Woe, horror and rage

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

Where once ran water, only woe, horror and rage now flood down the Murray. Suddenly, furious blockers picket our parliament like only the violent French would. Desperate to recall what it was like to manage a winery in hard times, the transnational grape refineries struggle to juggle their diminishing returns. Big family wineries are forced to pay their suppliers on delivery. Overhead, sprinklers squirt mindlessly.

“The wine industry will never be the same”, Peter Dawson, Hardy’s senior vice-president of operations, murmured at a party at Paxton’s in March.

It’s a lot worse now. Last week Dawson announced his company’s retreat from its refinery on the River in Victoria, to regroup this side of the border at its Berri Estates, where fifty new jobs might be created.

Never pleased with my thirty years of preaching that Murray Valley viticulture could not be sustained as it was, and that smart wineries should be concentrating their efforts on making better wines for more profit with less environmental and social destruction, Dawson finally announced that his company needed to shift its focus to more profitable wines. But he said “higher-priced”, not “higher quality”.

“The wine industry is not globally competitive at lower price points”, he said. “We should be striving to get all of our Australian wine into higher-priced bottled products.”

Hardy’s have always been prickly at my Banrock Station scepticism. While they market their award-winning property as an environmental triumph, one might ask whether it’s a broadacre big-cropping industrial grapeyard where slightly salty River water is pumped onto an ancient dried-out seabed full of much stronger salt. The little bags of sugar that grow are processed and refined to become what I imagine the senior vice-president of operations would call lower-priced softpack products, until they put it all in bottles.

Use some profit to take the sheep off an old station, and reeds and redgums return to the riverbank. An environmental triumph. Let a swamp develop, call it a wetlands. Another triumph. Then empty the wetlands to put more water in the River, when it gets really crook. Another triumph. 100,000 admiring visitors a year walk the trails, admiring the rejuvenated scrub and riverfront, but the reality of the vineyard is never made quite so clear.

Last week also saw the release of another of the endless scientific reports on the River. This finally put a dollar value on the natural filtration effected by one hectare of working wetland – a higher value than one hectare of productive irrigated land. That is a triumph.

The River has always washed itself. But because there’s been so much poison to be filtered and broken down by the reeds and the weeds and sedge, wetlands which are now being deliberately dried out may never recover. While the dirty water kept them alive, the concentrates now drying in their crusty beds may be too harsh for regrowth.

The whisky bottle was beginning its conciliatory wink when, miraculously, a bottle of O’Donohoe’s Find Tom’s Drop Mourvèdre Shiraz arrived. On its label is an 1896 photograph of the O’Donohoe Brothers’ Hillen Grove Condenser. Michael O’Donohoe’s grandfather, Tom, and his six brothers lobbed on the Kalgoorlie goldfields from County Cork. Traditionally, Irishmen knew how to turn cloudy weak ale into clear powerful poteen in a copper pot still. But O’Donohoes built a desalination business by distilling salty bore water. During the day, anyway. Scouring their photograph, I suspect tradition may have returned at night. Nice marketing.

The vineyard responsible for Tom’s Drop is an environmental triumph. Not only do they need less water, but Michael and Jan are probably cleaning river water by running it through their organic vine garden. “The vineyard is part of a polyculture of trees, vines, plants and creatures” their back label explains. “We endeavour to mimic nature, maintain diversity, and focus on the relationship between soils, plants, and animals.” The living soil below their organic mulch has not been disturbed by machinery for 26 years. They won their Level A Organic certificate in 1990. The crop is always below two tonnes per acre.

And where is this? At Berri. So there’s three examples of nice marketing. Which has the truest ring?

One acre of dirt can never produce more than one acre of flavour. You can squirt on plenty of water and spread your acre of flavour over twenty tonnes of sultana, or chardonnay, seasoned with pesticide, fungicide, and herbicide. Or kill the hose and the poisons, get that mulch going, and squeeze your acre of flavour into a tonne or two of living essence like Tom’s Drop. And guess what happens? You get better wine. For which people are prepared to pay more, because they’re not stupid.

