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NUDGING THE HONEY MOON BARRELS

by PHILIP WHITE - This was published in The Independent Weekly on 21 NOV 08

There’s nothing new about vineyards being subdivided for villa rash. South Australian winemakers have been at it since the colony began.

John Barton Hack’s North Adelaide vineyards were barely two years old when he subdivided the land in 1839, took his money to Echunga and started again: 500 vines to begin; 3000 more in 1842.

There’s nothing new about South Australian developers and speculators going broke, either. Hack had barely got his first vintage fermented when debt swallowed him in 1843; by 1844 Walter Duffield had the vineyard and became the State’s first wine exporter when he sent a case of his Echunga Springs to Queen Victoria. He was then prosecuted for selling wine without a license.

But Duffield had 14 acres of vines and orchard at Para Inga, on the river north of Gawler, by 1862, where he soon learned about the fickle nature of irrigation. “We are sure a considerable quantity of very tolerable raisins might be gathered” wine writer Ebenezer Ward scratched drily upon his visit in the drought of February 1862.

At least Duffield got his vineyard mix right that time: while Echunga was all white grapes, the Gawler vineyard included shiraz and mataro alongside the verdelho and muscats.

Back to Echunga. Enter Hylton McLean and Jane Bromley, quite a few years later. Their brave little Honey Moon Vineyard rides the ridge east of the village, above a gully laced with springs. They planted reds there in tough podsolic soils shot with ironstone in 2004; their first wines are stunning.

“Our climate’s half way between Burgundy and the Rhone”, says Hylton, “so we reckon shiraz and pinot noir can co-exist here”. And co-exist they do, just as they work perfectly, given the right soils, at Romney Park, on a similar ridge the other side of Hahndorf. And again on the piedmont of Mount Barker, at Ngeringa.

We stood nudging the barrels on the apron of the neat Honey Moon cellar last week, a warm breeze stirring the leaves. If the air was not so sweet and acrid from eucalyptus and very Australian grass pollens, and the kelpie not so persistent in troubling us with sticks, we could indeed have been in Burgundy in the summer.

The barrels certainly smelt of Burgundy: a range of oaks, of differing ages, from the better forests of France, wrangled, toasted and wrought by the coopering world’s equivalents of Chanel, Dior, and Givenchy. Their contents were Burgundian too: pinots that evoked cellar after cellar from that amazing slope of gold; but sinister gunblue shiraz that glinted with as much Australian depth as earthy Rhonish elegance.

As Beaujolais is between France’s pinot and shiraz vignobles, I couldn’t help wondering what bright games its gamay grape might play in these Hills. Somebody will try it. That would be fun, and an earlier-drinking, cheekier red that would see some winery income a year or two quicker than the more serious models.

Hylton McLean taught wine science for may years; he now works on experimental oenology at Pernod Ricard’s Rowland Flat winery. He’s certainly not a sub-divider. One can’t tread too much of the Honey Moon property without being aware of how painstakingly it was sought and selected.

“We’re at 420 metres here, so at night it’s more continental”, Hylton said. “This last vintage, it’d be 41 degrees in the day, but we’d be quickly back to twelve at night.”

The 2008 Honey Moon Vineyard Rosé ($19; 13% alcohol; screw cap; 94 points) is a bright and cheeky young thing made from pinot and shiraz. It’s all saucy raspberry, strawberry and cranberry, with, as Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks observed, “a maraschino cherry sitting on the top”. But as the seduction continues, stone fruits and kernels become apparent further down the drink, while an acrid edge of those mean weathered soils adds a sexy, husky dry note. The flavours are pretty much what those aromas prophesied, but better. It’s deep and delicious stuff, bone dry, with the texture of a good chardonnay.

While that rosé was pretty much along the lines of your Folies Bergere, the 2007 pinot noir was straight to a modern Burgundian cellar. The oak had squirted a streak of gingery lemon through a precise cordial of raspberry, wild cherries and juniper berries. It’s nutty, like a cheeky Dujac, and finishes very very deep, juicy and long. $33; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; 93+ points.

