BAROSSA FINALLY GETS ROCKS IN ITS HEAD

LOUISA ROSE, CHIEF WINEMAKER AT YALUMBA, HOST OF THE 2010 BAROSSA TERROIRS TASTING: A RE-ASSURING CONFIRMATION OF LAST YEAR'S INAUGURAL SHIRAZ TASTING BASED ON GEOLOGICAL TERRANES

Getting Below One's Roots Rockstars 2nd Year Hit Yalumba Tasting Bites Paydirt

by PHILIP WHITE - A version of this story appeared in The Independent Weekly ... an expanded, more inclusive and detailed version will appear in place of this piece soon.

Barossa staged a tasting last week that history will regard more profound than most attendees will realise.

This year, hosted by Yalumba - who loaned their beautiful tasting chamber and numerous inestimable members of their staff - sixty wines were served blind in eight groups, according to their geology. A similar event was held at Seppeltsfield a year ago, but to garner support from the region’s constituents, that nervy exploratory fixture was held mainly for famous wine critics from around the world, some of whom got the point.

It's a tragic reflection on Australia's dumb forelock-tugging mentality that it seems no wine region can get a project up unless there are humans from foreign shores to endorse it before it starts. This happens too, in McLaren Vale, where local press, who understand the detail of the deal, are forced to take back seat to, or be replaced by, overseas hacks, or peanuts from dumb glossies, because such humans impress the paying members sufficiently for them to agree to proceed, regardless of whether anybody understands it or not.

The winemakers who observed last year’s Barossa event, but didn’t participate, have had twelve months to ponder. We then tasted shiraz wines from 2008, from older, neutral barrels. This year it was 2009s, to establish the foundations of a database which will, after further decades of tasting, suggest descriptors unique to each vague sub-region. Twelve tasters, including twitchy industrialists, ticked four pages of boxes for each wine, covering its spectrum of flavours, aromas, styles and strengths. This will be compiled statistically by the astonishing Louisa Rose and her crew at Yalumba, isolating words that re-occur frequently for future use in describing each zone’s characteristics.

In spite of vintage variation, my responses almost identically matched last year’s.

TOPOGRAPHICAL MAP OF THE BAROSSA, WITH THE ALTITUDE GREATLY EXAGGERATED TO MAKE THE HILLS APPEAR SUDDENLY TO RESEMBLE THE SWISS ALPS ... AN ACCURATE GEOLOGY MAP IS BEING PREPARED BY THE TEAM WHO HAVE FINISHED THE SAME TASK IN McLAREN VALE, AND AWAIT PUBLICATION. CLICK ON IMAGE TO MAKE HILLS EVEN BIGGER.

The first set came from the higher vineyards between Williamstown and Lyndoch, and a few from the older country over the Para around Gomersal. These are largely in alluvial sands laid down in the last million years or so, overlying the micaceous schists, siltstones, calcilicates and quartzites of the Upper Burra group, all older than 540 million years. These were perfumed and fragrant delicacies with hints of fennel, aniseed and wintergreen over their elegant cherries and dark berries. They were generally of moderate alcohol and acidity; concentrated, yet modest and pretty, reminding me of the floral cuties from the schist of northern Beaujolais.

Next, the western piedmont of the Barossa range, from Rowland Flat north through Bethany and Vine Vale, along the Stockwell fault to Saltram. Most of this is sediment of sand, gravel and clay, younger than 1.8 million years. These, too, were perfumed, elegant wines, musky, juicy and delicate over their cherries and blackcurrants. Fleshy rather than mineral, with meaty charcuterie hints.

The bracket from north of there, in similar geology, from Nuriootpa past The Willows and Light Pass, was quite different, with a touch more acidity and alcohol, and classic Barossa chocolate adding to their rich fruitcake and leather. In these ethereal, juicy, wines, dried apple, an aroma typical to the more westerly vineyards, began to emerge. Some showed the minty influence of eucalypts.

Across the range, the wines of the High Barossa - from McLean’s Farm atop Mengler’s Hill, south past Mountadam to Eden Springs and east to Craneford - rocked. This geology - metasiltstones, metasandstones, slates, gneisses and granites - is 490 to 545 million years old, when sluggy critters, arthropods and trilobites were evolving. With stony mineral basenotes perfectly reflecting their source, these were stacked with marello cherries, blackberry jam and prunes, in ethereal, juicy, bouquets; below lay charcuterie meats and earth. The alcohols seemed modest, as did the acidity, but the latter looked natural, which always beats shovelled tartaric!

