SOUTH AUSTRALIA'S BRAVEST NEW CREWS

SOME YOUNG PUNKS DO THE WASHING: Dr JEN GARDINER, Dr COL McBRIDE, AND NIC BOURKE

A Baker's Brave Dozen

Top Hotshots To Watch

Cream Of South Aussie

by PHILIP WHITE - a version of this appeared in Decanter's April South Australia Supplement

SOME YOUNG PUNKS - Various regions

Dr. Col McBride has tattoos all over his very large muscles, and he tends to lean back and stretch them cruciformly while you chat. His partner, Dr. Jen Gardner, is generally better covered, if a tad gothic. Both are nerdy biochemists: yeast experts. Their partner is winemaker Nic Bourke, who was covered in grape skins last time I saw him. These are Some Young Punks. Their delicious wines are covered in classic original dimestore pulp fiction covers and drawn-to-order cartoons. They have reached into the past, back into the epoch before critter labels, to start a revolution in wine livery.

Some Young Punks have also returned to the past to rekindle some pre-industrial love in their winemaking, which is performed largely by Bourke at a contracting winery in McLaren Vale. They buy select parcels from other districts, generally use wild yeasts, and leave the wines on skins much longer than the fast-food norm. After all that study, McBride readily admits they can’t work out exactly what wild yeasts do, but they know enough to appreciate their advantages over factory yeasts, and that each vineyard has its own indigenous culture giving unique aromas and flavours.

Like Jeanneret, the Punks are bending the Riesling rules: their Monsters Monsters Attack Clare Riesling 2009 clocks in at 28 grams per litre of residual sugar, much more than seems apparent in its alluring complex form. And the reds? Big. Lush. Soulful. Adventurous. And much more serious than their labels.

NATASHA MOONEY – Adelaide Hills and Barossa

Tash Mooney says the key to her winemaking soul is her preference for wines from Italy and Burgundy. She made wine at Penfolds, Lindemans, and Barossa Valley Estate before establishing Fox Gordon with some mates. She also makes wine for others, like the Amadio family, whose front line vineyard near Mount Crawford in the Adelaide Hills supplies her with some of the newly-introduced varieties she is quickly mastering.

Like the best of her ground-breaking colleagues, Mooney keeps one foot grounded firmly in the past: she loves working with old Barossa grape-growing families whose generations of experience with more traditional varieties – Shiraz, Grenache, Mourvedre and Cabernet sauvignon - provides the foundations for forays into the likes of Arneis, Aglianico, Sagrantino, Sangiovese, Tempranillo and Zinfandel.

“It’s a hard sell, so far, with these alternatives”, she says. “It’s difficult to tell how much the market can absorb. It’s a big learning curve for the drinker, as much as the retailer.”

While she’s made “easy-drinking fruit bombs” from the new types thus far, Mooney’s major wines are staunch, yet sensual, reflecting that rare gastronomic intelligence that the industrialised wine world seems to have forgotten. “We’ll make more serious wines from these new varieties as I learn more about them” she says. “In the meantime profit is still Shiraz-driven!”

There are many exquisities to come from this uncommonly bright, tenacious, eternally curious wine lover.

YANGARRA ESTATE - McLaren Vale

Peter Fraser is the winemaker-manager of Yangarra, a 420 acre Aussie slice of the huge Californian Kendall-Jackson empire. In the decade since its purchase, Fraser has led a charge towards wine more spiritually entwined with the Mediterranean coast of Spain and France than anywhere else. Why? He believes McLaren Vale has the best Mediterranean climate on Earth.

Fraser and his vineyard wizard, Michael Lane, have ripped out modern trellised vineyards of Chardonnay, Cabernet sauvignon and Merlot to plant bush vines of Tempranillo, Graciano, Mourvedre, Cinsault, and Carignan. This adds deep blending texture to their trellised plantings of Roussanne, Viognier, Shiraz, Mourvedre and Grenache. Grenache blanc and Counoise are on the way, Vaccarèse and Bourboulenc are on the cards.

At night, Yangarra is cooled by air spilling from the Adelaide Hills, making a sharp diurnal contrast to its hot, sunny days. Its distinct geologies include rounded riverine pebbles, a great wind-blown sand-dune covered with healthy 65 year old unirrigated bush vine Grenache, and prominent ridges bony with ironstone.

