KIWI DOC WARNS: NO SAVVY SAVVY

BEAUTIFUL, BEAUTIFUL MARLBOROUGH. BUT IS IT TOO BIG? photograph by KEVIN JUDD

Marlborough's Big Tip

“Tip glut wine or Marlborough topples, industry warns”, was Rachel Young’s headline in The Marlborough Express on New Year’s Day.

I don’t want to go on too much about my piece Wine Biz On The Nose, published on the same day in response to a Sydney Morning Herald piece, but I can’t help observing: why are these terrible wine crises reported only at a time when nobody’s reading newspapers, including journalists?

Oldest trick in the book. They can say “I told you so”. But they didn’t. They didn’t even tell themselves.

But Whitey noticed.

Dr. John Forrest, of the winery bearing his name, said Marlborough's wine image could be forever tarnished if the export market is flooded with cheap sauvignon blanc.

Plenty of that in my in tray. From Marlborough. Already. About the same quality as your average Adelaide Hills sauvignon. Piss on the nettles.

“Marlborough's vintage size increased by 61 percent from last year to a record 194,639 tonnes this year which has caused talk of excess wine and oversupply within the industry”, the Express reported.

“Forrest said oversupply could cause major problems for Marlborough's image and the price it could demand for future vintages ... most wineries took in more fruit than they needed, of which he estimated about 20 per cent was of compromised quality ... this compromised wine should not be blended with good wine, he said.

"If you believe that by flogging cheap 2008 when the 2009 is available and waiting will not compromise the long term viability and profitability of the New Zealand wine industry then I think you are kidding yourself.

"How do we save the Marlborough and New Zealand wine industry from slipping down to produce bulk white wine like you can buy for around 3 to 5 in the UK from Chile?" the Doc asked.

"I feel like we are standing on the edge of a cliff and once we go down I don't see how we can come out of it."

So does he have any solution?

Yep. Tip it out.

Ask our Riverland, and Coonawarra. And give Texas a call. And check CADUCEUS.

CHRIST'S BLOOD GOES FIZZY FOR SCOTS

CHRISTCHURCH SHOULD TAKE COMMUNION FROM EDINBURGH

Dry Midwife Gives Kiwis Proho Urge

Fully Burgundied Jap Snots Wife

Scots Give Sparkle To Communion

by PHILIP WHITE

“This is the most alcohol-driven country I’ve ever encountered” recovering alcoholic Susan Parker - sober for just 27 years – told the New Zealand Herald yesterday. A midwife who’d lived previously Britain, Ireland, Denmark and the USA, Susan said Christchurch’s drinking is "even worse than Ireland".

Just why the paper asked her was not reported. I mean, if you’re looking for a comment, there’s no shortage of drunks in Christchurch.

It’s as bad as Aberdeen of a Saturday night, when the North Sea oilers all come through town on their way back from a week in Barcelona or somewhere, and they dump all their powder in that grey old burgh before they catch the big choppers back to their rigs.

The kids get it into them however they can, dilute it wiv powerful spurruts and maraud in raggedy kilts and Doc Martens. Their parents all work as security guards, lined up outside the restaurants and bars in tuxedos to keep their kids out. And the coppers patrol in nervous teams of twelve, reluctantly interfering now and then to save both lots from killing each other.

Plenty of work for plastic surgeons in Aberdeen.

I was in Christchurch one horrid night after the Christchurch Cup, and if it wasn’t red-nosed hacking-jacketed plaid-tied farmers vomiting very fresh suds at me – no diced carrot – their awful over-dressed wives would bash me with their handbags, just for attempting to get out of their way. I stayed in the best hotel in town, and by 10PM the concierge was cowering terrified inside the door, refusing to open it to anybody. I had to phone him to convince him I was a guest, alone and relatively harmless.

That probably answers my question: the NZ Herald reporter obviously asked the only sober person he could find in Christchurch on Monday morning.

The Kiwis are having one of their little waves of awkward guilt about their boozing.

Where most of Europe has what has been called a "wet" drinking culture based on wine with meals, the Herald reported, New Zealand and other Anglo-Saxon countries are said to have "dry" cultures - where drinking is discouraged but most alcohol is consumed in periodic binges where drinkers actually aim to get drunk.

