.

In Australia, the best regions for agriculture are mostly near the coast because they have more rainfall. This is also where it is cheapest to dig mines or drill for gas because of access to transportation. Unfortunately, this is also where 90% of us live.

Our best land and food security is being sacrificed for housing estates and mining because:

1) The government is usually the owner of the land and needs the money to fund infrastructure for bigger cities and mines

2) The government earns stamp duties and royalties from these projects, which it uses to fund infrastructure for bigger cities and mines

Does anyone else see a pattern here?

In McLaren Vale, the Labor government just sold land for a 1000 house estate on some of the best cropping and viticultural land in the world despite furious local opposition. An adjoining property grows grapes that end up in wine that sells for $250 per litre – 500 times the price of the drek produced by our tax incentivized middlemen.

The new housing estate will be on land classified as “low value” because the government only share-farms grain on it. The fact is that if agricultural land isn’t in highly valued use, it gets sold for housing.

The only serious solution is to embrace denser, smarter cities where the best agricultural land is ring-fenced in perpetuity from urban sprawl.

DUDLEY BROWN (LEFT) AT LAST YEAR'S TRACTOR ACTION DEMONSTRATION OPPOSING THE SA LABOR GOVERNMENT'S PROPOSED SUBURBAN DEVELOPMENT ON PRICELESS AGRICULTURAL LAND AT SEAFORD HEIGHTS, McLAREN VALE. ALSO PRESENT (LEFT-TO-RIGHT) ARE LAURA JACKSON (WE OPPOSE SEAFORD HEIGHTS), GRAPEGROWER JOHN HARVEY, PHILIP WHITE, AND PETER DAWSON (CHAIRMAN, AUSTRALIAN WINE RESEARCH INSTITUTE) photo LEO DAVIS

Having lived in California, I’ve seen the best and worst models for protecting valuable land in Los Angeles and Napa Valley. We have a choice.

In McLaren Vale – agricultural land has risen 30 times in value in the last 40 years. We have prodded the current government to embrace a long-term protection strategy for our best land after a five-year campaign. It isn’t law yet bit it’s a Big Idea we stole from the Napa Valley where agricultural land has increased in value by 300 times in 40 years under a similar protection model.

The nexus of interests between treasury departments, developers, engineers, construction companies, miners, unions and “planning departments” may be too strong for this to change. Maybe.

This leads me to revise Big Idea #1: Politics matter. But, politics - and politicians - could matter a lot more if we make Big Ideas political ideas.

Tedx is a brilliant forum to air the Big Ideas governments find unthinkable - taxing alcohol rationally, building denser cities, ending the dream of endless sprawl, putting levies on irrigation water, spending the proceeds to future proof our food and water supplies, protecting people without means from cheap ethanol, picking real winners, whatever.

This will only work if you leave Tedx and start thinking the unthinkable, saying things your neighbors won’t agree with, calling your MP every week (ask mine, I call him at least three times a week), building new kinds of community groups, blogging, writing, talking, and generally upsetting people. This also means bypassing traditional industry and policy structures.

Politicians, not bureaucrats, need to know that they need to change their policies or that they will be changed out at the next election. Voting for the party you have always voted for ensures that you keep getting these same crappy results because of:

Big Idea #6:

Politicians take you for granted and your silence as permission.

The truth is that you own this country. You are the person who can turn Big Ideas into political ideas. Politicians and bureaucrats are your employees. Its your job to make it clear what you want and to keep Big Ideas in the air and on the table.

It’s no fun figuring out whom to upset every day but neither is running out of great land, clean water or healthy food.

Or, good wine. Now, that would be disaster. Thank you.

MOLLYDOOKER'S VELVET GLOVE INCIDENT

MOLLYDOOKER OWNER/WINEMAKER SPARKY MARQUIS WITH WINE DAMAGED WHEN A SHIPPING CONTAINER WAS DROPPED, TRIGGERING AN INSURANCE CLAIM FIRST REPORTED TO BE IN THE VICINTY OF $1 MILLION ... CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO HEAR THE WHOLE SORRY STORY photo MOLLYDOOKER

The Fist In Marquis' Velvet Glove
Southpaw Winery Drops Bundle
PR Machine Rings Out Last Drops
by PHILIP WHITE

So. Mollydooker Winery’s export shippers somehow managed to drop, shatter or damage a lot of cases of very expensive McLaren Vale Shiraz.

In all the international fluff and bluster surrounding the dropping of the shipping container filled with Sparky and Sarah Marquis’ Mollydooker Velvet Glove Shiraz ($185 per bottle), nobody bothered to mention that the source of the wine, the revered Gateway Vineyard owned by rival David Paxton and a consortium of McLaren Vale A-Listers, is immediately adjacent to the Seaford Heights property that the Labor government and its developer mates are determined to cover with housing.

In all the front-page tears and grief that the busted boxes triggered, nobody has mentioned that Marquis’ possible $1.025 million loss is piffling compared to the income that site would trigger were it sensibly put to clever vineyard.

Sell it for houses; it’s gone forever and you get one quick squirt of cash. Plant it to vineyard, and you’d get those very big numbers every year, ongoing, ad infinitum. Many ordinary vineyards on lesser land may come and go according to the wine industry’s crazy splurge-and-retreat cycles, but only this intellectually decrepit Labor mob would seriously consider cementing this one over.

DAVID PAXTON IN HIS GATEWAY VINEYARD, THE SOURCE OF MOLLYDOOKER'S $185 PER BOTTLE VELVET GLOVE SHIRAZ ... THE SEAFORD HEIGHTS SITE IS THE HILL BETWEEN HIM AND THE GULF St VINCENT, PATRON OF VITICULTURERS photo KATE ELMES

While the priceless 650 million year-plus siltstones of the Reynella Member and the Wilmington Formation have been almost entirely built over on the northern third of the McLaren Vale Geographical Indicator, the only bit of this geology in the Willunga Embayment is the Gateway Vineyard and Seaford Heights, just across the road. David Paxton has never had a shard of doubt as to its importance and its potential, and had sought fruitlessly to purchase the Seaford Heights land for more super-premium vineyard some years ago.

Another small outcrop of the same geology, just north of the Onkaparinga Gorge between Cox’s Hill Road and States Road, is home to the Ulithorne Vineyard, source of prized fruit for many canny Vales winesmiths, including Rose Kentish, who just a couple of years back won her Bushing Crown with it. The houses are creeping toward those fences, too.

But back to matters of publicity, which the Marquis family is determinedly grim at reaping. After gaining significant coverage through its distribution, they “withdrew” their original press release, and issued another statement requesting that “journalists and other readers should disregard the news release Years of Tears and Sweat and More Than $1 Million Worth of Fine Wine Go Down the Drain, issued 25-Jul-2011 over PR Newswire.”

The news of this turnabout seemed to garner more international press than the first, presumably erroneous one. While that apparent backflip sizzled around the internet and the tittering tippling classes, they were left awaiting yet another release to correct the first: a dramatic pause that the Bard himself would find savoury.

Even London’s pompous Decanter magazine had a huffy hissy on its website, complaining that while “a revised release 'will be issued at a later time' … it has not been possible to contact Mollydooker for more information.”

