MOLLYDOOKER'S VELVET GLOVE INCIDENT

MOLLYDOOKER OWNER/WINEMAKER SPARKY MARQUIS WITH WINE DAMAGED WHEN A SHIPPING CONTAINER WAS DROPPED, TRIGGERING AN INSURANCE CLAIM FIRST REPORTED TO BE IN THE VICINTY OF $1 MILLION ... CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO HEAR THE WHOLE SORRY STORY photo MOLLYDOOKER

The Fist In Marquis' Velvet Glove
Southpaw Winery Drops Bundle
PR Machine Rings Out Last Drops
by PHILIP WHITE

So. Mollydooker Winery’s export shippers somehow managed to drop, shatter or damage a lot of cases of very expensive McLaren Vale Shiraz.

In all the international fluff and bluster surrounding the dropping of the shipping container filled with Sparky and Sarah Marquis’ Mollydooker Velvet Glove Shiraz ($185 per bottle), nobody bothered to mention that the source of the wine, the revered Gateway Vineyard owned by rival David Paxton and a consortium of McLaren Vale A-Listers, is immediately adjacent to the Seaford Heights property that the Labor government and its developer mates are determined to cover with housing.

In all the front-page tears and grief that the busted boxes triggered, nobody has mentioned that Marquis’ possible $1.025 million loss is piffling compared to the income that site would trigger were it sensibly put to clever vineyard.

Sell it for houses; it’s gone forever and you get one quick squirt of cash. Plant it to vineyard, and you’d get those very big numbers every year, ongoing, ad infinitum. Many ordinary vineyards on lesser land may come and go according to the wine industry’s crazy splurge-and-retreat cycles, but only this intellectually decrepit Labor mob would seriously consider cementing this one over.

DAVID PAXTON IN HIS GATEWAY VINEYARD, THE SOURCE OF MOLLYDOOKER'S $185 PER BOTTLE VELVET GLOVE SHIRAZ ... THE SEAFORD HEIGHTS SITE IS THE HILL BETWEEN HIM AND THE GULF St VINCENT, PATRON OF VITICULTURERS photo KATE ELMES

While the priceless 650 million year-plus siltstones of the Reynella Member and the Wilmington Formation have been almost entirely built over on the northern third of the McLaren Vale Geographical Indicator, the only bit of this geology in the Willunga Embayment is the Gateway Vineyard and Seaford Heights, just across the road. David Paxton has never had a shard of doubt as to its importance and its potential, and had sought fruitlessly to purchase the Seaford Heights land for more super-premium vineyard some years ago.

Another small outcrop of the same geology, just north of the Onkaparinga Gorge between Cox’s Hill Road and States Road, is home to the Ulithorne Vineyard, source of prized fruit for many canny Vales winesmiths, including Rose Kentish, who just a couple of years back won her Bushing Crown with it. The houses are creeping toward those fences, too.

But back to matters of publicity, which the Marquis family is determinedly grim at reaping. After gaining significant coverage through its distribution, they “withdrew” their original press release, and issued another statement requesting that “journalists and other readers should disregard the news release Years of Tears and Sweat and More Than $1 Million Worth of Fine Wine Go Down the Drain, issued 25-Jul-2011 over PR Newswire.”

The news of this turnabout seemed to garner more international press than the first, presumably erroneous one. While that apparent backflip sizzled around the internet and the tittering tippling classes, they were left awaiting yet another release to correct the first: a dramatic pause that the Bard himself would find savoury.

Even London’s pompous Decanter magazine had a huffy hissy on its website, complaining that while “a revised release 'will be issued at a later time' … it has not been possible to contact Mollydooker for more information.”

I scoured the first release for possible legal hitches and insurance problems – the container had been fully insured – and thought I saw a few claims and suggestions there which some lawyers may think to be possibly contentious to one party or another, but surely in a very minor way.

CLICK ON THIS MOLLYDOOKER PROMO IMAGE TO WATCH VID OF THE MARQUIS RESPONSE TO THE GOODWILL THEY'VE HAD SINCE THE VELVET GLOVE INCIDENT

Just fishing, I thought I’d ask the Mollydooker owners which parts of the release were inaccurate. Janet Gawith, Sparky’s Mum, was quick to respond. She said the release I had was in fact the third one, with all the corrections in place.

“Somebody accidentally sent out a draft of the first release”, she advised. “It had the wrong heading; the wrong facts. You’ve got to be very careful with these things, with big insurance claims pending and so forth,” and assured me the release I held was the correct one.