“Alcohol is literally in our blood” the paper confessed. “Our colonial forebears brought a culture of heavy periodic drinking with them from Britain, which even today consumes about 6 per cent more alcohol per capita than we do.”

So there’s some margin there. You can hear the reporter sigh with relief.

“Broadly speaking” he said, “our consumption seems to have levelled out at around nine litres of alcohol a head, compared with a world average which is now around five litres.”

Gerard Vaughan of the Alcohol Advisory Council told the Herald “it’s is not our total level of drinking, but the way we binge-drink to get drunk. As the AAC's hard-hitting TV ads put it, ‘It's not the drinking. It's how we're drinking’. With five standard drinks you are six times as likely to be injured, and with seven standard drinks you are 10 times as likely to be injured compared with not drinking at all”.

Somebody should have told this to the wife of Japanese businessman Yoichi Shimamoto, who this week sued United Airlines for serving him fine Burgundy at twenty minute intervals between Tokyo and California.

This generosity, he claims, was so good he beat up his wife as they walked through customs at San Francisco. Shimamoto was charged and sentenced to 18 months probation following the incident. He wants the airline to fork up US$100,000 for his bail and defence costs.

Jean Medina, of United Airlines, said: "We believe a lawsuit which suggests we are somehow responsible for the consequences of a passenger's physical assault on his own wife is without any merit whatsoever."

The gentlemen farmers of Christchurch will enjoy that news.

As this parable began in Christchurch, it’s appropriate we should finish in South Leith Parish Church in Edinburgh.

Rev Ian Gilmour, God’s man there, will pour champagne at communion to celebrate the kirk’s 400th anniversary.

"We are going to use it to emphasise the party aspect of being together", the preacher said.

To show their support for his unitarian vision, congregations from other Edinburgh churches intend joining in.

An estimated 20,000 people – people married or baptised in the church, or immediate relatives of those buried without - are eligible for the most formal celebration. The most celebrated of these seems to be young Alistair Stewart, son of Rod, who was christened there in June 2006.

Rev Gilmour said: "I'm not sure what we would do if all 20,000 turned up to be honest.

"Rod Stewart certainly will be contacted though. It would be good if he could come.

"The congregation of South Leith Parish Church is very hard working," said Rev Gilmour. "Some organisations last for little longer than a year, but we've gone on for 400. There are a lot of reasons to celebrate."

Tell that to the good Christians of Christchurch.

SAUVIGNON KING LEAVES CLOUDY BAY

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

Juddy Mosies On

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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THUS SPRACH THE LORD

Tony Lord photographed in Chesser Cellars by Philip White 1982

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by PHILIP WHITE - Interview in WINESTATE July 1982

Tony Lord is the editor of the prestigious British wine magazine, Decanter. In Australia recently, on his way home from New Zealand, Lord delivered some scathing criticisms on the way Australian wine marketing is conducted abroad, especially in London itself.

Lord believes that since the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation closed the Australian Wine Centre in London, an invaluable twenty years of effort in promoting Australian wines there has been almost entirely wasted.

Pointing out that the number of cases of Australian wine imported into Britain escalated steadily from 11,000 in 1977/78, to 48,000 cases in 79/80, Lord is particularly reproachful of the fact that this figure dropped to 33,000 cases in 80/81, neatly comparing the situation to the number of Californian cases imported: that figure has jumped from 40,000 cases to 400,000 in two years.

Explaining that the established European wine producers are almost operating at their maximum production levels, with very little room for expansion, Lord believes these suppliers have little choice other than to charge higher prices for their shrinking market share, and is adamant that the gap will be filled by wines from the New World countries, like Australia, California, South Africa and New Zealand.

However, Lord explains, Australia, unlike the others, appears now to be disproportionately focusing its attention on the much more difficult markets of the USA and Canada, both areas requiring relatively massive investments for the slightest market share.

A jovial expatriate Australian, Lord displayed a rare and irreverent candour when confronted with the Winestate microphone, and fairly large chunks of his dissertation proved far too spicy for these pages. A pity, but there’s plenty here:

Will we have to send our best wine to Britain to establish a market?

