CAB MAC v COKE - AUSTRALIA v FRANCE

STEPHEN HICKINBOTHAM 1983 - photo WHITELIGHT

Making A Pause Refreshing Having Bought Jacob's Creek France Copies It
by PHILIP WHITE - two recent additions to the archive

2 July 2010

In the early ’eighties a brilliant young winemaker, Stephen Hickinbotham, decided Australia needed a bottled red wine that would fight off the dodgy French Beaujolais Nouveau which was threatening to catch Australian attention.

An early adherent to the notion of premium wines having a sense of place, a home base, and a distinctive terroir, Hick was also aware that the irrigated Murray-Darling was about to start producing a lot more amorphous red than Australia could drink.

To make the most of this, he modified the Beaujolais winemaking technique called maceration carbonique, invented and sought patents for the simple, cheap equipment his new technique required, and registered the name Cab Mac. His elegant script logo was deliberately designed to look like Coca Cola.

But like Beaujolais Nouveau, which vanished in an international currency shift, Cab Mac only threatened to catch Australian attention: after a few exciting vintages, Hick was killed in a plane crash, and the whole exercise fizzled out, in spite of it being sold for expansion to John Valmorbida, who then owned Mitchelton winery.

It was a great pity, because Cab Mac was reliably a much better wine than the baby Beaujolais, and was vastly superior to the bladder pack reds which now make up a great deal of our red output (last year we drank 96.7 megalitres of bottled red vs. 56 megalitres of bladder pack).

Last week, Valérie Pajotin, the diva directrice générale of the Association Nationale Interprofessionelle du Vin de France, or ANIVIN, announced that France should now approach its wine manufacture in a totally new way. She even named that great French-owned product, Jacob’s Creek, and triggered an international frisson when she said “It’s like creating a well-known brand name, like Apple or Coca-Cola”.

After interminable Gallic wrangling, this new ANIVIN body has the job of promoting France’s new Australian-style refinery-made wine. In a sense, Pajotin has replicated the young Hick’s dream, and even dared to mention the C-C-words.

Most of Australia’s grapes go into amorphous bottom-shelf blends which sell in the vulnerable nether regions, where the tiny profits are at the mercy of endless currency fluctuations, and the whims of new rival countries which can produce similar products at lower costs than we can manage.

Their labour is cheaper; they usually have much more water than us, and their environmental awareness and controls are nowhere near as restrictive as Australia’s.

Add a flash of critical discontent like our plonk has attracted in the USA and UK in recent years, and a great degree of the Australian wine business suddenly looks a lot more rickety than anyone seems ready to admit.

And just when we thought we had France licked, Mme. Pajotin has lurched it back into the picture, big time.

There are 861,075 hectares of wine grapes in France. Australia has 162,550 hectares.

While the pointy end of Australia’s premium wine business is finally beginning to understand the importance of local geologies and terroir, which the best of the French have understood for centuries, the rest of the French have finally legislated to make possible enormous inter-regional refinery blends, just like the dud end of our business.

This new megabulk appellation is called Vin de France. And while it appears, on the face of it, to be more along the lines of your baby Beaujolais than Cab Mac in quality, Mme. Pajotin’s threatening to very quickly rattle the trendy end of Australia’s cage.


She’s taking the great Ocker wine refinery doctrine, demolishing France’s inter-regional blending restrictions, and is about to replace France’s knowledge of wine regions with a new knowledge of varieties.

She’s determined first to teach French lasses whether they’re Pinot grigio girls, Sauvignon blanc girls or Chardonnay girls – she’s a Chardonnay girl – but is already challenging the vast grapeyards of France to open their floodgates with giant blends that Australia simply cannot match.

While Colombard/Chardonnay and Carignan/Shiraz sound uncannily workaday Ocker, this country simply could not mount a counter-attack with Chardonnay/Gros manseng, Terret/Sauvignon blanc or Gamay/Shiraz, which Mme. Pajotin’s right onto.

And she’s looking way past the borders of France: she’s determined to win back the shelves of the UK, the USA, and Germany, with fewer brands of more consistent varietally-labelled mega-blends than ever before.

In the same week that every Australian politician with a propensity for travel and red teeth was leading a delegation of their favourite Australian winemakers into China, Mme. Pajotin uttered that C-word, too.

One thing about the Chinese. Their wine business has been inextricably entwined with France since the days the English poured them a Cognac as they paid for their tea with shiploads of opium. French wines were the only grape-based alcohol in the courts of Beijing and Shanghai long before Mao took his walk, and China still proudly thrusts forward bottles of Dynasty, the Remy-Martin joint venture that commenced with Frenchmen teaching China how to plant and manage vineyards right when Hick was working on his first Cab Mac.

JACOB'S CREEK IS NOW AN INTERNATIONAL TORRENT: PERNOD-RICARD CONSULTANT AND FORMER BOSS WINEMAKER FOR JACOB'S CREEK, PHIL LAFFER, NOW WORKING ON BIG NEW PERNOD-RICARD VINEYARDS IN NORTH CHINA

Now we see Pernod-Ricard, the giant French pastis empire which owns Jacob's Creek, busy establishing vast vineyards in China. Who knows - If the history of the Pernod and Ricard families' attitude to such important terroir as Steingarten is any indicator, we may soon see a Chinese Jacob's Creek.

The Chinese prefer long-term relationships.

Winemaker Of The Year Dutschke Resurrects Cab Mac At St. Jacobi The Perfect Sunshine Slurp

1 October 2010

Wayne Dutschke, Barons of Barossa Winemaker of the Year 2010, slunk a slinky blast from the past onto the market during the winter. He’s rekindled Stephen Hickinbotham’s early ’eighties invention, Cab Mac.