Wild yeasts, older barrels, small batch, minimal intervention, then masterly blending gives unusually fine, gentle wines from across these distinctive terrains. The highlight, High Sands Bush Vine Grenache, has now been joined by Ironheart Shiraz, from the ironstone vineyards.

Using biodynamic principles, Yangarra is in transition to full organic certification. A radical new small-batch winery was finished just in time for vintage 2010.

JEANNERET and GOOD CATHOLIC GIRL - Clare

Years back, when the River Murray still trickled into the sea, Clare winemaker Ben Jeanneret irritated his rivals who’d begun piping its salty water to Clare to irrigate their industrial grapeyards. He put a line on the Jeanneret back labels stating that no River Murray water was used to irrigate his grapes. Environmentalists loved this fact. Now the river’s virtually dead, Jeanneret’s a reluctant hero. And guess which vineyards are for sale?

When the authorities banned the use of the word moscato, as in d’Asti, Jeanneret labelled his delicate, frizzante Muscat blanc à petit grains Mosquito. Sales boomed. Everybody must get stung.

Jeanneret simply gets on down, making wines in the most natural, industrochem-free manner possible, infuriating the wannabees. While his uncommonly clean, svelte reds stand out, his Rieslings were amongst the first to break from the traditional steely, humourless style, with a touch of wild yeast adding fragrance and allure to their sinuous form.

Jeanneret’s partner, Julie Barry, of the Jim Barry Wines tribe, has her own vineyard adjacent to the latter’s famous Armagh. While this is the source of her astonishing James Brazill Shiraz, which is made with similar attention but sells at a skerrick of the cost of the wine from across the lane, her Rieslings are also outstanding, eccentric glories: perhaps bigger and bustier than most, but still perfectly poised. Appropriately, both are under the Good Catholic Girl brand, labelled with the cover of her Catechism book.

McLEAN’S FARM - Barossa

Big Bob and Wilma McLean went through the roof of the wine business, as he was the first modern PR flak/marketer/backslapper at Orlando in the late ’70s, then marketing boss at Petaluma in the days of its ascendancy, thence to shareholder/GM at St Hallett, where he collected a modest bag of gold when that company was floated and absorbed by somebody promptly absorbed by somebody else. The McLeans spent that loot on a high rocky farm atop Mengler’s Hill, overlooking the Barossa. Since the beginning of the colony, nobody had been mad enough to plant anything there.

So what did they do? They planted 6144 bush vines without trellises in 500+ million years old sandstone. Without water. Shiraz, Grenache, Mourvedre and Riesling. McLean talks about the importance of the soil, but I’ve been there with a shovel. There ain’t any soil. The porous sandstone holds enough rain to keep the little critters alive. And now, after six years, they’re growing enough fruit to make wine.

While the McLeans buy grapes from their downhill neighbours to give visitors something beautiful to drink, the initial wines from this crazy lunge upwards and further into the past – way past anything the German settlers were game to attempt - are simply stunning. Naive, but stunning. Lock in early to this ride, and get the thrill of weightlessness as McLean’s Farm set a new ceiling for vinous adventure and crazy, wild, inspired playing of the gastronomic cards. This is not only high, but very, very cool.

OLD MILL ESTATE and BEACH ROAD - Langhorne Creek and McLaren Vale

An Aussie parable: Peter and Vicki Widdop became vignerons only when a mighty flood washed their lucerne farm into the Murray River estuary. Unwilling to take the risk itself, a Barossa winery convinced them to plant Touriga nacional, the Portuguese vintage port variety. After several years of good business during which the purchaser quietly convinced Barossa growers to plant Touriga, it brutally dropped the Widdops’ contract, leaving them a vineyard full of ripening grapes that nobody really understood.

Fed by panic and nous, some urgent Aussie smarts took hold. To feed the hungry bank, the Widdops created a brand named after their defunct lucerne mill, and engaged Simon Parker to turn their vintage port grapes into rosé. By the time they discovered the market’s rote sluggishness to accept the new, they had three vintages of a rosey beauty with much more body, mouthfeel, depth and complexity than rosé normally displays. It also became obvious the wine grew admirable condition with age.

