Boffins Butcher Trott's Dream

by PHILIP WHITE - This was published in The Independent Weekly on 17 October 2008

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The ghost of Greg Trott is this minute glowering angrily over Glenthorne Farm and the University of Adelaide.

Trott, the founder of Wirra Wirra, and Spiritual Guidance Counsellor of the southern Vales, loved recalling his youthful journeys across vineyard and pasture in the back of the ute, en route to Hackney High. He fought to keep the old CSIRO research station free of housing, like all those rolling farmlands before they were devoured by malignant villa rash.

With the aid of Robert Hill, then a Senator, Trott had the 208 ha O’Halloran Hill property passed from the CSIRO to the University of Adelaide. A solemn deed was signed, prohibiting housing, but deeming compulsory the use of the land for viticultural research, experimentation and education. Trott wanted the testing of organic and biodynamic grape framing techniques; the trialling of new drought resistant varieties, providing the winemaking and viticulture students at the University with a king-sized opportunity to test their skills and climb new heights of environmentally responsible viticulture.

He dreamed of revegetating the headlands and creeklines with native plants, providing lungs for the south, walkways for human recreation, and homes for the native birds that would move in. He knew these birds would eat the grapes, providing more room for research in the tricky field of birdlife and vineyards co-existing without shotguns.

Dryland viti research became more essential when the Roseworthy winemaking campus was closed, meaning the loss of that full-sized winery, and its vineyards, for trials and education. Alan Hickinbotham kindly shouted the Uni a kindergarten winery at the Waite, but there was no room there for serious industrial-scale winemaking or vineyards and students were suddenly expected to gain their practical winemaking experience out in the industry they aimed to eventually work in.

This supplied the wine refineries with guaranteed cheap subservient labour at vintage, and the students would be trained in status quo industrial winemaking, limiting the free-thinking, ground-breaking experimentation which makes universities special and harvests the fruits of young minds set free to fly within the study of their choice.

Ironically the refineries most of these students would work in are retreating from this drought-stricken country and the river they helped to kill. If more free-thinking and enlightened experimentation had been encouraged all along, these transnationals would be better off right now, and our River would be in better nick.

The University says it has consulted intensely with the wine industry, that the land is not suited to viticulture, that there’s not enough water. Who, for Bacchus’s sake? Brian Croser? Alan Hickinbotham? The transnationals? They don’t seem to realise that McLaren Vale is almost 100% drought-proof since its enlightened move to using recycled water from the villa rash that surrounds it, or that the Glenthorne vineyards would test new techniques in dry-ground viticulture. This is even more critical since Rudd parsimoniously budgeted to close the existing CSIRO dryland viti research station at Mildura.

As for consulting with the wine industry? I recall Ian Sutton, Chief Executive of the Winemakers’ Federation, Wine Australia Pty. Ltd., Australian Wine Foundation and the Australian Wine and Brandy Producers' Association, saying accusations of a lack of consultation with the wine industry in his planning of the National Wine Center was simply balderdash. "My job's not to consult the wine industry -- my job is to represent the wine industry", he said.

The same university which now intends to break its deed of trust on Glenthorne Farm soon had the National Wine Centre as its own, at a peppercorn rent that draws puke from the average wine student struggling for digs.

If consulting had occurred, you’d think they’d talk to Jock Harvey, grapegrower, winemaker, and Chairman of the McLaren Vale Grape Wine and Tourism association.

“Consultation?” he growled. “I haven’t heard a word! Of course it’s viable for vineyards. It’s ideal for vineyards. Not enough water? Where are they going to get the water for the housing? The reservoir across the road! And what sort of housing? We’ve got the cheapest, dumbest housing along this coast. It’s built to make money for the developer, the tradesmen, the council and the government. All short-term. Nothing green about it.

“If they’re interested in regreening” he stormed on, “they should take a look at what this community has done on the Willunga escarpment. This Greening of the Range has been one of the most extensive projects of its kind in Australia, and it’s all been a voluntary community project.”

