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.

PEAK OZ BODY REEK: WINE BIZ ON THE NOSE

GREENOCK CREEK ROENNFELDT ROAD VINEYARD AT HARVEST: BUGGER-ALL IRRIGATION; NEVER MORE THAN A TONNE PER ACRE; HAND-MADE; ONE OR TWO BARRELS A YEAR; $190 A BOTTLE; HUNDREDS OF PARKER POINTS; ALWAYS SELLS OUT - SUSTAINABLE? INDUSTRIAL? LEO DAVIS PHOTO

Australian Wine Industry Goes Off In Summer Break
Sudden Sicko Revelations On New Year's Eve

by PHILIP WHITE

“Wine industry grapples for new hook” croaked the Sydney Morning Herald on December 31.

Precisely who it was that decided to run this piece of deep misery on the last day of the year, when most readers are too full of the fruits of the wine biz to remember anything, let alone read, remains to be seen.

I’m sure it was dumped, like the unseemly crock it is, by somebody who hoped it would just sort of gradually break down and dribble through the many levels of the business nice and easy over the summer holidays, so’s not to cause too much of a stink all at once.

Reminds me of John writing in The Holy Bible, King James Version, in chapter 3, verse 13 of his gospel: “And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.”

Good enough reason to keep the stink under a tin until dark falls on New Year’s Eve and the whole nation gets maggoted, eh?

Having sat watching this nefarious business for thirty years, I feel vaguely qualified to respond to this article, bit by bit.

The wine industry was exposed to some unpalatable truths this year, as the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation acknowledged that vineyards and winemakers would need to make major changes if they are to survive an ever growing plethora of challenges.

Well, yes. This is the body that has overseen the dumbest broadscale rooting of the Australian countryside, local economies, public health, families, environment and water during the last decades. Its board includes nobody who grows grapes; nobody with actual investment in the wine industry; nobody I would call a particularly talented hands-on winemaker. (There is one winemaking director who is on the board for his marketing skills, according to the original press statements). Two of its small number work for huge transnational companies (Pernod-Ricard; Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessey) which are direct rivals of the Australian wine business. Its members change in about one quarter the time it takes a responsible winemaker to decide upon a flavour, find the land, prepare it, plant it, harvest it, convert it from primary to secondary product in the winery, mature it, package it as something gastronomically attractive, market it, promote it, sell it, distribute it, and see it winning respect.

Major changes indeed.

With the preceding "boom time" party now well and truly over, 2009 could prove to be a major turning point for the consortium as small and large operations alike look for innovative measures to help the Australian wine industry recover from what has been a long-running hangover.

Yes. As I have consistently written for thirty years, there is no point in the driest country on Earth buggering arid land and wasting precious water to make cheap rotgut bladder pack quality wine which is two or three times the strength of your average beer for sale to the world at the price of imported water.

2009 IS the major turning point. Things have already changed, and admitting this on New Year’s Eve will not make the facts go away.

This industry is cactus whether these geniuses look for innovative measures or not.

The confronting reality for Australia's wine industry is actually a cautionary tale for all producing countries, says the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation.

Well, yes. The Australian wine industry should immediately advise the world to drop the Australian winemaking recipe immediately. It is Australia’s duty. Through its great publicly-funded halls of academe, like the University of Adelaide, this industry trained thousands of winemakers and sent them out like apostles around the world to advise our rivals how to do things our way. We never seemed to realise that because they had the equivalent of slave labour, no environmental restrictions, and either plenty of water or plenty of water which could be procured illicitly, we never seemed to realise that these countries would be able to make cheaper wine than Australia could.

So before their environments fail like Australia’s, before their water dries out, before their communities drink themselves to oblivion and ruin, of course we should be out there, telling them to stop.

The University of Adelaide should quickly knock a course together, offering a doctorate in how to undo what we’ve just taught these hapless copyists to do.

The people who have encouraged the Australian wine industry to develop to this sickening delusion should all be on the road, at their own expense, apologising, and helping put things right. In Georgia, Romania, China, India, Argentina, Chile ... wherever it’s necessary.

