PATRITTI SWAPS PIEDMONTS: ITALY TO S.A.

GIOVANNI PATRITTI, LEFT: A VERY NEW AUSTRALIAN, SELLING ICE CREAM BY THE ADELAIDE BOTANIC GARDENS GATES IN THE LATE TWENTIES.

The Patrittis Throw A Top Party
Great New Tasting & Sales Suite
At Aussie's Oldest Italian Winery
by PHILIP WHITE

There was a special party in an ordinary little back street in Dover Gardens, Adelaide. The Patritti family had used some of the beautiful Jarrah hardwood from their old wine vats to make a stylish new sales and tasting suite at their suburban winery that hardly anybody knows about. Now it was complete they thought they’d have a bit of a knees-up with politicans and the mayor and their business colleagues, customers, and drinking mates.

A CELEBRATION AT THE SAME WINERY IN EARLIER YEARS: ITALIAN DANCE PARTY IN THE FIFTIES. CHECK THE DUDE IN THE SHADES AND PALE SUIT SECOND FROM RIGHT OGLING THE PRETTY GIRL'S DERRIEIRE ...

I stood outside the marquee to the side, brooding over a ravishing Patritti Barossa Saperavi 2009 ($14; 93+++ points), watching Ines Patritti take the microphone to welcome us. She was shy, and she was obviously moved, and her story was even more moving.

“My Father, Giovanni Patritti, arrived in Adelaide in 1925 at the age of 25 from Piedmont, Northern Italy,” Ines said with humble dignity. There were some sniffles, the big inhalation, recomposure, and a fresh start. You knew that what she was about to say would somehow explain how that mighty winery behind her grew there, and it was obvious she’d grown with it, and in it, that they were part of each other..

“We have no idea how he managed with no English and a community with few native countrymen. However, manage he did – initially doing odd jobs, even selling ice cream as you can see from the old photo taken in front of the gate at the Adelaide Botanic Gardens.

“He came to live in the Marion district around 1926. Making wine was second nature and through the production of wine for his own consumption came a business enterprise. As more Italians arrived in steady numbers, the demand for Italian style red also increased and the business began to flourish.”

Some big people in suits, and a lot of quite ordinary folk, stood in dead silence as they absorbed the weight of the Patritti story. Ines’s description of those long decades of sweat and toil emerged with its own patina in place. Her words had the same beige tint as the old family photos flickering on the screen.

Giovanni (right) leased some land to start with, and gradually purchased more, some of which was planted to old bush vines, as was much of the Adelaide Hills piedmont. There were vineyards from Skye right along the slope to Marion and hooking back north to Glenelg: very fine vineyards which were gradually devoured by mindless villa rash.

I have an etching from the late 1800s, made from somewhere around Skye, looking south across the Grange Hermitage and Romalo, down along that rich piedmont slope. Adelaide is a distant smoky village; the great swathe of vines fades gradually into the Gulf St Vincent, patron of vine growers, thirty kilometers away.

Some of the most recent vineyards to go, those last few hectares the Patrittis owned, were compulsorily acquired by the state government to build a school. The family decided to stay put with the winery, nevertheless, as modern transport made it very easy to truck grapes from over Flagstaff Hill around Morphett and McLaren Vales. Fully understanding that they were part of the population growth essential for the colony’s growth, they thought a school was the best idea, if indeed population growth meant their beloved vines had to go.

THE PATRITTI BROTHERS PAUSING FOR A STOCKTAKE IN THE LATE SIXTIES

But you see a bristle of quiet rage when you ask where the school is.

“After a few years they knocked the school down, sent the kids further away, sub-divided the land, and built more houses,” Ines’s big winemaker son, James Mungall, said later, eerily reflecting what the University of Adelaide plans to do with Glenthorne Farm, the 206ha research property it was granted for a dollar a decade ago, just over the ridge. How stupid we are to imagine that houses are more vital than productive gardens, education and research!

In the dark old vintage halls out the back, James, and his trusted buddy, winemaker Ben Heide, annually crushes around 1000 tonnes of grapes. With 500 tonnes crushed elsewhere, and brought in as must, they make fifty products, give or take a few.

GIOVANNI AND GEOFF PATRITTI WITH THE NEW VINTAGE FRUIT: NOTE THE HAND-MADE BRICKS IN THE WINERY WALLS: EVERYBODY CHIPPED IN TO MAKE THEM AFTER WORK AND ON WEEKENDS. WHEN THEY HAD SUFFICIENT, THEY'D BUILD A NEW WALL.

“The original buildings that had been constructed with corrugated iron - and seaweed for insulation - were slowly rebuilt with hand-made bricks that were manufactured on the winery premises,” Ines continued.

“Power was made available when Dad’s third son, Geoffrey was born in 1947 and this was when a 10 hp Blackstone motor drove the wooden Horwood & Bagshaw crusher.

“Dad met and married my mother, Giovanna Callegari, in Melbourne in 1938. Mum was a sister of one of his Melbourne-based customers. They went on to have three sons and a daughter (me), all of whom entered the family business.”