Harvey got angrier. “What about low-impact food production? Community vegetable gardens? Trying to re-establish the native foods that once grew there? Getting the local unemployed and handicapped in to learn something wholesome?”

That’s the sort of talking that would have Trott smiling that inimitably curious smile of his, with its puzzled mixture of disbelief and delight.

“Dear Boy”, he would say.

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Biodynamic, bold, and beautiful

by PHILIP WHITE – This appeared in The Independent Weekly in December 2007

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When I was a little kid at Nairne primary school, I spent years gazing from my desk, out over the jumping green fields toward the summit of Mount Barker, knowing that this was good country. Away over there, around the big Chapman house, lay some of this state's best farming dirt. It spread from the piedmont of the Mount down across the Bald Hills Road to the west, including the verdant swathe of ground on which my woodwork teacher's dad had first isolated and developed the clover he named Mount Barker Subterranean, which kept the district's dairy cattle full of goodness and milk for nearly a century.

Today much of that ground is covered in some of the most graceless villa rash imaginable. Thanks to the genius of greed and the idiocy of planners who'd love to be developers, we have turned that glorious garden into a wretched suburban sprawl fit to make Brian Burke proud - the stuff of a future Four Corners expose.

But there's one good stretch of it that seems securely determined to remain horticulturally productive. This is where the German founders of Jurlique first planted their biodynamic gardens to supply the ingredients for their natural wellbeing and skin care brand. They'd scoured the earth from California to here, searching for ground that was fit and healthy, and devoid of DDT.

Since they sold and moved on, they've left behind the beautiful Ngeringa biodynamic vineyards set up by their son, Erinn Klein, and his wife, Janet, over the last six years.

Biodynamic? You mean all that mumbo-jumbo about full moons, natural manure mulch and preparations made from cow's guts in buried horns? You bet.

"We'd eat our cow manure", said Erinn, grinning proudly last week, as we tasted his first wines, in a spotless winery stacked with glistening, impossibly fresh and aromatic vegetables. The cows are biodynamically-grown Highland cattle, with their huge horns and curly coats, and the produce? Well, start with the pumpkin they gave me. I cut a hole in the top of that heavy shiny brute, scooped its seeds out, filled it with cream, yoghurt, onions, garlic, chillis, mushrooms and herbs, put the lid back on, and baked it. It was so dense it wouldn't bloody cook. After three hours, the first serving fed four. Then we sliced the remaining flesh, baked it again, and tried to mash it in a blender. It nearly mashed the blender. Eventually we bashed it into another, more conventional soup, which fed six. The remainder's still swelling, like the Magic Pudding, in the big iron pot. There's enough there for another eight serves. Biodynamic plants seem to have twice the cell density of stuff conventionally grown. And at least twice the flavour.

This goes for grapes, too. The first Ngeringa wines are drop-dead gorgeous. There are two tiers, J.E and Ngeringa, the latter appellation being reserved for only the very best produce from their own vineyards. The J.E Chardonnay 2005 ($25; 93++ points) being as good an opener as I know. It's more Chablis than Burgundy, being wonderfully tight and lithe, with the perfect creaminess of a Chinese custard, flavoured with the slightest hint of honeycomb and spiced by a whiprod of the very best oak.

There's a J.E Pinot with a lovely fluffy, spongy texture, and a range of flavours from black cherry through roast cashew to sweet baby beetroot, crying out, like any exemplary Burgundy, for a confit of goose, or mild cassoulet ($25; 92++); and a J.E McLaren Vale Shiraz 2004 ($20; 92++) jumping with vitality and organic health; beginning with plump, fleshy berries and finishing with tannins that set your happy cheeks agush.

Then comes the Ngeringa Syrah 2005 ($40; 92++) which is more a Rhonish Hermitage Hill than almost any other Australian shiraz, explaining the syrah nomenclature. An astonishing concentration of sweet perfumed fruit and earth, this essence dawns ever so gradually, a little like that magic pumpkin. My bottle has been open for days, and it's only beginning to sing.

