BASS PHILLIP DANCES TANGO IN EXETER

THE TWO PHILS GETTING FULL OF BASS PHILLIP DURING JONESEY'S PHILIPPIC IN THE EX ... all photography MILTON WORDLEY

Phillip (sic) Jones Brings Bass Phillip (sic) To Fill Up Philip The Pinot Sicko ... One L Of A Night In The X
by PHILIP WHITE

Phillip Jones came to The Exeter for a few slow quiet ones last week. An engineer who fell in love with pinot noir is a scarce beast. An engineer who so frequently masters the mystical and confounding nature of such an ethereal drinking genie is an absolute rarity. For Jones is a passionate and erudite man, and makes his wines with the flesh of his hands and feet rather than employing anything as harsh and brash as a pump.

I first suspected this man had studied and practised engineering purely to eventually focus all his engineering skills upon one critical job: the disconnection of his brains from his heart, as he seems to run most of his life with the latter organ. Which is, as any cardio surgeon will tell you, a lot more visceral and gentle on the life-juice than your average open-throat mono pump made of steel. And which is never to say Jones is not an highly captivating and rewarding conversationalist. After an evening wallowing in his estimable company, one could only wonder what in the hell his engineering was like. You don’t get sensual engineers.

Away back in the ’seventies, when Jones began his errant vineyard dreaming, there was bugger all of this weird Burgundian variety about. Murray Tyrrell had a patch in the Hunter; having tired of the frustrating monoculture and frosts of Coonawarra, David Wynn was planting it at Mountadam on the High Eden Ridge. The most common one was the Hardy’s Keppoch, a vast-volume cheapy made from a huge monoclonal vineyard near Padthaway. And that clone was in fact a sparkling wine model, so the chances of it being a great red pinot were remote. That wasn’t what Jones had in mind.

Although he started out growing Bordeaux varieties, he sought somewhere as cold and damp and humid as Burgundy, south-east of Melbourne. He passed the outbreak of Jaguar XJ12s of the Yarra Valley, and even the Ferrari and Porsche appellation of Mornington Peninsula. This obsession was no hobby. He went to Leongatha, away down near Victoria’s southernmost point, Wilson’s Promontory, at the bottom corner of wet old Gippsland.


Leongatha’s wetter than Burgundy. Mainly dairy and onion country, it gets over 1000 millimetres a year. It rains roughly every second day from April through October. The average daily maximum temperature peaks at 26 in January and February, but through June and August it’s all twelves and thirteens. The critical mean’s 18.2.

So much water is not much of a problem: the extremely deep loose soils south of the mountain ash country of the Strzelecki Ranges just soaks it up. “It’s so absorbent there are hardly any rivers”, Jones tells his glass disbelievingly. “But jeez the rain brings the moulds. I can’t spray 500 in the ripening season.” He refers here to the biodynamic preparation which encourages white fungal tendrils to sprout in the soil, where they perform a healthy enlivening function, and somehow assist the vine roots to better extract every hint of mineral. “Unfortunately, 500 also encourages moulds in the foliage when it’s so wet,” he said. “There’s so much cloud that light management is more critical: I fine tune it with 501. It’s all about canopy and light management.” 501 is the silica-based biodynamic preparation which works as a light diffuser.

Jones now takes his fruit from four sites spread over 24 kilometres of country. “Every site is different,” he said. “Like the ferric soils require a different approach and give different flavours to the ferrous.”

Because he wanted low yields – hard to get in such prosperous country – he planted his vines very, very close: 9000 vines per hectare. Most of Australia’s vineyards sit on about 2000. He thins everything: leaves, tendrils and bunches, to limit his yields to 250-350 grams of grapes per vine. Then his winemaking is more like a lyrical slither than anything industrial. And his wines? Sloppy, stupefying, seductive dances all. Make that dancers.

Constant high humidity, as in Burgundy at vintage, does something to the tannins of grapes, which are highly concentrated around the skin’s pores, which constantly transpire water. A single variety grown to a certain ripeness in a dry place will generally be harder of tannin than the humid model, perhaps due to the background humidity limiting the amount of transpiration. Jones’s Bass Phillip pinots show this to the extreme. “In older vineyards, the humidity really brings out the provocative aromatics,” he said. They also seem softer, plumper, and wetter. Freakishly Burgundian. Yet below each peculiar beauty, there is the tickling piquancy of the soil and the rock from whence it came.

Away down at the bottom of Australia, Bacchus and Pan do the tango, held up by the Norman Lindsay lasses, the Rubens mob having occupied every couch. Soused in Guerlain’s Jicky, of course.