THE SECOND GENERATION OF AUSTRALIAN PATRITTIS: PETER, JOHN, GEOFF AND INES IN THE LONG-GONE DORADILLA VINEYARD AT DOVER GARDENS IN THE EARLY 70s

English Adelaide got a bit shy about its European immigrants during the wars. If you were German, or Italian, with the wrong attitude, or the wrong contacts back home, you were locked up for the duration of the war. But after the second war, influential people like winemakers Ian Hickinbotham (Kaiser Stuhl) and Colin Gramp (Orlando) made it fashionable, if not a little quaint, to be German in such a quaintly English settlement. People came to the Barossa to look at the Germans, listen to them, and try their food and wine.

There were, however, “New Australian” Italians quietly filling up backstreets and market gardens all that time, enduring the kind of loutish irrespect earlier settlers of this land habitually show the newest wave of immigrants, whatever their homeland. Life was tough for those we derided as Spags, Eye-ties, and Dagoes. It wasn’t cool to be wog in this town until those scarlet Ferraris screamed around the streets in the first Adelaide Formula One Grand Prix in 1986. After that it was compulsory.

Ines made no mention of any of this. She pressed on with the story of the family’s export success, explaining how their first cargo of barrels of red wine were sent by ship up the east coast of Australia to the Queensland cane fields in the ’forties. The tireless Italians who built a good deal of modern Australia need lots of good red wine.

Giovanni Amadio also knew this. He leased vineyards north along the Adelaide piedmont at East Marden, and sold his Amadio Dry Table Wine to the Australian government. This was served to Italian prisoners of war in the internment camps up the Murray - they were a happier lot with some good red wine at mealtimes. Surprise, surprise. And they were the enemy. We lock genuine refugees up in similar camps now. Imagine the outrage if their guards gave them a civilized glass of wine at the taxpayers’ expense!

Faithfully, but prematurely imagining that Australia was ready, in 1962 the Patrittis imported all the necessary machinery and built a state of the art pasta factory beside the winery. Patritti Pasta Gloria was rightfully adored by the few Australians in the know, but the rest of us knew proper spaghetti was squishy white worms in a tin of bad tomato sauce. The business struggled, faded, and ceased, just in time for the winery to require another shed. On things went. To commemorate that brave excursion into fine Italo-Australian cuisine, they now make an incredibly cheap Gloria range of premium wines, using the original pasta label.

GIOVANNI PATRITTI, PATRON OF JUVENTUS SOCCER CLUB, PRESENTS A TROPHY. JUVENTUS EVENTUALLY BECAME ADELAIDE CITY, THE CURRENT CLUB.

Ines went on describing the huge grape glut of the early ’seventies, when her brother Geoff had a brainwave.

“Geoff revels in new ideas and is a constant advocate for the development of new products,” she said. “After considerable thought, the development of the non-alcoholic juice production went ahead and he and my brother John produced the first batch of juice in 1974. After all – what did they have to lose? At worst it could always be turned into wine! What was produced and bottled during that 1974 vintage proved to be so popular it sold out very quickly. In the 1975 vintage, the quantity of juice produced was quadrupled and also sold out prior to the next vintage.”

Once again, Ines sidestepped a scary reality: 1974 was the wettest vintage in Australian history, when the destructive moulds were akin to the ruin of the second wettest, 2011. When nobody else could produce anything worth drinking, Patrittis made unfermented pasteurized juice at a profit. The secret lay in their modern technology: sanitary pressurized bottling and careful pasteurization, as had just been perfected by Ian Hickinbotham, Wolf Blass, and Colin Gramp.

“The juices went into green pressure Riesling bottles with screw caps,” Ines explained. “The range included a Sparkling Grenache, Sparkling Golden Muscatel and Sparkling Pedro. In following vintages, a Sparkling Shiraz grape juice was added. Bottling took place as soon as the juice was stabilized. As it is now, the juice is in-bottle pasteurized. In those days it meant that my brothers, Geoff and John, would spend long into the night making sure that pasteurisation took place correctly as it was done in batches using tanks with two or three batches at a time, whereas now bottling is continuous using a tunnel pasteurizer.

“The 20,000 units (1.5 containers) produced then must have seemed an enormous quantity,” she continued. “When John was telling me about these early times - still with the excitement of the achievement of producing 5,000 units and going on to quadruple it, I was thinking to myself – but that was only 1.5 containers; now only a morning’s work!”

PATRITTI MEN MAKING AN EXPORT DELIVERY IN THE EARLY DAYS

She talked about exporting juice to Canada, about getting Halal certification, which only upset the USA given its tetchiness about Islam, and about how the ’eighties Gulf War saw their sales to Saudi Arabia stop dead. But other sales picked up in the ’nineties, and Patritti opened other markets in Sweden, New Zealand, Malaysia, and India.

Ines recalled her phone ringing in the street in Glenelg. Somebody in Vietnam wanted seven containers of sparkling juice for the Chinese New Year. She ripped back to the winery, everybody dropped everything and they got those containers packed and delivered on deadline in six weeks. Last year they sold 37 containers of Patritti juices in Vietnam.

But not without a hiccup. Literally. Instead of copying Grange, some genius with “close links to the Vietnamese army” launched a counterfeit Patritti Non-alcoholic Sparkling Apple Juice there, but at 11% alcohol. Their agent was wisely tremulous at the thought of legal action, so they pumped some promo money into a big print campaign advising people of the difference and the danger. The true blue no-alc Patritti won the sympathy of the ’Nam punters, and they sold everything before the Chinese New Year. Back to packin’ ships from Dover Gardens.