The wines from north of Eden Valley town, out past the Henschkes, were more boisterous, minerally and stony, with blackcurrants, blackberries, dark cherries, prunes and sinblack jams abundant. Milk chocolate appeared here, and more charcuterie; even metwurst. The tannins were earthy, yet sinewy.

Back to the Moppa: the flats north of Nuriootpa, where the great old vines of Ebenezer and Kalimna somehow live in dry alluvial sands deposited 1.8 to 50 million years ago, with bits of more recent wind-blown sand on top. These were what I’d call classic, mighty, fruitcake Barossa: black and thick with prunes, cherries, mulberries and cassis, with dark chocolate, and meaty, leathery tones glowering below, and higher alcohols to match. The tannins were soft, yet earthy and mineral.

South then, and west to Greenock, Seppeltsfield and Marananga, and the Valley’s strongest, most complex wines: packed with jams and fruitcake, prunes and figs, dried apple and pear, leather, cooking chocolate, and walnuts. The rocks north of the Marananga Church to the by-pass highway are schists, siltstones and quartzites from the Upper Burra Group, from away back in the Neoproterozoic (545-1200 million years), when multi-cellular life was beginning. Climate and altitude aside, this is where I dream that the older, more complex rocks give flavours to match.

THE NEOPROTEROZOIC ROCKS IN THE HILL AT GREENOCK CREEK VINEYARDS AND CELLARS' ROENNFELDT ROAD VINEYARD ARE MUCH OLDER THAN MOST OF THE BAROSSA FLOOR GROUPS - LEO DAVIS PHOTOGRAPH

And so to Stonewell: the ironstone south from Marananga to Tanunda. Some of these wines smell like a blacksmith’s shop, with hot coke burning below horseshoes glowing on anvils. You’ll find aniseed, walnut, fig and leathery aromas here, with much of the Greenock character, contrasting in a more elegant, creamy structure, somewhat akin to chocolate crême caramel, towards the softer custardy textures of Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

While the winemakers who entered wines in this event were brave, showing unfinished produce to so many fusspots, I bow to them, very, very deeply. They will be remembered. Too many others failed to attend the next day’s event, when everything was on display. They’ll slip off the map.

Unlocking The Rocks

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CONTRIBUTION TO THE 2008 GREENOCK CREEK VINEYARDS AND CELLARS NEWSLETTER

by PHILIP WHITE – September 2008

Time for some rough science. While global warming is such a hot topic cough cough it seemed perfectly appropriate to take a little geology lesson: geology shows we’ve had global warming before. So, like, how bad can things get?

Before you check out Snowball Earth on Wikipedia, let me quote a report of Hoffman, Kaufman, Halverson and Schrag, suggesting one of the things that happened at the bottom of the Neoproterozoic groups which underly Greenock.

“… biological productivity in the surface ocean collapsed for millions of years. This collapse can be explained by a global glaciation (that is, a snowball Earth), which ended abruptly when subaerial volcanic outgassing raised atmospheric carbon dioxide to about 350 times the modern level….resulting in a warming of the snowball Earth to extreme greenhouse conditions. The transfer of atmospheric carbon dioxide to the ocean would result in the rapid precipitation of calcium carbonate in warm surface waters, producing the cap carbonate rocks observed globally.”

I’m sure they make a big difference, but there were no Hummers in those days.

It was also high time the Barossa seriously compared local wines according to their geological sites. But fearing that they may end up with a geology somehow less desirable than others, some vignerons have opposed such an approach for decades. Their excuse? They say they don’t want an appellation imposed like those of France. My response? It’s not a man-made imposition. It’s in the ground beneath you. It was there first.

So a highlight of my thirty years of wine writing finally exploded like a firework, when, in June, I was invited to assist the Barossa winemakers assemble a blind tasting of 52 unfinished 2008 shiraz wines from across the breadth and length of the Valley, from Lyndoch to Kalimna. These were tasted in brackets roughly according to their geological sources, as set out in The Geology of the Barossa Valley, a brochure and map by revered government geologist, W. A. Fairburn. This work, which has the authority of having been gnawed over by the author's scientific peers, is available from Primary Industry and Resources SA. We also had input from the contrary geologist-turned tea-trader turned wine-merchant turned wine-blogger David Farmer, who is writing a book on Barossa geology, and who disagrees with some of Fairburn's mapping.

