DAMAGE MANAGEMENT IN RECORD TIMES

BUSHFIRE NEAR MELBOURNE, VICTORIA, SATURDAY 7th FEBRUARY, 2009

Where There's Smoke There's Fire Call The Messenger A Liar 09 "Excellent Year ... Excellent Wine"
by PHILIP WHITE

"Elizabeth and Dudley themselves were under no illusion as to the unpleasant construction that was being put on the tragedy." - Anne Somerset, Elizabeth I


On January 28th last year, DRINKSTER began reporting the extreme weather conditions which threatened vintage right across south-eastern Australia. “Another torrid vintage hits”, was the first headline. “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”.

From that day on, I published honest, day-to-day reports and opinions of the havoc Global Warming, a freak summer, the ongoing drought, whatever, was delivering to the vignoble. As the heatwave built and bullied and smashed all records, then moved across the border to blitz Victoria, I attempted to project to the international reader just a hint of that violently confronting horror.

It’s sobering reading; so blank and frank it now seems to have been written by someone else. The shock and depression triggered by the mass death and general destruction seem to have been erased from the Australian psyche as its collective brain defragged and scandisced itself back into some sort of basic operating form. We all knew people whose crops were damaged or ruined. We all knew folks in the bushfires: many had friends and lovers who perished. I was affected so severely I could barely write about wine for months. It’s called Post-traumatic Shock Disorder. It’s a very confronting thing to realise your planet is bucking you off.

So I coughed a whole mouthful of Inkwell Shiraz into my keyboard last night when I discovered that McLaren Vale, the district I love enough to make my home, now has its very own personal weatherman: it’s my mate Dudley Brown.

Dudley, an upstate New Yorker from the same school as the Sands brothers, the bosses of the beleaguered Constellation, is a fairly recent blow-in, like me, but he’s the chairman of a body called McLaren Vale Grape Wine and Tourism, which is supposed to hold this bounteous Vale together, and ensure its image is sparkling clean. (“Try marketing anything via an acronym like MLVGWATS”, the writer’s doppleganger whispers.)

Upon his election, Dudley appointed a mate from his canasta club, Elizabeth Tasker, to be his propaganda manager and office lass while he got on hand-weeding his tiny Inkwell vineyard and worked out how to scare all the lazy courtiers clear outa the palace.

DUDLEY BROWN

Not yet famous for holding his counsel when confronted by humans who don’t measure up to his exacting demands, Dudley has had Elizabeth send a royal-ish decree to his three hundred constituents, commanding them to cease talking to people like me about things like weather. The sarcastic, the cynical, and the conspiracy theorist could call this another example of the panic rife in the skrillion management councils of the buggered Aussie wine biz, but it’s better presented as an example of ordinary hubristic blundering and normal provincial naiveté.

However, the matter deserves examination. Particularly as the whole wine business hunkers down to stare another scary summer in the eye. This vintage, South Australian records began exploding in the spring, when November, the hottest ever recorded, gave us daily maximum temperatures roughly 10 C (18F) above average, and eight consecutive days above 35C (95F), the hottest November sesh since records began in 1887. This seriously damaged the McLaren Vale grenache crop in the hotter terrains. Those in the cooler spots which flowered later, did rather well.

TYPICAL HEATWAVE-EFFECTED SHIRAZ, MCLAREN VALE, 9th FEBRUARY 2009

Senior climatologist at the Bureau of Meterology, David Jones, says each decade since the 1940s has been warmer than the previous one, and warns that this year is set to be even hotter, with temperatures likely to be between 0.5 and 1 degree above average.

"There's no doubt about global warming: the planet's been warming now for most of the last century," he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “Global warming is clearly continuing. We're in the latter stages of an El Nino event in the Pacific Ocean and what that means for Australian and global temperatures is that 2010 is likely to be another very warm year - perhaps even the warmest on record."

WILTING GRENACHE, MCLAREN VALE, 2 FEBRUARY 2009

That digested, we should get back to our friends at the MLVGWAT.

“Dear Members,” Dudley says (this Virgo admits to correcting petty errors of grammar, punctuation and spelling), “We have begun to receive media enquiries about the effect of the warm weather on the grape crop in McLaren Vale. As you well know, heat at this time of the year is not a major concern provided adequate irrigation is available.

