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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Limestone Is Not A Friggin' Mineral See?

CLICK ON MILTON WORDLEY'S PHOTOGRAPH TO VISIT HIS GALLERY - COONAWARRA LIMESTONE: NOT A MINERAL

by PHILIP WHITE – this was published in The Independent Weekly 10 October 08

Geology students lick rocks to help identify them.

This takes a lot of education and practise.

But although they’re implicitly involved in the extraction of flavour from the air and the ground, winemakers never taste their dirt, perhaps because they tend to pump it full of poison. So how come, suddenly, they’re all boasting about “mineral”, “minerally” and “minerality”? Out of the blue, “mineral” makes ordinary wines more glamorous and alluring. My desk is covered with press releases boasting of wines with “minerality”. All my colleagues in the wine writing racket see it in their favourites. Suddenly it’s on more back labels than, say “fruit-driven”, or “goes with most foods”, or, the even more handy “goes with all foods”.

What is a mineral?

My basic geological primer, Whitten and Brooks, says mineral is “a structurally homogenous solid of definite chemical composition, formed by the inorganic processes of nature”. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary On Historical Principles is a little less rigid. It first permits any substance which is obtained by mining. Mine-eral, see? So. Uranium? Salt? Arsenic? Coal? Peat? Then it tightens up, and suggests “the ore of a metal ... any natural substance which is neither animal not vegetable... a mineral medicine or poison”. The current online Oxford says “a solid inorganic substance of natural occurrence, such as copper and silicon ... an inorganic substance needed by the human body for good health, such as calcium and iron ... a substance obtained by mining ... fizzy soft drinks”.

“The only allowable exception to the rule that a mineral must be solid is native mercury (quicksilver), which is a liquid”, Whitten and Brooks say, and “this definition includes ice as a mineral, but excludes coal, natural oil, and gas”.

So why, when a wine tastes of organic phosphate, chalk or limestone (mainly from ground, one would hope, packed with marine skeletal remains), or lignin, peat or coal dust (perhaps from burnt oak if not from freaky soil made from decayed vegetation), why would you say it was minerally?

Chlorite is mineral. Diamond, gold, flourite and graphite. Gypsum, haematite and opal: all minerals. Silver, sulphur and talc. At least sulphur’s in there, which is probably what most of these “minerally” characters are, particularly under the sanitary screwcap, which seals and preserves sulphur as much as primary fruit.

Which is not much help to the new drinker.

Such words come and go. They fester at wine shows, where you invariably have a Young Turk who likes to show off by claiming certain wines have a character they think they can detect. The more impressionable judges start to look for this character in their own vast suites of glasses, and eventually the word is all over the show. If the word is derogatory, the character will suddenly seem to be in nearly all the wines which don’t win anything shiny. If it’s seen as an attractive character, it’ll suddenly seem to be in all the favourites.

Invariably, there’ll be wine writers there to launch the new term in the media, and soon we have a rash. These words emerge, fester and fade as another one moves in. It’s fashion. Mercaptan was THE word in the late ’eighties. Wikipedia says this is “a colorless gas with a smell like rotten cabbage ... a natural substance found in the blood, brain, and other animal as well as plant tissues ... disposed of through animal faeces ... It is one of the main chemicals responsible for bad breath and the smell of flatus”. I never met a judge who knew that. And while I’ve smelt it in their perfidious miasmas, I haven’t heard a wino actually utter “mercaptan” for years.

At a tasting in Walkerville in 1982, I called a wine “dusty”, because it smelled like an Australian paddock in the summer. My colleagues thought I meant sawdust, and before long “dusty” was being applied to wines with overt sawdust characters.

Those of us in the business of floating these new terms win shiny approvals of our own when such terms catch on. The greatest trophy is to see the chemical industry produce an essence named after your word. I’m sure I was the first person to use the word “fluffy” in regard to the way certain wines felt in the mouth. Soon you could ring up your essence dealer and order a product called Fluffy Tannin. I have yet to see the telltale forty-four of “MINERAL”, but it can’t be far off.

The good folk at the Australian National Dictionary Centre are halfway though the next edition of the Australian Oxford, and they’ve already done M. It’s highly unlikely that the wine business will nail the meaning in time for the next one after that, so maybe the lexicographers should wait ’til the essence manufacturers get their product out, give them a call, find out what’s in it, then tell us what we mean.