She also thanked me for bothering to check, and said no other journalist had done so.

Surprisingly, Sparky himself then sent me a copy of the erroneous one – the one you wouldn’t want falling into the hands of the press. Again.

“I wasn’t sure if you wanted to see what the differences were from the press release that was the draft and mistakenly put online and the correct one,” he explained. “I found the draft on the Coca-Cola internal web site (that in itself made me laugh – maybe we are competing against Coca-Cola).”

Attached was a link to that initial, presumably erroneous document. It’s fascinating to compare the two.

The headline – “Years of Tears and Sweat, and More Than $1 Million Worth of Fine Wine Go Down the Drain” - had disappeared from the third release. But Mollydooker had already got that tearjerker into circulation in both the first release and their second one, which “withdrew” the first.

How anybody can “withdraw” a press statement which had gone around the world, won the winery a front page in The Advertiser, this state's only metro daily, and even made the internal mailing list of Coca-Cola staffers, is a baffling notion, but there you go.

In the corrected version, the line about the container falling six metres “and doing away with one third of the winemaker’s annual production” was gone. As was the bit about the failure of the forklift’s “security locking device … sending the wine more than 18 feet to the ground.”

Another paragraph down, however, the revised version then re-inserted the line “luckily we still have two-thirds of our production left so we still have plenty to share with our friends.”

So, we’re half way in, and there’s barely a scrap of difference between the withdrawn document and its replacement. But then the revised version adds a plug for “International Mollydooker Day”, when the wine was intended for release in the USA on September 15th.

ANOTHER OF THE PROMO PHOTOGRAPHS MOLLYDOOKER DISTRIBUTED TO THE PRESS AFTER THE VELVET GLOVE INCIDENT

“The Marquises and insurance assessors are now checking each bottle by hand to determine if any of the $1.025 million shipment can be salvaged,” it added, dropping the initial claim that “at least 70 per cent of the cartons have been reported damaged.”

The revised version also includes a new plug for the confounding “Marquis Fruit Weight” index, which is trademarked, and apparently helps determine which parcels of fruit make the Velvet Glove appellation. Then it goes on to add more breathless claims to the wine’s quality, as measured by the equally confounding USA wine press in the form of that dreaded lover of jammy gloop-gloop high alcohol wines, Robert Parker Jr., who has awarded the Marquis tribe “more 94-99 point scored than any other winemakers in the world” and dubbed them “Top Wine Personalities in the World.” The equally adoring Wine Spectator magazine has included four Mollydooker wines in its Top 100, and so on, and so forth. They’re not missing any opportunity to rub in the bling, but nowhere do they advise us that the Gateway Vineyard, the source of the fruit in the dropped bottles, is owned by David Paxton and his partners, and not Mollydooker.

So there you go. Three waves of press attention in place of one, and now I hand them a fourth. At least this should sit in neat counterpoint to the tear-jerking stuff they’ve put all over Youtube and Facebook.

Just between you and me: the Northern Hemisphere’s fascination for late-picked wines of incredibly dense fruit is waning as blogosphere rabble dilutes the opinions of the few US critics mentioned above. On top of that, the Aussie dollar now buys 110 US cents. So if I were Sparky, I’d be happy to see a successful insurance claim deliver the money: it could be safer and quicker than waiting for the USA salesmen to cough up. Sparky’s former USA partner, Dan Phillips, comes to mind. Their bitter court battle was not so long ago; Phillip’s Australian operation is still in receivership.

GLENTHORNE FARM: ONCE AGAIN UNDER HOUSING THREAT photo LEO DAVIS

And, sorry, but one last plug for the viticultural worth of the ground which produced this expensive luxury. There IS one more bit of it left unplanted. That’s the 209 hectare Glenthorne Farm at the top of Taps. This, of course is the farm we taxpayers bought from the CSIRO, and gave to the University of Adelaide for $1, provided it set about using the land for desperately-required viticultural, horticultural, and winemaking research.

As Planning Minister, Deputy-premier Rau is the only one who could release the University from the solemn deed it signed a decade back, promising to carry out such research, and repeatedly forbidding it from any sub-development. As Attorney-general, he is the appropriate Minister to advise the Planning Minister as to the legal hitches which might be encountered in scrapping the deed, which the University desperately wants to do, so it can sub-divide and develop the site. It has never really attempted to keep its pledge and use the site for viticultural, horticultural, and winemaking research.

