It's In The Middle Of Your Face

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by PHILIP WHITE – This first appeared in The Advertiser in November 1990

“Mummy it smells!”

Therein lies one of our biggest deceits.

To the white man, smell is a dirty word. Not only do we train our children to believe this lie, but we live our lives maintaining it. We feel awkward discussing smells. We have very few words we can comfortably use to describe and discuss them. People who wouldn’t write a letter in a fit suddenly up and off nervous notes of ridicule when I honestly report the bouquets of wines I want to share.

Somewhere between now and that strange dawn by the swamp, when first we stood up on our hind legs, raising our noses from mushroom-snuffling height, through handy genital-sniffing levels to superior, fully erect, Apollonian majesty, we began the tragic denial of our most refined, acute and sensitive sense. Now we pretend the world of aroma belongs solely to dogs and cats. Fools.

The human schnozz can detect and identify some aromatic compounds, like methoxypyrazine¹, the prominent smell in under-ripe sauvignon blanc and cabernet sauvignon, at levels measured in parts per trillion, and even the smaller US trillion has twelve zeroes. That’s like detecting and identifying one grape in the entire Australian vintage. With your nose.

Ours is vastly superior to the smelling ability of most animals. While our tongues taste only four things – sweet, sour, salt and bitter² – our olfactories work with millions of smells and combinations of them. They comfortably, continuously shuffle through a range of units so vast that it makes music and tone, and the variations of them, look tiny.

This is miraculous – a thing to be marveled at and investigated with great determination.

But it’s not. In fact, through the advent of Christian and Islamic stifling of almost everything fleshy, suddenly resurgent in the wowser epidemic, strangely combined with the neo-fascist preoccupation with perfect muscle tone and the getting of heart rates down to zero through obsessive exercise, and the opportune threat of exotic poxes such as AIDS, we have almost cut our noses out completely.

Think of the squillions spent on the enhancement and entertainment of our other senses. We have great industries and academies devoted to colour, line and form and the pursuit of things orderly and pleasing to the well-trained eye. Painting, architecture, packaging, fashion – this is not only a big education number, but a mammoth business, and a naive attempt at the taming and reshaping of the messy vagaries of nature.

We have great halls of learning devoted to the development and adoration of music, and enormous industries built upon its reproduction and sale.

Language is an even bigger game, and its presentation and storage aspects are as big as big gets on our little planet.

But smell? Apart from those relatively minor industries devoted to its modification or denial, such as deodorant manufacture, smell has never openly figured in the west’s broad-form indulgence stakes. People hate their noses, jammed there like blights, smack in the centre of their otherwise beautiful faces. Yeccch. It’s a nasty reminder of primæval nights sniffing for love or danger in the cave, long before we tricked ourselves into believing we’d finally got nature firmly strapped in a harness so it could pull us around, and that smell would no longer count.

Considering our ridiculous rigmarole in hiding from sight the anatomical bits not favoured by clean white people, like the anus, it’s surprising we don’t wear some ornate form of nose brassiere to keep this ugly, most intrusive of organs, out of sight.

I can see a huge future in designing, manufacturing and selling a thousand lines of nose bra. You know, the saucy Chantilly lace job with the cheeky cutaway sides and the unique charcoal lining to preclude all aroma, or the gentleman’s sports version with the chrome cover and inverted ram tubes to concentrate the whiffs of racing fuel, rubber and grease, but filtered to remove totally all fresh vegetable and meat smells.

Human smells, for heaven’s sake.

But despite all this ignorance and denial, there are a few genuine nose freaks out here willing to sell the house in pursuit of things that smell good. Like fine food, fine perfume and fine wine. It’s a shock to most folks to discover that the most expensive of all these things, the rarities in the greatest demand, are the ones which smell like the most intimate bits of humans.

Truffles, morels, fresh oysters, malossol caviar, ripe creamy cheese, smoked salmon – these are the wicked foods. Mature Champagne, the best Burgundies and Bordeaux reds are the wickedest wines. The compounds which give these exotica their unique, most desirable aromatics are often very similar in molecular structure to wonderful things called pheremones, which are airborne compounds similar to hormones. They trigger involuntary physiological reactions in creatures which may not always be aware of their smell.^3.

