The best recipes

by PHILIP WHITE – This was published in the Independent Weekly in December 2006

“I cut my teeth at Yalumba. I dragged hoses for Charlie Melton. I worked at St Hallett and Tatachilla. I do vintage every year in Portugal, making dry reds from Touriga and Grenache for Azamor in Alentejo. This year I’ve worked as a grunt for Ralph Fowler at Chateau Tanunda. And I make my own wines at various sheds throughout the Barossa.”

So explained the intensely quiet Tim Smith over a duck at T-Chow. It tasted so good it must have anticipated what it would finally swim in: his supple and elegant Tim Smith Wines Mataro Grenache Shiraz 2005 ($27; 14.6 per cent alcohol; 93 points).

“I’m finding I like Mataro more and more”, he said, “like the Bandols of southern France, where it’s called Mourvedre. I’ll be using more of it in this blend in the future. Bugger this obsession with GSM. Grenache Shiraz Mataro? Why should it always be those three in that order? Whose idea was that? I’ll probably end up dropping the Shiraz from the blend altogether.”

Tim’s exquisite wines are a lot about texture. I mean this blend shows amazing fruit intensity, freshness, and depth of flavour, but its texture, its silky smooth viscosity, gives it elegance and form, and what Max Schubert used to call warmth. At the risk of being gender specific, it’s feminine.

“If you want big firm extracted red, drink Stonewell”, he says, respectfully, of one of Peter Lehmann’s macho flagships.

Hot ferments and plenty of stirring of the yeast lees in barrel is the trick to the Tim Smith Wines fleshy, silky style. “That leesy slime is essential”, he continued. “A lot of people can’t sell their wine because they don’t have a point of difference. Their tanks are full of ordinary wine. Attention to detail must be absolutely mercenary when it comes to quality decisions. It’s those one per cent decisions that give you a point of difference.”

So to his Tim Smith Wines Barossa Shiraz 2004 ($33; 14.5; 93), which seemed even softer, sweeter, and more opulent and silky, in spite of its velvety tannin. This wine was fermented with complete bunches suspended in the must, and had daily lees stirring for a month.

“And pigeage”, he says, referring to the old French method of gently agitating the ferment without bruising the uncrushed bunches suspended in it. “Great form of relaxation. Buy yourself a six-pack of beer, wash your feet, and walk up and down in your ferment for a while.”

We chewed over a barrel sample of his 2005 Shiraz (94 points; for Christmas release). This had a tiny proportion of the white, firmly tannic Viognier in it, which seemed in a sense to reverse some of the silkiness which is his trademark, but this will soften with time. “It’s okay. Just a trial”, he shrugged, when I suggested the French put the tannic white Viognier in their Shiraz to make it bigger and drier, especially in the simple, raspberry and cherry Shiraz of the cooler north Rhone.

In sunny Australia, where the Shiraz is already tannic, the questionable tendency is to let the Viognier get too ripe before the addition, and you end up losing its tannin and replacing it with a most unwinelike canned peach syrup.

“Yeah”, he continued. “In a way, Shiraz Viognier is a waste
of time in the warmer Australian districts.”

Thence to the majestic reserve Shiraz 2005 (95 points; release next year), which includes a touch of McLaren Vale Shiraz to further soften its structure. “I won’t live long enough to see this in its full glory” he murmured into his glass. His recommended food match? “Bloody rare haunch of Bison.”

So why the Barossa? There was no pause.

“Location, location, location” he said, finally approaching animation. “It’s fifty minutes from T-Chow. It’s a five minute blast on a Triumph Bonneville to the top of Mengler’s for the world’s best sunsets. It’s ninety minutes to the southern beaches. And it has all this amazing loamy soil with plenty of ironstone.

“Then, of course, there’s a really good vibe of camaraderie amongst the young winemakers now”, he continued, almost raising his voice. “Winewriters call me a young winemaker, but I’m forty-four years old. There’s a whole new generation rising. They’re on fire. Look at their surnames: Henschke, Glaetzer, Teusner, Lehmann, O’Callaghan.”