The ingenious Hickie had been infuriated by Australia’s infatuation with Beaujolais. The macho Aussie Dollar bought many Francs in those days, and to quote John Cale, “the Beaujolais was raining”.

Beaujolais is the impossibly cute vignoble south of Burgundy en route to the Rhone. It grows Gamay, an audacious juicy red which the vignerons traditionally vinify by carbonic maceration, where bunches are fermented whole in small containers so the wines can be sold quick and fruity.

The most obscene marketing perversion of this was the annual Beaujolais Nouveau release, when vignerons hired helicopters or whatever it took to get the first wine from the new vintage to market. I recall wine-bearing paras leaping into the Thames to get it into London gullets one year, and distributors doing very silly things to be the first into Sydney with the barely-fermented folly.



Eternally scheming of ways of outdoing the French, Hickie reached into his winemaking father Ian’s vast knowledge and theories about collapsible plastic wine containers. In the ’sixties Ian had worked hard on the adaption of the Italian vinegar bladder pack for use as a fine wine container – the wine “cask” - with David Wynn and Penfolds, and had also played with the idea of using bag liners in concrete wine tanks to minimise oxidation during the industry’s post-war conversion from sticky fortifieds to premium dry wines.

Shipping containers fitted with such liners are the standard bulk export containers now: giant oxygen-free bladder packs.



Instead of tanks, Hickie used potato pallets, those wooden pallet-sized boxes of about a metre deep, designed to be shoved about and stacked by forklifts. He patented a plastic bag liner which could be sealed to prevent oxygen ingress, but was fitted with a valve, so the normal CO2 of ferment could escape under its own pressure.

You simply picked grapes directly into these big bags in boxes, zipped them shut, and left the grapes to ferment within their own skins. Sometimes, to preclude oxygen and cool the fruit, he’d put big chunks of dry ice – frozen CO2 – in the bottom of each bag.

The shallow nature of the pallet ensured there was insufficient pressure on the bottom bunches to squash the berries, so there was absolutely minimal free juice running in absolutely minimal oxygen.

WAYNE DUTSCHKE

If you wanted to hurry the ferment, you left the pallets in the sun. To slow it down, you put them in the cellar.

Each berry is its own little sealed tank in this technology. As the wild yeasts of the vineyard begin to ferment the juice within each grape anaerobically, they extract a different spectrum of phenolics – tannins and colour - to those that would be exctracted from the same grapes submerged in juice in a normal whole bunch ferment.

Once the average alcohol reaches, say, six percent, the bags are tipped into the crusher and the ferment continues normally in tank. No oak is required, and largely regardless of the red variety used, the wine displays an intense cherries, nuts and berries freshness with a sort of gentle spiciness that normal ferments rarely produce.

While it’s dry, and not sweet, the result is a little like the effect of botrytis on sweet whites: this peculiar method naturally produces a smoothed-out flavour of its own, which can be more pronounced than the normal varietal indicators.

Hick registered the name Cab Mac, had a logo drawn that matched the cool breeziness of the Coca Cola calligraphy, and released a string of reds that were immediately noted for their vivacity and unabashed freshness of fruit.

JENNY REGAN AND STEPHEN HICKINBOTHAM. MID-EIGHTIES







John Valmorbida, owner then of Mitchelton in the Goulburn Valley, bought the system and the brand and continued with it for years, with the input of winemakers Don Lewis and Wayne Dutschke.

Hickie was killed with his partner Jenny Regan and five other close friends in a plane crash at Cairns, and Cab Mac became another of his brilliant ideas and inventions that were never fully extended.

Remembering this at a time when Australia is blamed with making wines too strong and too thick for easy refreshment, Wayne Dutschke took a look around the internet, and discovered the Cab Mac name was available for a song. The product had been let languish when Brian Croser bought Mitchelton, and since he sold his empire to Lion Nathan, now part of Kirin, the giant Japanese brewer, Cab Mac simply and stupidly slid into oblivion.

Dutschke couldn't believe his luck.

WORKING DUTSCHKE'S St. JACOBI VINEYARD, Ca. 1900

His wine is from old vine Shiraz from his home block at Lyndoch. He used small airtight tanks, where the berries sat for nearly a fortnight before crushing. The ferment was finished normally, and the wine bottled and released.

The resulting Cab Mac 2010 is a modest 13.2% alcohol and is the perfect sunshine slurp for spring or summer weather. The normally floral nature of Lyndoch Shiraz, reminiscent of the best of Beaujolais anyway, has an extra layer of bright maraschino and marello cherry, and a subtle nutmeg spiciness that looks all the world like good oak.

So, we have a spunky 2010 dry red that slots neatly between Grenache and Pinot in style, at a cool $20, and an easy 92 points. You should be into it by the time your patio vine casts a proper shadow.

JANCIS: 2009 OZ VINTAGE NOT SO BAD

"We've All Got Some Adjustments To Make"
Fosters Admits Simple Cockups
Pommie Coke Hits £1 A Line
by PHILIP WHITE

Since the Wine And Brandy Corporation AND St. Jancis are saying the Australian vintage is not as bad as some errant scoundrels reported, I knew a brilliant statement from Fosters must be coming next.

It seemed unlikely on the face of it, because Fosters must be all statemented out after last week, with a new business plan for their wineries, and their new wine branch and all, and the terrible challenge of what to call it ... I mean they’ve decided it’s there, and there it must be, like the wine group and everything, suddenly absorbing baby wine marketers like a driver recruitment racket for a stretch limo mob, and it hasn’t got a name? Oh my God.