I scoured the first release for possible legal hitches and insurance problems – the container had been fully insured – and thought I saw a few claims and suggestions there which some lawyers may think to be possibly contentious to one party or another, but surely in a very minor way.

CLICK ON THIS MOLLYDOOKER PROMO IMAGE TO WATCH VID OF THE MARQUIS RESPONSE TO THE GOODWILL THEY'VE HAD SINCE THE VELVET GLOVE INCIDENT

Just fishing, I thought I’d ask the Mollydooker owners which parts of the release were inaccurate. Janet Gawith, Sparky’s Mum, was quick to respond. She said the release I had was in fact the third one, with all the corrections in place.

“Somebody accidentally sent out a draft of the first release”, she advised. “It had the wrong heading; the wrong facts. You’ve got to be very careful with these things, with big insurance claims pending and so forth,” and assured me the release I held was the correct one.

She also thanked me for bothering to check, and said no other journalist had done so.

Surprisingly, Sparky himself then sent me a copy of the erroneous one – the one you wouldn’t want falling into the hands of the press. Again.

“I wasn’t sure if you wanted to see what the differences were from the press release that was the draft and mistakenly put online and the correct one,” he explained. “I found the draft on the Coca-Cola internal web site (that in itself made me laugh – maybe we are competing against Coca-Cola).”

Attached was a link to that initial, presumably erroneous document. It’s fascinating to compare the two.

The headline – “Years of Tears and Sweat, and More Than $1 Million Worth of Fine Wine Go Down the Drain” - had disappeared from the third release. But Mollydooker had already got that tearjerker into circulation in both the first release and their second one, which “withdrew” the first.

How anybody can “withdraw” a press statement which had gone around the world, won the winery a front page in The Advertiser, this state's only metro daily, and even made the internal mailing list of Coca-Cola staffers, is a baffling notion, but there you go.

In the corrected version, the line about the container falling six metres “and doing away with one third of the winemaker’s annual production” was gone. As was the bit about the failure of the forklift’s “security locking device … sending the wine more than 18 feet to the ground.”

Another paragraph down, however, the revised version then re-inserted the line “luckily we still have two-thirds of our production left so we still have plenty to share with our friends.”

So, we’re half way in, and there’s barely a scrap of difference between the withdrawn document and its replacement. But then the revised version adds a plug for “International Mollydooker Day”, when the wine was intended for release in the USA on September 15th.

ANOTHER OF THE PROMO PHOTOGRAPHS MOLLYDOOKER DISTRIBUTED TO THE PRESS AFTER THE VELVET GLOVE INCIDENT

“The Marquises and insurance assessors are now checking each bottle by hand to determine if any of the $1.025 million shipment can be salvaged,” it added, dropping the initial claim that “at least 70 per cent of the cartons have been reported damaged.”

The revised version also includes a new plug for the confounding “Marquis Fruit Weight” index, which is trademarked, and apparently helps determine which parcels of fruit make the Velvet Glove appellation. Then it goes on to add more breathless claims to the wine’s quality, as measured by the equally confounding USA wine press in the form of that dreaded lover of jammy gloop-gloop high alcohol wines, Robert Parker Jr., who has awarded the Marquis tribe “more 94-99 point scored than any other winemakers in the world” and dubbed them “Top Wine Personalities in the World.” The equally adoring Wine Spectator magazine has included four Mollydooker wines in its Top 100, and so on, and so forth. They’re not missing any opportunity to rub in the bling, but nowhere do they advise us that the Gateway Vineyard, the source of the fruit in the dropped bottles, is owned by David Paxton and his partners, and not Mollydooker.

So there you go. Three waves of press attention in place of one, and now I hand them a fourth. At least this should sit in neat counterpoint to the tear-jerking stuff they’ve put all over Youtube and Facebook.

Just between you and me: the Northern Hemisphere’s fascination for late-picked wines of incredibly dense fruit is waning as blogosphere rabble dilutes the opinions of the few US critics mentioned above. On top of that, the Aussie dollar now buys 110 US cents. So if I were Sparky, I’d be happy to see a successful insurance claim deliver the money: it could be safer and quicker than waiting for the USA salesmen to cough up. Sparky’s former USA partner, Dan Phillips, comes to mind. Their bitter court battle was not so long ago; Phillip’s Australian operation is still in receivership.

GLENTHORNE FARM: ONCE AGAIN UNDER HOUSING THREAT photo LEO DAVIS

And, sorry, but one last plug for the viticultural worth of the ground which produced this expensive luxury. There IS one more bit of it left unplanted. That’s the 209 hectare Glenthorne Farm at the top of Taps. This, of course is the farm we taxpayers bought from the CSIRO, and gave to the University of Adelaide for $1, provided it set about using the land for desperately-required viticultural, horticultural, and winemaking research.

As Planning Minister, Deputy-premier Rau is the only one who could release the University from the solemn deed it signed a decade back, promising to carry out such research, and repeatedly forbidding it from any sub-development. As Attorney-general, he is the appropriate Minister to advise the Planning Minister as to the legal hitches which might be encountered in scrapping the deed, which the University desperately wants to do, so it can sub-divide and develop the site. It has never really attempted to keep its pledge and use the site for viticultural, horticultural, and winemaking research.

In his suggested plan for “saving” McLaren Vale from further ghetto spread, the same Minister makes it clear this land should be excluded from the preservation zone, meaning that once again, it, too, would be ripe for another outbreak of dreaded villa rash.

Given their phenomenal international reputation and respect, their skill at the gathering of such fame, and the fact that they can get so much money for a bottle of Gateway which may cost them, say $20 to produce, perhaps the Marquis family might exert some influence? Do something civic-minded?

BOTRYTISED SHIRAZ WITH SEVERELY STRESSED LEAVES IN THE MOLLYDOOKER VINEYARD BESIDE THE WINERY, VINTAGE 2011 ... MOST OF McLAREN VALE HAD PICKED OR GIVEN UP BY THIS STAGE OF VINTAGE, AND YET MOLLYDOOKER WAS STILL WATERING THESE VINES DURING THE SECOND WETTEST VINTAGE IN HISTORY ... CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO LEARN ABOUT MOLLYDOOKER'S TRADEMARKED FRUIT WEIGHT INDEX

And that's not all they've trademarked. There's also the Marquis Vineyard Watering Programme (sic) ™ ...

On April 28th, the Mollydooker Facebook entry said "The Marquis Vineyard Watering Programme™ tells us how much water we need to apply each day in the weeks before harvest to keep the canopy working and to hold the grape sugar levels down. Because we are watering, we can leave the grapes on the vines for an additional 10-14 days to accumulate extra flavour and colour. We don't pick grapes for Mollydooker until the flavour levels reach Awesome, and the juice has a Marquis Fruit Weight™ of at least 60%. It is our guarantee of quality to you. Janet."

On April 16, the site had reported: "We are watering to keep the sugar levels down and the canopy flourishing so that the Mollydooker grapes can continue to bask in the beautiful Indian summer sun. The vines are maturing and sending ripe tannin signals to the grapes, which gain extra flavour and richness every day."

GLENTHORNE CARVE-UP BACK ON TABLE

Hard-core Vineyard Researchers Could Learn From Gum Guardian: Do Science On Glenthorne Farm!
by PHILIP WHITE

Having seen enough vineyards rotting away this vintage, your correspondent was delighted this last week to attend what is Australia’s leading arboretum of eucalypts at Currency Creek.