The Patritti Chinese exercise is fascinating. They sold juices to China; then lower-end reds. And already they’re getting Chinese enthusiasts working from their bladder packs into the lower-priced bottles, and then up toward the top end, where my hypnotizing Saperavi smugly sits at $14.

GIOVANNI PATRITTI, FAMILY AND FRIENDS AT THE VISIT OF PRIMO 'THE AMBLING ALP" CARNERA. AT 197CM AND 129KG, CARNERA WAS THE HEAVIEST WORLD CHAMPION BOXER IN HISTORY. HE BEAT MOST OPPONENTS BY KNOCKOUT, AND ATTRACTED WHAT SEEMED TO BE THE ENTIRE ADELAIDE ITALIAN COMMUNITY TO PATRITTI. BACK IN NEW YORK HE KILLED ERNIE SHCAAF BY KO IN MADISON SQUARE GARDEN, AND WENT ON BECOME A HEAVYWEIGHT WRESTLER AND ACTOR. HE APPEARED FAMOUSLY IN MIGHTY JOE YOUNG, A BIG APE MOVIE WHICH AFICIONADOS REGARD AS SUPERIOR TO KING KONG IN THE QUALITY OF ITS SPECIAL EFFECTS.

“We believe it’s the wide variety of packaging options that we can offer that’s helped provide starting points for these export customers,” Ines said. “The Indian market has embraced our de-alcoholised wines and some juices. Once again, we negociated with our clients and the labels were modified to suit their requirements. Because we have our own production and packaging facility, we’re able to tailor the products and packaging requests to suit the client.”

As it grew, Patritti remained self-contained, an incredible rarity for wineries today. Not only do they have their own packaging and labeling lines, but they can make just about any type of sparkling anything and bottle it to order at your price. I was surprised to find they didn’t own a printing press. Check the Patritti website and marvel at how cheaply you can sell wines if you do everything in-house.

And when you consider how they turned the botrytis disaster of 1974 into good money with modern technology, you can bet Patritti will be the one winery to make the most of this year’s mess after another 37 years of perfecting the old Hick/Blass/Gramp technology. Not many wineries boast a continuous pasteuriser!

THE ANCIENT PATRITTI BUSH-VINE GRENACHE VINEYARD SOUTH OF THE SUBURBS AT TATACHILLA IN McLAREN VALE IS GRADUALLY BEING REJUVENATED.

Finally, to really rip the strings of this sultry heart, the Patrittis have taken over the management of the council-owned Marion Vineyard on Oaklands Road. Surrounded completely by houses and light industry, this final single hectare of the great southern suburban vignoble was planted to Grenache and Shiraz in 1907. Saved from conversion to a fast food wasteland for obese taggers by my Adelaide Vines project, and Brian Miller in 1989, it had once again been let fall into disrepair. Council decided in 2006 to invite the Patrittis to look after it in exchange for its precious fruit, which they are doing with fastidious skill. Their first release from the rejuvenated vines is the delicious 2008; each vintage the pressings go into a special fortified, yet to be released.

Along with the remnant of the Grange Hermitage Vineyard now called Magill Estate, and the tiny 1932 Montmartre Vineyard in Paris, this is the most significant suburban vineyard on Earth. Traffic should be forced to slow down as it passes, and learn some respect. It has the earliest vines, and at last it’s in appropriate hands: the oldest Italian family-owned winery in Australia. I could think of no more appropriate, nor delicious Adelaide souvenir to give foreign guests or new Australians.

But make yourself a gift: go visit Patritti. Be astonished. You won’t need much money, and you’ll leave with a freshly-warmed heart.

OLD OAK VATS AT PATRITTI: STILL LOVINGLY MAINTAINED FOR WINE STORAGE

INFECTING REDS WITH ROT? WHAT ROT!

STEPHEN HICKINBOTHAM: THE AUSTRALIAN, KIWI, AND INDIAN WINE INDUSTRIES WOULD BE VERY DIFFERENT IF HE WAS STILL WITH US

Where Are Today's Young Wine Radicals?
This Dude Used Botrytis On His Reds!

by PHILIP WHITE

In the early 1980s, there was a dramatic change of guard in the Australian wine industry.

Feisty young blue bloods like Brian Croser were suddenly everywhere, in everybody’s face, changing the way everything worked.

Professing that only they knew how to do it.

Adam Wynn was back from duxing Bordeaux university, taking the reins of Mountadam, Australia’s first big high country chardonnay and pinot vineyard.

And in Victoria, the fearless, questioning intellect of Stephen Hickinbotham was kicking all the old inbred Australian shibboleths in the head.

Hickie’s grandfather, Hick, had founded the Roseworthy winemaking college; his father Ian was a formidable wine scientist and wine maker – the first bloke on earth to deliberately, scientifically, induce and manage malo-lactic fermentations when he worked for Adam Wynn’s father David at Coonawarra in 1952 and 53.

Ian once told me he deliberately named his first son Stephen because it was the “only name we could find with pH in the middle”.

