JIM INGOLDBY, JEAN PAXTON DO A RUNNER

JEAN PAXTON IN HARRY WHO AT HER 100th BIRTHDAY PARTY, AT WHICH SHE ARRIVED BY BLACK HELICOPTER TO ANNOUNCE "I'VE TRAVELLED HERE IN ONE OF THOSE SELF-FLYING CRAFT". JEAN IS THE ONLY WOMAN EVER TO ASK FOR PHILIP WHITE'S HAND IN MARRIAGE! photo KATE ELMES, The Independent Weekly





Mighty Wine Characters Die
Missing Mates At Christmas
Much Else Has Gone Forever
by PHILIP WHITE - a version of this appeared in The INDEPENDENT WEEKLY.


“Do you know anything about finance?” Jim Ingoldby glowered.

“No,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “Now we can talk.”

I’d known Jim for twenty-five years. But this was a different day: I was suddenly there in his home as his fair daughter Jane’s partner. His wry opener was an indicator of his intention to hang on to the family coffers as much as his disbelief at what was happening to the wine industry.

Jim died of long life a few months back, one of the last of the great post-war winemakers. He had stacked many a gift beneath the Christmas trees, allegorical or real, of his friends, family and employees through his amazingly creative life, and as I contemplate whether indeed to bother with a baubled fir on the occasion of Jesus’ 2009th birthday, I know Jim would ridicule my sentiment, but love playing with the wires and lights.

JIM INGOLDBY

Baubles are scant in the wine business firs this year. But if you could grant me just the one, another bottle of scotch with Jim would do nicely. We’d reflect on the staggering hubris of a business that had absolutely everything going for it fifteen years ago. I would suggest, as I do, that if it were the wool business, or the Australian Wheat Board, that had greedily overgrown itself by at least a third, and was now rotting in its own havoc and destruction, there’d be a Royal Commission into who was to blame. They’d be stood up, cross-examined, and locked in the stocks.

I’d recall asking Ian Sutton, Chief Executive of the Winemakers’ Federation of Australia, Wine Australia Pty. Ltd., Australian Wine Foundation and the Australian Wine and Brandy Producers' Association, which bits of the wine industry he’d consulted about his determined putsch to use $40 or 50 million of the taxpayers’ money to build the National Wine Centre in the Botanic Gardens. Sutton snarled "My job's not to consult the wine industry -- my job is to represent the wine industry". Great.


NATIONAL WINE CENTRE: AN UNFINISHED GRANDSTAND WITH ITS BACK TO THE PEOPLE? ADELAIDE UNIVERSITY NOW RENTS THIS FOR $1 A WEEK ...

That ugly pile in the Gardens is the perfect allegory for the way the whole business has gone crook. Those who put it there should be drawn to account, if not drawn and quartered. They should never be let near the levers of wine industry power, ever again. But still they hover. “This tax-payer-funded Xanadu will have little purpose beyond housing the bureaucrats who will be responsible for the next taxpayer-funded Vine-pull Scheme,” I wrote at the time. Touché?

I would recall with Jim his early days at McLaren Flat, where at Rycroft, in the seventies, he radically marketed McLaren Vale wines in bottles labelled according to the vineyards and growers whose wine glowered within – something that is finally, sensibly becoming vogue. I would recall his early adoption of the screw cap, and the ingenious machine he built to apply them. I would revel in his exquisite watercolours: always a new’un on the easel at the end of his bed. And we would roar with derisive laughter and rage at the squirming idiots who, until just a year and a half ago, were urging growers to plant more chardonnay, lay more irrigation pipes, and guarantee an endless supply of fruit at prices so low whole communities would inevitably collapse, along with the river that nurtured them.

If you could squeeze another gift beneath my tree, it should be one more bottle of shiraz with the amazing Jean Paxton, who also left us this year, at the grand old knock of 102. Jean, Mum of David, had watched their family business march bravely out of almond-growing and into viticulture. She saw her son move from an aggressive developer of inspired, but industrial vineyards, to become one of the first converts to biodynamic principles and sustainable natural practices, and eventually marry Ang, formally entwining “Them Paxtons” with the vinous blood of the great Tolley and Penfold families.

When she was a hundred, Jean proposed marriage to me: the only lass to ever do so. She mischievously joked that David would be annoyed at me “getting all the money”, and reassured me “ - but don’t worry – you wouldn’t have to put up with me for long.”