This amazing plantation is largely the work of one obsessed man, Dean Nicolle Ph. D.; B. Sc. (Hons) Botany; B App Sc. (Natural resources Management). By the age of eight Dean (above) knew he would be dedicating his life to botany, by his sixteenth year he knew his focus would be the eucalypts, and was hard at work collecting and propagating seeds for his collection. He plants four trees from each source tree, and preserves other seedlings which are stored in scientific repositories elsewhere.

He now runs an arboretum of over 900 species and sub-species, totaling some 9000 plants. He talks of individual source trees in the Kimberly, the Simpson Desert or Cape York with the sort of familiarity most of us show our nephews and nieces. With other scientists, he is constantly running essential trials and experiments, and showed us an amazing study in progress examining the carbon-storing capacities of different types of eucalypt. To scientifically test the effect of bushfire on the different types, he even burnt a large part of his original plantings to a cinder, with the help of the local fireys.

It is alarming to realize that the knowledge of our most common indigenous tree rests so much in the zeal of one man, who has tirelessly done most of this off his own bat, working as a consultant to raise the funds to keep the whole complex exercise alive. To visit this quiet corner of the Fleurieu is a humbling, confounding experience.

Which brings me to Glenthorne Farm, the 206ha research station on O’Halloran Hill. In the late ’nineties, the late Greg Trott and I fought for some years to have this saved from sub-division and established as a research vineyard and winemaking site as part of the campus of the University of Adelaide. With some acute wheeling and dealing, and the assistance of Senator Robert Hill, Minister for Environment, and Di Laidlaw, local Minister for Planning, we eventually convinced the CSIRO to dramatically drop the fee it expected. The State government bought the land and a deed was drawn to have it transferred to the University for a dollar.

This deed was very specific. Amongst its Recitals are the following:

B. For many years the CSIRO has used the land for purposes of agriculture and as an agricultural research facility.

D. The CSIRO has only agreed to sell the Land on the proviso that the Land will be preserved and conserved for agriculture and other related activities and will not be used for urban development.

E. The University, as the person nominated by the State, has agreed to purchase the Land from the CSIRO, to preserve and conserve the Land for other related activities and not use, develop or permit the Land to be used or developed for urban development.

Furthermore, the Obligations of the University included the following very specific clauses:

4.1 The University covenants with the Minister that it will, subject to obtaining all necessary statutory approvals, do all reasonably necessary things to ensure that the Land is

4.1.1 preserved, conserved and used for Agriculture, Horticulture, Oenology, Viticulture, Buffer Zones and as Community Recreation Area, and

4.1.2 is available for Project Research Activities, University Research Activities, Education Activities and operating a Wine Making Facility.

4.2 The University covenants with the Minister that it will not at any time hereafter:

4.2.1 use or permit the Land to be used other than as provided for in subclause 4.1 unless such other use is approved in writing by a Minister acting as agent of the Crown,

4.2.2 undertake or permit Development or seek to undertake Development of the Land for uses other than those specified in subclause 4.1 unless such other use or Development (excluding Urban Development which will not be approved) is approved in writing by a Minister acting as agent of the Crown.

4.4 The University covenants with the Minister that it will not at any time hereafter sell, transfer or otherwise dispose of the whole or any portion of the Land unless it shall first procure from the purchaser or transferee a binding undertaking either to be bound by this Deed or to enter into a Deed with the Minister on the same terms as are contained in this Deed.

The University spent almost two years considering this deed before affixing its seal; Trott eventually set up a joint venture with BRL-Hardy, which would buy fruit from the first commercial-scale vineyard there, providing some of the funding for the further development of the facility according to the deed. The transfer eventually went through smoothly, and in the University newspaper, Vice-Chancellor, Professor Mary O’Kane promoted the deal as a sensible triumph for the future of viticultural research in Australia.

“The partnership agreement between the University and BRL Hardy—two of the icons of the South Australian wine industry—will strengthen South Australia’s position as an international leader in wine research and education,” she said.

“This is a strategic, long-term investment based on sound financial principles and an assessment of the future needs of the Australian wine industry.

“In addition to state-of-the-art laboratories and equipment at the Waite campus, the University will now have access to a large commercial vineyard managed by one of the world’s fastest-growing wine companies. This will be a tremendous advantage in ensuring that the University and the South Australian wine industry stay at the forefront of viticulture and oenology research and education.”

Professor O’Kane said most of the land would be put under vines and some research facilities would also be located on the site. The commercial vineyard would contribute further money for research at the University.

“We expect that the vineyard will begin to generate income for research from the third vintage,” Professor O’Kane said. “We have entered into a long-term contract with BRL Hardy for the management of the vineyard and sale of the fruit, more than 50% of which will be available to other winemakers.”

Through hopeless mis-management, and perhaps some nefarious long-term scheming, none of this occurred, and after nearly a decade the University attempted to sub-divide enough of the land to build a thousand houses. BRL-Hardy was absorbed by the giant Constellation Wines of upstate New York, which has now sold everything at bargain basement rates, dumping $1.6 billion, and virtually left Australia. Your correspondent nevertheless spent over a year lobbying to ensure the University kept its side of the very generous deal, and eventually then Planning Minister Paul Holloway ruled that the University should conform to the agreements it made in the deed.

Two short years later, now with Robert Hill as chancellor, the University is again angling to wriggle out of the deed and grab some cash, so the writer is dumbly preparing for another battle, the third, to see this land used to avoid some of the destruction and mismanagement we have seen in Australian viticulture in the last few years.

There are countless trials and tests which urgently need to proceed in the world of viticulture in this time of extreme climate, global warming, and ever-changing wine trends. There are thousands of grape varieties never even trialed in Australia. We need urgently to source better flavours, and more drought and disease resistant grape sorts. There is a desperate need to research better irrigation practices and recycling of water, and scientific tests of organic and bio-dynamic procedures must be commenced to keep international shelf space as the whole world of gastronomy moves toward more wholesome, eco-friendly farming and manufacture.

To think that all the billions invested in the wine industry sit there awaiting their Dean Nicolle leaves me angered and frustrated. With the disappearance of Constellation, and the possible fragmentation of Fosters wine group, now called Treasury, McLaren Vale suddenly has no big winery presence to rekindle that sensible JV arrangement and get on with it.

But now Angoves, the giant Riverland winery more aware than most of the troubles of irrigated viticulture is moving into McLaren Vale with a new cellar door and vineyards, perhaps it’ll take one of the last great wine families to rekindle some sense and some hard, cold science. Any company that saves precious southern vineyard and farming land from ghetto rash would rise immediately to hero status. Internationally.