In his suggested plan for “saving” McLaren Vale from further ghetto spread, the same Minister makes it clear this land should be excluded from the preservation zone, meaning that once again, it, too, would be ripe for another outbreak of dreaded villa rash.

Given their phenomenal international reputation and respect, their skill at the gathering of such fame, and the fact that they can get so much money for a bottle of Gateway which may cost them, say $20 to produce, perhaps the Marquis family might exert some influence? Do something civic-minded?

BOTRYTISED SHIRAZ WITH SEVERELY STRESSED LEAVES IN THE MOLLYDOOKER VINEYARD BESIDE THE WINERY, VINTAGE 2011 ... MOST OF McLAREN VALE HAD PICKED OR GIVEN UP BY THIS STAGE OF VINTAGE, AND YET MOLLYDOOKER WAS STILL WATERING THESE VINES DURING THE SECOND WETTEST VINTAGE IN HISTORY ... CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO LEARN ABOUT MOLLYDOOKER'S TRADEMARKED FRUIT WEIGHT INDEX

And that's not all they've trademarked. There's also the Marquis Vineyard Watering Programme (sic) ™ ...

On April 28th, the Mollydooker Facebook entry said "The Marquis Vineyard Watering Programme™ tells us how much water we need to apply each day in the weeks before harvest to keep the canopy working and to hold the grape sugar levels down. Because we are watering, we can leave the grapes on the vines for an additional 10-14 days to accumulate extra flavour and colour. We don't pick grapes for Mollydooker until the flavour levels reach Awesome, and the juice has a Marquis Fruit Weight™ of at least 60%. It is our guarantee of quality to you. Janet."

On April 16, the site had reported: "We are watering to keep the sugar levels down and the canopy flourishing so that the Mollydooker grapes can continue to bask in the beautiful Indian summer sun. The vines are maturing and sending ripe tannin signals to the grapes, which gain extra flavour and richness every day."

NO FUTURE IN OLD WORLD DISCOUNT BINS

M. Robert Beynat, Big Cheese at Bordeaux's forthcoming Vinexpo



Major Frog Kicks Ocker Teeth
Numbers War Hots Up As Everything Changes

OK. It’s official. By 2012, the United Kingdom will be world’s biggest importer of wine.

While France’s wine consumption tumbles, along with its Cognac and Armagnac guzzle, the French are hitting the Scotch whisky big time, with an eight per cent increase.

Meanwhile, the Japanese, Chinese, and Russians are following the Poms to reverse the Frogs’ trend away from wine. They're into it.

So. What’s new?

This news from Reuters’ reporter Marcel Michelson is the first of a huge wave of numbers and propaganda that we can expect from the powers that be at Vinexpo, the world’s biggest regular plonkfest, held every second year in Bordeaux.

It's on this year in June. We all hope they've got the airconditioning fixed.

Robert Beynat, chief executive and co-founder of the Vinexpo has opened the squirt by prophecying that the world will continue to drink more wine in the next few years.

Champagne and other sparkling wines will increase by twelve per cent, he forecast.

This may explain why the French have recently, suddenly, made the precious appellation of Champagne quite a lot bigger, in spite of global warming simultaeneously forcing Champagne producers to begin eyeing land in the south of England, where it is now warm enough to make wines as good, perhaps better than, Champagne’s. The geology, after all, is identical. The white cliffs of Dover are made from the same precious Kimmeridgian chalks that give Champagne and Chablis its class.

With typical Gallic aplomb, M. Beynat dumped big time on Australia.

"China will enter the top 10 producer countries while Australia is dropping out," he said, citing our water issues, new heat and “export problems due to long distances”.

“Italy, which overtook France as biggest wine consumer country in 2007, and the biggest wine producer in 2008, is set to lose the former crown to the United States in 2012 when Americans will buy some 314 million cases of wines with an 11.9 percent rise between 2008 and 2012 following a 14.8 percent gain over the 2003 to 2007 period.

“Spain will see a further 6 percent decline in 2008 to 2012 to 92.2 million cases and will drop behind Russia that will have a growth of some 25 percent in the 2008 to 2012 period.

“That compares to a baffling rise of 60 percent over 2003-2007 and remains below the 36.6 percent expected growth in China in the period 2008-2012.

This follows recent news that Australia’s exports have suddenly dropped eleven per cent in gross volume, due partly to difficult exchange rates. What made things worse was the value dropped even more – eighteen per cent.

Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation senior analyst Peter Bailey confirmed that the fastest-growing market for Australian wine was China, which spent $74 million on our product in 2008, up 32 per cent from 2007, and making the nation the fifth-largest market in value terms.