What comes to mind? Now, let me see ... Fosters? Penfolds? Wolf Blass? Rosemount? Tollana? Jamieson’s Run? Black Opal? Kaiser Stuhl? Andrew Garrett? Tin Men? Repo Man?

But it came! Nah, not the name. That’ll cost ’em $200,000 ... Not for me - I’m not in the league of the winebiz serpent greaser who could sell Fosters its own word for $200,000. I'm talking about the unlikely statement from Fosters, which would once and for all trounce the namby-pamby positivism of our beloved vintage Jancis and the Australian Wine And Brandy Corporation.

Something really bloody gut-wrenchingly depressing!

It came. It was magnificent when it came. It even trounced the hot slow news of how the fair Jancis narrowly survived Black Saturday. It came from Group Director James Lovell, who today told the Australian Bureau of Agriculture Resource Economics Outlook 2009 conference:

“We've all got some adjustments to make".

Does he know something Jancis and the AW&BC don't?

“Our competitive advantage has gone and our competitors are catching up”, he said.

Dr Lovell must have verged on bitter regret when he then went on to explain that Australian wines were “a bit the same”, that drinkers were “looking elsewhere”, and that Australia needed to push and "rebuild brand Australia” by promoting luxury wines and making wines with a broader ranger of flavours and styles.

This astonishing revelation came hard on the heels of that same Fosters, Australia’s largest sudsmonger, admitting it had completely buggered up when it shrunk the Cascade stubby by 45ml from 375ml to 330ml without dropping the price accordingly.

James must have been completely shagged after the humiliation of admitting that Australian wines are a bit the same, so another Fosters person, Felicity Watson, took her turn at the Gatling and admitted that when Fosters shrunk the stubby by 12%, sales dropped by 33%.

In a more or less blondish moment she said they’d shrunk it to “give the bottle a more European appearance”.

Why didn't she say it was an attempt to stem binge drinking?

And Tasmanian beer? European? I thought it had a Tasmanian tiger, a thylacine, on the label. European? With the help of the swarthy Armada Irish, the blonde European settlers killed all the poor bloody thylacines by 1936!


Highly retouched, Thylacinus cynocephalus, above, [Greek: dog-headed pouched one] is what we call the Tasmanian Tiger. Fosters put 'em on its Cascade beer label, long after they were all dead by 1936. And then the boofheads cut the volume of the stubby by 12% and left the price where it was!

Anyway, Fosters will gradually reintroduce the 375ml stubbie for the thylacine freaks, without increasing the price. Talk about capitulation!

You’d think that at a time when so many great minds are completely contrite and freshly focused on the brave new hyperprofits of tomorrow, they’d have the brilliance to just go that little bit extra and realise that they’re all in the business of flogging really cheap recreational drugs which are in fact dangerously depressive. So the cut in volume could have been sold as a socially-responsible manouvre. No?

Okay. Try this: Why not sell cheaper, stronger, arguably safer, much more reliable stuff that won't cause depression?

The Babyboomers need pain relief!

The British Home Office has just admitted that the street price of both cocaine and heroin has fallen by half in a decade, with cocaine now available for £20 a gram, down from £77 ten years back.

So when a takeaway bottle of execrable Australian plonk can set you back £2 to £4 in a London Tesco, a glass of said swill at a bar £3.50, and a pint of lager around £2.75, a line of coke will set you back just £1. Glass of water, line in the bogs, go home sober without your head kicked in, still do the bedroom business, and save money, see?

In a stroke of analysis whose brilliance could only be matched by Fosters, the Home Office suggested that drug prices may be falling partly because fewer people are buying drugs.

So why are previously reliable British plonk discounters’ not restocking shelves? Why do five British pubs go bankrupt each week? Eh? Don't try to tell me it's not 'cause cocaine's the better buy.

Are we all incapable of stretching our tiny minds just that one extra inch? Bugger this pretending vintage is lovely and Fosters will get better, and Cascade drinkers can count ... why don’t we all work together to sell beautiful Tasmanian Government heroin to the rest of the world? We can make cleaner hospital grade opiates than Afghanistan in Tassie, and we do!

You might think I'm getting off the track here, but please bear me out. This is lateral thinking, and, as my dear departed mate Stephen Hickinbotham used to say, "one lateral kiss is worth a thousand standing up".

Over thirty years, the Tasmanian opiate industry has grown to a $200 million a year business. Best pain relief on Earth, so America insists it should remain illegal.

Funny, really. The American wowsers are encouraging Tassie to bugger its beautiful opiates business in much the same way Carlton United Breweries, now a Foster's subsidiary, mucked up the Tasmanian hop business when they monopolised it and tried to control the market, and the flavour of all Australian beer, by making an essence from all the hops and selling only that to anybody who needed fresh hops.

Imagine Coopers having to buy industrial hop essence from CUB.

Pretty soon all Australian beer tasted like Carlton Draught, so we flocked en masse to Coopers, and to European lagers. To discover why, CUB got into bed with Interbrew, the Belgian Beer Cafe mob who owns nearly every interesting beer. They set up Belgian beer pubs around Australia to learn about the premium beer market. They even tried to buy The Exeter!

So soon we had the new smaller Cascade bottles filled with beer which the labels boasted was lovingly hand-crafted with only the best fresh hops from Europe.

The USA, which runs the world's opiates business, buys 80% of its hospital-grade opiates from India and Turkey, whilst much of its street hammer comes from Afghanistan. It strictly limits the amount of opium poppy Tassie can grow to supply the rest of the world's hospitals, using the excuse that stuff might seep onto the streets of Emurka. We wouldn't want to interfere in the Afghan trade, now, would we. Nope.