GLENTHORNE FARM: THE UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE IS ATTEMPTING ONCE AGAIN TO WRIGGLE OUT OF THE DEED IT SIGNED, IN WHICH IT PROMISED TO USE THIS RESEARCH STATION FOR VITICULTURAL SCIENCE, WINEMAKING STUDIES AND HORTICULTURE WHILST PRESERVING AND CONSERVING THE ENTIRE 206 ha PROPERTY photo LEO DAVIS

OZPLONK WINEBIZ, DESERT PEOPLE: CACTUS

Urgent Need For Oz Overview Wine, Drugs, Water, People Desert Mess Needs Sharper Brains

by PHILIP WHITE ... bits of this have appeared in the independent weekly

Bacchus and Pan are on a bender. They’re delighted that the ridiculous number of self-serving inquiries and committees investigating the dread realities of this country’s biggest river system show no sign of achieving needed change. They’re giggling drunkenly at a bar somewhere, delighted that of all the billions of dollars involved in the irrigation corrections proposed, and the millions of people affected, there is still no call for a full-scale public inquiry into what went wrong, and precisely which plonk the water goes into.

Those mischievous deities, and the ethanol dealers who worship them, are getting away with their deadly scam. While the international wine lake shows little sign of abating, the farmers of Australia’s arid centre are determined to keep adding to it.

Nobody seems willing to face the blatant reality: if you tip vast amounts of scarce, impossibly cheap water onto the desert to make wine which is three times the strength of your average beer but is sold for the price of bottled water, you have a business which is not in any way sustainable, even if a good deal of the plonk you so make is guaranteed consumption by our shredded original peoples.

If you can absorb Damming the Rivers of Grog, Russell Goldflam’s new paper on alcohol problems in the Northern Territory, without feeling wretchedly ill at the sanctimonious deceit of the wine industry, you might just as well join this nefarious racket.

Goldflam is the Principal Legal Officer of the Alice Springs office of the Northern Territory Legal Aid Commission, and Damming the Rivers of Grog is an extended and updated version of his presentation to the inaugural National Indigenous Drug and Alcohol Conference in June 2010 in Adelaide. It should be compulsory reading for all Australians.

But while most drug peddlers can be expected to traffic in lies and deceit, their financial models are breathtaking in their lucrative profitability. Not so our wine makers. The financial nous displayed in their exportation of irrigation-driven rotgut is even more dubious than their morality.

“Australia’s core business is cheap supermarket wines” my London colleague, Tim Atkin MW, wrote recently in the UK Off License News, “many of them sold on meaningless promotions.”

“But it also needs to think strategically,” Atkin (below left) continued.

“The strength of the Australian dollar and the scarcity of water in the country’s irrigated vinous heartland make a change of tack unavoidable. To put it bluntly: Australia cannot continue to make and sell wine of decent quality under £5. Or rather it can, but only if it is prepared to do so at a loss.”

Nobody in this country seems ready to think like the astute Mr. Atkin, except, perhaps, for Paul Henry, who has contentiously abandoned his post of general manager for market development at the Australian Wine & Brandy Corporation. The departure of Wine Australia’s UK director, Lisa McGovern, and of Paul Henry, within weeks of one another prompted Atkin to quote Oscar Wilde: “To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”

Paul Henry always seemed to me to be far too pleasant and intelligent a man to be touting the Australian wine lake as an ongoing, sustainable concern. He saw the need to focus promotion on Australia’s better, more profitable wines: those reliable, respected luxury gastronomic products which have a true home and a true story.

Sustainable products.

Atkin reported the vast gap between the philosophies of Henry, and the likes of Paul Schaafsma, UK and European G-M of the beleaguered bulk exporter, Australian Vintage. “92.6% of all Australian wine is sold below £6,” he paraphrased Schaafsma, “so for Wine Australia to be allocating the majority of its budget to regional wines over and above £7 or £8 seems to be slightly flawed.”

Atkin and Henry have one supporter in the parliamentary Member for Mawson, Leon Bignell, who took withering flak for his February report suggesting “the UK market seems more than a little schizophrenic with its approach to sustainability.

“There is a lot of talk about airmiles,” Bignell wrote, “and the need to eat food and drink wine that hasn’t travelled around the globe but, when that argument doesn’t suit them, they revert to selling cheap wine that has actually cost our country millions of litres of valuable water.

LEON BIGNELL, MP, MEMBER FOR THE McLAREN VALE SEAT OF MAWSON, WORKING IN DUDLEY BROWN'S INKWELL VINEYARD

“While UK newspapers fill their features, news and opinion pages with missives about sustainability they don’t mind peddling unsustainable goods when they are profiting from our environment.”

Always a fearless defender of his beloved McLaren Vale, Bignell suggested “growers along the river in NSW and Victoria use up to ten times the amount of water per hectare used by growers in McLaren Vale … it is simply not sustainable for a number of different reasons ... the water should be left where it is worth more to Australians and our iconic river than it is in a bottle being sold on a UK supermarket shelf for less than what the water is truly worth.

“Making ordinary wine in places grapes weren’t meant to grow does immeasurable harm to Australian regions that do produce top quality wines.”

In stark contrast to the Murray-Darling Basin and its products, McLaren Vale uses no Murray-Darling water on its vineyards. It recycles locally-caught water from the coastal suburbs for its irrigation, and returns many more jobs and dollars, per litre of water used, than the inland irrigators. It does this producing the sorts of profitable premium wines Mr. Henry preferred to promote, rather than the megaswill River blends which we ship in giant bladder packs to Britain and the USA, where they sell for the price of Evian or Perrier in the sorts of expensive “meaningless promotions” Atkin derided.

While the implications of all this are clear to my mind, they add ridiculous illogic to Bignell’s position, entrapped as he is between a winemaking electorate fighting to protect its best agricultural land from his own party’s addiction to malignant housing development, which, perversely, provides irrigation water for the McLaren Vale vineyards.

UNIRRIGATED 1946 GRENACHE BUSH VINES AT YANGARRA ESTATE, McLAREN VALE - STACEY POTHOVEN photo

Struggling new home-owners in Bignell’s suburbs are sore displeased; while they’ve already paid for expensive waste recycling plants in their own backyards, they are now getting $6000 bills for the pipes to carry their waste water along the street to the water wholesaler, and then they’re being hit for an extra grand or two to connect the tanks they’ve already paid for to the new pipe in the street.

The recent tractor rally against new housing in McLaren Vale was a polite, dignified, powerful display of the rage the local farmers feel over proposals like Seaford Heights, where priceless high-profit viticulture land is about to be cemented over with a multi-storey ghetto. The SA Police were cool, there were no bad manners, the law was observed. The point was confidently made.

ONE OF THE EARLY ARRIVALS AT THE McLAREN VALE TRACTOR ACTION DEMO AGAINST THE SA GOVT - photo LEO DAVIS

And there was the very brave Bignell in attendance, fending the flack he gets for his own party’s lack of intellectual and moral clarity over this housing vs. sustainable agriculture argument.

Dudley Brown, chairman of the McLaren Vale Grape Wine and Tourism Association, summarized the situation thus: “Leon can work has arse off for this district”, he said. “We love him. But his party has to realise that if they keep this up they’ll lose the seat of Mawson for a decade, destroy the career of one of their brightest performers, and lose a brilliant potential leader in the meantime. I mean what other talent have they got?”

THE GREAT STRING OF TRACTORS TOOK THIRTY MINUTES TO GET FROM THE MAIN STREET TO THE EDGE OF THE PROPOSED SEAFORD HEIGHTS DEVELOPMENT - photo LEO DAVIS

They certainly have none of the analytical talent displayed by my London winewriting colleague Atkin, the disappearing Paul Henry, or indeed the tireless Bignell.

But it is the wine business as a whole that lacks the intellectual exactitude required to retain great operators like Henry.