Not all pheremones work in overtly sexual ways. Scientists in the UK, for example, are synthesising one which appears to settle agitated people down. Called Osmone 1, this molecule of steroid musk, shaped very much like the hormone testosterone, is also closely related to five-alpha-androstenone, linked in turn to boarfish, truffles, celery, parsley, cedar and sandalwood. They impregnate a little cube with it, so patients can sniff it at will.

It seems likely to be used in the place of calmative, hypnotic and sedative drugs. The best description of the smell? In this concentration, clean mother’s breast, or armpit. Lovely soft, creamy flesh. The smell of great aged merlot from Chateau Petrus.

There are other wines which smell like high concentrations of androstenone, as it approaches the musky, urinous fragrance of sweat and sex. Some great Champagnes smell like pyrroline, the smell of carob beans, semen, corn on the cob, persimmons and caviar.

A smell like that of isovaleric acid, one of the most womanly aromas, can hike the price of a great Burgundian pinot noir into the nether regions. Paraaminobenzoic acid, the most prominent smell of many skin creams and hair conditioners, occurs naturally between your toes in the most secret creases of your skin, and has very close parallels in some of the finest and most expensive wines.

So. You see why we play these wine games, eh? Good. All this excitement is enhanced by the knowledge of the machinery of smelling. Think of your nerves. Every nerve ending in your body is thoroughly shielded, carefully packed away to prevent the sort of pain you get when this shield is broken by a razor or waddy. But there behind your honker lie 20 million stark naked nerve endings, swaying like seagrass in a thin layer of mucous, their short roots poking straight through into your brain.

An aromatic tickle of these can bring back the most vivid memories of childhood, the most sensuously erotic imaginings, terrible hunger, or the name, vintage and maker of a wine you drank with your Mum on the beach at Victor in the spring of 1967. And we’ve been trained to shun them.

After the weirdo Samurai writer Mishima ritually disembowelled himself twenty years ago in Japan, curiosity led me to study his warrior’s meditative breathing technique. It changed my life, because in it I discovered that our noses smell too when we breathe out.

In the west, we think to smell is to inhale, short, sharp and simple, and we believe a breath first involves inhaling, then exhaling. We start it empty and dead; there is a typically brief western climax, then we finish it empty and dead.

Mishima taught it the other way round. You start on the plateau, packed full of life and air, and gradually force it out, carefully examining your exhalation for the smells of yourself. These will include the food and wine in your belly; the smell of your blood. Your lungs, after all, are a flimsy layer of wet tissue paper with your blood on one side and the sky on the other. Fully exhaled? Empty? Pause and consider. Here is the typically inscrutable eastern anti-climax. With careful practise, this becomes the point at which you can fall asleep at will.

But then you inhale, filling yourself with new life and wonder and the smells of all that surrounds you. Put a glassful of immaculate twenty year old fermented grape juice which reeks of all your favourite things in there with everything else, suck it up til even your shoulders are full, and you begin to wonder whether something went wrong with poor old Mishima’s nose. Full of fresh air and bouquet now? Good. Pause and consider. Here endeth the lesson.

Unless, like me, you want to do it all again. Architecture? Deodorant? Order? Give me a smelly old romp in the primordial swamp any day of the week. And let’s discuss the smells, all the smells, as we go.

FOOTNOTES

1 - METHOXYPYRAZINE

This compound is produced by cabernet sauvignon and sauvignon blanc – and some other grapes - to deter predators which might damage the grape before its seed is ready to germinate. Once the seed is ready to germinate, the grape ceases to produce methoxypyrazine and acid, and instead produces sugar, which is an attractor. In the case of the cabernet, the berry even changes colour, from the green which usually indicates tart bitterness, to a pretty, bright red-purple. The predator eats the berry, and by the time its stool emerges, the seed has sprouted. Methoxypyrazine is the prominent smell in tomato leaf, pea shells and bean skins. It occurs in many grasses, often alongside oxalic acid. When these grasses are dried and oxidised, as in hessian or burlap sacks, their aroma is like the methoxypyrazine in a slightly oxidised wine. I find it highly attractive.

