HILLSBILLIES BECOME HILLS ANGELS

NGERINGA BIODYNAMIC VINEYARD, MOUNT BARKER
Adelaide Hills Turn Green In Drought
Enviro Smarts Plan Track To Future
by PHILIP WHITE

Bacchus, a large part of the community, and then possibly the entire wine drinking world, will bless the Adelaide Hills winegrowers.

The Hills vineyard environment, and its wines, are certain to improve through the new ecologically-responsible framework devised, established and broadcast via the Adelaide Hills Wine Region website by the region’s savvy Environment Committee.

For twenty years the Hills have been too easily satirised for their profusion of posh hobbyist growers who planted vineyards with little idea of viticultural science or oenology, not to mention the realities of a crowded marketplace. Vineyards of the wrong varieties were planted holus bolus in the wrong places for the wrong reasons. Machiavellian transnationals love taking this fruit at minimal rates for amorphous blends without attribution.

The side effects include inappropriate petro-chem regime management, pollution of watercourses, water abuses, bird scarers, neighbour disputes, lack of native vegetation, and so on.

But the Hills have suddenly leapt ahead of all other South Australian regions.

Last week the Adelaide Hills Wine Region Australia launched its impeccably responsible Environmental Management System. While nobody from The Courier could find the time to attend, or indeed The Advertiser, the Mount Barker Council mayor, Ann Ferguson, and its CEO Andrew Stuart were there with keen enthusiasm to see a few quiet local heroes make a most impressive presentation.

While rival regions have depended upon vague claims to green awareness, and maybe even practice, the Hills region association has nailed the theory better than the rest, released its template for measurable practice, and thus laid the gauntlet down to all its members, not to mention the other districts, like McLaren Vale, which have depended on anecdote and impressionable writers like me, to spread the word about green credentials.

The determined and seemingly tireless Larry Jacobs, of the biodynamic Hahndorf Hill Winery, has worked like a tiger, chairing the region’s Environment Committee.

“It is extremely exciting for us to realise”, he said, “that after all our effort to develop a program we saw could genuinely benefit the Hills, we’re the first region in the State, if not Australia, to have a functioning and government endorsed regional EMS available to our members”.

Put most simply, this system will grow and evolve as more practitioners climb aboard. It may not be long before the punter is paying a premium for these classified products, as the whole thing grows by competition.

With the assistance and support of Greenochre Environmental Consultant Andy Chambers, and Bryce Routley, Efficiency Project Officer at the Environmental Protection Authority, the Hills have adopted the philosophy of green guru Heinz-Werner Engel, an expert in environmental management systems and ISO 14001, the latter tattoo being a key international identifier of rigorously environmentally aware businesses which must practise what they preach.

Perhaps most critical to the Hills plan is Engel’s system called EcoMappingTM.

“An environment management system (EMS) is simply a tool for measuring and then managing a organisation’s impact on the environment, said Janet Klein, of the Ngeringa biodynamic vineyards and winery at Mount Barker. (Having well and truly completed his stint, Larry Jacobs has left his position as chair of the environment committee, and the able Janet has now taken the role.)

“Ecomapping is a simple flexible tool that helps with environmental management, leading if you like to achieving ISO 14001 status” Janet said.

Both went on to explain how Ecomapping helps a grower/maker become aware of their environmental impact and ongoing behaviour, identify issues and emergent problems, give these rank, and schedule the appropriate reactions.

Once completed, Ecomapping can serve as the basis for a wider environmental management system which promotes itself.

So, with all the confounding acronyms and psuedo-religious verdanture, what does this actually mean on the ground at the coalface further along down the track at the grassroots?

It means that by self-promoting rivalry, individual vintners in the Hills, and then entire wine regions elsewhere, will learn to clean up their act.

The new practitioner simply learns to draw maps of different aspects of their business. Larry showed us his Hahndorf Hill maps, based on aerial photography of his site. There’s a ten step method, available on the association’s website, www.adelaidehillswine.com.

These generations of maps cover, in order: urbanity and biodiversity; water, soils and storage; air - including odours, noise and dust; energy; waste; risks; materials flow; employee opinion; and the maintenance of an ecolog book.

The next step it to devise a badge or logo to identify and reward businesses and products that have committed to the system, and made progress in cleaning up their act. This will make the whole deal competitive, both within the region, and with its rivals, who are all desperately keen to make sales to an increasingly environment and health-conscious international marketplace.

So Hillsbillies become Hills Angels? I’ll say it again: “By their works ye shall know them

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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