Now, driven by their paranoid fear of morphine, the Americans are gradually relaxing their 80-20 rule on the proviso that Tassie grows more of the tricked-up opiate-free Thebain poppy, which is used to make the drug OxyCodon, which is not as intense in its pain-relieving capacities as morphine or the old Nepenthe hospital grade heroin, which the pious and sanctimonious USA also put an end to.

It's like the genetically modified Canola business, or the corn/petrochem industry.

Mallinckrodt and Noramco, the Johnson and Johnson subsidiary, report that last year their sales of OxyCodon increased by 95% to suddenly make it a $1 billion business.

Anyway, I reckon that with CUB's raw experience in the Tassie hops racket, and the brilliant marketing skills of Fosters, who know how to provide less for more, then replace it with more for less and get everybody feeling sorry for them, we should nationalise Fosters, liberate the Tassie poppy farms, and flood the UK and USA with pure Tasmanian Government grade heroin, using Fosters' expansive international distribution networks.

There are those among us, after all, who cannot forget the pristine beauty of Sandoz, the USA goverment branded LSD, which was second only to Owsley's in quality.

Sandoz, eh? ... Mmmmm ... Fosters posh new wine division, whatever they eventually call it, could distribute the Thylacine Superior brand, which would be in a pack just 12% smaller than the Tassie Devil Magnum, which would be the bigger pack, but cheaper, and distributed by the beer division.

This would return Australia's competitive advantage, and destroy the traditional marketplaces of all other purveyors of the Dreaded Devil's Brew.

We've all got some adjustments to make.

I could get my lovely Mum Drinksy (top) out of the pinot vat long enough to pose for some poppy shots for the "Put An End To Depression" advertising campaign, and Brand Australia would once again conquer the world ...

INFECTING REDS WITH ROT? WHAT ROT!

STEPHEN HICKINBOTHAM: THE AUSTRALIAN, KIWI, AND INDIAN WINE INDUSTRIES WOULD BE VERY DIFFERENT IF HE WAS STILL WITH US

Where Are Today's Young Wine Radicals?
This Dude Used Botrytis On His Reds!

by PHILIP WHITE

In the early 1980s, there was a dramatic change of guard in the Australian wine industry.

Feisty young blue bloods like Brian Croser were suddenly everywhere, in everybody’s face, changing the way everything worked.

Professing that only they knew how to do it.

Adam Wynn was back from duxing Bordeaux university, taking the reins of Mountadam, Australia’s first big high country chardonnay and pinot vineyard.

And in Victoria, the fearless, questioning intellect of Stephen Hickinbotham was kicking all the old inbred Australian shibboleths in the head.

Hickie’s grandfather, Hick, had founded the Roseworthy winemaking college; his father Ian was a formidable wine scientist and wine maker – the first bloke on earth to deliberately, scientifically, induce and manage malo-lactic fermentations when he worked for Adam Wynn’s father David at Coonawarra in 1952 and 53.

Ian once told me he deliberately named his first son Stephen because it was the “only name we could find with pH in the middle”.

Stephen was oenologist at his family’s winery and vineyard on the slopes of a volcano cone at Anakie, near Geelong, Victoria. An inventor, passionate theorist, and rigorous intellectual, he studied at Bordeaux University, where he also made wine for the Rothschilds. He worked for a while in a government wine research laboratory in Alsace, then at Bollinger and Mumm, and did vintages at Rutherglen, Barossa, Mildura, the Hunter Valley and Great Western. He made the first great modern reds from Tasmania, flying grapes from Meadowbank to Anakie, made some of the earliest Adelaide Hills wines at his uncle Allan's vineyard at Clarendon, and was an anchorman par excellence in the many tastings I conducted at Winestate, Wine And Spirit Buying Guide, and The National Times.

Hickie advised the Indian government on viticulture and winemaking, and was probably the first to realise the potential of sauvignon blanc in Marlborough, New Zealand, as it was he who teased David Hohnen into developing Cloudy Bay.

Not a bad innings for a 1955 vintage lad.

Put very simply, he turned my brain on.

When Stephen was killed, with his partner Jenny O’Regan,and five other good friends from Melbourne, in a plane crash at Cairns in 1986, he took an encyclopædic headful of ideas and knowledge with him.

The Australian wine industry would be very different today had he survived.

I narrowly missed catching that plane.

In those early ’eighties, it suddenly became highly fashionable to make botrytis-affected wines after the styles of Sauternes, Barsac and Germany. Many of these early experiments were dreadful.

The Alsatian wizard, Michel Dietrich, arrived in Clare in 1982, brought in by Francois Henri to manage Remy Martin’s new acquisition, Quelltaler, the grand old headquarters of Buring and Sobels almost a century earlier.

He was immediately bemused to discover two of the local hotshot winemakers, Tim Knappstein and Tim Adams, had begun deliberately infesting riesling grapes with laboratory-grown botrytis in specially constructed and humidified cellars where the grapes were laid on racks and sprayed with spores.

Michel had literally caught a plane in a blizzard in Alsace, disembarked in Adelaide in a 42 degree heatwave, hired a car and driven to Clare. He raised the French tricolour over his new charge, as if to purge it of any traces of Germany, took one look at the vineyards along the creekline at Watervale and announced that this was a good place for botrytis.

The locals were incredulous.

Michel let those grapes hang in that humid little microclimate and made a ravishing and revolutionary botrytis-infected semillon.

The locals accused him of cultivating the spores on V8 vegetable juice, as they had done, then stealing into the vineyard at night to spray it on the vines!