At 101 years, this mighty woman triggered a frisson of panic when she was found face down on the floor of her unit, looking all the world like she’d had a big stroke. There were ambulances, and drips and whatnot, and the usual jittery concerns. But when her family arrived at casualty, a good nurse relieved their fears. It wasn’t so bad. They’d just checked her blood alcohol: 0.13. Jean had been enjoying a bottle or two of the sublime Paxton Jean Shiraz, the pinnacle of her son’s endeavour, which had been named after her. She couldn’t understand the fuss.

I could go on with my festive cheer. But about forty per cent of the wine business won’t. It’s finished.

Wine and the War On Drugs

by PHILIP WHITE - This was first published in The Advertiser in 2005

As paranoid chatter about Australia’s two-plus billion litres of unsold wine rises to delirium, and new experts appear daily to have their two bob’s worth in the media, maybe it’s time we began a conversation the wine business doesn’t particularly want us to have.

The industry itself seems dumbstruck by this stupid, utterly predictable situation. All their baying voices that talked it up are suddenly dumb. Those of us who were shunned for our bleats of warning over recent years could be forgiven for now feeling smug. But I feel sick. Sick at the inexcusable extravagant waste in field, stream, and home.

Wine hasn’t been mentioned yet in the War on Drugs, but maybe it’s time we sat back as a community and had a hard think about the total amount of recreational drugs we should collectively ingest each year. This must include alcohol. Learn to manage drug consumption as a whole. Get honest. Admit the war is lost. Start again.

Instead of following this sickening downward spiral toward cheaper, inferior, stronger, more dangerous wines, we should now, more than ever before, consider the nature and end use of most of the wine made in Australia.

When the Vine Pull words are uttered, people think of cute little ivy-draped cellars full of lovely old shiraz, pioneer couple weeping out the back, like a McCubbin tryptich. In reality, most of our wine is ruthlessly, skillfully grown and manufactured to compete at the bottom of the market, where profit evaporates. Broadacre, monocultural, water-wasting grapeyards. Sugar quarries for industrial refineries.

Much of the trouble with the voluble Riverland growers stems from the hyperactive response to the 2025 viticulture plan of the Winemakers Federation. This fairly conservative 1995 initiative was supposed to guarantee sufficient grapes to fuel the next thirty years of constant growth. But it included no pressure valve or review mechanism to measure new plantings or wine in stock, and the full quota was reached within just a few years. There is still no national vineyard or stock register.

There’s been so much planting in what they rather stupidly call “the cool regions”- by which they mean everywhere but the River and Griffith - that the big buyers are using more of that fruit once its price falls enough. Cool is better than hot.

Cut to Nepenthe boss James Tweddell, at his promotional dinner in his Hahndorf Vineyard last year. When I commented on the magnificent triffid aggro of his vines, he proudly pronounced two telling words. Jacob’s Creek. I could hear a big ouch up the River.

So, apart from a few dozen exceptional cheap brands, what exactly do these hot areas produce? Are they alcoholic commodities that could be better made from other sugar from other sources at lower prices? If, as a society, rather than an economy, we decide that we really do need all this alcohol, for us or for export, should it necessarily involve grapes?

What if the sugar needed for the production of all this alcohol could be more cheaply grown, with less abuse of environment and water resources, somewhere else? On the big, complete picture, could Queensland sugar cane replace most of our contentious grapes? Or palm sugar, on the Ord? Should precious Adelaide Hills land – our lushest food garden – be used to make barely profitable gourmet drug refreshments, for export to markets that don’t give a fig for its source, but buy purely on price? They could be drinking Andes Ridge or Amazon Creek tomorrow.

The incredible popularity of alco-pops stems partly from their lower strength and convenience, but largely from their wide range of flavours. One fridge offers a rainbow of whisky, gin, vodka, ouzo, brandy, bourbon and coffee and cream liqueurs pre-mixed with lemonade, squash, dry ginger, neutral beer, cola and tonic. Small bottles. Screw caps. Lower alcohol.

Compare that lolly box with the sea of half-hearted wine currently made in Australia. White. Red. Sweet. Dry. Wooded. Not wooded. Too alcoholic. You have be a tripper, or an uncomfortable nit-picking Virgo like your correspondent, to spot a difference in any of it outside of those few dull, endlessly repetitive parameters.