Bass Phillip Estate 21 Gippsland Pinot Noir 2006
$53.75; 12.8% alcohol; cork; 93+++ points
This, the twenty-first vintage, came from a difficult year, in which Phillip Jones says he “blended everything” to make this wondrous confrontation. It smells like maraschino cherries soused in lemon juice, with a whole barrage of other stuff coming in soon after: the potato sack earth, the gingery oak, the plump dancing girls. In fact, my notes are specific about the lass here in question: it’s Vanessa Redgrave’s Isadora: dancing like a giraffe, then too keen to leap into the deadly Bugatti, the silk scarf immediately dragging the neck t’wards the beautifully spoked wheel. Give it six years, breath in, accelerate. (All my other Bass Phillip notes were stolen in the Great Bag Heist of 09)

PHILLIP JONES CLINKS PINOTS WITH EXETER PUBLICAN KEVIN GREG ... IN BACKGROUND, WRITER LANCE CAMPBELL (LEFT), WITH WINE MERCHANT PAUL JAMES. all photography: MILTON WORDLEY

INTUITION: SANITARY SCIENCE LACKS SOUL

CASTAGNA WINERY AND VINEYARD AT BEECHWORTH ON THE NORTHERN SIDE OF THE VICTORIAN ALPS: JULIAN AND CAROLANN CASTAGNA HAVE JUST WATCHED YET ANOTHER HUGE BUSHFIRE FROM THEIR RIDGE

More Old Drunks Than Old Doctors

Castagna Cleans Up Without Poison

by PHILIP WHITE - THIS STORY WAS WRITTEN FOR THE INDEPENDENT WEEKLY ON 30 JAN 09

When I started in this racket, back in the precambrian, a few lunies professed to make natural wines.

Gil Wahlquist made wines which would crawl outa the bottle all by ’emselves at his cobwebbed vineyard at Mudgee. In McLaren Vale, Gabor Berenyi almost equalled Gil with some of the most feral tinctures ever. If you didn’t let em out, they’d eat straight through the side of the bottle.

Through the ’eighties, and into the ’nineties, there were several characters who plied more intuition than wine science. Some even remembered what their grandfather had taught them about the draw of the moon. But they’d never admit such dangerous tendencies. Basically, everyone made hyper-sanitary wine like Brian Croser’s. That was the only way to get a trophy.

The petrochem industry, which grew from the explosives and nerve gas industry after the First World War, ruled the wine business. They’ve learned to switch back to explosives and gas when the demand’s there, but they, well, you know ... a man’s still gotta make a buck when peace breaks out.

Then, in 2000, I was half way down a row of two or three hundred masked shiraz bottles in my annual Top 100 tasting, when a wine exploded in my face. Vibrancy, intensity and vigour.

Disbelieving, I had my crew first check that it was Australian. Yep. They put it another bag with another number, further down the long row. It whacked me again. And again. As the day wore by, the damned thing just got more and more audacious, alarming and cheeky.

Once it had eventually earned the highest points of the whole tasting, all varieties, I rang the maker, who’d just got home from LA or somewhere, where he’d been directing a theatre ad for BMW or somebody, which is what he did to pay for everything. His name was Julian Castagna. He was a bit puffy from running to the phone, but his breath soon settled when I congratulated him and told him what had happened. I then asked his secret.

“Do you really want to know?” he asked ... perfect theatrical pause ... “It’s biodynamic.”

Castagna wines, of Beechworth in the Victorian Alps, went on to win that competition, or get in the top three, for years. He even won it with a rosé. Eventually he staged a conference of biodynamicists from all over the world, and many Australians who attended came back convinced.

Even David Paxton, who had been a relentless pursuer of yields came back to McLaren Vale, turned off the tap, and turned on the moonjuice.

You can drink the results in the Paxton bottles now: more intensity; more depth; more raw sex; more ethereal sensuality.

“It’s not the fact that you’re doing it”, he told me of his change of career, “but the resultant wine that hooked me, from vines which are all in balance – their natural ability to resist disease is enhanced.

“It’s about the density of the cells. The fruit is more naturally expressed. The true flavour is enhanced ... the further we go, the more we get into it. And surprisingly, it’s cheaper!”

Given the current allegation that bio-D is being used by charlatans as a marketing tool, I am the first to agree that you can make bad bio-D booze as easily as you make decrepit plonk the scientific way. But just as there are lot more old drunks than old doctors, there’s a lot more execrable swill being made by the scientists than the moon swooners, and always will be.

“Biodynamics for me is intuitive” Castagna wrote recently, “a craft rather than a science”. But he went on to cite the findings of Professor Stuart B. Hill, formerly of the Department of Entomology at McGill University, Canada, but now in the Department of Social Ecology at the University of Western Sydney-Hawkesbury.

"Biodynamics tends to be presented with a high level of mythology and talk of etheric forces and so on, but if you analyse the preparations you find they are in fact, if properly made, highly concentrated inoculums containing high levels of trace elements and a variety of micro-organisms" Hill said.

"A purely scientific approach does not allow for the intuitive understanding of the ‘good’ farmer” he continued. “Most people, including scientists, make decisions partly based on ‘feelings’ and intuitions, probably more often than they recognise, but science makes no allowance for that.

“In fact, most aspects of science are in denial about the phenomenon, and scientists set up experiments which ignore it. Those feelings or intuitions are, in fact, based on readings of inputs we don’t consciously recognise.”

Back to Castagna: “I wonder if the criticism now being levelled at Australian wine of ‘sameness’ would be tempered if our highly-skilled, highly-trained, science-based winemakers listened to their inner-self, their intuition, a little more often”, he asks.

Do they have any? I ask.

.