Reflecting the growing wealth of Chinese drinkers, sales of bottled wine were up 27 per cent while sales of cheaper bulk wine were down 68 per cent, lifting the average price per litre sold by 58 per cent to $4.92.

But the gains in China were not enough to offset declines in the US, Australia's second-largest wine export customer, where sales were down just 5.6 per cent by volume but plummeted 26.5 per cent by value.

At the same time, the biggest producers report increasing international sales in their more expensive brackets as they inch away from their inexplicable long-term addiction to the discount bins of the UK and USA.

Adding spice to the soup is Fosters’ claims that their up-market sales have improved, while rival Constellation is dumping a huge lump of its low-end spirits manufactory, a move, some suggest, to cash up for the purchase of Fosters’ gutted wine division.

I can't help feeling that these great prophets, bean-counters and money-changers are even more hopeless than the finance gurus which failed to forsee the recent disappearance of all the money in the world.

They obviously have no real handle on issues of climate change, the new heat, the disappearance of the water, or the true issues associated with transport of a totally unneccessary, fashionable commodity which just happens to be a major recreational drug and one of the most scary depressants available.
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COMMENTS:

Wayne Young said... Let's do some math... "In 2012, the US will consume more wine than Italy".

For the sake of comparison let's use some current statistics: Approx consumption: 300 million cases per year. Italian population: 60 million. US population: 300 million. Italian consumption per capita: 5 cases per year. US consumption: 1 case per year.

When we get American consuming HALF what Italians consume, per capita, that will be news.

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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PEAK OZ BODY REEK: WINE BIZ ON THE NOSE

GREENOCK CREEK ROENNFELDT ROAD VINEYARD AT HARVEST: BUGGER-ALL IRRIGATION; NEVER MORE THAN A TONNE PER ACRE; HAND-MADE; ONE OR TWO BARRELS A YEAR; $190 A BOTTLE; HUNDREDS OF PARKER POINTS; ALWAYS SELLS OUT - SUSTAINABLE? INDUSTRIAL? LEO DAVIS PHOTO

Australian Wine Industry Goes Off In Summer Break
Sudden Sicko Revelations On New Year's Eve

by PHILIP WHITE

“Wine industry grapples for new hook” croaked the Sydney Morning Herald on December 31.

Precisely who it was that decided to run this piece of deep misery on the last day of the year, when most readers are too full of the fruits of the wine biz to remember anything, let alone read, remains to be seen.

I’m sure it was dumped, like the unseemly crock it is, by somebody who hoped it would just sort of gradually break down and dribble through the many levels of the business nice and easy over the summer holidays, so’s not to cause too much of a stink all at once.

Reminds me of John writing in The Holy Bible, King James Version, in chapter 3, verse 13 of his gospel: “And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.”

Good enough reason to keep the stink under a tin until dark falls on New Year’s Eve and the whole nation gets maggoted, eh?

Having sat watching this nefarious business for thirty years, I feel vaguely qualified to respond to this article, bit by bit.

The wine industry was exposed to some unpalatable truths this year, as the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation acknowledged that vineyards and winemakers would need to make major changes if they are to survive an ever growing plethora of challenges.

Well, yes. This is the body that has overseen the dumbest broadscale rooting of the Australian countryside, local economies, public health, families, environment and water during the last decades. Its board includes nobody who grows grapes; nobody with actual investment in the wine industry; nobody I would call a particularly talented hands-on winemaker. (There is one winemaking director who is on the board for his marketing skills, according to the original press statements). Two of its small number work for huge transnational companies (Pernod-Ricard; Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessey) which are direct rivals of the Australian wine business. Its members change in about one quarter the time it takes a responsible winemaker to decide upon a flavour, find the land, prepare it, plant it, harvest it, convert it from primary to secondary product in the winery, mature it, package it as something gastronomically attractive, market it, promote it, sell it, distribute it, and see it winning respect.

Major changes indeed.

With the preceding "boom time" party now well and truly over, 2009 could prove to be a major turning point for the consortium as small and large operations alike look for innovative measures to help the Australian wine industry recover from what has been a long-running hangover.

Yes. As I have consistently written for thirty years, there is no point in the driest country on Earth buggering arid land and wasting precious water to make cheap rotgut bladder pack quality wine which is two or three times the strength of your average beer for sale to the world at the price of imported water.

2009 IS the major turning point. Things have already changed, and admitting this on New Year’s Eve will not make the facts go away.

This industry is cactus whether these geniuses look for innovative measures or not.