Stephen was oenologist at his family’s winery and vineyard on the slopes of a volcano cone at Anakie, near Geelong, Victoria. An inventor, passionate theorist, and rigorous intellectual, he studied at Bordeaux University, where he also made wine for the Rothschilds. He worked for a while in a government wine research laboratory in Alsace, then at Bollinger and Mumm, and did vintages at Rutherglen, Barossa, Mildura, the Hunter Valley and Great Western. He made the first great modern reds from Tasmania, flying grapes from Meadowbank to Anakie, made some of the earliest Adelaide Hills wines at his uncle Allan's vineyard at Clarendon, and was an anchorman par excellence in the many tastings I conducted at Winestate, Wine And Spirit Buying Guide, and The National Times.

Hickie advised the Indian government on viticulture and winemaking, and was probably the first to realise the potential of sauvignon blanc in Marlborough, New Zealand, as it was he who teased David Hohnen into developing Cloudy Bay.

Not a bad innings for a 1955 vintage lad.

Put very simply, he turned my brain on.

When Stephen was killed, with his partner Jenny O’Regan,and five other good friends from Melbourne, in a plane crash at Cairns in 1986, he took an encyclopædic headful of ideas and knowledge with him.

The Australian wine industry would be very different today had he survived.

I narrowly missed catching that plane.

In those early ’eighties, it suddenly became highly fashionable to make botrytis-affected wines after the styles of Sauternes, Barsac and Germany. Many of these early experiments were dreadful.

The Alsatian wizard, Michel Dietrich, arrived in Clare in 1982, brought in by Francois Henri to manage Remy Martin’s new acquisition, Quelltaler, the grand old headquarters of Buring and Sobels almost a century earlier.

He was immediately bemused to discover two of the local hotshot winemakers, Tim Knappstein and Tim Adams, had begun deliberately infesting riesling grapes with laboratory-grown botrytis in specially constructed and humidified cellars where the grapes were laid on racks and sprayed with spores.

Michel had literally caught a plane in a blizzard in Alsace, disembarked in Adelaide in a 42 degree heatwave, hired a car and driven to Clare. He raised the French tricolour over his new charge, as if to purge it of any traces of Germany, took one look at the vineyards along the creekline at Watervale and announced that this was a good place for botrytis.

The locals were incredulous.

Michel let those grapes hang in that humid little microclimate and made a ravishing and revolutionary botrytis-infected semillon.

The locals accused him of cultivating the spores on V8 vegetable juice, as they had done, then stealing into the vineyard at night to spray it on the vines!

Hickie was already making great controversial stickies at Anakie.

Adam Wynn also made exquisite botrytised rieslings from one of highest blocks on Mountadam.

I was there once, after vintage, trying to take photographs in the frigid, swirling, highland mist. I heard a sound that made me think "bear!".

I'll never know why I thought it may have been a bear, because there are no bears in Australia, and the only bears I've seen have been imprisoned in solitary confinement in Guantanamo things they politely call zoos.

Sure enough, through the mist, there was a large dark figure, about the size of a bear, beneath the vines.

Silly enough to approach, I got closer.

It was David Wynn, wearing an oilskin Drizabone duster, on his hands and knees, studying the ground.

I said "Hullo David".

"Oh hullo Philip", he said, staring back at the sodden ground.

"This is awful", he said. "Terrible. Look at this terrible waste!"

The riesling that Adam had left hanging had got botrytis in its stalks, and the bunches were falling to the ground.

Adam picked, and picked up, that rizza into a wheelbarrow, and made a stunning sticky.

The four of us: Hickie, Michel, Adam and me, had many weekend summits where we rewrote the future, blending bottled wines from all over Australia's exciting new vignobles, just to see.

We spent a lot of time making the perfect pink. The base was usually Hickie's amazing dry botrytised rieslings from Anakie, with Michell's wood-aged Clare semillon, with red bits from Hickie's Meadowbank, Tassie cabernet, Adam's pinot, and some 1979 Petaluma Coonawarra shiraz.

We just had to have some Brian in there.

To encourage some public discussion about these heady botrytis developments, I ran a series of interviews in Wine And Spirit Buying Guide in 1984.

While most contributors knew only of botrytis on white grapes, Hickie immediately threw petrol on the discussion by claiming he deliberately used botrytis on his ravishing reds.

In fact, he said, he never made red wine without botrytis.

The wine business was, once again, incredulous.

“I think it was about 1896 when Louis Pasteur published his amazing study Les Maladies du Vin”, Hickie told me in 1984.

“It was a monumental work, but it was flawed. After studying many bad table wines, Pasteur determined that their malaise was due to these tiny single-celled organisms called bacteria. What he did wrong was to extrapolate on this finding, and he declared that all bacteria were bad. He invented pasteurisation as a means of destroying bacteria in wine.

“Now, if Pasteur’s well-intentioned advice was heeded by all the French vignerons, we’d have no great French wines today. Pasteur neglected to study great wines, and he never came to realise that if they were properly controlled, the same bacteria would, or could, have some highly desirable effects, like conducting the malolactic fermentation which is common to so many great French wines.

“The role that noble rot can play in making red wines has been obscured for several reasons. Certain ill effects found in red wines have been attributed to noble rot because the original grapes were noble rot infected. The great, healthy wines have never really been studied, and because researchers often have so little practical winemaking experience, the role botrytis can play in red wine making has been ignored. That’s pretty simple.