Led by the eternally-curious Melbourne restaurant market, and then the Adelaideans, Australians are discovering this suits their blistering clime and seafood cuisine a little more harmoniously than Shiraz at sixteen per cent. And now, with the help of master winesmith John Glaetzer, the ex-Wolf Blass guru, Old Mill is perfecting a full-bodied dry red from the same grape. With uncanny serendipity, the popularity of this wine is leading curious drinkers into the easier wonders of the rosé.

Meanwhile, across the same estuarine flats, the delighted ex-Rosemount winemaker Briony Hoare discovered Dennis and Elliot Zonda had brave, but modest plantings of Arneis and Greco di tufo, a rare Campania variety never before planted in Australia.

Briony slipped her acute sensories into gear and immediately made two of the most fragrant, entertaining white wines this writer has seen lurch unheralded onto the shelves. These radical whites are available, with lovely McLaren Vale reds, under Briony’s new Beach Road brand. Pour them, and the table overflows with a joyous aroma that triggers intense savoury anticipation: a much happier flood than the one which pushed the Widdops into the wine lake.

PIOMBO - McLaren Vale

Paul Petagna is a hard-core shedtser who uses words like ethos. He was a computer tech and graphics wiz until his father-in-law, Modestino Piombo, took him into his shed at MacLaren Vale and showed him how wine occurs. With measured confidence and thirsty curiosity he pours soulful, hearty drinks simmering more with Italian genetics than any Aussie industrial sophistry.

Petagna cooks like a master: he has the sort of gastronomic savvy that the Australian wine industry’s terribly short of. And he’s never been lobotomised by the University of Adelaide or Roseworthy. He makes wines from the belly up.

Similarly, without any rockdoctor training, he isolated a string of gnarly vineyards on the rubbly piedmont of the Willunga Escarpment, on the coast at McLaren Vale. Geologists can draw a line where this terrain ceases and gives way to hopeless black Bay of Biscay cracking clay; Petagna seems to have done it by smell. He buys from these growers to blend with the little vineyard Modestino left upon his death. Finally, he has a graphic skill which puts him beyond the skrillion winemakers who can only pretend knowledge of label art.

Apart from some remarkable yet-to-be released fortifieds, including a bone dry white that tastes like a savoury vermouth base, Petagna’s Piombo triumphs are the zappily-packaged Dio and Diavolo. Dio is a Grenache-Shiraz-Mourvedre trinity; Diavolo is Shiraz and Cabernet: harmonious delights with ethos and Earth a-plenty.

CHILL DUDES! IT’S ONLY ANECDOTAL HEAT!

MCLAREN VALE SHIRAZ PICKED THIS MORNING. THE LEFT HAND BUNCH IS FINE; THE MIDDLE ONE TYPICAL OF THE FRUIT WHICH IS NOT TOO BADLY AFFECTED. ZOOM ON IT AND YOU'LL SEE THE RAISINING AND BAGGING. THE RIGHT HAND BUNCH IS ABOUT AVERAGE FOR THE SORT OF FRUIT THAT WILL BE PICKED THIS VINTAGE. THERE'S A LOT WORSE STUFF LEFT ON THE VINES IN THE HOTTEST PLACES WITH THE HARDEST SOILS.

Another Day Of Hell

But Cool Respite On The Way!

by PHILIP WHITE

There’s been a little respite from the heatwave since I last wrote here of weather. The daily max actually slumped below 40ºC a few times. Not far below, but mercifully below. Yesterday was back in the forties, and last night was a blisterer.

Winemakers in the Fleurieu Peninsula, McLaren Vale, and up through the Adelaide Hills section of the South Mount Lofty Ranges, through Eden Valley and the Barossa to Clare, have well and truly got into picking.

Or at least selecting which of the least blistered rows to pick.

On the other side of the ranges at Langhorne Creek, nobody wants to talk about it. But closer to the receding Lake Alexandrina, Peter Widdop, world champion battler of Old Mill Estate is candid. “You’ve gotta be realistic”, he says. “This is terrible. But we’ve got some really good fruit. I got up on the roof of the shed this morning and when you look out across the flats you can see where the damage is. It’s highly soil-specific. Our touriga nacional is amazing. And we’ve got really tough shiraz: you can look into the odd vine and say ‘jeez, that fruit’s perfect’. But we’ve lost some of the cabernet that’s on the harder soil.”