The confronting reality for Australia's wine industry is actually a cautionary tale for all producing countries, says the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation.

Well, yes. The Australian wine industry should immediately advise the world to drop the Australian winemaking recipe immediately. It is Australia’s duty. Through its great publicly-funded halls of academe, like the University of Adelaide, this industry trained thousands of winemakers and sent them out like apostles around the world to advise our rivals how to do things our way. We never seemed to realise that because they had the equivalent of slave labour, no environmental restrictions, and either plenty of water or plenty of water which could be procured illicitly, we never seemed to realise that these countries would be able to make cheaper wine than Australia could.

So before their environments fail like Australia’s, before their water dries out, before their communities drink themselves to oblivion and ruin, of course we should be out there, telling them to stop.

The University of Adelaide should quickly knock a course together, offering a doctorate in how to undo what we’ve just taught these hapless copyists to do.

The people who have encouraged the Australian wine industry to develop to this sickening delusion should all be on the road, at their own expense, apologising, and helping put things right. In Georgia, Romania, China, India, Argentina, Chile ... wherever it’s necessary.

The corporation's market development manager, Paul Henry, says the industry will in all likelihood face production without profit and diminishing bargaining power in the face of attritional retail dynamics caused by the global financial crisis.

Well, yes, and all the above. Has anybody sat down and considered precisely how much wine the world should be expected to drink? That would a handy number to have before we encounter tricky difficulties like the global financial crisis, which wasn’t really much of a surprise to those of us who live moderately and watch.

Despite the ongoing drought, wine production went up this year, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), but lower domestic sales and a drop in exports led to a surplus in wine stocks.

Yes. But this was no surprise. The whole business was looking forward to a bumper harvest until the Lord smote the grapeyards with withering heat. The heat was the surprise. The export slump was predicted; the increase in yields per acre and total tonnes harvested was exactly what the University of Adelaide and the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation have been struggling for decades to achieve. This oversupply – two billion litres in tank at the moment, and another good vintage looming – is the direct result of everything everyone’s struggled for. Just how this industry could justify the use of the extra water required to achieve these enormous increases should confound and enrage the entire community.

"Global financial crisis aside, Australia has manoeuvred itself into a situation where innovation and efficiency in production has outstripped the sector's own ability to manage that capacity," Mr Henry said.

What did I just say?

Exports of Australian wine fell by nine per cent to 715 million litres and the United Kingdom remained the largest importer of Australian wine, taking 268 million litres valued at $895 million. However, Mr Henry says Australia's competitors should be mindful of being hubris.

I think that should be hubristic.

I’ve only met Paul Henry once, and on that short occasion he impressed me. He seemed to understand that he was on his donkey, riding into a seething Jerusalem. But I got the feeling that the only eternal life he could see was the history he’d leave behind. There are not many successful liquidators remembered down through the years.

"These current market and structural challenges are not exclusive to Australia ... they are common to the development cycle of all wine producing countries," he said.

Well, yes, apart from the fact that this country seems to be withering, bleaching and cracking rather faster than those with snow-peaked mountains providing them with ongoing life.

There are no environmental scientists on the board of the Australian Wine And Brandy Corporation, either.

Remaining optimistic the industry will return to its former days of glory, Mr Henry said the real judgment call should not be based on how Australian viniculturists got themselves into such a difficult supply and demand situation, but rather, how and when the industry will get itself out.

Yes, of course. Savoury though the notion be, there is little point in stringing the whole roadside with crucifixes. But what should happen immediately is the old guard, who got this amazing industry into this decrepitude, should never, ever be given another chance. They should take their money and the remnants of their glossy gastroporn fame, and retire, planting native vegetation as they go. They should have no further influence over our own great public institutions, like the University of Adelaide. They should never be permitted to represent or influence this country anywhere, ever.

Which brings us to the question: is there sufficient hot young blood hiding in the hallways and annexes of the Universities and the great glimmering refineries of this country to come out and lead? Have we trained any? If we did, would we recognise them? Are they brave enough to speak? Do they have the intellectual and moral exactitude to do this awful job?

If we haven’t trained any such leaders, then those in charge should in fact be crucified on the roadsides after all.

"The stated aim of the industry is to identify a credible premium to be paid for Australian wine and to move our production and marketing platform towards a quality vision that celebrates sustainable value above unprofitable volume growth," he says.

Doesn’t that mean make better wine at better prices if indeed the environment permits, the market desires, and government tolerates?