“Carefully controlled noble rot can contribute great complexity to red wines. Many of Bordeaux’s greatest red wines were from grapes infected by botrytis – ask Roy Moorfield about the ’61 Montrose we had.

"Anyone who says it can’t be done is wrong. In winemaking, there are a lot of nuances between the black and the white, and too many people aren’t sensitive to them.”

My experience of Hickie’s love affair with botrytis began in 1982, when he was blending the first Cab Mac, a carbonique maceration red he’d made using his revolutionary sealed pallet bags, for which patents were pending.

The cabernet sauvignon he’d selected from the Goulburn Valley, Victoria, was botrytis infected. He said he’d deliberately botrytised the fruit to pass some complexity and body to the wine.

When I reported this, the broadacre response from other winemakers was a guffaw followed by a loud “Bullshit!”

The main reason for this response centered on the widespread belief that in red fruit, botrytis gave rise to laccase, an oxidase enzyme which turns red wine milky when exposed to oxygen.

I asked Dr. Terry Lee, the NSW food scientist who’d just taken over the boss role at the Australian Wine Research Institute, about his experience with botrytis infected reds.

“We got involved with botrytis when some of the reds in Coonawarra became infected last year”, he said of the 1983 vintage, which was all fire then flood.

“If you get a bit of unwanted botrytis in reds they can go brown as soon as they’re exposed to air or oxygen.

“Chris Summers did most of the work.

“It wasn’t exactly noble rot, though, it was a real zoo growing on those grapes. We had to look for ways and means of preventing deterioration in the wines once they were exposed to air. We were mainly concerned with the bad effects of the wrong kinds of botrytis mixed with a lot of other moulds.

“Stephen Hickinbotham’s had a lot of experience in Bordeaux. I’m sure there’s quite a lot of botrytis in Bordeaux reds. The whole Bordeaux area has a significant level of botrytis: the conditions are right for it. He’s most probably right.

“There are a few components produced when botrytis gets in the grape berry. You get increased glycerol levels. You also get the production of an acid called gluconic acid. The presence of this acid is a fairly good indicator of botrytis infection.

“I think you’ve got to appreciate that Stephen’s trying to get a small botrytis infection as a complexing agent on his reds –- he’s certainly not trying to make sweet reds!”

Eventually Hickie made a couple of small batches of cabernet sauvignon that was deliberately infected with botrytis. He imported the test enzyme from Bordeaux to have the Wine Research Institute check these for gluconic acid, using the same techniques the Bordelaise use when testing sauternes for botrytis.

I arranged a tasting of these wines in Adelaide, and invited several fellows who had said quite distinctly and unequivocally that you couldn’t make red wine from botrytised fruit.

If you knew the big cheeses of those days, you'd be able to name the detractors and disbelievers. They're still here.

Once the wines were poured, and the and the wine sat there in the glasses, glowering red and jolly, totally devoid of anything vaguely resembling milkiness or cloudiness, the noses came down and the discussions began, but there was still a genuine air of disbelief.

The only fellow who didn’t detract from the Hickinbotham achievement was the most senior of the winemakers present, Max Schubert, who happened to be the fellow who created Grange Hermitage.

Max said the wines were good and interesting, and said they reminded him of the days when he used flor yeast on red juice to make “nice complex mother wines”, the bases for his famous blends.

“Nobody really believed I did that either”, Max chuckled.

“I had to get used to keeping my mouth shut.”

Back to Dr. Terry Lee.

“There’s not really such a big mystery about handling botrytis in reds”, he said.

“You can handle it with heat treatment”.

Presto! While Hickie never actually admitted he pasteurised his wines, it’s worth remembering that his father, Ian, had left Coonawarra to work in the Barossa, where he converted the foundering old grape-growers’ co-op to the phenomenally successful Kaiser Stuhl.

Part of this success was his adoption of pasteurisation of sparkling wines under pressure, stabilising them to a degree otherwise unknown in those years.

“I read a letter in an American magazine” Ian wrote in Australian Plonky, his autobiography.

“It was an important Professor Marsh, who was pondering why sparkling winemakers didn’t pasteurise in the bottle as did the spumante makers of Italy.

“Pasteurising was, and still is almost a dirty word in our wine industry and was dismissed because of the association with the cheap wines of Europe.

“However, the thrust of the argument was that, because of the gas content in sparkling wines, the temperature needed to achieve pasteurisation was quite low. I decided to trial the technique.”

Using the Kupke-Trinne team of Roseworthy College, Ian built a machine that pasteurised the Kaiser Stuhl Sparkling Rhinegold at only 63 degrees centigrade, “therefore not damaging the quality”, he wrote.

“In fact, in our experiments we had found that the heat treatment helped ‘round’ the taste, meaning the wine was more drinkable immediately.”

(Winemakers can now hire an Agmaster pasteurising machine that fits on a trailer, and processes very slowly, -- 2,000 to 4,000 litres per hour -- so the required temperature can be minimised, avoiding thermal damage to the wine.)

The resultant popularity of that Kaiser Stuhl Sparkling Rhinegold wine made necessary a full-time sparkling expert to manage the manufactory, and develop other products, like the first real kiddylikker alco-pop, Pineapple Pearl, which was packaged in a little pineapple-shaped bottle with a panoply of green plastic which resembled the foliage at the top of the pineapple, and twisted off to open the bottle.