2 – SWEET, SOUR, SALT AND BITTER

We have known since the 1940s that the standard school map of the human tongue, with distinct areas each designated to detect one of these basic flavours, is balderdash. We also know that the human mouth can detect many other things. Chilli, for example. Water. And, of course glutamates, or umami. To investigate this, click on Nairupa Chaudhari, the world’s leading expert on glutamate receptors.

3 – PHEREMONES

While many pheremones have no discernable aroma, they are frequently accompanied by other animal excretions that do have distinct aromas, which, when inhaled and detected, trigger an involuntary anticipatory excitement in the reciever. Pheremones have their own detector, in the nose, but separate from the aromatic olfactories. These are tiny tear-duct-like openings on either side of the septum, just a short distance up the nostrils, called Jacobson’s Organ. Their signals travel to a completely different part of the brain to that which receives aromatic signals.

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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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The less water we need

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

While we’re talking water, I was surprised to read Cara Jenkin’s piece in The Advertiser linking Riverland grape irrigation to salt. There was the clever irrigation R&D man, Dr. Tapas Biswas, and Fosters viticulturer, Gioia Small, promoting a salt management regime that has cut annual irrigation requirements from 10.4 megalitres per hectare to 4 megs. One meg used to be called one million litres. Salt is still NaCl, which is unleashed by irrigation.

Let’s get this in perspective. Baz White, - Gomersal Wines, Barossa - was on the phone immediately. “Jeez, Whitey”, he said. “The River blokes got it down to four megs!” Since the day he planted in December 2001 Baz has used 0.65 megs per hectare per year. He has twenty hectares all up, uses bugger all poison, and has a list of some very famous Barossa names keen to get his fruit. In sharp contrast, I recall some whingeing from upriver about the lack of buyers of any sort.

Heat makes exotic plants very thirsty. Rice, cotton, oranges, vines – you need oceans of water in the desert. The Barossa’s not cool, but it’s a lot cooler than the River.

“Four to six megs per hectare would be about right for responsible commercial use up here in a year like this” says Riverland viticulturer and lecturer Darryl Lang, who made a brilliant organic Second Dune Ruby Cabernet a few years back, and hasn’t irrigated at all this year.

“It’s amazing how my vines stay alive”, he says. “But I wouldn’t suggest to anybody that they should follow my example. If I was serious about making commercial wine in 2008 I’d be watering right now. But in a drought like this the evaporation loss is awful. Even those growers who have decided to ‘mothball’ their vines and grow no crop this year would be using four or five megs I reckon.”

Michael Waugh, who’s just added another perfect 100 Parker points to his phenomenal tally at Greenock Creek, in the Barossa, uses about the same amount of everything – that’s bugger all - as Baz White. “Some of my vineyards never get any irrigation”, he said. “But if I do buy them a drink, it’s about 0.6 of a meg per hectare - thirty litres per vine. There’s no point in letting them die of thirst, but most of my watering is mainly a vehicle to get some nutrient down to their roots.”

Next day I tasted Paxton barrels. Paxtons manage 300 ha of vines including their own, and have begun replacing the old chemical spray and big irrigation with Rudolph Steiner’s biodynamic methods. The first wine from their 20ha Quongdong Farm vineyard near McLaren Vale, after just one year of the new management regime, was probably the most vividly flavoured, wholesome ’06 SA red I’ve seen. The bio stuff jumps at you. It’s like a new variety.

“We’re limited to 1.1 megs per hectare if we’re using aquifer water on conventional vineyards”, says David Paxton. “But sometimes we use much less.”

“And you know Whitey”, says Paxton viticulturer Toby Bekkers, “the more we build up the humus in our soil with the biodynamic preparations and mulches, the less water we need”. There sure wasn’t too much water in that Quongdong Farm shiraz. I’ll warn you when that one’s imminent. It’ll be famous.

Earlier, I’d stood with Andrew Mitchell in his House Block biodynamic riesling vineyard in the Skillogalee Valley, Clare. There was misty rain, and you could smell the gamy reek of the roos we’d disturbed. The wine is brilliant and vibrant, with the sort of banana and lemon pith aromas I’d usually associate with expensive German rizza. The soil didn’t smell of banana, of course, but for a weathered old mix of dolomite, magnesite, sandstone and quartzite, it certainly had plenty of life buzzing in there since it’s been getting its doseage of Steiner’s moonjuice. Andrew has two enormous mulch heaps moulderin’ away on the headlands, ready to add to that veritable plum pudding once they’ve decayed enough.