The tasting was astonishing, while predictable enough. Neighbouring vineyards in each precinct offered flavours and aromas in common, and these characteristics changed from precinct to precinct. This pioneering tasting, conducted with thirty wine writers from around the world, will no doubt be the first of many such exercises, and marks the beginning of a whole new database of gastro-geology.

The base rocks around Seppeltsfield, the Greenock Creek homestead, and Roennfeldt Road are all from that Neoproterozoic, the geological era in which multi-cellular life first appeared. This era stretches from about 550 million years ago to 1.2 billion years. Just for reference, the Universe seems about 13 - 15 billion years old; Earth about 4.5 billion. While these old rocks are generally below the topsoil, they do extrude, and have of course influenced and added to the formation of much of that soil, which very directly influences the flavours of the grape.

But it’s those base rocks that really interest me, particularly when I read back labels and brochures claiming “our vines are grown in some of the oldest soils on Earth”. Most of the Barossa geology formed in the Tertiary and Quaternary, the last 50 million years; its soils are only tens of thousands of years old: most of them are such recent alluviums they’re barely soils at all. “To the geologist, soil is the dandruff of the Earth”, my friend Wolfgang Preiss, Chief Geologist of the Geological Survey in PIRSA, sagely uttered on a recent field trip.

The Greenock Creek vineyards are on four quite distinct formations. The creeklines, both at the homestead and Roennfeldt’s, are very recent alluviums, just tens of thousands of years old. The cabernet, the Creek Block shiraz, and most of the Apricot Block are in such alluviums. These deposits fill the creeklines between the sharply-dipping older strata which protrude in the ridges.

These include the blue-grey dolomitic siltstones - Willunga slate, for example - of the Tapley Hill Formation, deposited as sediments in still deep lakes that once covered the area about 750 million years ago. The Seven Acre and part of the home blocks are in this formation.

Below that lies the Yudnamutana Subgroup. This dark mix of siltstone-derived soil with blotches of bright quartzite and pebbly dolomite is up to 800 million years of age. These layers reappear in Clare and the Adnyamathanha country of the North Flinders. They are pocked with dropstones, which were deposited by floating glacial ice floes. These rocks were one of the fascinations of the great geologist and explorer, Sir Douglas Mawson. Alice’s and part of the Apricot Block are in Yudnamutana.

The Hopeless Hill, on Roennfeldt’s, is on the border of the Yudnamutana and the underlying Burra Group, where we get to really ancient glittery micaceous schists, metasiltstones, calcsilicates and quartzites. These are as old as it gets in the Barossa. The Roennfeldt shiraz, cabernet and the Cornerstone Grenache are in Upper Burra.

In geology, there are many arguments. But having finally got this sorted better than ever before, I’ll never approach Greenock Creek wines in the same way. The distinguishing characters of each vineyard already make much more sense, and the differences between the Greenock Creek/Marananga/Seppeltsfield/Roennfeldt vineyards and the much younger formations in the rest of the Valley become even more meaningful.

So that’s the ancient history. Contemporary history includes the salination, through introduced irrigation water, of the young creekline sediments and clays. And, of course, it includes current weather and climate. People are finally beginning to understand my salination theories. Now, the pace at which the climate is changing must force closer investigation, much quicker than anybody has imagined necessary. If, in a couple of decades, man can change the soil sufficiently to kill a vineyard, like the poor old Creek Block, never irrigated, but dying through salination from upstream irrigators, we can surely bugger up our air.

Or maybe old Mother Earth will just carry on doing what she did before. Now and again, as geology shows, something makes her lose her cool.

PS.

Just to put all this perspective, Don Francis, professor of geology at McGill University in Montreal, has since reported in Science journal that his team has found a sample of Nuvvuagittuq greenstone on Hudson Bay that they believe is 250 million years older than any other rocks known.

"The rocks contain a very special chemical signature - one that can only be found in rocks which are very, very old," he said. "Originally, we thought they were maybe 3.8 billion years old. Now we have pushed the Earth's crust back by hundreds of millions of years. That's why everyone is so excited."