Hickie was already making great controversial stickies at Anakie.

Adam Wynn also made exquisite botrytised rieslings from one of highest blocks on Mountadam.

I was there once, after vintage, trying to take photographs in the frigid, swirling, highland mist. I heard a sound that made me think "bear!".

I'll never know why I thought it may have been a bear, because there are no bears in Australia, and the only bears I've seen have been imprisoned in solitary confinement in Guantanamo things they politely call zoos.

Sure enough, through the mist, there was a large dark figure, about the size of a bear, beneath the vines.

Silly enough to approach, I got closer.

It was David Wynn, wearing an oilskin Drizabone duster, on his hands and knees, studying the ground.

I said "Hullo David".

"Oh hullo Philip", he said, staring back at the sodden ground.

"This is awful", he said. "Terrible. Look at this terrible waste!"

The riesling that Adam had left hanging had got botrytis in its stalks, and the bunches were falling to the ground.

Adam picked, and picked up, that rizza into a wheelbarrow, and made a stunning sticky.

The four of us: Hickie, Michel, Adam and me, had many weekend summits where we rewrote the future, blending bottled wines from all over Australia's exciting new vignobles, just to see.

We spent a lot of time making the perfect pink. The base was usually Hickie's amazing dry botrytised rieslings from Anakie, with Michell's wood-aged Clare semillon, with red bits from Hickie's Meadowbank, Tassie cabernet, Adam's pinot, and some 1979 Petaluma Coonawarra shiraz.

We just had to have some Brian in there.

To encourage some public discussion about these heady botrytis developments, I ran a series of interviews in Wine And Spirit Buying Guide in 1984.

While most contributors knew only of botrytis on white grapes, Hickie immediately threw petrol on the discussion by claiming he deliberately used botrytis on his ravishing reds.

In fact, he said, he never made red wine without botrytis.

The wine business was, once again, incredulous.

“I think it was about 1896 when Louis Pasteur published his amazing study Les Maladies du Vin”, Hickie told me in 1984.

“It was a monumental work, but it was flawed. After studying many bad table wines, Pasteur determined that their malaise was due to these tiny single-celled organisms called bacteria. What he did wrong was to extrapolate on this finding, and he declared that all bacteria were bad. He invented pasteurisation as a means of destroying bacteria in wine.

“Now, if Pasteur’s well-intentioned advice was heeded by all the French vignerons, we’d have no great French wines today. Pasteur neglected to study great wines, and he never came to realise that if they were properly controlled, the same bacteria would, or could, have some highly desirable effects, like conducting the malolactic fermentation which is common to so many great French wines.

“The role that noble rot can play in making red wines has been obscured for several reasons. Certain ill effects found in red wines have been attributed to noble rot because the original grapes were noble rot infected. The great, healthy wines have never really been studied, and because researchers often have so little practical winemaking experience, the role botrytis can play in red wine making has been ignored. That’s pretty simple.

“Carefully controlled noble rot can contribute great complexity to red wines. Many of Bordeaux’s greatest red wines were from grapes infected by botrytis – ask Roy Moorfield about the ’61 Montrose we had.

"Anyone who says it can’t be done is wrong. In winemaking, there are a lot of nuances between the black and the white, and too many people aren’t sensitive to them.”

My experience of Hickie’s love affair with botrytis began in 1982, when he was blending the first Cab Mac, a carbonique maceration red he’d made using his revolutionary sealed pallet bags, for which patents were pending.

The cabernet sauvignon he’d selected from the Goulburn Valley, Victoria, was botrytis infected. He said he’d deliberately botrytised the fruit to pass some complexity and body to the wine.

When I reported this, the broadacre response from other winemakers was a guffaw followed by a loud “Bullshit!”

The main reason for this response centered on the widespread belief that in red fruit, botrytis gave rise to laccase, an oxidase enzyme which turns red wine milky when exposed to oxygen.

I asked Dr. Terry Lee, the NSW food scientist who’d just taken over the boss role at the Australian Wine Research Institute, about his experience with botrytis infected reds.

“We got involved with botrytis when some of the reds in Coonawarra became infected last year”, he said of the 1983 vintage, which was all fire then flood.

“If you get a bit of unwanted botrytis in reds they can go brown as soon as they’re exposed to air or oxygen.

“Chris Summers did most of the work.

“It wasn’t exactly noble rot, though, it was a real zoo growing on those grapes. We had to look for ways and means of preventing deterioration in the wines once they were exposed to air. We were mainly concerned with the bad effects of the wrong kinds of botrytis mixed with a lot of other moulds.

“Stephen Hickinbotham’s had a lot of experience in Bordeaux. I’m sure there’s quite a lot of botrytis in Bordeaux reds. The whole Bordeaux area has a significant level of botrytis: the conditions are right for it. He’s most probably right.

“There are a few components produced when botrytis gets in the grape berry. You get increased glycerol levels. You also get the production of an acid called gluconic acid. The presence of this acid is a fairly good indicator of botrytis infection.

“I think you’ve got to appreciate that Stephen’s trying to get a small botrytis infection as a complexing agent on his reds –- he’s certainly not trying to make sweet reds!”

Eventually Hickie made a couple of small batches of cabernet sauvignon that was deliberately infected with botrytis. He imported the test enzyme from Bordeaux to have the Wine Research Institute check these for gluconic acid, using the same techniques the Bordelaise use when testing sauternes for botrytis.

I arranged a tasting of these wines in Adelaide, and invited several fellows who had said quite distinctly and unequivocally that you couldn’t make red wine from botrytised fruit.