“Logic says that the more biomass we can get into this ground, the less water we’ll need”, he said. “We try to keep pretty calm about it, but it’s really bloody exciting!”

The Ngarrindjeri Curse

by PHILIP WHITE - this was published in The Independent Weekly in August 2008

“What does this mean for the image of the wine industry?” asked Tony McCarthy. The Baldies had woken me to discuss the continuing retreat of Constellation, the world’s biggest wine company, from South Australia. I didn’t really answer his question.

Constellation, which managed to absorb Hardy’s, which had absorbed Chateau Reynella before being absorbed by the big Riverland duet, Berri-Renmano, knows more than most the true value of green bucks.

These are the guys, remember, with the wetlands.

Banrock Station is a perfect example of how you use salty irrigation water on arid land to grow vines which produce little bags of sugar, from which you can legally make alcohol, which brings sufficient profits to fund a swamp along the river from which your humungous pumps took the water for the vineyard. Until it all goes cactus and you put your hand out to the government to help you keep it all looking tickety-boo for a little longer. Which can also be sold as a good news yarn for all concerned. Once or twice.

This is about tweaking the image of the true nature of your business. Green bucks. When John Grant, the President, yep, President, of Constellation Wines Australia, sent out his triumphant press release about how his winery closures and vineyard sales was a deft response “to the difficult global environment by taking steps designed to benefit the company over the long term and, by so doing, help strengthen Australia’s wine sector”, he mentioned the environment, but not Banrock Station. This is because the River is on the nose, but not yet sufficiently stinky to sacrifice Banrock, which might come in handy if the Murray gets better.

“World’s Biggest Wine Company Heals Aussie River”… I can hear it. “We’ll blame this hiccup on the Ngarrindjeri Curse: the disturbed dead of Ngurunderi taking their revenge. Storm Boy has prostrate cancer; old Gulpilil’s pissed in the cane grass; white man’s firewater saves sick river … just a touch more oboe behind the baby ducks, please Boris...”

But image-wise, internationally, the Murray, and its estuary, is quickly becoming our equivalent of the Amazon Basin. A posh pleasure industry based on the totally unnecessary luxury commodity, wine, doesn’t want to be associated with destroying the Amazon Basin. But that’s what it’s done.

In the same news bulletins that reported the Constellation retreat, Dean Brown was on, spraying big time about how us citizens don’t appreciate the hard work Mike Rann and Karlene Maywald are putting into the River. The Brown Man can flush red and lecture, believe me. But suddenly he was doing it for Robin and Catwoman.

Not long ago it was Premier Brown arranging some water rights for his mates in the wine biz who saw Langhorne Creek as a little Coonawarra conveniently close to Adelaide. The vineyards increased from 471 hectares to 4700 within a few years, and now there’s no water and many tears. This sudden lapse coincides with Mr. Brown becoming Mike Rann’s Droughtmeister, not to mention Chairman of Hillgrove, the miner who’s about to dig the biggest pit this side of Roxby at Kanmantoo.

But open pits are thirsty. No worries. Fill the sails of Mount Barker Council and The Courier with bumptious self-congratulatory bullshit about the mining boom being good for the Hills, thus justifying the construction of another one or two thousand villas to house all the lucky employees.

This presents a crisis: what are we gonna do with all this grey water this new Tupperware Tuscany has produced? Easy. Put in a nice little wetland to keep the kiddies and the greens happy with a few shags, coots and ducklings, and flog the overflow to the mine. An environmental triumph matched only by Banrock!

But this is where Dino becomes the Joker: riparian rights. Any effluent from Mount Barker should flow straight to Langhorne Creek, which has no water in the Brown pipes. This may help replace the water they took out of the river a little upstream to supply Mount Barker’s Villa Rash/Greywater Factory so they can fill the kiddies’ wetlands and keep the miners happy. Whew!

The hubris of prospective winegrape investors is similarly malignant: they’re doing soil tests at Langhorne Creek for new big plantings. Now. These, no doubt, intend to take water from one of the private pipes being run past the forthcoming Wellington Weir to catch the last drops of fresh water that managed to get past the Mount Barker pipe. Just think. A few years back it would have run down there to Langhorne Creek, through the Lake, all by itself.