That housing's gotta be stopped.

For reviews of Ngeringa's latest, hit DRANKSTER.

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The less water we need

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

While we’re talking water, I was surprised to read Cara Jenkin’s piece in The Advertiser linking Riverland grape irrigation to salt. There was the clever irrigation R&D man, Dr. Tapas Biswas, and Fosters viticulturer, Gioia Small, promoting a salt management regime that has cut annual irrigation requirements from 10.4 megalitres per hectare to 4 megs. One meg used to be called one million litres. Salt is still NaCl, which is unleashed by irrigation.

Let’s get this in perspective. Baz White, - Gomersal Wines, Barossa - was on the phone immediately. “Jeez, Whitey”, he said. “The River blokes got it down to four megs!” Since the day he planted in December 2001 Baz has used 0.65 megs per hectare per year. He has twenty hectares all up, uses bugger all poison, and has a list of some very famous Barossa names keen to get his fruit. In sharp contrast, I recall some whingeing from upriver about the lack of buyers of any sort.

Heat makes exotic plants very thirsty. Rice, cotton, oranges, vines – you need oceans of water in the desert. The Barossa’s not cool, but it’s a lot cooler than the River.

“Four to six megs per hectare would be about right for responsible commercial use up here in a year like this” says Riverland viticulturer and lecturer Darryl Lang, who made a brilliant organic Second Dune Ruby Cabernet a few years back, and hasn’t irrigated at all this year.

“It’s amazing how my vines stay alive”, he says. “But I wouldn’t suggest to anybody that they should follow my example. If I was serious about making commercial wine in 2008 I’d be watering right now. But in a drought like this the evaporation loss is awful. Even those growers who have decided to ‘mothball’ their vines and grow no crop this year would be using four or five megs I reckon.”

Michael Waugh, who’s just added another perfect 100 Parker points to his phenomenal tally at Greenock Creek, in the Barossa, uses about the same amount of everything – that’s bugger all - as Baz White. “Some of my vineyards never get any irrigation”, he said. “But if I do buy them a drink, it’s about 0.6 of a meg per hectare - thirty litres per vine. There’s no point in letting them die of thirst, but most of my watering is mainly a vehicle to get some nutrient down to their roots.”

Next day I tasted Paxton barrels. Paxtons manage 300 ha of vines including their own, and have begun replacing the old chemical spray and big irrigation with Rudolph Steiner’s biodynamic methods. The first wine from their 20ha Quongdong Farm vineyard near McLaren Vale, after just one year of the new management regime, was probably the most vividly flavoured, wholesome ’06 SA red I’ve seen. The bio stuff jumps at you. It’s like a new variety.

“We’re limited to 1.1 megs per hectare if we’re using aquifer water on conventional vineyards”, says David Paxton. “But sometimes we use much less.”

“And you know Whitey”, says Paxton viticulturer Toby Bekkers, “the more we build up the humus in our soil with the biodynamic preparations and mulches, the less water we need”. There sure wasn’t too much water in that Quongdong Farm shiraz. I’ll warn you when that one’s imminent. It’ll be famous.

Earlier, I’d stood with Andrew Mitchell in his House Block biodynamic riesling vineyard in the Skillogalee Valley, Clare. There was misty rain, and you could smell the gamy reek of the roos we’d disturbed. The wine is brilliant and vibrant, with the sort of banana and lemon pith aromas I’d usually associate with expensive German rizza. The soil didn’t smell of banana, of course, but for a weathered old mix of dolomite, magnesite, sandstone and quartzite, it certainly had plenty of life buzzing in there since it’s been getting its doseage of Steiner’s moonjuice. Andrew has two enormous mulch heaps moulderin’ away on the headlands, ready to add to that veritable plum pudding once they’ve decayed enough.

“Logic says that the more biomass we can get into this ground, the less water we’ll need”, he said. “We try to keep pretty calm about it, but it’s really bloody exciting!”