He went back to his original hush for the last line. “But Whitey, you know, the real Barossa heroes are the unknown hosedraggers and steel fitters who make it all happen and are happy to tell us pompous winemaking pricks where to get off. They’re always the ones with the best humour.” And then in a whisper: “And the best recipes.”

Bolt-on acquisitions in the sector

by PHILIP WHITE - This was first published in The Independent Weekly in DECEMBER 2007

The Oz last week gave a big slab of its business pages to brewer Lion Nathan's CEO Rob Murray. He'd overseen an increase in his company's operating and net profit figures. "Solid" he called it, whilst warning that aluminium (containers) and sugar (contents) were increasing in price, and the drought was sending the cost of barley boonta.

Rob plans to counterattack with a $40 million hike in his marketing spend, and attack "the younger market" with more "ready-to-drink pre-mixed products". He's also steering Lion Nathan into the rum market with the purchase of the sacred Inner Circle, and you'll see their McKenna bourbon everywhere by Jesus' birthday.

"Lion's wine business" wrote The Australian's Blair Speedy, "which includes such premium brands as Petaluma, Wither Hills and Stonier, booked operating earnings of $6.7 million, up 26.4 per cent." We may parochially add Knappstein, St Hallett and Tatachilla to that list. (Eastern scribes also tend to fail to mention what Lion failed to buy - it didn't even end up owning the driveway to its Petaluma winery.)

But the increase in the barley bill will absorb all those wine earnings this year. And if it doesn't rain with abnormal fervour for most of the year, next year's hike will be $9 mllion. And so on.

Without mentioning what the drought will do to the cost of grapes, Speedy added that while Lion had bought its "wine assets" at the top of the cycle, Rob had no intention of "compounding the error by selling them when the industry was in slump. Accordingly, Lion was still looking for bolt-on acquisitions in the sector."

So, Petaluma. Part of an error? Not such a suite of Vineyards of Distinction? St Hallett? Knappstein? Bolt-on acquisitions in the sector?

Whether Rob Murray uttered these words or not, language like this, and the business philosophies it indicates, is all too cheap and flash, especially as the wine industry councils are finally discovering, and proclaiming, that it's time the wine business got down to making some profits through improved quality, higher intelligence, better attention to wine's gastronomic aspects, and better education of the market.

Given the years those companies spent promoting their distinction, their quality, their terroir and their lure, could they all end up coming from the Knappstein winery, like the myriad brands that exude from Fosters at Nuri? You watch.

Further down the slide, the water crisis daily exposes more terrible truths about the vulnerability of the highly-irrigated discount wine business, and while it's been about twenty years too late, the industry's new twenty year plan makes it clear we should be thinking quite a lot more profit, with less feverish concentration on the sickening downward gurgle of the discount bins of the Old World. Less water; more money.

But the old acquire-and-dilute mentality persists. Southern brewers envy the success and quality of premium European beers. They take over their distribution, then buy their manufacturing rights, and make them here, or in Asia. Fosters, for example, is about to do Carlsberg and Elephant. Lion imports Heinecken and Becks from Asian breweries. These licensed brews eventually cease convincing the cogniscenti that they're as good as the original beers, sold fresh from their home breweries, full of wholesome local ingredients. Examples? Peroni is delicious right now, as is the bright Trumer Pils.

While Lion Nathan is not in the silver pillow business, its determined plunge into kiddylikker could take a more enlightened start. Why bother attempting to put real whisky, gin, vodka, or Coke in RTDs? Why insist on the cheapest bags and bottles having grapes in them? Why not get into the lab with a team of cunning industrial chemists and design a range of new confected drinks that covers the flavour range of the whole damned bottle-o, just go somewhere and manufacture them. Turn off the irrigation, leave the old arid land behind, go to where the sugar grows and the rain falls, and release a set of bright young bevvies at prices and profits that will set the world reeling? Put vitamins and minerals in them, instead of caffeine.

Forget the irrigation, the Mallee, the grapes.

They might even be able to do away with barley.

Now there's a bolt-on acquisition for the sector.