I know many of you think this column should be about wine. But Thirst is thirst, and water is an important gastronomic item. Constellation knows Adelaide is approaching the point where it must choose whether it wants water or wine. The whole world is watching.

Constellation clings to swamp

by PHILIP WHITE - This was first published in The Independent Weekly on 15 AUG 2008

“What does this mean for the image of the wine industry?” asked Tony McCarthy. The Baldies, from the ABC breakfast program, had woken me to discuss the continuing retreat from South Australia of Constellation, the world’s biggest wine company. I didn’t really answer his question.

Constellation, which managed to absorb Hardy’s, which had absorbed Chateau Reynella before being absorbed by the big Riverland duet, Berri-Renmano, knows more than most the true value of green bucks. These are the guys, remember, with the wetlands.

Banrock Station is a perfect example of how you use salty irrigation water on arid land to grow vines which produce little bags of sugar, from which you can legally make alcohol, which brings sufficient profits to fund a swamp along the river from which your humungous pumps took the water for the vineyard. Until it all goes cactus and you put your hand out to the government to help you keep it all looking tickety-boo for a little longer. Which can also be sold as a good news yarn for all concerned. Once or twice.

This is about tweaking the image of the true nature of your business. Green bucks. When John Grant, the President, yep, President, of Constellation Wines Australia, sent out his triumphant press release about how his winery closures and vineyard sales was a deft response “to the difficult global environment by taking steps designed to benefit the company over the long term and, by so doing, help strengthen Australia’s wine sector”, he mentioned the environment, but not Banrock Station. This is because the River is on the nose, but not yet sufficiently stinky to sacrifice Banrock, which might come in handy if the Murray gets better.

“World’s Biggest Wine Company Heals Aussie River”… I can hear it. “We’ll blame this hiccup on the Ngarrindjeri Curse: the disturbed dead of Ngurunderi taking their revenge. Storm Boy has prostrate cancer; old Gulpilil’s pissed in the cane grass; white man’s firewater saves sick river … just a touch more oboe behind the baby ducks, please Boris...”

But image-wise, internationally, the Murray, and its estuary, is quickly becoming our equivalent of the Amazon Basin. A posh pleasure industry based on the totally unnecessary luxury commodity, wine, doesn’t want to be associated with destroying the Amazon Basin. But that’s what it’s done.

In the same news bulletins that reported the Constellation retreat, Dean Brown was on, spraying big time about how us citizens don’t appreciate the hard work Mike Rann and Karlene Maywald are putting into the River. The Brown Man can flush red and lecture, believe me. But suddenly he was doing it for Robin and Catwoman.

Not long ago it was Premier Brown arranging some water rights for his mates in the wine biz who saw Langhorne Creek as a little Coonawarra conveniently close to Adelaide. The vineyards increased from 471 hectares to 4700 within a few years, and now there’s no water and many tears. This sudden lapse coincides with Mr. Brown becoming Mike Rann’s Droughtmeister, not to mention Chairman of Hillgrove, the miner who’s about to dig the biggest pit this side of Roxby at Kanmantoo.

But open pits are thirsty. No worries. Fill the sails of Mount Barker Council and The Courier with bumptious self-congratulatory bullshit about the mining boom being good for the Hills, thus justifying the construction of another one or two thousand villas to house all the lucky employees.

This presents a crisis: what are we gonna do with all this grey water this new Tupperware Tuscany has produced? Easy. Put in a nice little wetland to keep the kiddies and the greens happy with a few shags, coots and ducklings, and flog the overflow to the mine. An environmental triumph matched only by Banrock!

But this is where Dino becomes the Joker: riparian rights. Any effluent from Mount Barker should flow straight to Langhorne Creek, which has no water in the Brown pipes. This may help replace the water they took out of the river a little upstream to supply Mount Barker’s Villa Rash/Greywater Factory so they can fill the kiddies’ wetlands and keep the miners happy. Whew!

The hubris of prospective winegrape investors is similarly malignant: they’re doing soil tests at Langhorne Creek for new big plantings. Now. These, no doubt, intend to take water from one of the private pipes being run past the forthcoming Wellington Weir to catch the last drops of fresh water that managed to get past the Mount Barker pipe. Just think. A few years back it would have run down there to Langhorne Creek, through the Lake, all by itself.