On Wednesday, Chester Osborn, of d’Arenberg, McLaren Vale, told DRINKSTER “Nightmare vintage again Whitey. Again. Again.”

“It’s the earliest vintage by a million miles”, he continued. “And it’s very very low. We’ll pick about thirty per cent of what I estimated three weeks back, and that was already reduced dramatically from my previous estimation. Now we’ve got too many pickers. Nothing to pick.

“Anything in shallow hard ground, or reflective sands, with no deep moisture, is over. Bush vines? Poor old buggers! McLaren Vale grenache looked amazing. All gone. The sauvignon blanc’s brown. No flavour. The roussanne died. Viognier? No good, but not bad compared to the rest. Petit verdot? Shrivelled to buggery.”

I live about fifteen kays from Chester as the crow flies – although there’s not much in the way of flying going down in the bird world at the moment: they’re hiding. Here, it’s a bit higher, and a bit cooler, and not nearly so bad.

Most of the priceless old bush vine grenache perished in the first couple of plus forty days: the very sand which reflects light and heat up under the basket-pruned canopies to ensure even veraison and ripening, this year simply roasted them as temperatures in the sun passed 50º C. Unless somebody does a very selective pick of the best sheltered bunches, of which there are some surviving, there'll be no super-premium grenache this year.

But three nights ago the lads picked the first Yangarra chardonnay at 12.5 Beaumé, and near perfect pH and acidity. That went straight into the press, the juice cooled and cold settled, and it’ll soon catch some yeast from the air or from within itself, and begin its blessed tick. For that lot, the torture is over, and it’s now in the cool of the cellar.

The Yangarra shiraz is remarkably well, and the stoic crew are suggesting that in today’s bake it’ll hunker down and close up to retain as much moisture as possible, to then prepare to turn back on and complete veraison in next week’s promised cool, when they think “it could ripen up pretty quickly”. Although it’s patchy, and very dependent on soil types.

The remaining chardonnay is coming on bravely, and the roussane has the punk cockiness of Robert de Niro’s Travis Bickle (pictured) staring himself down in the mirror:

“You lookin at me? ... Who you lookin’ at?”

It’s fit, tight and cheeky.

Around the Vales, I hear good reports about tempranillo, too.

I rose at 0500hrs for a walk before sunrise. Looking across the vignoble, I see growing yellow patches in the canopy above the harder soil types. But there’s still plenty of green here.

In times of such stress, the vines sacrifice the burnt, crisping, yellowing and curling leaves, put their berries on hold, and pump their energy into the remaining canopy instead of the grapes, as they determinedly protect their little babies for another day or two, until the seeds become viable. That’s when veraison

occurs, and the vine ceases production of acid, turns the deterrent green bitter grapes to sweet, juicy, red attractors, and then lies back and hopes the birds will come in, eat them, incubate them in the warm little gizzards, and then kindly disperse them to keep the species going.

Funny thing, nature. Since the vines have trained humans to depend upon them for wine, we coddle the vine gardens, keep the flying incubators off and harvest the crop. We actually kill the seeds in the ferment, but instead of killing the vine as a species we also plant more vines than have existed ever before: there’s decreasing need for the plant to actually bother producing a seed!

Certainly no more need to grow up through the poplars and whatnot.

But back to the weather. By 0600hrs, a full-bore Heat Health Warning had been issued by the State Emergency Service and SA Health, while the three south-eastern mainland states brace for another day of searing, life-threatening hell. Some rural areas have been advised to expect 46+º C, 114ºF in the old money.

The Country Fire Service announced “all resources are on high alert in preparation for today’s extreme weather conditions ... the Bureau of Meteorology is forecasting extreme fire danger across most of South Australia with temperatures above 40 degrees and wind gusts of up to 90kph ahead of a mid-evening change. (!)

“But the fire danger forecast for today may be as extreme as we’ve seen in South Australia for a number of years,” CFS Chief Officer Euan Ferguson said.

“People who live in high fire risk areas will need to activate their Bushfire Action Plans and be prepared to swing into action by either staying and defending their property or leaving early, depending on what’s been decided in the plan.”