Although at the end of 2007 there was concern there would be a mass exodus from viniculture in Australia, experts now say the removal of several vineyards is necessary if the industry is to remain on a sustainable footing.

Several vineyards? The whole mentality of the current “industry” – and that’s it’s own word – is to continue planting enormous broadacre monocultural grapeyards the like of which continue to be planted, lickety-split, right up the Murray darling Basin into Queensland, and all over the bits of the south-western corner of Western Australia which aren’t already dying under intensive bluegum plantations.

The whole mentality of the current “industry” is to keep the grape prices down by forcing out of business the specialist families who’ve hand-worked environmentally-responsible vineyards with modest expectations through drought, bushfire and flood, for generations.

The Australian wine “industry” is about as smart as the American corn industry, which must over-produce to succeed. There are no fences anymore, no plants, no insects, no shops, no townships, nobody with dirt on their hands. Plenty of petrochemicals; plenty of poison. But no flavour.

Despite earlier gloomy predictions, ABS statistics show the total area of grape vines this year was slightly higher than last year at 166,000 hectares and, with production up, yield rose from 9.3 to 11.8 tonnes per hectare.

See? From whence came that water? Eh?

Winemakers Federation of Australia chief executive Stephen Strachan says it is because of the success of the industry in recent years that so many challenges have arisen.

Exactly. We’re so goddam clever – remember hubris? – that we fucked it completely. Greed comes into mind, too.

"We saw a lot of people come into the industry expecting the phenomenal growth to continue and we've got a job to do to try to keep that market share, rather than continue to grow," he says. "Australia, I think, is now the fourth largest wine producer in the world."

There’s a lot of stuff in that par.

The likes of Strachan talked the business up for years, encouraging increased investment. Every extra tonne of grapes grown in Australia sees the Wine And Brandy Corporation budget swell. The money comes from a levy on tonnes harvested.

Which has nothing to do with market share. Share of what? The biggest wine oversupply in history? The biggest recreational drug racket fiasco ever? Share of what?

The ABS says the total grape crush for the 2007-08 vintage came in at 1.8 million tonnes, up by about 30 per cent on last year, and produced 1.2 billion litres of wine.

Giving us two billion litres of very ordinary plonk to sell into a world market that’s already overflowing.

Australia's largest winemakers accounted for 71 per cent of the total crush, while the smaller winemakers averaged 97 tonnes each. Mr Strachan said although the drought continued to ravage the country, the high quality and size of the 2008 vintage surprised a lot of people.

And delighted those big four companies with the 71 per cent, as their costs were delightfully low. Two of those four, half, of course, are not Australian companies, and you needn’t be a cynic to realise Foster’s won’t be Australian for very much longer.

"It was a very challenging vintage because of the size of it and if we have another vintage of that magnitude, then there is a fairly high likelihood that a significant amount of fruit won't be processed," he said. "The bottom line is there needs to be an adjustment downwards in terms of our vineyard capacity in Australia and that will probably happen at a greater pace now because grape prices are going to be very low this year. From an industry perspective we need to see some vineyards removed so we get back on to more stable footing in terms of sustainability."

Okay, Mr. Strachan, we get your drift. We need to lose a quarter of our vineyards. If you like, I can make available thirty years of tasting notes, with say, two to six thousand wines assessed each year. Let’s say we sort them in ascending order of scores, and tell the producers of the bottom quarter that they obviously don’t know what they’re doing and should simply eff off.

That would provide this industry with its biggest ever international marketing message.

If we also locked in a ratio of water used per dollars profit per tonne of grapes, and native vegetation planted to counterbalance the environmental damage inevitably incurred, that would be another incredible marketing message that would be of enormous assistance in notifying the world that we’ve been leading them in the wrong direction, too.

In fact, their drinkers might even forgive us. People might begin to trust us again.

Mr Henry agrees there is an urgent need for rationalisation and downsizing required within the industry. "But there was little consensus about where and who that corrective measure would come from," he said.

Try my suggestion above, Paul.

And while some might expect a limited amount of water to restrict the number of hectares covered in vines, the corporation reports that the physical availability of water is not likely to be a serious constraint on the size of the 2009 harvest. The ABS says nearly all vineyards in Australia were forced to irrigate this season, bringing the average water consumption to 3.2 megalitres per hectare, with drip and micro spray the most common forms of watering.

So?

"About 65 per cent of all wine grapes are grown in South Australia's Murray Darling Basin and even if drought breaks, the issue is not so much how much rain we have but more so how much irrigation there is," Mr Strachan said. "The river is going to take a number of years to fill up after the drought breaks, so the water outlook is not terribly promising."