If you knew the big cheeses of those days, you'd be able to name the detractors and disbelievers. They're still here.

Once the wines were poured, and the and the wine sat there in the glasses, glowering red and jolly, totally devoid of anything vaguely resembling milkiness or cloudiness, the noses came down and the discussions began, but there was still a genuine air of disbelief.

The only fellow who didn’t detract from the Hickinbotham achievement was the most senior of the winemakers present, Max Schubert, who happened to be the fellow who created Grange Hermitage.

Max said the wines were good and interesting, and said they reminded him of the days when he used flor yeast on red juice to make “nice complex mother wines”, the bases for his famous blends.

“Nobody really believed I did that either”, Max chuckled.

“I had to get used to keeping my mouth shut.”

Back to Dr. Terry Lee.

“There’s not really such a big mystery about handling botrytis in reds”, he said.

“You can handle it with heat treatment”.

Presto! While Hickie never actually admitted he pasteurised his wines, it’s worth remembering that his father, Ian, had left Coonawarra to work in the Barossa, where he converted the foundering old grape-growers’ co-op to the phenomenally successful Kaiser Stuhl.

Part of this success was his adoption of pasteurisation of sparkling wines under pressure, stabilising them to a degree otherwise unknown in those years.

“I read a letter in an American magazine” Ian wrote in Australian Plonky, his autobiography.

“It was an important Professor Marsh, who was pondering why sparkling winemakers didn’t pasteurise in the bottle as did the spumante makers of Italy.

“Pasteurising was, and still is almost a dirty word in our wine industry and was dismissed because of the association with the cheap wines of Europe.

“However, the thrust of the argument was that, because of the gas content in sparkling wines, the temperature needed to achieve pasteurisation was quite low. I decided to trial the technique.”

Using the Kupke-Trinne team of Roseworthy College, Ian built a machine that pasteurised the Kaiser Stuhl Sparkling Rhinegold at only 63 degrees centigrade, “therefore not damaging the quality”, he wrote.

“In fact, in our experiments we had found that the heat treatment helped ‘round’ the taste, meaning the wine was more drinkable immediately.”

(Winemakers can now hire an Agmaster pasteurising machine that fits on a trailer, and processes very slowly, -- 2,000 to 4,000 litres per hour -- so the required temperature can be minimised, avoiding thermal damage to the wine.)

The resultant popularity of that Kaiser Stuhl Sparkling Rhinegold wine made necessary a full-time sparkling expert to manage the manufactory, and develop other products, like the first real kiddylikker alco-pop, Pineapple Pearl, which was packaged in a little pineapple-shaped bottle with a panoply of green plastic which resembled the foliage at the top of the pineapple, and twisted off to open the bottle.

The appointment? An eager young German from Avery’s of Bristol, one Wolfgang Blass.

Kaiser Stuhl sales went from £160,000 in 1955 to £740,000 in 1962.

Wolfie still has a row of Pineapple Pearl bottles along the top of his bar, sitting there like browning hand grenades.

Which is simply to say that Stephen Hickinbotham had a very learned advisor in matters concerning the pasteurisation of wine.

I miss Stephen -- with a pH -- dreadfully. But if you’re lucky enough to try his reds now, given a merciful cork, you’ll find them breathtakingly beautiful.

That’s getting close to eternal life.

And, just for the record, I should say that dear Max heat treated his flor-infected mother wines.

He learned to keep schtum about that, too.

BOOZEBIZ CHATTERBOX TAKES GREEN HUE

ENVIRONMNENTAL SCIENTIST DR DAVID PATON ON THE RECEDING WATERS OF THE MURRAY-DARLING ESTUARY: EVERY BARGAIN BIN CLEANSKIN YOU BUY SUCKS MORE WATER OUT OF THIS RIVER SYSTEM


Solving The Carbon Footprint Crisis
While Keeping The Booze Flowing
by PHILIP WHITE

Bacchus only knows just how far The Wine Supply Chain Council is willing to go to ensure wine drinkers make less of a mess of the global environment, but they’re having another talkfest in Melbourne next week.

The shocking condition of Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin, with the cruel extant fact of the death of its estuary, is partly the work of Australian wine drinkers determinedly demanding cheap squirt; partly the work of the thirsty who buy from the humungous booze mongers of Britain and the USA.

It is certainly partly the work of some of the winemakers of Clare and the Barossa, who built their own private pipelines to import salt water from the Murray to guarantee sufficient irrigation supplies to maintain their manufactory of industrial quality wine for export.

Such water inevitably increases the salinity of the ground to which it is applied.

The WSCC was devised to address such issues, but tends to approach the problem from the “must have” point of view, as in “these markets exist, they must have our wine; ergo we must work out how to get it there”.

The meeting follows one held in South Africa last year and will set the cooperative research agenda for the next 3-5 years to benefit wine producers.

“Experts from around the world will talk about how to ensure consumers receive the best wines possible” the WSCC says.

“The meeting on January 13-16 includes 25 industry leaders, academics and researchers. Australian representatives at the workshop include researchers from CSIRO and Monash University and senior managers from some of Australia's wine companies including Yalumba and Orlando Wines.”

(Orlando is part of Pernod-Ricard. It is not Australian.)

CSIRO mathematical and information sciences research leader, Dr Simon Dunstall, said one of the major issues for discussion will be how to reduce the environmental impacts of the wine and grape juice industry's transport task.

"Transport is a significant consideration in Australia, particularly the carbon footprint involved in moving wine over long distances," he said.

Consumers are quickly becoming directly concerned with such issues, and some wineries are already taking advantage of this.