A good measure of the depth of this glamourpuss industry’s capacity to address these tricky issues appeared in the September/October issue of The Australian And New Zealand Wine Industry Journal, a perfect-bound collection of the opinions of winebiz insiders, often masquerading as science. This magazine lives off the advertising of the designers of critter wine labels, transnational chemical companies, sawdust salesmen and other mongers of shonky oak products like corks, and features a regular page by somebody using the pseudonym PP [sic] Bradshaw.

“My childhood was spent in the Riverland”, PP anguished, “and I have maintained close ties with the region ever since. I tend to take it personally. My hackles rose, therefore, when I read Philip White’s comment at the South Australia Wine Press Club held earlier this year that ‘… the Riverland produces poor quality wine and should be shut down.’ This is wine snobbery at its worst and is typical of the twaddle that emanates from some wine scribes. I suppose that when you have rarely purchased a bottle of wine for the past 30 years, it is easy to be snobbish. We don’t all have access to free Greenock Creek and the like."

THE AUTHOR AND GEOLOGIST JEFF OLLIVER WORKING ON THE SA GOVERNMENT'S McLAREN VALE GEOLOGY MAP - photo KATE ELMES

"If Mr. White got his head out of the rocks of the Fleurieu and bothered to do some real research, he would soon discover that Riverland fruit ends up in many good quality wines that are successful in the international market ... for example, I recently tried a Vermentino and a Nero d’Avola from Sunraysia-grown fruit. These are very nice wines, with better quality than many other wines from the Barossa – or wherever it is that Mr. White gets his free samples.”

While PP quotes another anonymous genius who purports to have been sufficiently present to paraphrase my impassioned and lengthy speech, whoever they are fail conspicuously to mention that I shared the lecturn with Bill Moularadelis, whose Kingston Estate was the plonk de jour, and whom I had busted in a front page newspaper story years earlier for doctoring his wines with illegal chemicals. That May 2000 piece in the only South Australian daily, The Advertiser, brought about the suspension of Moularadelis’s export license for using illegal silver nitrate to clean up his murkier plonks, resulting in an unseemly scramble to clear other Riverland wineries of illegal winemaking additives.

Unchallenged on any of this, Moularadelis preached at the Wine Press Club that no vineyards should be removed in the current glut because his company needed every grape it could get.

Nobody questioned the fact that the chairman of the SA Wine Press Club was Moularadelis’s newly-appointed distributor, with both gentlemen relishing the opportunity to display their wine to the many key industry folks, bankers, and media representatives that had come to the National Wine Centre to hear my address.

THE NATIONAL WINE CENTRE IN THE ADELAIDE BOTANIC GARDENS HAS COST THE TAXPAYER WELL OVER $50 MILLION - photo KATE ELMES

While they’re busy in their smoke-free rooms, sweating over their dying River, and their lack of profit, planning and vision, the wine industry’s plethora of councils, lobbies, and publications exude only a dumb silence while the opposing health lobby grinds determinedly on, demanding a rewrite of the taxes imposed on wine. Herein lies a problem even bigger than the tricky removal of water from those farmers addicted to the irrigation of arid land.

There was a certain degree of miffedness last week when the alcohol statisticians finally realised that one critical factor had slipped through their forensics: their supposition that Australia’s thirst for alcohol had stabilized in recent years failed to include the fact that Australian wines have been steadily growing in alcoholic content. So in spite of an apparent slight decrease in total alcohol consumed, triggered by the higher alco-pop tax, once the burgeoning strength of our wine is included in the figures, it appears we actually drank more.

I reminded the Wine Press Club that regardless of their stature in the gastroporn world, winemakers sell a dangerous depressive drug called ethanol. It makes people drunk. Drunks tend to bash each other and get killed on the roads. Over the last fifteen years, these ethanol dealers have steadily increased the strength of their product.

The cheapest way to get drunk in Australia is to drink bladder pack wine, which makes up about half of our total wine consumption, and comes from the irrigated riverlands.

Because wine is not taxed on the amount of ethanol it contains, like other alcohol, bladder pack plonk is a much, much cheaper route to the sort of oblivion sought by many.

How many percentage points are we talking?

“How much?” is the more pertinent question, and I don’t mean volume of alcohol. I mean the damage bill the taxpayer meets. One good measure, repeatedly cited by the health lobby, is the National Drug Strategy report of 2008, which found that the 2004-05 bill for “alcohol-related harm”, amounted to $15.3 billion.

When alcohol prices increase, consumption falls. But politicians can’t handle the next fact: people who feel the need to self-medicate into oblivion will choose another intoxicant, which will probably be illicit, and therefore not taxable.

But when deserved public attention is paid Treasury boss Ken Henry’s logical proposal to tax wine like all other alcohol, on its gross amount of ethanol, there will be an instant decrease in the amount of irrigation water required by the bladder plonkmongers and their growers.

The price of a $12, four litre bladder will head quite logically and rightfully toward $30, and the most expensive wines will be cheaper. While this will diminish the ravaging of desert communities by alcohol, it will wreak more havoc on the grape growers of the irrigated inland than the most savage water restrictions.

Put simply, the river will flow again. And the poor deluded farmers will flow out of their beloved bush, into the cities and Centrelink and the arms of the shrinks and the pharmaceutical transnationals who dictate drug policy. Regardless of what it costs the taxpayer, these ripped-off folks may even move to the seaside suburbs near McLaren Vale, and contribute their waste water to the local recycling plant for profitable viticulture.

Add to this confusion the latest discoveries about the amount of public harm caused by alcohol relative to illicit drugs, and the logical mind would suggest that those growing grapes would be better off growing marijuana on their arid, salty, sandy land. It would require less ground, much, much less water, would slow increasing soil salinity and incur a much lower health cost per user than the strong plonk currently produced. To be blithe, you can even make rope and fabric and insulation from hemp, and one recent report suggested that the dreaded opiates incur a much lower total public health cost than alcohol, measured per user.

So while all these inquirers and lobbyists and angry farmers foment and wave their pitchforks for the telly, while more skrillions are spent on more self-interested pow-wows, there is still no respected investigator combining these obvious issues. It’s not just the amount of water we abuse. It’s not just the rural farming community hurt and the destruction brought on by the over-allocation of irrigation water. It’s not just the river running into the ocean like it should, the red gum forests surviving, the fish, or even the votes in the electorates.

This whole mess is about our community’s yearning for oblivion, and its incredible capacity for self-deceit. This delusion expands exponentially once you enter the parliamentary bars or the sanctimonious halls of the wine business, where there is too much to lose.

It is essential that government should set up a well-funded inquirer to passionately yet forensically investigate all of this. If the wool board, the wheat board, or the mining industry made such a humungous stuff-up, there would be a dead serious inquiry, and those responsible would be denied their chance to repeat such destruction. Heads would roll. Changes would be made. Things would improve.

As for the illicit drugs industry … well, while Bacchus and Pan appear to be winning that one too, at least somebody actually declared war. I'd like to see the rules of engagement.

Moularadelis’s Kingston Estate, meanwhile, has failed spectacularly to buy all the grapes he promised he needed. He seemed sincere at the time.