Different sugars can crop almost continuously in the tropics, meaning the manufacture could be spread more efficiently over the year, doing away with much of this vintage panic and the sickening lurches of perfectly natural vintage variation. Leave that difficult bit to the committed specialist artisans who make the wine we’d all prefer to drink.

Give the River a break. Distil a neutral alcohol, add antioxidants, fructose, water and the minerals and vitamins essential for keeping alcoholics alive, fruit it up, fizz it, screw cap it in small bottles, and sell it priced according to its alcoholic strength, with a hearty slice of the excise dedicated to the restoration of the health of the locals and their environment.

Research even healthier ways of chilling out or getting smashed. Maybe save even more resources and replace the alcohol with a safer drug that triggers less aggro; I know many mothers, fathers, police and health workers who’d suggest that was music to their ears. And some who won’t.

Last drink for the Vales

by PHILIP WHITE - This was published in The Independent Weekly in February 2008

THE politics of drought are set to ravage McLaren Vale – a world leader in viticultural water conservation.

Vignerons are reeling from Water Security Minister Karlene Maywald’s shock announcement that mains water allocations have been slashed 35% from February 1^st.

“We’ll lose between 350 and 500 hectares of Australia’s most valuable vineyards”, said Derek Cameron, chairman of the McLaren Vale Growers’ Council. “That’s well over $60,000,000 loss in five years.

“The real insult is that this is being inflicted on Australia’s most efficient and productive irrigating vignerons” he said. “All our mains water is from our Myponga catchment – we use no Murray water. We have no channel irrigation; no sprinklers – everything’s on highly efficient drip with the most advanced monitoring systems available. And because we waste no water, and irrigation is absolutely minimal, a cut of one third is disastrous.”

Mr Cameron explained that his growers fully appreciated the value of water. They’d happily paid the $1160 per ML going rate, and had perhaps naively supposed the imposed hike to $1650 next July would involve some surety of supply.

“Murray growers pay from $75 to $400 per ML”, Mr. Cameron said. “They yield between $1100 and $2500 income per ML applied. If they paid mains rates they’d run at a loss. We average $13,660 to $17,000 income per ML. We’re sustainable.”

In a scenario eerily akin to Labor’s disastrous ’80s Vine Pull Scheme, the cuts will destroy smaller, super-premium McLaren Vale growers, many organic, who supply international figureheads like Grange, Eileen Hardy, and Dead Arm, while broadacre chemical regime irrigators of cheap bulk industrial fruit survive.

“At least that Vine Pull was voluntary”, Mr. Cameron said. “95% of those to go this time will be profitable family-owned vineyards smaller than 40 acres … people who’ve struggled through five years of drought and low payments, without the wherewithal to connect to the recycled system.”

Jock Harvey, chairman of McLaren Vale Grape Wine and Tourism, said the cuts showed a frightening lack of government understanding of McLaren Vale.

“We’re 80% of the way through a 22 year plan to totally drought-proof our district”, he said. “By 2012, we will be the first premium grape region in the world to be economically and ecologically sustainable in this way. So this is devastating. Imposing this on such marginal electorates is political suicide.”

McLaren Vale growers have instituted and paid for the oldest and most successful underground water management system in the state, recharging their aquifer by at least 2000ML per year. They have funded the largest network of reclaimed water use in Australia, providing 40% of irrigation demands with recycled water from the southern suburbs.

Intensive work with local State MP Leon Bignall last year saw both state and federal governments allocate funds to assist more small growers switch from mains water to the recycled network. The immediate construction of a winter storage dam would reduce the flow of Christie’s Beach effluent into the Gulf, and reroute 1000ML of mains irrigation back into Adelaide’s drinking supply by 2012.

“This plan we’d engineered with Leon – who’s been a big help - would have reduced mains water irrigators by 80% within four years”, Mr. Cameron said. “We’d be back to 95% in five years. To destroy these irreplaceable heritage vineyards when they’re finally about to switch completely to recycled water just doesn’t make sense.”

“I understand there’s only so much water in the bucket”, said Leon Bignall. “But this is disastrous for the south. We’ve lost Mitsubishi. Now McLaren Vale. We’re meeting Karlene on Wednesday to get this fixed. These growers deserve acknowledgement and reward, not punishment. Unlike the overhead sprinkler regime up the River, these blokes are world leaders in water conservation.”