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Woe, horror and rage

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

Where once ran water, only woe, horror and rage now flood down the Murray. Suddenly, furious blockers picket our parliament like only the violent French would. Desperate to recall what it was like to manage a winery in hard times, the transnational grape refineries struggle to juggle their diminishing returns. Big family wineries are forced to pay their suppliers on delivery. Overhead, sprinklers squirt mindlessly.

“The wine industry will never be the same”, Peter Dawson, Hardy’s senior vice-president of operations, murmured at a party at Paxton’s in March.

It’s a lot worse now. Last week Dawson announced his company’s retreat from its refinery on the River in Victoria, to regroup this side of the border at its Berri Estates, where fifty new jobs might be created.

Never pleased with my thirty years of preaching that Murray Valley viticulture could not be sustained as it was, and that smart wineries should be concentrating their efforts on making better wines for more profit with less environmental and social destruction, Dawson finally announced that his company needed to shift its focus to more profitable wines. But he said “higher-priced”, not “higher quality”.

“The wine industry is not globally competitive at lower price points”, he said. “We should be striving to get all of our Australian wine into higher-priced bottled products.”

Hardy’s have always been prickly at my Banrock Station scepticism. While they market their award-winning property as an environmental triumph, one might ask whether it’s a broadacre big-cropping industrial grapeyard where slightly salty River water is pumped onto an ancient dried-out seabed full of much stronger salt. The little bags of sugar that grow are processed and refined to become what I imagine the senior vice-president of operations would call lower-priced softpack products, until they put it all in bottles.

Use some profit to take the sheep off an old station, and reeds and redgums return to the riverbank. An environmental triumph. Let a swamp develop, call it a wetlands. Another triumph. Then empty the wetlands to put more water in the River, when it gets really crook. Another triumph. 100,000 admiring visitors a year walk the trails, admiring the rejuvenated scrub and riverfront, but the reality of the vineyard is never made quite so clear.

Last week also saw the release of another of the endless scientific reports on the River. This finally put a dollar value on the natural filtration effected by one hectare of working wetland – a higher value than one hectare of productive irrigated land. That is a triumph.

The River has always washed itself. But because there’s been so much poison to be filtered and broken down by the reeds and the weeds and sedge, wetlands which are now being deliberately dried out may never recover. While the dirty water kept them alive, the concentrates now drying in their crusty beds may be too harsh for regrowth.

The whisky bottle was beginning its conciliatory wink when, miraculously, a bottle of O’Donohoe’s Find Tom’s Drop Mourvèdre Shiraz arrived. On its label is an 1896 photograph of the O’Donohoe Brothers’ Hillen Grove Condenser. Michael O’Donohoe’s grandfather, Tom, and his six brothers lobbed on the Kalgoorlie goldfields from County Cork. Traditionally, Irishmen knew how to turn cloudy weak ale into clear powerful poteen in a copper pot still. But O’Donohoes built a desalination business by distilling salty bore water. During the day, anyway. Scouring their photograph, I suspect tradition may have returned at night. Nice marketing.

The vineyard responsible for Tom’s Drop is an environmental triumph. Not only do they need less water, but Michael and Jan are probably cleaning river water by running it through their organic vine garden. “The vineyard is part of a polyculture of trees, vines, plants and creatures” their back label explains. “We endeavour to mimic nature, maintain diversity, and focus on the relationship between soils, plants, and animals.” The living soil below their organic mulch has not been disturbed by machinery for 26 years. They won their Level A Organic certificate in 1990. The crop is always below two tonnes per acre.

And where is this? At Berri. So there’s three examples of nice marketing. Which has the truest ring?

One acre of dirt can never produce more than one acre of flavour. You can squirt on plenty of water and spread your acre of flavour over twenty tonnes of sultana, or chardonnay, seasoned with pesticide, fungicide, and herbicide. Or kill the hose and the poisons, get that mulch going, and squeeze your acre of flavour into a tonne or two of living essence like Tom’s Drop. And guess what happens? You get better wine. For which people are prepared to pay more, because they’re not stupid.