McLAREN VALE AT WAR WITH GHETTO GOVT

GOING: DAVID PAXTON IN HIS GATEWAY VINEYARD OVERLOOKING THE SPARKLING GULF St VINCENT, THE PATRON SAINT OF VITICULTURERS, THIS VINEYARD IS QUITE LITERALLY THE OPENING TO THE McLAREN VALE WINE DISTRICT. THE HILL BEHIND PAXTON IS WHERE THE LOCAL ONKAPARINGA COUNCIL HAS CONSPIRED TO DUMP AN INTENSIVE MULTI-STOREY DORMITORY SUBURB SURROUNDED BY A "BIG BOX" LIGHT INDUSTRIAL "EMPLOYMENT ZONE" photo KATE ELMES

Council Shafts Winemakers Abandons Planning Pledges Here Comes The Ghettoby PHILIP WHITE
This July article was the first to report the treacherous situation at Seaford Heights. Since this, intense lobbying saw the Council backflip on its approval, Mayor Rosenberg castigate Council for spoiling her plan, and the Labor Party government ministers obfuscate and bullshit about whose plan it was and how the backflip will forever hurt development in the region, et cetera, ad infinitim ... In the meantime, government is intent on continuing with the development. An update on the situation will be published here soon.

Here's the original story:


McLaren Vale has had enough.

Three years ago, Lorraine Rosenberg, Mayor of Onkaparinga, launched Trott’s View, the late Greg Trott’s weighty conservationist tome about what and whom he loved and feared in his beloved McLaren Vale.

Rosenberg spoke precisely and brightly about a new era of council-community co-operation: a new environmental morality. Trott could now lie straight in his grave.

This speech was a shock: when Rosenberg was the Liberal Member for Kaurna in the Olsen government, she ruled as if no hillside was nice without colourbond.

Late last week, Vales winemakers discovered it was the end of the ten days Rosenberg’s Council had given them to peruse and comment on a tasteless development many years in the planning.

One can hear Trott roaring from the Strout Road cemetery. He died believing he’d secured a solemn vow from government: no more villa rash east of South Road.

GOING: GLENTHORNE FARM ON McLAREN VALE'S NORTHERN BORDER ... CURRENTLY IN LIMBO AS THE UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE, WHICH WAS GIVEN THE LAND FOR VITICULTURAL RESEARCH, FAILED IN ITS RECENT ATTEMPT AT LUCRATIVE SUBDIVISION, BUT CONTINUES TO FAIL TO KEEP THE SOLEMN PLEDGES IT MADE IN THE DEED IN SPITE OF PRECISE INSTRUCTION FROM THE PREMIER THAT THE DEED SHOULD BE HONOURED photo LEO DAVIS

The 1,700 new houses of Seaford Heights will be east of South Road, bang on the entrance to McLaren Vale, opposite Paxtons’ prestigious Gateway Vineyard. These vines grow some of the district’s best fruit. Trott had been scheming to hang a giant bell on that hilltop, to peal every morning at eleven. Tasting time.

For McLaren Vale, the location couldn’t be worse. David Paxton is livid.

“McLaren Vale is striving for world wide recognition as a first-class wine region,” he fumed. “Do you think the French would build a housing estate on the edge of Burgundy?”

The new suburb is opposite his vineyard, bordered by Main South Road, Wheaton Road, Ostrich Farm Road and Victor Harbor Road: a tagger’s paradise of eave-to-eave dormitoria, industrial “big box” sheds and colourbond fences. Its name alone should enrage creative sprayers. How can you have a ford on the sea in the heights?

The plan ridicules the long-term conservation and development promises the Rann Labor government devised before it dribbled in at the election.

The Labor Member for Mawson, Leon Bignell, is suddenly under a spotlight he wishes would pop. He works hard for the winemakers; his angry opposition to Constellation Wines’ destruction of John Reynell’s 1839 vineyard helped get him re-elected with an increased majority.

Seaford Heights also ridicules the November 2008 assurance of Planning Minister Paul Holloway.

“Because the Barossa Valley and McLaren Vale are important economic areas of the state,” he promised on ABC radio, “because they’re wine regions, also significant tourism regions, it would not make sense to have urban encroachment to a significant extent into those areas.

“So we’ll avoid those areas and the areas that we’ll be looking at for future expansion are those areas where there’ll be less impact on the important tourism and economic areas ... it’s simple common sense: why would you want to encroach on areas that are important to the economy … Clearly that would be put at threat if we allowed rampant urban development within those areas.”


GONE: JOHN REYNELL'S 162 YEAR OLD VINEYARD ... LOST TO INTENSIVE GHETTO SUBDVISION EARLIER THIS YEAR AS CONSTELLATION WINES, COUNCIL AND GOVERNMENT DIDDLED HISTORY AND HERITAGE WITH SOME VERY SWIFT BACKROOM DODGES photo KATE ELMES
 We heard a lot more of that from Premier Mike Rann before the election.

“The McLaren Vale Grape Wine and Tourism Association represents approximately 500 grape growers, wineries and tourism operators,” said its chairman Dudley Brown in his last-minute submission to Council, “with combined revenues exceeding $800 million per annum ... the single largest group of employers, landholders, ratepayers and tourism attractions in the City of Onkaparinga ...

“The Seaford Heights development plan and amendment goes to great lengths to discuss how ‘integrated’ it is with the 30 Year Plan for Adelaide and the Council's own plans,” he writes, “but seems entirely divorced from the economic reality and planning needs of its neighbouring communities … [It is] a very poor reflection of the Council's regard for its most successful worldwide brand and economic backbone ... and is likely to haunt the region for many decades to come.”

This belated rage is accompanied by many good suggestions about how to make the new burb look better, indicating to some that the Association has already thrown in its towel because the development deal was done before the newest restrictions were imposed.

The Association kept schtum when the Rann government, Rosenberg’s Council and Constellation Wines willfully destroyed the famous Chateau Reynella vineyard. Some Barossa winemakers equate that to replacing the Hill of Grace with slums.

Speaking of really dumb names, perhaps it was envy that kept the McLVGW&TA silent when the Onkaparinga Council recently began an official rebranding of its plant and properties: Onka is the new word. Parri means river. Onka means women.

Ponkepurringa, Unkaparinga, Ingangkiparri, Unkerparingga, Ngangki-parri, Ngangki-parri-unga … Onkaparinga was where the Kaurna secured their women and kids when invaders came to steal ceremonial ochre, and savage wars were fought. It meant “the place of the women’s river”, or “women’s place by their river”.

That old parri, with its deep protective ravines, still flows by, just a spear’s throw from Seaford Bloody Heights. But todays’ attack comes from within: from the only council on Earth with WOMEN painted on its garbage trucks.

“These pages are dedicated to all who live within this beautiful and bounteous region,” Trott wrote in the book Rosenberg launched, “trusting that they will always remain guardians of its heritage and will plant its future carefully and sensitively, while forever maintaining a level of sympathetic creativity.”