I know many of you think this column should be about wine. But Thirst is thirst, and water is an important gastronomic item. Constellation knows Adelaide is approaching the point where it must choose whether it wants water or wine. The whole world is watching.

Tasting the dirt

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

Now that the vintage Band-aids are coming off, it was a great treat last week to taste a sweeping selection of the Barossa’s 2008 shiraz. All were single-barrel samples, so anything could happen on the blender’s bench between now and the bottle.

I say Band-aids, because never before have I witnessed so many industrial accidents during a vintage. Knuckles, fingertips, toes, feet, noggins - all bore the brunt of humans working utterly ridiculous hours under totally unfair pressure in close proximity to great big things made from steel, many of which move.

But the Band-aids are coming off the wines, too: it’s now much easier to see the true nature of these woody babies. And while this tasting did NOT include much wine picked after the arrival of the worst heat wave on record, it certainly included fifty or so of the best of those picked in the sublime cool before that heat, and they’re very good.

The tasting was also a ground-breaker in that we poured the wines in groups according to their geological sources. I’ve gone on a lot lately about geology, but suddenly, in the local haute couture of wine, geology is the New Black. Even James Halliday was quoting what sounded like precise geological ages, reporting Brian Croser’s wines in The Weekend Australian last Saturday.

There’d been constant opposition to organizing a Barossa tasting on geological bases since I first suggested it in 1983. People thought it would become an appellation which they did not want; others obviously would do anything to avoid discovering that their geology wasn’t everybody’s favourite. My response has always been to suggest that this delineation is not a man-made imposition or regulation, because it is, very simply, already in the ground. It is there. Why not consider it? That’s what we did at Yalumba last week, and I don’t think things will ever be the same.

To those who are reluctant to admit to a direct influence on wine flavour from geology, which includes soils, subsoils, bedrock and whatever, I suggest they mount a similar tasting and look for the taste of salt. Salt is, of course, just one of the many compounds which come from geology, and, through the roots of the plant, very directly influences the flavour of the wine. Each year, more and more of the vineyards along the Barossa’s creek lines produce salty flavours.

This happens, too, in Clare, Padthaway, McLaren Vale, Langhorne Creek and just about everywhere. Australia is, after all, mainly comprised of ancient sea beds. It’s full of salt.

Just as wine is eighty per cent water. And water is, as John Gilbert wisely pointed out last week, “the ultimate solvent”. This becomes sap, which becomes juice. Then, apart from all the glycerols, fragrances, polyalcohols and other alcohols, on top of the thirty or forty organic acids in wine, as well as all the nitrogenous stuff, like the amino acids, apart from all the polyphenols and tannins, the pigments and vitamins, come the mineral salts of chlorides, phosphates and sulphates, locked onto calcium, magnesium, potassium, and sodium – all through the water, the sap – before you begin thinking about the trace elements: fluorine, boron, iodine, silicon, zinc, iron, manganese and what not.

So as we tasted our way through, and across, the Barossa’s natural history, we discovered little glimpses of this pretty flavour and that common to certain sub-regions. This infernally complex wave of new knowledge will snowball as more such tastings produce more intelligence, eventually making it much easier for blenders to produce better wine, and much easier for those single-vineyard producers with truly unique geology to win praise for their distinction.

Call such a technology an appellation if you will, but at least realise that it’s coming up from beneath. It was here first.

And if we’re really about to tackle the very best of France and the Old World, instead of drowning in the sickening downward gurgle of the discount gutter, we shall have to very quickly learn about our geology, just as the French have learned theirs for many centuries, and have regulated their plantings accordingly.

There will be many spats. Former geologist and tea and liquor merchant, David Farmer, is obviously exciting some Barossa winemakers with his theorizing, and he seems keen to prove the map I promoted here last week, W. A. Fairburn’s learned work from PIRSA, is wrong, which brings the Coonawarra boundary dispute to mind, but, you know, oh well. Get published; get it all approved by your peers, and on we’ll go.

The day after this tasting, I was greatly pleasured to taste the 2008 barrels of Greenock Creek Vineyards and Cellars according to the various local geologies, and suggest they are the most profoundly stimulating wines I have seen yet from 2008. Not the slightest hint of Band-aid.