The corporation's market development manager, Paul Henry, says the industry will in all likelihood face production without profit and diminishing bargaining power in the face of attritional retail dynamics caused by the global financial crisis.

Well, yes, and all the above. Has anybody sat down and considered precisely how much wine the world should be expected to drink? That would a handy number to have before we encounter tricky difficulties like the global financial crisis, which wasn’t really much of a surprise to those of us who live moderately and watch.

Despite the ongoing drought, wine production went up this year, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), but lower domestic sales and a drop in exports led to a surplus in wine stocks.

Yes. But this was no surprise. The whole business was looking forward to a bumper harvest until the Lord smote the grapeyards with withering heat. The heat was the surprise. The export slump was predicted; the increase in yields per acre and total tonnes harvested was exactly what the University of Adelaide and the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation have been struggling for decades to achieve. This oversupply – two billion litres in tank at the moment, and another good vintage looming – is the direct result of everything everyone’s struggled for. Just how this industry could justify the use of the extra water required to achieve these enormous increases should confound and enrage the entire community.

"Global financial crisis aside, Australia has manoeuvred itself into a situation where innovation and efficiency in production has outstripped the sector's own ability to manage that capacity," Mr Henry said.

What did I just say?

Exports of Australian wine fell by nine per cent to 715 million litres and the United Kingdom remained the largest importer of Australian wine, taking 268 million litres valued at $895 million. However, Mr Henry says Australia's competitors should be mindful of being hubris.

I think that should be hubristic.

I’ve only met Paul Henry once, and on that short occasion he impressed me. He seemed to understand that he was on his donkey, riding into a seething Jerusalem. But I got the feeling that the only eternal life he could see was the history he’d leave behind. There are not many successful liquidators remembered down through the years.

"These current market and structural challenges are not exclusive to Australia ... they are common to the development cycle of all wine producing countries," he said.

Well, yes, apart from the fact that this country seems to be withering, bleaching and cracking rather faster than those with snow-peaked mountains providing them with ongoing life.

There are no environmental scientists on the board of the Australian Wine And Brandy Corporation, either.

Remaining optimistic the industry will return to its former days of glory, Mr Henry said the real judgment call should not be based on how Australian viniculturists got themselves into such a difficult supply and demand situation, but rather, how and when the industry will get itself out.

Yes, of course. Savoury though the notion be, there is little point in stringing the whole roadside with crucifixes. But what should happen immediately is the old guard, who got this amazing industry into this decrepitude, should never, ever be given another chance. They should take their money and the remnants of their glossy gastroporn fame, and retire, planting native vegetation as they go. They should have no further influence over our own great public institutions, like the University of Adelaide. They should never be permitted to represent or influence this country anywhere, ever.

Which brings us to the question: is there sufficient hot young blood hiding in the hallways and annexes of the Universities and the great glimmering refineries of this country to come out and lead? Have we trained any? If we did, would we recognise them? Are they brave enough to speak? Do they have the intellectual and moral exactitude to do this awful job?

If we haven’t trained any such leaders, then those in charge should in fact be crucified on the roadsides after all.

"The stated aim of the industry is to identify a credible premium to be paid for Australian wine and to move our production and marketing platform towards a quality vision that celebrates sustainable value above unprofitable volume growth," he says.

Doesn’t that mean make better wine at better prices if indeed the environment permits, the market desires, and government tolerates?

Although at the end of 2007 there was concern there would be a mass exodus from viniculture in Australia, experts now say the removal of several vineyards is necessary if the industry is to remain on a sustainable footing.

Several vineyards? The whole mentality of the current “industry” – and that’s it’s own word – is to continue planting enormous broadacre monocultural grapeyards the like of which continue to be planted, lickety-split, right up the Murray darling Basin into Queensland, and all over the bits of the south-western corner of Western Australia which aren’t already dying under intensive bluegum plantations.

The whole mentality of the current “industry” is to keep the grape prices down by forcing out of business the specialist families who’ve hand-worked environmentally-responsible vineyards with modest expectations through drought, bushfire and flood, for generations.

The Australian wine “industry” is about as smart as the American corn industry, which must over-produce to succeed. There are no fences anymore, no plants, no insects, no shops, no townships, nobody with dirt on their hands. Plenty of petrochemicals; plenty of poison. But no flavour.