Police are on high alert: Chief Superintendent Silvio Amoroso said SAPOL has boosted its number of roving firebug patrols. Pity help any mad bastard that gets caught.

Fireys are fighting forty bushfires across the border in woody Victoria. South Australia is holding its breath.

The Ultra-Violet Index is predicted to reach an extreme 11.

Reports of a blitzed vintage continue to trickle past the spin doctors, who have worked themselves into a frenzy, attempting to convince the world that everything’s cool.

The pinot of the Mornington Peninsula is in deep trouble, with Geraldine McFaul, winemaker at Willow Creek, telling Tyson Stelzer that "any exposed fruit has been completely fried. It looks like someone's taken to it with a flame thrower."

To add insult to its growing phylloxera bloom, the Yarra Valley has been utterly blitzed, with some growers losing everything.

“You have to see it in perspective”, said Tony Brady of the great Wendouree, in Clare. “The end of the world was already nigh.

“The malbec doesn’t like it. It’s very soil specific.”

“But Clare is very very lucky”, David O’Leary at O’Leary Walker told DRINKSTER on Wednesday.

“We had that four inches of rain in twenty four hours in November, which nobody else got. That deep ground moisture delayed vintage, so our riesling was only eight Baume last week. It’ll be above that now, but it was so young and tight and tough it’ll be okay if we get ten days of relief from the heat. If.

“I mean everything’s way down in yield, of course. There’s no weight in it, and we won’t get the flavours we want. But Clare will come out of it quite well if ... ”

Tim Smith of Chateau Tanunda reckoned “Barossa yields could be down forty to fifty per cent”.

While many Barossa white vineyards will not be picked, Tim picked good shiraz on Tuesday at 14.3 Baume, and he said the whites that were coming in had “a shitload of flavour ... But you know what, Whitey?" he continued, “it’s ironic. Those who’d been going for the big yields and pumping the water on big time, so they’ve got much bigger leaf canopies than you’d normally want, will probably come through all right. Like the high-yield chardonnay, which nobody wants, doesn’t have a speck of sunburn!”

So, at a time when there’s barely a drop of irrigation water left in Australia, the bastards who’ve been squirting it on like there’s no tomorrow, going for maximum tonnages to make up for the lowest grape prices in years, are succeeding at the expense of those who were being respectfully frugal with precious water.

This water paradox is also obvious in Coonawarra, and on the Murray. With typical reserve, Jon Angove said “The heat has been very severe. Unfortunately, those who were ekeing their water out, trying not to use too much, have shrivelling crops. Those who’ve kept the water up, and have good foliage, good canopies, are looking alright. We’ve seen this before you know.”

“We’re standing here watching the debilitating effects of earlier heat become apparent”, said Greg Clayfield at Zema, Coonawarra. “There’s a lot of sunburn, yellowing, and shrivelling, and the summer’s just begun. The old bush vines are taking it very badly.”

Some determined district representatives are still struggling to convince the world, and probably themselves, that all is cool in sunstruck Oz. I woke to the five o’clock news to hear a well-meaning hero from Griffith saying leaves were yellow, curled and dropping and yields might be down ten or twenty per cent, “but”, he said, “of course that’s only anecdotal”.

Yep. It’s only anecdotal.

None other than the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation, which is led by a former Minister for Defence, The Hon. John Moore AO (pictured, right), yesterday issued a press release saying:

“Recent reports of high temperatures across parts of South Eastern Australia are likely to impact the predicted yields of the 2009 harvest, however it is too early in the season to make quality assessments and it is clear that Australian wine supply is not threatened.

"Most reports from affected wine regions rate the downgrading at between 10% and 20%. The most likely impact of the sustained period of high temperatures will be to bring the season forward and to shorten it – thereby presenting Australian winemakers with some logistical challenges during harvest.”

Some logistical challenges, indeed. Probably merely anecdotal logistical challenges.

The first recorded use of the term “spin”, or its like, which I have encountered, is in dear old Cicero, reviewing the freshly-published historical writings of Julius Caesar sometime around 50BC.

“They are like nude figures, upright and beautiful, stripped of all ornament of style as if they had removed a garment” Marcus Tullio Cicero (left) wrote.