“As most of you will well remember, we received a great deal of negative publicity during last vintage's heat wave as a result of a few poorly chosen comments made by both winemakers and growers. The effect of these comments was to attract enormous follow-on media coverage that badly affected many growers’ ability to sell their fruit. Moreover, this publicity cast an unfair aspersion on the overall quality of the vintage in McLaren Vale. For many growers in later ripening areas and with later ripening crops, 2009 was an excellent year and excellent wine was made from them. This sort of publicity results in damage to the McLaren Vale brand for all of us - growers and winemakers alike - both now and into the future.

“From hard experience, we know that the sort of stories that result from these sorts of enquiries only get used if there is something negative to report. No matter how well-intentioned members’ comments are, they will only result in unflattering publicity for you, your brand, your crop, your neighbour and the region as a whole.

“Given this and the economic uncertainty in the grape and wine industry, we are strongly requesting that all media enquiries received by all members be re-directed to McLaren Vale Grape Wine and Tourism at 8323 8999 and that no comment be made about anything, no matter how brief or flippant.

“Your cooperation in this is essential if we are to effectively provide the service that all members financially contribute to - marketing Brand McLaren Vale.

“Finally, please make a point of mentioning this request to others in your business.

“Sincerely, Dudley Brown, Chairman, McLaren Vale Grape Wine and Tourism.”

DRINKSTER sincerely thanks those who realise that the wine critic is indeed one of the "others in your business", and I'm grateful to those who've obeyed their chairman's orders well enough to immediately mention his request. Copies of his e-mail have even come in from rival regions, who can't believe the scale of the matter. I shall thankfully consider the document sighted, and carry on.

But next time there’s a bushfire, or a phylloxera scare, a planning threat to this bonnie vignoble, politicians to be introduced or dealt with, or another record-breaking example of this thing the green pessimists seem to be calling Global Warming, I’ll look forward to phoning Elizabeth to tell me whether her Dudley thinks it’s really happening.

McLaren Vale is one of the best vignobles on Earth. It deserves better PR than this.

STUNNING McLAREN VALE ON A NORMAL DAY: DOUG GOVAN'S RUDDERLESS VINEYARD BESIDE HIS FAMOUS VICTORY HOTEL - MILTON WORDLEY PHOTO

Unlocking The Rocks

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CONTRIBUTION TO THE 2008 GREENOCK CREEK VINEYARDS AND CELLARS NEWSLETTER

by PHILIP WHITE – September 2008

Time for some rough science. While global warming is such a hot topic cough cough it seemed perfectly appropriate to take a little geology lesson: geology shows we’ve had global warming before. So, like, how bad can things get?

Before you check out Snowball Earth on Wikipedia, let me quote a report of Hoffman, Kaufman, Halverson and Schrag, suggesting one of the things that happened at the bottom of the Neoproterozoic groups which underly Greenock.

“… biological productivity in the surface ocean collapsed for millions of years. This collapse can be explained by a global glaciation (that is, a snowball Earth), which ended abruptly when subaerial volcanic outgassing raised atmospheric carbon dioxide to about 350 times the modern level….resulting in a warming of the snowball Earth to extreme greenhouse conditions. The transfer of atmospheric carbon dioxide to the ocean would result in the rapid precipitation of calcium carbonate in warm surface waters, producing the cap carbonate rocks observed globally.”

I’m sure they make a big difference, but there were no Hummers in those days.

It was also high time the Barossa seriously compared local wines according to their geological sites. But fearing that they may end up with a geology somehow less desirable than others, some vignerons have opposed such an approach for decades. Their excuse? They say they don’t want an appellation imposed like those of France. My response? It’s not a man-made imposition. It’s in the ground beneath you. It was there first.

So a highlight of my thirty years of wine writing finally exploded like a firework, when, in June, I was invited to assist the Barossa winemakers assemble a blind tasting of 52 unfinished 2008 shiraz wines from across the breadth and length of the Valley, from Lyndoch to Kalimna. These were tasted in brackets roughly according to their geological sources, as set out in The Geology of the Barossa Valley, a brochure and map by revered government geologist, W. A. Fairburn. This work, which has the authority of having been gnawed over by the author's scientific peers, is available from Primary Industry and Resources SA. We also had input from the contrary geologist-turned tea-trader turned wine-merchant turned wine-blogger David Farmer, who is writing a book on Barossa geology, and who disagrees with some of Fairburn's mapping.

The tasting was astonishing, while predictable enough. Neighbouring vineyards in each precinct offered flavours and aromas in common, and these characteristics changed from precinct to precinct. This pioneering tasting, conducted with thirty wine writers from around the world, will no doubt be the first of many such exercises, and marks the beginning of a whole new database of gastro-geology.