NEXT: HAVING BOUGHT THESE VINEYARDS AT MANY TIMES THEIR CURRENT VALUE, THE KARIDIS DEVELOPMENT GROUP WANTS TO REPLACE THESE HISTORIC VINEYARDS ON THE SOUTHERN BOUNDARY OF THE McLAREN VALE TOWNSHIP WITH OVER A THOUSAND UNITS FOR THE ELDERLY. photo KATE ELMES

LETTER OF RESPONSE FROM THE MAYOR

I was intrigued by ‘McLaren Vale tempers boil over villa rash’ (Independent Weekly, 16 July) with its selective and unbalanced reporting. The article failed to indicate the State Government’s primary role in the development of the land at Seaford Heights. This site has been earmarked for housing since 1962 and zoned as residential since the late 1980s. The State Government’s Land Management Corporation owned the land until 2008 when it contracted to sell half of it to Fairmont Homes. The City of Onkaparinga had no role in this sale. It must also be noted that the State Government has set SA’s population growth targets, which Council must adhere to.

Had I been given the opportunity to comment in the article, I would have explained that Council is trying to achieve the best outcomes for the region regarding Seaford Heights. This is through involvement in a Development Plan Amendment, which seeks to reduce future demand for urban expansion. As it stands, the new landowners could apply for development approval under existing rules, which we believe would exacerbate urban sprawl. I also wish to comment on the sexist remarks towards the end of the article, which add absolutely nothing to the content.

City of Onkaparinga Mayor Lorraine Rosenberg


Speech to Onkaparinga Council - 15 Septemberby Dudley Brown, Chairman of the McLaren Vale Grape Wine And Tourism Association

(This speech was critical in council's backflip over its plan: local government elections are in November, and the strength of the anti-development lobby saw council vote against its own plan. So now we lobby the state Labor ministers!) 
 
I would like to make the first of a few extraordinary claims tonight.

The first is that this beautiful new map on the wall is the finest geology map of any wine region in the world. Each of the different colors represents a different geological formation between 2 million and a nearly a billion years old in our region. Each of these imparts different flavors to grapes and creates diversity that most regions dream about.

My second claim is that this very unique geology is the foundation of what makes the McLaren Wale wine region so special on the world stage.

My third claim is that your decision regarding Seaford Heights is not a decision of local importance. It is of international importance.

Whether you know it or not, there are wine journalists and bloggers and consumers and wine tourists worldwide watching what happens tonight.

There’s an old saying in politics that where you stand depends on where you sit.

As Councillors from all parts of the city and as grape growers, winemakers and tourism operators in the McLaren vale wine region, we typically sit in different places.

However, in decision-making, we all try address the same three things: facts, context and process. I would like the council to respectfully consider all three from where our 500 members sit.

First the facts:

The McLaren Vale wine region’s borders are recognized by international treaty to be roughly contiguous with the borders of the City of Onkaparinga. Like you, we represent the entire city of Onkaparinga and not just the town of McLaren Vale.
Part of our charter is to maintain and preserve the rural amenity of our region for future generations to enjoy.

The grape industry of McLaren Vale contributes average annual revenues of approximately $80 million to the local economy. It employs sustainably managed and renewable water for over 95% of its irrigation needs while employing over 700 people on a full-time basis. Another 300-500 people are engaged as a second source of income and many more on a contract or part time basis.

The wine industry of McLaren Vale accounts for over 10% of the national wine output by value, employs over 2000 people full time and contributes $700 million per year in revenues.
The tourism industry of the McLaren Vale area just within the Willunga Basin contributes $160 million per year to the local economy comprising over 240 different tourism businesses in accommodation, food, wine, arts, transportation and other areas.

Any conservative multiplier would suggest that our industries support another 3000 jobs locally and another 3000 across the state.

McLaren Vale is consistently recognized by key media such as Australian Gourmet Traveler and Delicious as the number one wine and food region in Australia.

It has the #1 regional restaurant in Australia at Fino, it is the #1 region in Australia for local produce, the home of the best wine list in South Australia at the Victory, the host of Australia’s richest landscape art prize and the most valuable vineyard land in Australia.

THE SOUTHERN HALF OF THE McLAREN VALE VIGNOBLE IN THE WILLUNGA EMBAYMENT, LOOKING SOUTH. THE ONKAPARINGA GORGE IN THE FOREGROUND DISSECTS THE DISTRICT: THE NORTHERN HALF OF ITS AREA OF THE BEST OLD GEOLOGY FOR VITICULTURE HAS ALREADY DISAPPEARED BENEATH THE HOUSING YOU CAN SEE APPROACHING IN THE BOTTOM RIGHT - photo STACEY POTHOVEN

Now some context and a few more facts:

When the planning decisions for the proposed Seaford Heights suburb were made between the 1960’s and early last decade, the McLaren Vale wine industry was:

a) Spread out with many vineyards in the northern half of the current City of Onkaparinga

b) Much less intensive in nature relative to other crops

b) Less than 10% of its current size economically

c) Insignificant in terms of tourism

Since that time, a large portion of the historic viticultural areas in the northern part of the city have been developed for suburban development with the oldest vineyard in Australia bulldozed with this Council’s acquiescence at Reynella last year.

PART OF THE NORTHERN HALF OF THE McLAREN VALE VIGNOBLE, SHOWING NEW HOUSING SURROUNDING CHATEAU REYNELLA, WHICH IS OWNED BY CONSTELLATION WINES. JOHN REYNELL'S ORIGINAL 163 YEAR OLD VINEYARD IS CIRCLED. CONSTELLATION, WITH THE CONNIVANCE OF STATE AND LOCAL GOVERNMENTS REPLACED THIS PRICELESS HERITAGE ITEM WITH GHETTO EARLIER THIS YEAR.

At the same time, the southern part of the region has been much more intensively planted to vines. This part of the city is now, by far, the most intensively planted wine region (relative to other crops) in Australia.

The result has been an economic explosion of wine production and tourism in the region. McLaren Vale now accounts for: 25% of state grape and wine production by value, the highest per litre price for exports of any region in Australia, the highest total value exports of any wine region in Australia, the most successful job creator relative to water and grape inputs of any wine region in Australia and is the largest contributor to tourism of any SA region outside of Adelaide.

Moreover, as McLaren Vale is the highest cost region in SA for wine production, the economy is increasingly dependent on tourism and cellar door visitation as a path to profitability. Evidence of this is that cellar door numbers in the region have expanded from about thirty ten years ago to over eighty at present. This success story has evolved despite major wine companies withdrawing over 50% of their grape consumption and production from our high cost region over the past decade.

The result of this adaptive response to adversity is a wonderful and diverse set of tourism experiences that enable visitors to return many times and always have new experiences available to them. This is the exact type of organic economic development that state and local governments should be protecting and promoting rather than threatening with unsuitable development.

No other industry or area located in the City of Onkaparinga can list so many “best in Australia” gongs. None of this was true ten or twenty or thirty years ago when plans were originally made for Seaford Heights.


The Seaford Heights development is located at the entrance to the gateways to the tourism regions of McLaren Vale, the Fleurieu Peninsula and Kangaroo Island. The land adjoins the beginning of the vineyards of the town of McLaren Vale on the Victor Harbor Road and the open spaces of South Road. It is the point where suburbia fades away and the holiday experience begins for more people than any other region in South Australia.

Any development that occurs here should be designed from the context of the site’s importance as a place of transition from the suburbs to a major wine and food tourism region not as an extension of the suburbs.

Further, the site should also leverage the assets and possibilities presented by its proximity to an international airport for tourists, the city of Adelaide, major universities, one of the most economically important wine regions in Australia, a two-way freeway and a reliable supply of reclaimed water. Aside from the freeway, the current plan for this site ignores all of these assets.