“His [Caesar’s] aim was to provide source material for others who might wish to write history, and perhaps he has gratified the insensitive, who may wish to use their curling-tongs on his work; but men of good sense he has deterred from writing.” from Brutus (262)

It's 0922 now, 41ºC, and the foreboding calm of the dawn has been invaded by a savage northerly, coming in off Australia's vast baking centre. It dries the eyes to a sand-blasted painfulness within minutes, and in it you can smell an acrid, fearsome reek, like the hot metal and brick of a blast furnace.

POST SCRIPT:

2020HRS: I have just turned the exhausted air-conditioning off and opened my windows and doors for the first time since January 28th. There's a beautiful sou-easterly breeze coming in from the Gulf St Vincent (appropriately patron of viticulturers, lost things, schoolgirls and vinegar-makers), and the crickets are singing with glee!

I can almost smell the whales' breath.

In the last couple of hours, as the northerly wore itself out and swung about to the south, the temperature has taken a merciful plunge. It's now 18.6ºC, and the relative humidy has risen to a comfy 71%. At 0930 it was 12%! The Bureau of Meteorology says temperatures will stay below 30ºC until Friday, and ease up to 37ºC next Saturday.

My asthma has gone, the prickly hay-fevered skin is beginning once more to feel liveable, and my eyes suddenly require no lubricating drops. The wee berrudies are chattering delightedly in the gloaming, and from my desk, through the French doors, I believe I can hear the vines sucking in their first big gulp of cool air in a dozen days.

It will take the survivors a day or two to return to normal functions, and then winemakers hope they'll begin smoothly to stack on some sugar without shedding all the precious acidity that remains.

Baz White, from Gomersal Wines in the Barossa called to say that once it was cool enough, he'd taken a walk in his normally schmick vineyard, and discovered that his vines had been auto-aborting bunches all day: each vine has shed two or three bunches. And he keeps them running fairly minimally at the best of times, so that's a big crop loss before he gets down to individual row or even individual bunch selection at harvest.

"We'll just have to see how we go", he said sagely.

Peter Gago called this afternoon from Penfolds, where he makes the legendary Grange, the Magill Estate red, St Henri, and all the Penfolds numbered bin premiums. He'd just done a lap of his wide-spread minions.

"The Magill Estate crush is over", he said of the vineyard surrounding the grand old suburban winery and the tiny Grange cottage of the original winemaker, Mary Penfold. "We beat the previous earlist crush record by two days, and it's not looking too bad at that!

"We've got five open fermenters initially hovering around Baumes of 14.1-14.3, thankfully without any greenness."

Peter had been in the south-east and Coonawarra earlier in the week, and says it was "quite encouraging" since the best Fosters vineyards in the district have in recent years been returned to more modest viticulture with single-wire trellis systems.

"Yesterday in the Barossa it was, not surprisingly, more variable", he added politely.

Now the radio says that as the cool change moves east into Victoria, the cooling wind which brought it will actually inflame the many bushfires raging there. Many vignobles are now surrounded by savage conflagrations, and the poor old Yarra Valley, on the edge of suburban Melbourne, which has been strugging with phylloxera, then a record heatwave that scorched its crop, now looks like getting more than its share of smoke taint, if indeed it doesn't burn down.

Vineyards near Bendigo and Keyneton face the same threat.

Hundreds of thousands of Victorian householders have been warned to prepare for evacuation, or rigidly enforce their emergency bushfire plans if they choose to remain. Melbourne's major power supply lines are threatened at several points, and the open pit coalfields of the La Trobe Valley are being licked by uncontrolled bushfire.

The head of the Victorian fire services has just warned that the cool change has made the State even more treacherously dangerous.

"The wind is what we don't need ... and fire at night is a lot more scary than fire in the daytime", he added flatly.

Somehow, miraculously, South Australia stayed free of big fires today.

Now, with intense pleasure and relief, I'm going to put some clothes on and taste a few reds. It's that cool.

I may even risk turning the stove on to cook something.

Anecdotally, of course.

AND FURTHERMORE:

The radio has just reported fourteen people confirmed burnt to death in Victoria, with another thirty unconfirmed.

And the floods which have just subsided in northern Queensland are rising again, as some districts report two and three hundred millimetres of new rain.

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