Before this study, the oldest whole rocks were from a 4.03 billion-year-old body known as the Acasta Gneiss, in Canada's Northwest Territories, and the oldest Australia had to offer were 4.36 billion years old mineral grains called zircons from Western Australia.

The greenstone contains fine ribbon-like bands of alternating magnetite and quartz, typical of rock precipitated in deep sea hydrothermal vents - which have been touted as potential habitats for early life on Earth.

"These ribbons could imply that 4.3 billion years ago, Earth had an ocean, with hydrothermal circulation," said Francis. "Now, some people believe that to make precipitation work, you also need bacteria. If that were true, then this would be the oldest evidence of life. But if I were to say that, people would yell and scream and say that there is no hard evidence."

(This additional information was taken from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7639024.stm )

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Seep is the word

By PHILIP WHITE - This was first published in The Independent Weekly in 2006

Your scribe was chattering on about which port he’d been enjoying, comparing the ’06 to the ’05 and remembering with a certain fondness the ’93, when a colleague interrupted with a fair query: “Whitey, aren’t they a bit young for ports?”

Oh hell. I’d meant the 1906, 1905 and 1893 Para Liqueurs. The 1906 is seeping out now. These incredible Paras are released annually at one hundred years of age, and, seriously seep is the word. Or maybe ooze is better: the wine is incredibly thick and sticky after a full century of evaporation through the old oak of its barrel.

Upon the completion of his magnificent port cellar in 1878, the great Benno Seppelt selected his favourite puncheon (500 litres) of tawny, put it on a special stand, and declared that it was not to be opened for one hundred years. In spite of the incredulity that the hose draggers of the day must have felt, the ritual was repeated in 1879, and again every year since.

James Godfrey, who, as fortified maker at Seppeltsfield, is surely one of the world’s most patient men, explains the ever so gradual ageing process thus: “We lose two-thirds of every puncheon to evaporation. The Angels’ Share. That slow evaporation concentrates every component of the wine, but it all remains proportionate, in balance.”

“The sugars rise as the wine concentrates”, he continues, “peaking somewhere between the fifty and seventy-five year mark. They’ll increase from six-point five baumé at manufacture to as much as nineteen baumé.

“During those first fifty years, the acidity also rises from four grams per litre to around twelve. But the alcohol’s fastest: it’ll go from seventeen per cent by volume to peak at around twenty four percent by the twenty-five year mark.”

So James, at this point you simply sit back and wait for another seventy-five years? Of course. And what do these treasures taste like? A Buggatti Royale? The Brooklyn Bridge? The Crown Jewels? Maybe. Maybe not.

They certainly don’t taste much like wine. Think more of treacle pestled with balsamic, pickled walnuts, and ancient soy. Think of after dinner sweets made from strong, black, bitter cooking chocolate, filled with this syrup. Think of eating them with a shot of Cognac on the deep leather back seat of the aforementioned Buggatti. The lass there wears Guerlain’s Jicky and smokes a Cohiba cheroot. The sticky Para is smudged with the lipstick and flakes of cigar. Husky laughter is in order; smoky whispers through the hair.

In more winy terms, I reckon the ’06 is close in style to the ’05, in that it has less obvious volatile acidity and less oak flavour than in other years. They’re the smoother, more feminine styles. You want something butch on the back seat of your Bug, try a macho year, like the ’93. I know it well, having smuggled some through the dry zone to my dear grandmother Sarah on the occasion of her hundredth birthday. It was her birth year; more tannic, spiritous, and woody, after the mould of an old Shetland crofter, reeking of peat. More smuggler’s boat than billionaire’s Bug.

One thing all these incredible wines have in common is their persistence, and I mean hanging around the drinker’s palate for hours after tasting. You can have your Para, and a smoke, and a few beers, and dinner, for Bacchus’s sake, and still have that wicked sticky alive and prominent in your taste receptors. It won’t go away. It’ll still be there battling your toothpaste in the morning. Get down to bang for your suck, there’s no wine on earth that lasts this long.

Just as there are no other drinks like these centenarian Paras, there is no winery on earth quite like Seppeltsfield, which is, once again, on the market. While Fosters rather blithely announced its proposed sale before the end of last financial year, winning reams of free press, prospective buyers have since muttered frustrations about the vendor being a little disorganised about precisely what’s for sale.