Does that mean growers should steal water? How does he know this is a drought and that it will break?

He said federal reform was needed in regards to water trading allowed between irrigators and universal allocations.

Oh. Gotcha. Put him in charge of the River.

Wine consumers are proving to be "unforgivingly Darwinian", says the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation. The peak industry body says the market place is showing "little or no interest in any attribute other than volume at low cost".

"The most likely effect of the credit crisis is more conservative spending by consumers and gravitation to lower price points," the corporation's information and analysis manager, Lawrie Stanford said. And Mr Strachan agrees.

"We've got a global financial crisis that's leading to either a reduction in demand or consumers trading down to lower priced wines," Mr Strachan said.

Right. Let me think aloud. Forget most of our export. It’s neither profitable nor sustainable. Half the wine Australia drinks is in bladder packs, right? Mothers’ little helper. The silver pillow; the chrome handbag. Then we have, say, Greenock Creek, or Wendouree, which never makes more than fifty tonnes and never sells a bottle below, say $50.

The chrome is begat by chrome. The glittering refineries; the monoculture; the efficiency; the reliability; the science; the University of Adelaide; the salination; the alcoholism; the health costs; the full jails across the outback.

Wendouree is begat by Wendouree: by its hard dirt; its meagre climate; its humble expectations; its honesty with its customers; the way it decided against releasing any wine this year because it wasn’t good enough.

What do these businesses have in common?

Nothing.

So why are they lumped into one big cuddly “wine industry”?

Because the refineries need some modest honesty to ride upon, that’s why. Some quality, some reality, some gastronomic achievement. Some nuts and berries.

With domestic sales dropping by five per cent, Mr Strachan predicted the figure would continue to grow, particularly if the government introduced a tax on all alcoholic beverages in the new year.

I think he means “continue to fall”.

And the tax issue? Easy. Tax all alcoholic beverages on the amount of alcohol they contain.

Combine the resultant effect with that – cheaper, stronger, higher-volume packs will increase in price; winemakers will be encouraged to make wines of lower alcohol – with the results of my culling process above, and you have a happy, sensible, profitable, sustainable business.

Currently undertaking a review of Australia's tax system, and having already introduced a tax on pre-mixed alcoholic drinks, the government says "it is sometimes possible to improve overall welfare by taxing the consumption of particular commodities that cause social harm".

If government didn’t find these geniuses so easy to shove around then the twisted and arcane tax system the industry has already earned itself would never have been imposed in the first place.

As for pre-mixed alcoholic drinks? All the biggest wine companies have them. The wine industry invented them. In the ’sixties and ’seventies they were called Vin Spa or Pineapple Pearl, in the eighties they were West Coast Cooler and the like. Orlando (Pernod-Ricard) even had one called “e”, obviously hoping that a fair few bit of e would be dropped by the kiddies. The wine industry has always been in the business of selling alcohol any way it can. That is its nature.

But Mr Strachan says he is yet to see evidence that wine plays a big part in Australia's problem with alcohol abuse.

Then Mr. Strachan has never stood in the bed of the Todd River with his eyes open. What began with the gun is being finished by complacency.

With the government having signed an agreement with the European Union last week conceding the use of region-specific names such as champagne, Mr Strachan said Australian consumers might also steer away from their favourite drop for a short period once it was given a new classification.

Boo hoo. No more passing off.

He said wine lovers might be frustrated initially due to products formerly known as champagne, port, sherry and tokay being more difficult to locate on bottle shop shelves.

"It's just more a matter of working through a process where people become aware of a different set of descriptors," he said.

Mr Strachan said the new deal conceding the use of European names would mean less constraints on the way wine was made in Australia, allowing it to be more easily exported.

A different set of descriptors? Has Mr. Strachan ever read the claptrap, codswallop and balderdash that’s written on Australian wine bottles?

Mr Strachan said he expected large scale exporters would survive the economic downturn as a result of the deal, but that he was worried how the smaller-scale premium vineyards would fare.

"Consumers tend to trade down in a time of uncertainty, so they still continue to consume as much wine, but they tend to trade down, so those who are selling premium products are going to find the going pretty tough until we work through all the economic uncertainty."