Despite earlier gloomy predictions, ABS statistics show the total area of grape vines this year was slightly higher than last year at 166,000 hectares and, with production up, yield rose from 9.3 to 11.8 tonnes per hectare.

See? From whence came that water? Eh?

Winemakers Federation of Australia chief executive Stephen Strachan says it is because of the success of the industry in recent years that so many challenges have arisen.

Exactly. We’re so goddam clever – remember hubris? – that we fucked it completely. Greed comes into mind, too.

"We saw a lot of people come into the industry expecting the phenomenal growth to continue and we've got a job to do to try to keep that market share, rather than continue to grow," he says. "Australia, I think, is now the fourth largest wine producer in the world."

There’s a lot of stuff in that par.

The likes of Strachan talked the business up for years, encouraging increased investment. Every extra tonne of grapes grown in Australia sees the Wine And Brandy Corporation budget swell. The money comes from a levy on tonnes harvested.

Which has nothing to do with market share. Share of what? The biggest wine oversupply in history? The biggest recreational drug racket fiasco ever? Share of what?

The ABS says the total grape crush for the 2007-08 vintage came in at 1.8 million tonnes, up by about 30 per cent on last year, and produced 1.2 billion litres of wine.

Giving us two billion litres of very ordinary plonk to sell into a world market that’s already overflowing.

Australia's largest winemakers accounted for 71 per cent of the total crush, while the smaller winemakers averaged 97 tonnes each. Mr Strachan said although the drought continued to ravage the country, the high quality and size of the 2008 vintage surprised a lot of people.

And delighted those big four companies with the 71 per cent, as their costs were delightfully low. Two of those four, half, of course, are not Australian companies, and you needn’t be a cynic to realise Foster’s won’t be Australian for very much longer.

"It was a very challenging vintage because of the size of it and if we have another vintage of that magnitude, then there is a fairly high likelihood that a significant amount of fruit won't be processed," he said. "The bottom line is there needs to be an adjustment downwards in terms of our vineyard capacity in Australia and that will probably happen at a greater pace now because grape prices are going to be very low this year. From an industry perspective we need to see some vineyards removed so we get back on to more stable footing in terms of sustainability."

Okay, Mr. Strachan, we get your drift. We need to lose a quarter of our vineyards. If you like, I can make available thirty years of tasting notes, with say, two to six thousand wines assessed each year. Let’s say we sort them in ascending order of scores, and tell the producers of the bottom quarter that they obviously don’t know what they’re doing and should simply eff off.

That would provide this industry with its biggest ever international marketing message.

If we also locked in a ratio of water used per dollars profit per tonne of grapes, and native vegetation planted to counterbalance the environmental damage inevitably incurred, that would be another incredible marketing message that would be of enormous assistance in notifying the world that we’ve been leading them in the wrong direction, too.

In fact, their drinkers might even forgive us. People might begin to trust us again.

Mr Henry agrees there is an urgent need for rationalisation and downsizing required within the industry. "But there was little consensus about where and who that corrective measure would come from," he said.

Try my suggestion above, Paul.

And while some might expect a limited amount of water to restrict the number of hectares covered in vines, the corporation reports that the physical availability of water is not likely to be a serious constraint on the size of the 2009 harvest. The ABS says nearly all vineyards in Australia were forced to irrigate this season, bringing the average water consumption to 3.2 megalitres per hectare, with drip and micro spray the most common forms of watering.

So?

"About 65 per cent of all wine grapes are grown in South Australia's Murray Darling Basin and even if drought breaks, the issue is not so much how much rain we have but more so how much irrigation there is," Mr Strachan said. "The river is going to take a number of years to fill up after the drought breaks, so the water outlook is not terribly promising."

Does that mean growers should steal water? How does he know this is a drought and that it will break?

He said federal reform was needed in regards to water trading allowed between irrigators and universal allocations.

Oh. Gotcha. Put him in charge of the River.

Wine consumers are proving to be "unforgivingly Darwinian", says the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation. The peak industry body says the market place is showing "little or no interest in any attribute other than volume at low cost".