Spring rocks in

by PHILIP WHITE

Spring’s here. Well and truly. Just like spring in the ’sixties: gusty and dousing one minute; sunny and warming the next, and lots of wind. But that was spring. You know, September, October, November. This is August.

Until now, it’s been rain, rain, rain. Perfect. The creeks suddenly began to flow on July 10^th; within a week the dams were brimming. And today the wind has quit and we have sunshine so scrubbed and settled it seems to fill all the space of the yard with a dense brick of perfectly transparent matter. The almonds are in full bloom. Arum lilies have suddenly appeared along the water courses. Mick the Pre-Cambrian ram is looking around for all his old girlfriends, all those thousands of ’em, who no doubt went into the mutton pot long before I was born; the foal still within the bursting balloon belly of the mare in the horse paddock next door is kicking so much you can see the lumps moving around in the mother’s stomach. The sedges are alive with baby wood ducks. That’s early. The flats swarm with calm ibis, studiously poking those long black beaks into the sod. Yesterday the blackbird performed his opening cadenza for the sunshine oratorio that feels fit to burst the season wide open any minute now.

As Michael O’Donohoe said the other night in The Exeter: “if you don’t spray poison, your insects won’t get sick. No sick insects, your birds won’t get sick. No sick birds, no slugs or snails”. Since it cut back on the spraying, and sorting out its creeklines with native vegetation in place of the cluttered European species that went malignant, the whole of McLaren Vale is crawling with birdlife that simply wasn’t here five or six years ago. When we were working on the Trott’s View photography in 2000-2001, there was almost no birdlife available to be photographed. Now every time a person tries to get a clean photograph of a cloud, friggin’ wee berrudies fly in the way.

Budburst hit the bellwether vineyard opposite The Salopian Inn on August 1^st.. Last vintage, I reckon it was the 15^th.. And look what happened then. One of the earliest vintages ever, starting out cool in every sense of the word, then suddenly coming over all hellfire and brimstone when the record fortnight of heat hit. And now, although it came excruciatingly late: six weeks of steady soaking rain. The escarpment ground is making water, right down the fault line. If it rains on into the official spring this season, we may well end up with another half a million tonnes of surplus. And a vintage rocking in a fortnight earlier than the last freak.

As Penfolds’ chief winemaker, Peter Gago, said back in April, “In the last fifteen vintages, no two have been alike ...We have to keep modulating our definition of extreme. What’ll come next?”

Bluegrass music, probably. That’s how springy it is. The Dillards. Although I’ve been plastering my ears around The Felice Brothers new’un for a week solid. They’re not bluegrass. They must be sick of being likened to The Band, but it’s probably good for business. And they do come from Woodstock, NY. Raucous, rollicking and brassy like Rock of Ages, sure, and sometimes as if they’re in an empty hall; other times woodsy in that smoky barn sort of way, but they sometimes sound like The Band produced by Lanois, and they get really spooky. Then I sniff hints of Dixie Chicken blue-eyed baptist Billy Payne piano funk. More puce and big crimson than pink, if you get my drift. It will be a delight to follow them. The Band has kept me buzzing for forty years, so a first reserve will be nice.

As there’s nuthin’ new under the Sun, Fleet Foxes drags me back, too. Syrupy pre-Eagles vocals. Like Crosby’s spaced-out solo If I Could Only Remember My Name (with Nash and Young, the Dead, J. Airplane and Joni Mitchell), with splashes of Harry Nilsson and the Beach Boys. Now they’ve learned to sing, I’d love to see them ROCK.

Which there’s absolutely no shortage of in the stunning Large Number 12s, which Mick Wordley just unveiled for me. I can’t believe ’em. He recorded their live opening blast, Every Sunday at The Pint On Punt pub in St Kilda four years ago (it’s on his Mixmaster label – check www.mixmasters.com.au/ ). Mick’s just finished polishing the follow-up, which is studio live and sizzlin’. It’ll be out in a fortnight or so: GO BUY. They sound like Dwight Twilley; 10cc; Rockpile; Thunderclap Newman; The Records; et al, with the Les Paul/Strat interchange of Mick Robbins and the Rev. Charlie Owen always dazzling up the front. Great writing, too. Which is nothing at all to do with wine, other than it makes me very, very thirsty.

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