The appointment? An eager young German from Avery’s of Bristol, one Wolfgang Blass.

Kaiser Stuhl sales went from £160,000 in 1955 to £740,000 in 1962.

Wolfie still has a row of Pineapple Pearl bottles along the top of his bar, sitting there like browning hand grenades.

Which is simply to say that Stephen Hickinbotham had a very learned advisor in matters concerning the pasteurisation of wine.

I miss Stephen -- with a pH -- dreadfully. But if you’re lucky enough to try his reds now, given a merciful cork, you’ll find them breathtakingly beautiful.

That’s getting close to eternal life.

And, just for the record, I should say that dear Max heat treated his flor-infected mother wines.

He learned to keep schtum about that, too.

THE RADICAL SCIENCE OF BOILING BEER

LOUIS PASTEUR: CHANGED BEER AS MUCH AS WINE

The Beautiful Beer Of Revenge

Frog Beats Hun By Boiling The Suds

TRANSCRIPT OF RADIO NATIONAL'S THE SCIENCE SHOW WITH ROBYN WILLIAMS - 10 FEBRUARY 2002

Summary: Dr. Alan Baxter from the Centenary Institute in Sydney tells the story about "the beer of revenge".

As a result of the Franco-Prussian war Louis Pasteur, whose name is usually associated with milk, was left with an obsessive hatred for Germans. At the time Germany's main export was beer. Pasteur vowed to destroy Germany's primary export market by developing the world's best beer in France. He dubbed this "the beer of revenge".

Robyn Williams: If I told you that we’re now going to talk about the science of beer, there’s a fair chance you’ll infer straight away that it’s time to be flippant, make a few puns, go in for some drollery. In fact the science of beer, you’ll be pleased to know, helped revolutionise chemistry and the understanding of the molecules which make life possible.

For such an insight we must thank Dr Alan Baxter, who’s head of the Autoimmunity Research Group at the Centenary Institute in Sydney, and author of the book ‘Germ Warfare – Breakthroughs in Immunology’ which we talked about last year. And Alan Baxter begins the tale with one of the greatest names in the history of science.

Alan Baxter: "Today, Louis Pasteur’s name is usually associated with milk. After all, it appears on every carton and bottle of the stuff. But his major contribution to Australian society lies not so much in the milk bar, as in the public bar. Since he disliked the taste of beer, the basis for his interest in it is somewhat obscure, but it makes an interesting story and it’s probably worth telling.

"Pasteur’s reputation as a chemist had been established when he discovered that some organic molecules exist in two different orientations, or isoforms, related to each other by reflective symmetry. Since only one of these two orientations ever occurs in plants and animals, this led him to propose that chemical orientation provided a criterion to distinguish between living organisms and the inert, inorganic world. On this basis he did not believe in the spontaneous generation of life, and his fiery opposition to the idea led him to be regarded as something of an expert on biological matters. He became a freelance scientific consultant advising on a range of agricultural and industrial problems. In doing so, he greatly enhanced his reputation by identifying the organisms that spoiled wine and vinegar, and those that killed silkworms, discoveries that made a significant impact on the French economy.

"But Pasteur’s principal interests lay with basic science, not industry. ‘There is no such thing as applied sciences,’ he said, ‘only applications of science.’ Seeking to establish a publicly funded research laboratory at his university, the Ecole Normale, he wrote to the Emperor Napoleon III: ‘I wish for a spacious laboratory where experiments can be performed conveniently without danger to public health. Some of my current experiments relate to the transformation of organic matter after death, and … these studies can only proceed if a fully equipped laboratory is set up. The time has come to free the experimental science from the fetters of poverty.’

"The Emperor’s support was quickly gained. By the end of 1867 plans had been drawn up and the ground breaking for the construction of the new laboratory took place in the summer of 1868. Pasteur monitored the builders’ daily progress from the dining room window of his university accommodation across the Rue d’Ulm from the work site.

"Louis Pasteur felt unwell throughout most of the 19th October of that year. Despite an oppressive fatigue and a fleeting prickling sensation down his left side, he attended a meeting of the Academy of Sciences and fulfilled the rest of his commitments for the day. On his return home, he excused himself from dinner and retired early. That evening he was felled by a massive cerebral haemorrhage in which he lost the power of speech and the use of his left limbs. Doctors were called and leeches were applied.

"Of those that rushed to his bedside, one of the first to reach him was his dear friend, Pierre-Augustin Bertin. Pasteur and Bertin had met as students, and their professional paths had intersected more than once since. Bertin, as Head of Scientific Studies at the university, was technically Pasteur’s boss, but his desolation at the disaster that had befallen his colleague betrayed a much closer relationship.

"Madame Pasteur and Monsieur Bertin conspired to nurture the invalid through his convalescence. Gradually Pasteur recovered somewhat. His speech returned first, and then his power of thought. His body healed more slowly, and he never regained the use of his left hand. Every day, as he lay in his bed, he asked visitors for news of the construction of his new laboratory. And every day, under strict instruction, his visitors gave him vaguely unsatisfying responses. Finally, Pasteur dragged himself through to the dining room window and hauled himself up to his feet. The desperate effect of what he saw was as great an upset as the stroke itself, for within an hour of the news of his illness, all work on the laboratory had stopped dead.