"The most likely effect of the credit crisis is more conservative spending by consumers and gravitation to lower price points," the corporation's information and analysis manager, Lawrie Stanford said. And Mr Strachan agrees.

"We've got a global financial crisis that's leading to either a reduction in demand or consumers trading down to lower priced wines," Mr Strachan said.

Right. Let me think aloud. Forget most of our export. It’s neither profitable nor sustainable. Half the wine Australia drinks is in bladder packs, right? Mothers’ little helper. The silver pillow; the chrome handbag. Then we have, say, Greenock Creek, or Wendouree, which never makes more than fifty tonnes and never sells a bottle below, say $50.

The chrome is begat by chrome. The glittering refineries; the monoculture; the efficiency; the reliability; the science; the University of Adelaide; the salination; the alcoholism; the health costs; the full jails across the outback.

Wendouree is begat by Wendouree: by its hard dirt; its meagre climate; its humble expectations; its honesty with its customers; the way it decided against releasing any wine this year because it wasn’t good enough.

What do these businesses have in common?

Nothing.

So why are they lumped into one big cuddly “wine industry”?

Because the refineries need some modest honesty to ride upon, that’s why. Some quality, some reality, some gastronomic achievement. Some nuts and berries.

With domestic sales dropping by five per cent, Mr Strachan predicted the figure would continue to grow, particularly if the government introduced a tax on all alcoholic beverages in the new year.

I think he means “continue to fall”.

And the tax issue? Easy. Tax all alcoholic beverages on the amount of alcohol they contain.

Combine the resultant effect with that – cheaper, stronger, higher-volume packs will increase in price; winemakers will be encouraged to make wines of lower alcohol – with the results of my culling process above, and you have a happy, sensible, profitable, sustainable business.

Currently undertaking a review of Australia's tax system, and having already introduced a tax on pre-mixed alcoholic drinks, the government says "it is sometimes possible to improve overall welfare by taxing the consumption of particular commodities that cause social harm".

If government didn’t find these geniuses so easy to shove around then the twisted and arcane tax system the industry has already earned itself would never have been imposed in the first place.

As for pre-mixed alcoholic drinks? All the biggest wine companies have them. The wine industry invented them. In the ’sixties and ’seventies they were called Vin Spa or Pineapple Pearl, in the eighties they were West Coast Cooler and the like. Orlando (Pernod-Ricard) even had one called “e”, obviously hoping that a fair few bit of e would be dropped by the kiddies. The wine industry has always been in the business of selling alcohol any way it can. That is its nature.

But Mr Strachan says he is yet to see evidence that wine plays a big part in Australia's problem with alcohol abuse.

Then Mr. Strachan has never stood in the bed of the Todd River with his eyes open. What began with the gun is being finished by complacency.

With the government having signed an agreement with the European Union last week conceding the use of region-specific names such as champagne, Mr Strachan said Australian consumers might also steer away from their favourite drop for a short period once it was given a new classification.

Boo hoo. No more passing off.

He said wine lovers might be frustrated initially due to products formerly known as champagne, port, sherry and tokay being more difficult to locate on bottle shop shelves.

"It's just more a matter of working through a process where people become aware of a different set of descriptors," he said.

Mr Strachan said the new deal conceding the use of European names would mean less constraints on the way wine was made in Australia, allowing it to be more easily exported.

A different set of descriptors? Has Mr. Strachan ever read the claptrap, codswallop and balderdash that’s written on Australian wine bottles?

Mr Strachan said he expected large scale exporters would survive the economic downturn as a result of the deal, but that he was worried how the smaller-scale premium vineyards would fare.

"Consumers tend to trade down in a time of uncertainty, so they still continue to consume as much wine, but they tend to trade down, so those who are selling premium products are going to find the going pretty tough until we work through all the economic uncertainty."

This suits perfectly the perpetrators of the whole racket, right from the beginning. Trade down, and you support the refineries that have buggered the Murray and the Todd, and their inhabitants, you support the mentality of continual oversupply regardless of its effects, and you will need desperately to maintain status quo, with its morality, its experienced players, and its utter, overwhelming destruction.
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