This suits perfectly the perpetrators of the whole racket, right from the beginning. Trade down, and you support the refineries that have buggered the Murray and the Todd, and their inhabitants, you support the mentality of continual oversupply regardless of its effects, and you will need desperately to maintain status quo, with its morality, its experienced players, and its utter, overwhelming destruction.
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GRUNTY PARKERILLAS CRASH WITH DETROIT

Roberto at Wine Expo more gallons per smile

No Fish Eye Merlot At Wine Expo

By PHILIP WHITE – a version of this story appeared in The Independent Weekly 05 DEC 08

Australia’s invasion of the USA wine gullet was always Quixotic as much as chaotic. Other than the $1000 per bottle gobstoppers like those wine shipper Dan Phillips delivers to Robert Parker Jr., who loves them, the bulk of our ordnance has always been industrial plonk lobbing at the price of bottled Italian water. I’ve left a lot of good work out, but you get my drift.

When capitalism fell over the other day, the Australian blokes responsible for both horns of this wine dilemma, and their bank managers, went out and got cactus, were awful to their wives, and contemplated suicide. The smarter ones then took a tablet, begged their wives for forgiveness, hired a lawyer, and sued their American distributors for payment.

“Expensive Wines Rot On LA Shelves”, Jerry Hirsch trumpeted in the LA Times. “Sales of high-end wine are plummeting ... the Wall Street meltdown is rippling across the alluvial fields of Napa Valley to the chalky limestone vineyards of Champagne in France...”

Note: Jerry has to explain that Champagne’s in France. Either the location of Australia is obviously too difficult to explain (so we missed out), we just don’t count, or American distributors owe Australian winemakers so much money they’ve rubbed us off the map.

Ridiculously expensive wines – even Bob Parker’s personal favourites - are certainly taking the biggest hit. Mouton-Rothschild ’05 has slumped 50% to $549 per bottle in a few months.

“People are still drinking wine”, Jerry continued. “They are just spending less”. He listed a few examples of people who have cut their wine budgets from $20-$30 bottles to $10 jobs, and quoted the owner of a posh wine shop who went to a the supermarket and bought a big swag of commercial cheapies from which he selected two dozen to “offer in the store as ‘recession busters’ starting from $5.99 for a Fish Eye Merlot ... he then demanded a price break from his distributors so that he could match supermarket prices and still make a profit”.

Jerry quoted another favourite retailer whose sales “were off 28% in October compared with a year ago. November sales are running 16% below last year's figures, even after factoring in a bump-up around the presidential election earlier this month ...”

Wondering about all this, I called my maestro, Roberto, Wine Director at Wine Expo in Santa Monica, who was introduced to me by his former neighbour, Dan Phillips. (No expensive gobstoppers or River cheapos at Wine Expo, though. Roberto won’t stock them.) The LA Times generally raves about him and his store, which you should visit on www.wineexpo.com.

”They interviewed me for that story but I guess I was not telling the story they wanted to write this time”, he said. “We are selling MORE bottles to MORE people but at lower price points.

“Those in the Carriage Trade are getting to eat the cake they baked themselves and finding it is frosted with rat poison”, Roberto said.

“Those of us that have ALWAYS been about alternatives and value for money, travel the world and buy direct, are down somewhat, but not out by a long shot. We want you to be able to buy twice as much wine but spend half as much money with NO compromise in quality and we believe this is not only possible but that it is a lot more fun as well!

“Curiously, with all that ranting about Champagne being dead, we still sell boatloads of high quality farmer fizz in the $40-60 range”, he added.

Australia would have done better selling water to America.

Just one little desal plant, and we could tip the whole of the Gulf St Vincent into California. For a start, they’re short of fresh water. Then, Vince is the patron of schoolgirls as well as viticulturers, and you don’t strike too many California schoolgirls without their bottle of designer water. Call it Great Southern Ocean water. Great Australian Bight Water. Desert Water. Clean Water. Cool Water. Whalesbreath. Shark Bay. To keep ’em thirsty, we could also sell ’em the designer salt we took out of the water. A marketer’s dream!

All the money we wasted on the wine industry – pipelines, perma pine, wire, petrochemicals and refineries - could have gone into maintaining the River.

But we buggered the River by tipping it on the desert sugar quarries we call River vineyards, added some ground-up American oak, some cream of tartar and concentrate, dressed it up in fake aboriginal art, called it something really bloody stupid, and flogged it to America at the smallest margin possible. Brilliant.

There’s a serious challenge here. If our lads can’t tip our bursting wine lake into the USA before the Aussie dollar returns to equity, then they might as well regroup now for the second mighty wave when we flog America our water, unadulterated. I’ll bet Dan Phillips could sell water at $1000 a bottle.

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