I have, for example the first bottles from Zilzie’s Bulloak Carbon Neutral wine brand on my tasting bench now. From irrigated Murray Basin vineyards, these retail at $10 in Adelaide, a full day’s drive from Zilzie.

London is a lot further.

Surely the best way of easing the carbon footprint is to grow grapes closer to the markets which want the wine. If Texas can produce wines as fine as Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin and perhaps Coonawarra (see articles below), then why shouldn’t Texas be producing such fruit for the US market?

A hint of the future lies in Fosters new three-year contract with the Indian wine company, Indage Vinters, (formerly Champagne Indage), to package Fosters’ wine in Britain.

This wine will be shipped from Australia, South America and South Africa in tank, and packaged in the marketplace which drinks it. This reduces the footprint of such ridiculous mechanisms as taking bottles from Italy to Australia, filling them up, then taking them to Britain for sale.

While the UK drinks over 110 million cases a year, and drinking more and more of it at home, the feverish pressure there to supply ever-cheaper booze is forcing such Australia producers to chop costs.

Similar pressure in India will see more of that country’s booze made there.

Since Stephen Hickinbotham worked a consultant to the Indian government in the early ’eighties, it has been apparent that India can easily produce sufficient wine to supply its fledgeling market.

Given the water supplies, the same thing can be said of China.

One wonders just how the WSCC committee can flex its direction to suit such massive collisions of the booze world’s tectonic plates.

Topics the Council has discussed include: tracking temperature changes of wine as it is shipped around the world; improving order management processes; and, exploring the finding that 99% of wine currently made in the United States came from states that voted Democrat(!).

Dunstall's team uses a branch of mathematics called 'operations research' to simulate and optimise supply chains in a range of industries. It recently developed a “grape maturity forecasting system” which is being used in Australia and New Zealand to estimate when grapes are ready to harvest.

This was not much use in the harvest of 2008: we shall soon see how well it works this vintage, which is upon us.

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SAUVIGNON KING LEAVES CLOUDY BAY

KEVIN JUDD will be spending a lot more time on his brilliant photography. Check out his work by clicking on this image.

Juddy Mosies On

1984. Kevin Judd, probably the quietest man in the wine business, walked into my office grinning like a giant clam and said he was into this new thing with David Hohnen of Cape Mentelle. But New Zealand? Yep. A place called Marlborough.

“We’re gonna plant sauvignon blanc”, he gurgled through his smoke. “Best place for it.”

I liked two sauvignons blanc: one yellow softy made at Angle Vale by Rocky O’Callaghan; the other was Hardy’s tawny fortified made from Bob Hardy’s ancient vines at upper Tintara. Wolf Blass had been buggering about with some, blended with riesling and aged in mostly American oak(!).

Then came the radical Vales blitzkriegs Iain Riggs made in ’81 and ’82, at Hazelmere Estate (now Serafino Maglieri’s). Riggsy used fruit from the Edge Dennis vineyard that d’Arenberg has just bought. He picked it into milk crates so the grapes wouldn’t squash and oxidise, chilled it, then gave it the Oenotech treatment devised by Dr. Tony Jordan and Brian Croser, using their distinctive R2 yeast. The wine was a blast: crisp, grassy and fresh as a lemon, with all those alarming R2 whiffs of banana and passionfruit.

R2 had been isolated by Croser at Chateau Rahoul near Sauternes in Bordeaux, where Len Evans was spending Peter Fox’s money. But the financially-challenged Fox solved his Adelaide Holdings problems by driving his Ferrari flat out into a concrete wall, and Peter Vinding-Diers bought Rahoul, to make exquisitely fine, almost brittle sauvignon blanc. The savvy-B explosion ignited, and soon Rob and Michael Hill Smith had a great lunch at Yalumba, where they served Vinding-Diers’ inspiration: “Y”, the dry savvy-B from the mighty home of sticky, Chateau d’Yquem, in Sauternes.

Sometimes d’Yquem picks its sauvignon early in the vintage to make a dry wine, rather than letting it botrytise with the semillon and go into the mighty sticky for which that Chateau is revered. There have been only 23 vintages of “Y” since the first in 1959.

So we guzzled our “Y” while the Smiths quizzed us over the chance of dry savvy-B becoming the next chardonnay. Rob eventually went in the viognier direction, and while I have a tape recording of Michael deriding savvy-B that day, he went on to make it a stalwart at Shaw and Smith. There was much discussion of the cat’s piss grassiness of the variety, which comes from its natural methoxypyrazines (3-isobutyl-2-methoxypyrazine and 3-isopropyl-2-methoxypyrazine). These compounds are common to cabernet sauvignon, soursob, rhubarb, tomato leaves, and grass. Hemp, and jute, or hessian, is full of it, and sometimes austere sauvignons smell rather like superphosphate sacks, which combine the remnant methoxypyrazine with the smell of guano, which I reckon comes from combinations of sulphur, soil, and yeast.

Humans detect methoxypyrazine at around one part per trillion, which is like smelling one grape in the entire Australian crush. The grape manufactures it to deter predators, and only when the pip is ripe enough for germination does the vine suddenly cease its production and instead pumps sugar to attract said predators, which become incubators for those seeds.

Vignerons panic if they can’t get their savvy-B off quick enough in heatwaves, as the plants quite abruptly cease manufacturing this compound. On a hot day, the value of a crop can plummet in hours. The winery wants the methoxypyrazine for its distinction, but suddenly it disappears, leaving the grower with a grapeyard full of sugar but devoid of character and smothered in birds.