"His raging bitterness was relayed through a well-connected visitor and he quickly received an apology from the Emperor and an assurance that the project would be completed. But work was again interrupted in July 1870 by Germany’s invasion of France during the Franco-Prussian War. By October, the Germans had captured the Emperor and Paris was besieged. Furthermore, Pasteur’s only son, Jean-Baptiste, had enlisted and was now gravely ill with typhoid.

"Pasteur’s anguish at the national crisis was magnified by the loss of his laboratory and the threat to his son’s life. The war had jeopardised everything he cared about: Nation, Family and Science, and he was physically incapable of fighting back. This overwhelming feeling of impotence left him with an obsessive hatred of Germans and their nation, and by the end of the war Pasteur had formulated a plan to avenge his nation’s honour.

"At the time, although Germany had become the world leader in industrial chemistry, her main export was beer. Indeed, as part of the reparations demanded of France, Germany had subsumed Alsace and Lorraine, where hops were the primary crop and much of France’s own beer production had been based. German beer outsold local brews throughout most of central Europe because it tasted better and kept longer, and its continued sale in France irritated Pasteur intensely. He planned to destroy Germany’s primary export market by developing the world’s best beer in France, a brew he dubbed ‘the beer of revenge’.

"Beer is produced by fermenting water in which malted barley has been steeped. The carbon dioxide that gives beer its head is released by the yeast as a by-product of fermentation. Hop flowers are added prior to fermentation, because their aromatic oils act as a preservative and add to the taste of the finished product. Originally, all beers were dark and heavy, similar to the porters, stouts and brown ales of Britain. The major advance made by Germany in the 1860s was to develop strains of yeast that maintained their activity at temperatures near freezing. Fermentation achieved at such low temperatures proceeded so slowly that the beer had to be cellared over the whole winter instead of for just a few weeks. Furthermore, the yeast, instead of being buoyed to the top of the brew by the carbon dioxide produced (called ‘top fermentation’), sank to the bottom of the barrels and contributed little to the taste of the product. This was called ‘bottom fermentation’, or ‘lagering’, and the resulting lager beers were pale straw coloured, light in flavour and body, and kept extraordinarily well.

"Pasteur correctly surmised that the primary reason for beer spoilage was the presence of contaminating organisms. He quickly identified those most commonly spoiling brewery yeast samples and developed methods for excluding them from large-scale fermentations. He also developed new strains of heat-stable yeast that acted more rapidly without significantly contributing to the taste of the beer.

"Pasteur had by this time returned to his old haunt at the Ecole Normale. He bought a brewery kettle and installed a fermentation vat in the basement of the as yet unfinished laboratory complex nearby. Bertin’s interest in Pasteur’s experimental progress increased dramatically, betraying a fond familiarity with the subject under scrutiny. Bertin had developed a fancy for fine ales when he had worked in Strasbourg and a strange collaboration developed between the two men. Bertin’s sober responsibility was to steadily drink his way through Pasteur’s experimental results in order to provide a critical appraisal of each batch. Bertin’s high-spirited laughter and good humour did much to enliven the laboratory, and he pointed out to Pasteur more than once that there is much more to good beer than just keeping it free from infection.

‘First make me a good bock,’ he said, ‘and then you can tell me about it!’

"Pasteur travelled widely throughout Europe, demonstrating the key aspects of his methods to commercial brewers. The Whitbread Brewery in Britain and the Carlsberg Brewery in Denmark still attribute their success to visits by Pasteur in the 1870s. An even greater influence was attained on the publication of his book ‘Studies on Beer’, which immediately became the essential brewers’ manual.

"A brilliant young Belgian brewer, Auguste de Bavay, met Pasteur on one of his trips and adopted his methods before emigrating to Melbourne, where he was employed at the Victoria Parade Brewery. Because of the warmer temperatures in Australia, de Bavay had to adapt Pasteur’s methods to top fermentation. To protect against spoilage, he added greater amounts of hops, and fermented to a higher alcohol content. The highly fertile soils and plentiful sunshine resulted in increased levels of protein in the barley, which caused clouding of the beer. So de Bavay replaced some of the barley malt with cane sugar. The resulting beer was that now characteristic of Australia: light in colour and body, but tasting strongly of bitter hops. This style, although correctly described as a ‘bitter’ in Australia, is usually mistaken for a lager in Britain.

"De Bavay was quickly promoted to chief brewer at Fosters, a position he held from 1894 to 1904. For much of this time, he also acted as a bacteriologist for the University of Melbourne and used the influence gained from that role to fight for improvements in the quality of the Melbourne water supply. In 1889, his denouncement of the city’s fire plugs, claiming that they admitted sewerage and typhoid bacilli into the domestic water supply, resulted in a Royal Commission and the eventual removal of the devices. Although his primary interest was to protect the product of the brewery from infection, his efforts did much to protect the city’s population likewise.

"And what of Pasteur? Well he too saw the parallel between the infection of an ale and human disease. ‘Seeing that beer and wine undergo profound alterations because these liquids have given shelter to microscopic organisms,’ he wrote, ‘how can one help being obsessed by the thought that phenomena of the same kind can and must sometimes occur in humans and animals.’ It was this analogy that drove him on to study cholera, anthrax, erysipelas and finally rabies, culminating in the development of the rabies vaccine.