It’s always better to start at the top and work down, but given the quality of the wine selling there now, the wines like the ones Yalumba are shipping are very good flagbearers.

If you look at what’s happening in Australia at the moment, you’ve got a glut of wine and you’ve got price discounting. Everybody’s moaning about there being no profitability in wine, but those companies that are exporting are making money. Any company that’s built up a substantial export base, even on a modest scale, at least they’re getting some reasonable profitability with their wines, which may help the subsidise the furtherance of what they’re doing.

I was talking to Max Lake the other day, and he’s firmly committed to exports, and he said ‘It might be that I do have to cut down the amount of wine that I release in Australia’, but, he said, ‘I just can’t rely on the Australian market for my livelihood if we’re starting to get these price discounting problems with people undercutting and stuff selling for a buck a bottle’.

All the smart people in this industry are the ones who are exporting. In the future, and I’m certain that in the not-too-distant future, there’ll be a huge wine glut in this country again, and in the next minute we’ll see Boeings full of Ockers coming over to London and trying to offload what they’ve got in their warehouses, with little regard for the poor bloody importer who wants continuity of supply, and this time the people in Britain certainly already know what they can expect. They’re not gonna touch these guys with a bargepole. But they will go for the companies like Yalumba and Rothbury and Petaluma, and those companies that have been in Britain for five or six years, and all release a certain quantity of wine to that market each year.

See, that’s very important. The poor bloody importer. I just heard the other day about two companies from Australia that have been exporting to Britain and have decided not to send them any more wine. They’re getting top dollar over here, but when they’re not getting top dollar, they’ll be back over there, and that’s stupid short-sightedness. It really is.

Is there any way around the problem of trying to attack a big market like that with four or five pallets of cabernet?

If the maker finds a good importer and he’s prepared to say ‘Yes, I’ll let you have a thousand cases each year”, and if they’re honest about it ... you see Whitey there’s far more possibility for consistency here because of the climate, if for no other reason.

If the importer gets a duff one, he’s gonna make a decision what he’s gonna do about it. The first and foremost problem is that most of the poor buggers who are in London trying to sell Australian wines – and there are some of them who are putting far more effort into it than their profitability would ever justify – what they want to know is that they are going to get wine. I mean, one of the people who have pulled out rang up the UK importer and said ‘Look I can’t let you have any wine for the next two years’. Well now, what is the importer expected to say? He’d been building this thing up, and he’d had the winemaker over. He’d been holding lunches. He’d been getting press coverage, and then he gets this telephone call. He only wanted two or three hundred cases!

But you need about two or three thousand cases there to start with, to make any sense in terms of profitability, and there are very few wineries here that are even prepared to let an export market have that much wine. And they’re silly. The Californians will let you have as much as you want. They realise what the future is! The South Africans will let you have as much as you want.

The New Zealand industry thinks far better about the future than the bloody Australians!

See what they don’t realise is that London’s a prestige market. The Californians aren’t there to make a noticeable profit within five years. It’s a prestige market. They’ve got to see you represented. Every decent wine merchant in the world goes to London, if only because it’s the stop-off before you go to France. But they see your wine, you’re talked about, and the West Germans feed off it, the Belg feed off it, the Scandinavians feed off it, and the Dutch feed off it. And it’s a very big deal to be there.

The north-west Americans feed off it very heavily, too. But the Australians have got tunnel vision. And this is where I ... well, for a highly-placed person in an Australian wine corporation to say, effectively, that Poms wouldn’t know a good bottle if it hit them over the head, is just the end. If they think it privately, keep it to themselves but you don’t go saying it where it’s going to be quoted back at you in an influential trade publication. If the wombat’s doing these things, you bury him in a very large hole!

There are no marketing skills within the industry that apply to the international market that I’ve ever seen. If you’re dealing with Canada, you must have somebody who understands that market. If you’re dealing with America, you’re dealing with a totally different market, and you need somebody who understands that market. And ditto for Germany and the UK. But what we have here is a Coca-Cola salesman who goes around and thinks he can apply Australian marketing techniques in four totally disparate markets. And what he’s doing is – they open the door and they see this turkey coming from ’way back.