But Fosters PR flack, Matt Schmidt, is non-stick. “We have healthy interest from international quarters”, he insists, “and feel our responsibility is to ensure it goes to a sympathetic buyer who will look after it with respect”.

Seen many Benno Seppelts around lately?

FOOTNOTE:

Seppeltsfield Para 1906 is $525 for 375ml., and $1050 for a full bottle at the cellar.

The wowsers are not ready

by PHILIP WHITE - This was published in The Independent Weekly in 2006

Saturday’s reading started with Friday’s Financial Review colour mag. The first reference to the drug, alcohol, came quickly with the head “Drinks missionary bar none”, a piece about London’s new bar czar, Jonathon Downey. He’s coming to Sydney to open more bars. “What the hell are we going to do when we can’t smoke, dance, drink and fight in bars anymore?” he asked.

Then came a woman in suspenders with a bottle of Dom Perignon pink, giving Karl Lagerfeld a plug. The old restaurateur, Beppi Polese, was next: full page, in his cellar, white wine in hand. Over the page he’s sniffing a red. Another full page praised vintage port.

The Life and Leisure section devoted half a page to Seppeltsfield, our most hallowed port house. Then a double page to “the historic riesling region”, Clare.

There were pieces about pubs losing money via the smoke bans, and the MD of Adelaide Bank being awarded an expensive burgundy for achieving a twenty five per cent increase in profit.

Move to the Weekend Oz. “Clare may offend again” turned out to be about a serial pedophile, with no mention of historic riesling. Similarly, the bit about Bob Francis made no mention of alcohol, but Lion Nathan confirmed a $25 million profit in Business. The Tour de France winner made the front page of Sport saying his testosterone was high because he’d had a pint of beer.

Travel included a half page on the Italian winemakers of the King Valley, another praising the Pinots noir of Curly Flat, and an encouraging piece about the glories you can drink with your food at Brasserie Moustache, which everyone should attend. It’s near Henschke’s. Magazine ran another piece about Seppeltsfield.

Then there was yours truly recommending the wines of Tim Smith in The Independent Weekly, and I imagine The Advertiser must have had alcohol in it somewhere.

Considering all this, it’s amusing to find the Fin Review’s Health page listing Australia’s “top six drugs” as being aspirin, insulin, diuretics, antibiotics, Paracetamol, and the opiates.

Who are they kidding? Most of the dudes I know on that stuff take it to alleviate the effects of alcohol.

I dined recently with Dr. David Caldicott, the emergency and trauma research fellow at the Royal Adelaide Hospital, and Sandra Kanck, the Democrat. While we drank an exquisite red from Ben Jeanneret – Clare offending again – we talked about the hypocrisy of this society when it comes to drug use and abuse.

Now that the fizz of sanctimonious outrage is settling, it’s worth re-examining the pasting all media gave Kanck for her attempt at injecting some logic into the drug debate. Having read her contentious Legislative Council speech of May 10, complete with the contrary hissings of Anne Bressington – thanks for that, Nick – one can only marvel that none of these detractors can see that there are votes in more sensible, realistic, holistic drug policy. Or maybe they can. Maybe that’s why they’re all so hissy.

Maybe Bressington suspects that the party-drug users who voted for Xenophon may have cast their ballot in another direction if they’d known about her.

The infuriating spaghetti of theories and ideas that rise from any contemplation of drug use share one point of eureka clarity, and this is where they most revealingly intersect: the point where drug policy is actually formed. Who forms it? Drug companies? The liquor barons? The religious right? The Laura Norder brigade? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. And the politicians and press who can control the ebb and flow of public fear and derision by ridiculing the likes of the well-intentioned Kanck. They’re scared and angry. They think the debate is evil in itself.

The wowsers certainly aren’t ready for Caldicott. As a scientist and an intellectual, he’s razor sharp and determined. As a hot-blooded Irish catholic who dated Dr Ian Paisley’s daughter, he understands the holy roller, the Bible-poker, the interferist and the self-interested powermonger as well as he knows the reality of life and death at the front line in his wards. Where does his budget go? Repairing the victims of alcohol, of course.

“Until I came to Australia I’d never met a dim Australian”, he said. “You have a genetic ingenuity which you betray by adopting an American drug policy which is used as a political agenda. It’s morally bankrupt. It should be the doctors and scientists making this agenda, not politicians, unelected priests, or press.”

I’ll drink to that.