For this reason alone, the Council should reject the current DPA as a hasty and inappropriate outcome for the entire region.

My final really big claim is that this site is the viticultural equivalent of Olympic Dam.

The 650 million year old exposed geology of the land in question is possibly the most important and valuable unplanted site for viticulture in the world.

How do we know this? Because

1) the PIRSA geologists who mapped this site are some of the best in the world

2) this map tells us how old the geology at this site is and

3) old rocks produce great wines.


The only place where there is an exposed geology of at least 650 million years old in the entire world of viticulture is in pockets of the Greenock area in the Barossa and the Polish Hill area in Clare Valley. Vines in these areas have produced more perfect wine scores ever received in Australia many times over that of any other area of Australia combined. Even McLaren Vale.

There is nowhere else with geology this old or of this size exposed in a suitable viticulture area anywhere in the world.

Despite this information being available from PIRSA, the DPA’s brief section on soil and geology section simply says that the site has gray brown loams suitable for foundations and gardens.

For this reason alone, the Council should reject the current DPA as a hasty and inappropriate outcome for the entire region.

Serendipitously, there is also an ample supply of reclaimed water for irrigation located directly across the Victor Harbor Road. If this parcel was developed as agricultural land, effluent to the sea could be reduced by as much as 800 million litres per year or 20% of the total remaining outflow of pollutants into the Gulf. This is not mentioned anywhere in the planning documents either. How can a Council that is a partner in the $120 million dollar waterproofing the south strategy that supplies this water not know this or mention it in a DPA?

The process employed by the City with regard to the planning and public consultation about the Seaford Heights Development has been badly flawed.

Released on 13 May 2010, the Council’s DPA, listed those with whom the Council undertook to consult with on a statutory basis. It also committed to consult with “relevant community and business groups active within the City of Onkaparinga.”

At no point did the MVGWTA receive any formal or informal communication from the City regarding the consultation process for Seaford Heights.

We were completely unaware of this process until the 7th of July. Only on the 9th of July were we able to make our members aware of this situation. Submissions closed that day. As our Council and city staff did not consider us “relevant”, our members did not have the same opportunity to respond as other stakeholders.

How can the largest employer in the city that is acknowledged to be the best in Australia in so many ways, that contributes a billion dollars of year in revenues in the mostly highly taxed industry in Australia that also physically adjoins the property in question not considered ‘relevant’ by either staff or Council? “ We believe that this is more than an oversight.

The lack of relevance of McLaren Vale and the food and wine tourism economy of the region isn’t just confined to the DPA’s invitation list however.

In the many hundreds of pages of planning and research documents that I read - including the DPA - from surveys of job location and creation to zoning and building densities – nowhere did I find the words “McLaren Vale,” “wine and grape industry” or “tourism” anywhere.

Nowhere in the employment assessment did the research mention the words McLaren Vale or wine industry or tourism – it only looked north and west of Seaford Heights and to other industries like retail. It turns out we supposedly don’t have enough grocery stores despite there being two large ones around the corner with an empty parking lot.

Nowhere did I find any risk assessment of the impact on the $160 million per year tourism industry.

Nowhere did I find an assessment of the risk posed to an $800 million dollar per year grape and wine industry that depends on tourism for profitability.

Nowhere did I find any reference to the authoritative research of Kym Anderson from the University of Adelaide on the economic impact of Australian wine regions undertaken last year.

Nowhere did I find any assessment of the risk or impact posed to the locally owned Main Street merchants across the Willunga Basin by the proposed retail development at Seaford Heights.

Nowhere did I find any reference to the community consultation undertaken by the City in 2006 with McLaren Vale to regarding the maintenance of the rural amenity and character of our region.

In short, there was absolutely no consideration of the impact of this proposed development on our region or industries or alternative uses at any point in the planning and consultation process. The “oversights” in this DPA are entirely too many and too serious to be simply brushed off. Remarkably, the city conducted an appropriate community consultation process about the location of a Leopard tank in a park but not about a new suburb with the population the size of McLaren Vale.

For this reason alone, the Council should reject the current DPA as a hasty and inappropriate outcome for the city.

Tonight, we are asking for three things from the Council:

1) That you reject the recommendation to extend the DPA process until January 2011 as it can only result in tinkering with a fundamentally flawed plan that is inappropriate to the site in question and does not meet Council’s own objectives.

2) That you take a non-binding vote as to who on the Council supports or does not support this current DPA as it stands. You owe the voting public the respect of standing to be counted on this issue prior to the election.

3) That you vote to abandon the current DPA process altogether and that you inform the Minister that any new DPA for this site needs to be undertaken with the full involvement of the Council, the community and industries affected as part of a long term strategic plan for the Willunga Basin that includes the LMC sites at Aldinga, Bowering Hill and Sellick’s Beach.

While it is easy to blame the State or the developers or the staff for the squeeze you find yourself in tonight, you can put them all on notice that it is the elected officials of this City who take responsibility for well considered and appropriate outcomes for our beautiful region.

A lot more people than our members are watching your decision tonight. The world is watching.


Comments posted on original DRINKSTER publication:

Nigel: .

"The Onkaparinga is also my river. I can hear the waters when they run, (and remember, Phil, I am deaf.) It's that close to my office window. The Onkaparinga District Council was for so many years South Australia's second oldest local government body, formed just a few months after Mitcham. And then it was swallowed up in the Adelaide Hills Council when amalgamation came about. Gleefully and to our gutwrenching dismay, the southern areas snapped up our beautiful name. The local footy team still enjoys the nickname Onkas. Won't they be thrilled to read their names on the garbage trucks. And believe me, they're competitive. They don't pussyfoot around and play like onkas...." July 29, 2010 7:58 PM

Anonymous:

"This new villages should be for Cambo people who do weeding and pruning the picking for the wines." July 29, 2010 10:24 PM

McLoverAllMyLife:

"that's just nuts" July 31, 2010 9:18 PM

Grant:

"It seems to me that Biggles has lost site of the fact that it is a Labor government that he happens to be part of, that has changed the planning act which is allowing this unbridled destruction. He can't have it both ways. Clearly his voice in Caucus is not as loud as his voice in the public press." August 1, 2010 5:03 PM

Roger Wingco:

"why wasn't he at the meeting?" August 1, 2010 8:43 PM

Philip White:

"If you seek blame, you will get nowhere, because everybody shares the blame for this. Even the street directories have shown this land as a suburb for many years, and the entire community has sat back without wondering why or how. Some locals were tipped off a year ago that this was impending, and never made mention of it. So forget the blame, and get active, and show your anger. Get onto FaceBook at http://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/pages/WE-OPPOSE-SEAFORD-HEIGHTS/133760679996263?ref=ts and offer your support." August 3, 2010 8:51 AM

Anonymous:

"I hear the govt's offer of compromise is ratshit!" August 11, 2010 6:40 PM

Garbage Trucks For Sale:

"Wow nice land it was very environmentalist and beautiful place to live in." August 12, 2010 12:54 AM

Garbage Trucks For Sale:

"Nice land and very relaxing ambiance when taking vacation or lifetime resting." August 27, 2010 6:09 PM
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