There’s an advertising agency in Toronto who are I bet are still laughing at the rip-off they got over Kelvin the Koala. Jesus, they must be bloody in hysterics! “Half a million in your pocket? Great, we can do you a beaut one!’ And, of course, what everybody forgot was by putting this French-speaking koala on the market was that they immediately alienated all the English-speaking Canadians who thought they had a strong bond with Australia through the old Commonwealth. And I mean that’s just a fundamental marketing mistake.

If they can’t see such elementary mistakes, God knows what happens when they get down to the fine print with dealing with these Americans who are so bloody sharp that they’ll eat you before breakfast. In fact, that’s probably when they got this bastard, before breakfast, and tied him up then. You know, while he was still half asleep. They’ve all had a jog and a shower and a jacuzzi and a screw and they’re into the office at seven-thirty in the morning, bouncing and raring to go.

You know me, and any Pom I know, we stagger and say ‘Jeez, I need a glass of good bloody Champagne!’ And you know, these Americans: ‘While you’re signing the documents we’ll open the Deutz, Sir’.

What do people in Britain look for on an Australian wine label?

Well, the varietal name. Area definition, and perhaps a little back label information about the product. It’s getting to the point now with these bloody EEC bureaucrats that by the time you’ve got all the crap that they want on the label, you’re lucky to be able to fit the producer’s name.

Fundamentally, what they want is attractive labelling, and like every other market, there’s just ... well you take a Wolf Blass label. There’s eye-catching shelf appeal, with the varietal name, and the area information, and the vintage. Varietal name and vintage are the key things at the moment because they imply immediately that this wine is quality wine.

It doesn’t necessarily follow-through in the bottle, but, at the moment, anything that hasn’t got a vintage date or a varietal name in Britain is considered real cheapo junk.

But what about an indication of style?

There’s a fine balance in Britain now. You’ll find that, say compared to ten years ago, there’s far more descriptive stuff on labels. “Dry red’, ‘medium white’: very much more indication to tell the consumer what’s inside. People make automatic assumptions in Britain now that if they buy cabernet they expect a certain style of wine. 99.9% of the time they’ll get it. But if it’s a blended wine, like say cabernet-shiraz, you can do that on the back label. But the only thing you don’t want to happen is to go to the California extreme where they literally tell you what socks the winemaker was wearing when he made the wine. I think that’s the sign of a fairly unsophisticated wine-drinking market.

The primary considerations must be shelf-appeal. Eye-catching visual stuff. The South Africans, say, might just call it ‘premium dry red’. We’re not allowed to use the pejorative name in England, but you can in some other markets. You know, in Belfast the soldiers think it’s a good day if they get hit on the head by a bottle that says ‘premium’.

What about the state of Australian wine writing?

I think the wine writers here pussyfoot around a bit too much. There should be much more criticism, because no industry’s going to really top if it’s not criticised, and if it’s not criticised constructively.

There’s this stupid Australian insularity problem. Australians know they’re making good wine. Some of them mistakenly think they’re making brilliant wine. There’s a person I went to university with who’s now a winemaker, and he’s going to charge $14 a bottle for his next release of cabernet sauvignon. Now, this guy’s a doctor. Well, he’s a butcher at medicine, and his winemaking’s even more execrable.

Now it’s awkward. I’m a magazine editor, like you, and we’ve been criticised because we don’t mention bad wines. But a newspaper journalist who has no problem with that sort of thing can come out and say ‘Look, this wine’s been released at $14 but in my humble opinion it’s just not worth the money ... I went down to Chesser Cellars and bought a bottle of Lindeman’s riesling as well as a bottle of so-and-so for under $14 and I think the money was better spent’.

They can’t do anything about that.

What can we, as an industry, do to correct some of these problems?

I’d like to see a lot more of the Wine Board bringing down good journalists and good people from around the world, who know what they’re talking about when they’re talking about wine. More scribes and trade people from different countries. You know, you should be saying ‘OK, the biggest wine buyer from the biggest wine chain in Germany is coming to town, and if anyone in the trade wants to come and meet him for lunch, come along, because he’s going to talk about how to sell wine in Germany’. That’s the sort of thing you should be doing more of, instead of giving your boys first class air tickets to go and whoop it up in the ritziest hotel in New York, wasting growers’ money, when they bloody well need it back here.

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