“I knew Stephen Hickinbotham was sniffing around Marlborough - he knew sauvignon had a future there”, Hohnen says. “He was first into everything. Kiwi sauvignon had the eyebrow factor: nose in the glass and up goes the eyebrows. But it was all too sweet and too acidic.

“Juddy instinctively knew what to do. He’d worked four vintages with Merrill at Reynella, then went to Selacks in New Zealand. We found three or four growers with 120 tonnes. They didn’t know what to do with it. Juddy made it after work. We built Cloudy Bay in ’86, and off it went.”

Kiwi savvy-B is now an international hit. Hohnen sold Cloudy Bay to Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessey in 2000. In the twelve months to October, Australia drank 26 million litres ($206 million worth) of Kiwi white, most of it sauvignon blanc. Like Hohnen, Juddy’s off to make a little wine for himself, and get on with his first love, photography.

I would have liked to talk to Juddy about all this, but at the time of writing the Cloudy Bay people haven't responded to my enquiries.

You couldn’t squeeze another grape onto the Marlborough plain now - the vineyards are climbing over the hills. Google Yealands and you’ll get my drift. But too much of it’s mean greed, all acid and sugar, devoid of soul or balance. Same old tale.

At home, the world’s biggest wine company, Constellation, just won the top sauvignon blanc gong in the Adelaide Hills show with Oomoo, and while Rob Hill Smith’s waiting for viognier to become the next chardonnay, he still imports d’Yquem and, when they make one, the crunchy “Y”. They’re only $685.

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From the vineyards up

by PHILIP WHITE
This was first published in The Independent Weekly in August 2008

“Mr. White, I’m not like you”, James Hook said as I settled in his ute. “I am a scientist.” He then took me to show me a thing or two about McLaren Vale, where he worked for the Grape, Wine and Tourism Association.

In this business, you don’t meet many so certain about their roles and their determination to fulfil them. Ian Hickinbotham spoke in such a manner when first introduced some thirty years ago; his son Stephen, was another. Ray Beckwith, too, now in his mid-nineties, is still similarly precise. Probably no other Australians have had such influence on wine as Hick Snr., and Beckwith, with their ground-breaking work on pH and malo-lactic fermentation, now taken for granted by winemakers the whole world over. Had Stephen not been killed in a plane crash, I’m sure he would have gone on to show us another thing or two.

So here was your writer, suss that we’d run out of such people of serious category, and jaundiced by the thousands of cocksure pretenders and self-promoters who fill the vast gaps between. “Their obituaries describe these people as successful businessmen and they pass promptly into oblivion” wrote Walter James of this mob in 1970. I don’t think this will be said of James Hook.

I’d seen Hook the scientist at work when he’d been called in to make an independent judgement on a grape crop. With another viticultural scientist, Derek Cameron, they succinctly disproved an allegation that the crop was diseased. The brewery which had tried to evade its purchasing contract was forced to keep its bargain, and the conscientious, terrified grower stayed in business.

And now in McLaren Vale, Hook gradually unfolded a severe arsenal of knowledge and attitude. Not only did he show a rare savvy about vine husbandry, but his deep appreciation of the folly of greed and environmental destruction left most of the wine business for dead.

Then he sent me some shiraz: an understated bottle, displaying a dancer resting on a chair, named Lazy Ballerina after a canopy management where the vine’s canes were organized to resemble the dress of a ballerina. That wine, and another release since, with a little viognier, impressed me very deeply, with its intensity of character, gastronomic intelligence, and promise for the future.

With his parents, James has purchased an unusual, if run-down, European garden on the big bend at the south end of the Kuitpo forest. A new tasting room is nearing completion; the garden is gradually regathering its beauty, its silver birches and healthy river red gums standing in bright contrast to the wall of pines opposite, a carpet of winter blooms spread beneath. A peacock admired himself in the reflecting door as we nudged the glasses last week.

James, the viticulturer, had planned four shiraz wines and managed their vines accordingly. Two were from vineyards he considers sufficiently distinctive and suitable to be released as single vineyard wines, to offer numerous points of difference for discussion about the nature of McLaren Vale shiraz. Another is a cross-vineyard blend, designed to follow the style of his earlier releases; the fourth is a shiraz viognier.

“I have planned these from the vineyards up”, he said, introducing a string of barrel samples. “This exercise is to test my plan, to ensure the wines are sound and true to my original goal, or if any of them require tweaking or blending.”

The wines from Dudley Brown’s Inkwell vineyard, near the Gulf on California Road, was tighter than most shiraz, reflecting an uncommonly dense grape cell structure: elegant, but highly focused and intense. No changes required. Next was the contrasting monster from the piedmont of Sellicks Hill, from the vines of Paul Petagna. Whilst closer to typical Vales shiraz, with its cuddly big chocolate and licorice, this, too, was tight with mighty tannins, and ever so gradually tapered off into a tail uncommonly elegant and refined after such an opening. Right on the knocker.

The blended wine, from various sources, followed closely the earlier Lazy Ballerina style – read masterly - and the last, the shiraz viognier, is a lesson to those who mindlessly blend these varieties in the name of fashion alone. No peach syrup in this baby. Uh-huh. It had all the austere acid and tannin elegance of the first three wines, but with the added tannic finesse that only tiny additions of early-picked, cool-climate, co-fermented viognier have to offer.

Only one barrel was faintly suss, still showing a little lazy malo-lactic ticking away. It’ll be fine when the Lazy Ballerina tasting room opens in the spring. Which is something worth waiting for, given the maker’s success in defining the flavours of his finished wines in advance, then selecting and managing the vineyards to achieve his goal. We have a new benchmark forming up, there in the forest. I’m hooked.