"His strategy of revenge was also very successful. Indeed, so successful was it that to this day, even though some German beers are widely regarded as being among the best in the world, very little is exported. The irony is that the German breweries rendered idle by Pasteur’s strategy were adapted to manufacture acetone for cordite production. Thus Pasteur’s vengeance indirectly helped to equip Germany for their attack on France in the First World War.

Robyn Williams: The paradoxes of history. Alan Baxter, from the Centenary Institute in Sydney. His book, Germ Warfare which is about immunology, not Saddam Hussein, is published here by Allen & Unwin.

.

A textbook life

by PHILIP WHITE
This was first published in The Independent Weekly in March 2008

It was a shock to finally meet Ian Hickinbotham. I’d read his perky, provocative wine criticism for years in the Financial Review, The Age and Epicurean. As a brattish young wine hack loose amongst the bullshitting colonels, I lived in awe of his venerable knowledge of biochemistry, his incredible winemaking history, and his fearless, forensic attacks on the fusty conservatism which dominated winery boardrooms in 1980.

He eventually arrived in the flesh: stocky and abrupt, bright-eyed and particular, leading with that Burt Lancaster/George Clooney jaw that marks the Hickinbothams. In a day when great wine men were rarely seen without suits or blazers beneath their lab jackets, he sported an outrageous open-necked check shirt, and curly grey hair down to his shoulders.

Born in 1929, Hick grew up at Roseworthy, where his father had founded the wine science, or oenology, course. At twelve he had his “first practical chemistry lesson”, when, by titration, he analysed the “strength” of various popular soaps. In his essential autobiography, Australian Plonky, just published by The Adelaide University Barr Smith Press, he boasts of still washing with Velvet soap instead of the trendier brands, “appreciating that the practical lesson … was to ensure that young scientists understood the power of advertising”.

Hick’s first vintage was in the Barossa at Hardy’s Dorrien – now Siegersdorf - where, as a sixteen year old, he “revelled in the body-building aspect” of shoveling skins. As captain, his grandfather Dave led Geelong through the 1886 footy season undefeated, and later became that club’s first coach. Hick lists his own football and cricket achievements with as much cocky pride as he reminds us of his amazing winemaking record.

And amazing it is. After Dorrien, he worked at Hardy’s Mile End “champagne” cellars, began studying soil science, and moved back to the Barossa to the SA Grape Growers Co-operative Limited.

In 1949, in his second year at Roseworthy, he began work on untangling the biochemical mysteries of the malo-lactic fermentation. As oenologist at David Wynn’s Coonawarra Estate, in 1952, the year of the first release of Max Schubert’s Grange (the volatile acidity of which seemed to bemuse Hick from the start), he was the first winemaker on Earth to deliberately induce, manage, and understand a malo-lactic fermentation.

Until then, French winemakers knew that after the initial ferment, where yeast converted sugar to alcohol, some sort of mumbo-jumbo happened in their cellars. They never understood how this secondary ferment involved bacteria converting the harsh malic acid of grapes – the sharp acid of apples – to the soothing, milky, lactic acid we first taste from our mothers’ nipples.

Hick had just written his thesis on “malo”, and it was the keen enlightenment of David Wynn that let him proceed in practice. In those days, Australian winemakers added sulphur dioxide in such enormous quantities that no bacterium could live comfortably in the wine after its primary ferment, and most, like the Roseworthy eminence, Dr. Bryce Rankine, believed malo-lactic ferments simply did not occur in Australia.

Wynn, on the other hand, was an angel of enlightenment. When at Wynn’s Melbourne home for his interview, Hick recalls a poet reading to the dinner group, “while the ballerina, Sally Gilmour, lay on the carpet”. He was hypnotized by her pointy feet. Wynn was the first to use the word “estate” on his label, and perfected the bladder pack – then called the “table cask” – that Hick copied from an imperfect Italian vinegar container.

And on he went. With his wife, Judith, Hick ran the Penola pub, where all Coonawarra winemakers drank, then the famous Gini’s restaurant in Toorak for a decade, employing young winemakers like John Wade and Gary Baldwin as waiters. Knowing the Barossa to be home to numerous Nazi sympathisers, some of whom he thinks may have supplied German U-boats with fresh food off our coast in the dead of night, he convinced the paranoid Barossans to change the very Australian name of their co-op to the outrageously Hunnish Kaiser Stuhl. As manager there, he increased sales from £160,000 in 1955 to £740,000 by 1962. He brought Wolf Blass to Australia. He was the first Australian to pasteurise wine. He was the first on Earth to use a centrifuge to stop fermentation. He invented and perfected many of the processes used in the production of commercial sparkling wines. He was a pioneer in the use of stainless steel, insulation, screw caps, and, in The Bulletin of 28 August, 1984, he was credited for initiating one quarter of Australia’s 25 top-selling wines.

While no winelover will fail to be fascinated by it, there are many sanctimonious plonkmongers who will be very shitty with this book: insiders will recognize their charlatan-shaped omissions. Hick is, after all, a Hickinbotham. One wonders what Australia would look like if he’d gone into the villa rash business with his big brother.