The base rocks around Seppeltsfield, the Greenock Creek homestead, and Roennfeldt Road are all from that Neoproterozoic, the geological era in which multi-cellular life first appeared. This era stretches from about 550 million years ago to 1.2 billion years. Just for reference, the Universe seems about 13 - 15 billion years old; Earth about 4.5 billion. While these old rocks are generally below the topsoil, they do extrude, and have of course influenced and added to the formation of much of that soil, which very directly influences the flavours of the grape.

But it’s those base rocks that really interest me, particularly when I read back labels and brochures claiming “our vines are grown in some of the oldest soils on Earth”. Most of the Barossa geology formed in the Tertiary and Quaternary, the last 50 million years; its soils are only tens of thousands of years old: most of them are such recent alluviums they’re barely soils at all. “To the geologist, soil is the dandruff of the Earth”, my friend Wolfgang Preiss, Chief Geologist of the Geological Survey in PIRSA, sagely uttered on a recent field trip.

The Greenock Creek vineyards are on four quite distinct formations. The creeklines, both at the homestead and Roennfeldt’s, are very recent alluviums, just tens of thousands of years old. The cabernet, the Creek Block shiraz, and most of the Apricot Block are in such alluviums. These deposits fill the creeklines between the sharply-dipping older strata which protrude in the ridges.

These include the blue-grey dolomitic siltstones - Willunga slate, for example - of the Tapley Hill Formation, deposited as sediments in still deep lakes that once covered the area about 750 million years ago. The Seven Acre and part of the home blocks are in this formation.

Below that lies the Yudnamutana Subgroup. This dark mix of siltstone-derived soil with blotches of bright quartzite and pebbly dolomite is up to 800 million years of age. These layers reappear in Clare and the Adnyamathanha country of the North Flinders. They are pocked with dropstones, which were deposited by floating glacial ice floes. These rocks were one of the fascinations of the great geologist and explorer, Sir Douglas Mawson. Alice’s and part of the Apricot Block are in Yudnamutana.

The Hopeless Hill, on Roennfeldt’s, is on the border of the Yudnamutana and the underlying Burra Group, where we get to really ancient glittery micaceous schists, metasiltstones, calcsilicates and quartzites. These are as old as it gets in the Barossa. The Roennfeldt shiraz, cabernet and the Cornerstone Grenache are in Upper Burra.

In geology, there are many arguments. But having finally got this sorted better than ever before, I’ll never approach Greenock Creek wines in the same way. The distinguishing characters of each vineyard already make much more sense, and the differences between the Greenock Creek/Marananga/Seppeltsfield/Roennfeldt vineyards and the much younger formations in the rest of the Valley become even more meaningful.

So that’s the ancient history. Contemporary history includes the salination, through introduced irrigation water, of the young creekline sediments and clays. And, of course, it includes current weather and climate. People are finally beginning to understand my salination theories. Now, the pace at which the climate is changing must force closer investigation, much quicker than anybody has imagined necessary. If, in a couple of decades, man can change the soil sufficiently to kill a vineyard, like the poor old Creek Block, never irrigated, but dying through salination from upstream irrigators, we can surely bugger up our air.

Or maybe old Mother Earth will just carry on doing what she did before. Now and again, as geology shows, something makes her lose her cool.

PS.

Just to put all this perspective, Don Francis, professor of geology at McGill University in Montreal, has since reported in Science journal that his team has found a sample of Nuvvuagittuq greenstone on Hudson Bay that they believe is 250 million years older than any other rocks known.

"The rocks contain a very special chemical signature - one that can only be found in rocks which are very, very old," he said. "Originally, we thought they were maybe 3.8 billion years old. Now we have pushed the Earth's crust back by hundreds of millions of years. That's why everyone is so excited."

Before this study, the oldest whole rocks were from a 4.03 billion-year-old body known as the Acasta Gneiss, in Canada's Northwest Territories, and the oldest Australia had to offer were 4.36 billion years old mineral grains called zircons from Western Australia.

The greenstone contains fine ribbon-like bands of alternating magnetite and quartz, typical of rock precipitated in deep sea hydrothermal vents - which have been touted as potential habitats for early life on Earth.

"These ribbons could imply that 4.3 billion years ago, Earth had an ocean, with hydrothermal circulation," said Francis. "Now, some people believe that to make precipitation work, you also need bacteria. If that were true, then this would be the oldest evidence of life. But if I were to say that, people would yell and scream and say that there is no hard evidence."

(This additional information was taken from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7639024.stm )

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