Honey Moon Vineyard Shiraz 2007 ($27; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; 93+++ points) is a triumph in the inevitable march towards lower alcohols. It’s almost like malbec: as much gun blue as shiitake and blueberry; as much British Racing Green in mood as your pinus full of black cockatoos. Black tea; black pepper; black fruits ... Glory be.

If you feel like sending some to the Queen, Hylton, I'll frock up right away.

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Biodynamic, bold, and beautiful

by PHILIP WHITE – This appeared in The Independent Weekly in December 2007

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When I was a little kid at Nairne primary school, I spent years gazing from my desk, out over the jumping green fields toward the summit of Mount Barker, knowing that this was good country. Away over there, around the big Chapman house, lay some of this state's best farming dirt. It spread from the piedmont of the Mount down across the Bald Hills Road to the west, including the verdant swathe of ground on which my woodwork teacher's dad had first isolated and developed the clover he named Mount Barker Subterranean, which kept the district's dairy cattle full of goodness and milk for nearly a century.

Today much of that ground is covered in some of the most graceless villa rash imaginable. Thanks to the genius of greed and the idiocy of planners who'd love to be developers, we have turned that glorious garden into a wretched suburban sprawl fit to make Brian Burke proud - the stuff of a future Four Corners expose.

But there's one good stretch of it that seems securely determined to remain horticulturally productive. This is where the German founders of Jurlique first planted their biodynamic gardens to supply the ingredients for their natural wellbeing and skin care brand. They'd scoured the earth from California to here, searching for ground that was fit and healthy, and devoid of DDT.

Since they sold and moved on, they've left behind the beautiful Ngeringa biodynamic vineyards set up by their son, Erinn Klein, and his wife, Janet, over the last six years.

Biodynamic? You mean all that mumbo-jumbo about full moons, natural manure mulch and preparations made from cow's guts in buried horns? You bet.

"We'd eat our cow manure", said Erinn, grinning proudly last week, as we tasted his first wines, in a spotless winery stacked with glistening, impossibly fresh and aromatic vegetables. The cows are biodynamically-grown Highland cattle, with their huge horns and curly coats, and the produce? Well, start with the pumpkin they gave me. I cut a hole in the top of that heavy shiny brute, scooped its seeds out, filled it with cream, yoghurt, onions, garlic, chillis, mushrooms and herbs, put the lid back on, and baked it. It was so dense it wouldn't bloody cook. After three hours, the first serving fed four. Then we sliced the remaining flesh, baked it again, and tried to mash it in a blender. It nearly mashed the blender. Eventually we bashed it into another, more conventional soup, which fed six. The remainder's still swelling, like the Magic Pudding, in the big iron pot. There's enough there for another eight serves. Biodynamic plants seem to have twice the cell density of stuff conventionally grown. And at least twice the flavour.

This goes for grapes, too. The first Ngeringa wines are drop-dead gorgeous. There are two tiers, J.E and Ngeringa, the latter appellation being reserved for only the very best produce from their own vineyards. The J.E Chardonnay 2005 ($25; 93++ points) being as good an opener as I know. It's more Chablis than Burgundy, being wonderfully tight and lithe, with the perfect creaminess of a Chinese custard, flavoured with the slightest hint of honeycomb and spiced by a whiprod of the very best oak.

There's a J.E Pinot with a lovely fluffy, spongy texture, and a range of flavours from black cherry through roast cashew to sweet baby beetroot, crying out, like any exemplary Burgundy, for a confit of goose, or mild cassoulet ($25; 92++); and a J.E McLaren Vale Shiraz 2004 ($20; 92++) jumping with vitality and organic health; beginning with plump, fleshy berries and finishing with tannins that set your happy cheeks agush.

Then comes the Ngeringa Syrah 2005 ($40; 92++) which is more a Rhonish Hermitage Hill than almost any other Australian shiraz, explaining the syrah nomenclature. An astonishing concentration of sweet perfumed fruit and earth, this essence dawns ever so gradually, a little like that magic pumpkin. My bottle has been open for days, and it's only beginning to sing.

That housing's gotta be stopped.

For reviews of Ngeringa's latest, hit DRANKSTER.

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Constellation clings to swamp

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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