Foster's: two bill too big

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

They just don’t get it. Between them, The Australian Financial Review and The Australian published a virtual novella about Foster’s CEO Trevor O’Hoy in one recent week. I mean novella in the number of words, but it applies in another way. Let me explain.

The Fin Review scooped everyone with a folksy piece about the former St. Kilda footballer and economics grad, concluding that he’s not demonstrative or flamboyant, but deeply cerebral and committed, and that he feels that some see his humility as a weakness. Jeez.

But the guts of the story was Trev’s humble back-flip over his purchase of Southcorp. After thirty years slavery in the bowels of Carlton & United Breweries, he’d ascended the throne of CUB’s umbrella, Foster’s, promising shareholders there’d “be no big acquisitions on his watch”. Six months later, after a brief chat with chairman Frank Swan – three minutes after – he approved the $3.7 billion takeover. Which Merrill Lynch analyst David Errington agrees was $2 billion too big.

So somebody kicked some arse at The Australian. Out came the me-too scribble. Matthew Stevens called O’Hoy “just a tad gloomy”, and “wry, personable and approachable”, if showing “slightly disturbing honesty” in recent “engagements with the media”, meaning the AFR yarn.

In the same Business section, The Australian’s John Durie was a little less romantic in his “Foster’s chiefs must deliver or go”.

The takeover was a disaster. Showing devastating ignorance of the wine market, O’Hoy attempted to slash costs by having his new premium wine brands, like Penfold’s, distributed and sold by the same dudes who flogged his ordinary beer.

So you run a medium-sized pub. You sell a lake of Cooper’s and a fairly big dam of premium red, and have a couple of vintages of Grange on your list, which came from your private collection, because you don’t sell enough Koonunga Hill to earn yourself a Grange allocation. In comes the Foster’s rep, wanting you to switch taps to Foster’s and Carlton, and replace your precious boutique hand-made red listings with industrial plonk from a portfolio containing 100 brands and two or three thousand products.

So you put down your bar cloth, forget about your lunch customers, and help the sweaty beer rep through his great big friggin’ book? Uh-huh.

Both newspapers talked about the sacking of the three or four thousand, and how O’Hoy eventually repented his error, and appointed seventy wine apostles to sell, well, wine. Their brilliant plan is to “mosaic” customers, a new verb meaning “think about what they buy, then push equivalent bar codes from the thousands in your book”.

Given Southcorp’s history with computer systems and information networks, I’d avoid being mosaicked. The more lugubrious retailers claim service has improved; humble O’Hoy says the worst is over.

But that’s not my point. My point is the two gaping holes in these reports justify the second implication of “novella”. Neither mentions premium wine as a gastronomic item. It’s a commodity, tied like Gulliver with the infernal strings of percentages of this and targets of that and returns of so many per cent or even less. And fair enough, for this is business, and this writer is no expert at that. But this writer is expert at recognizing the difference between an industrial product made in a refinery by industrial chemists wearing steel-capped boots, hard hats and safety glasses, and a wholesome, organic drink made with minimal irrigation, bugger all chemicals, and a whole lotta love, by someone in thongs, with a soulful understanding of the gastronomic rewards implicit in such luxury.

He’s more Country Road than thongs, but think Peter Gago and his Grange. Therein lies value. And shareholder return.

The other hole’s bigger. It’s called water.

Do these people – O’Hoy, Foster’s, and the business hacks – know something I don’t?

The arid land irrigation which pumped up nearly all Southcorp’s grapes is over. No matter that the cotton fields and the rice paddies and the dairy cattlemen waste more water than the grape cockies, who happen to waste shocking amounts anyway. And why not? They pay bugger all.

But such sugar mining is over. It can’t continue. Even if the Queensland rain did fill the River for a month, the time it will take to convert all Murray Valley irrigators from overhead sprinklers and open channels to pipes and drippers will be long enough to get us to the next normal drought, and by then, it’ll be over. Again. Still.

Not to mention salt.

Add to this the strangulations Karlene Maywald has clamped on the Murray water irrigators of Clare, the Barossa, Langhorne Creek and even the recycling experts, McLaren Vale, who use no Murray, and you’ve got a problem that’s much bigger than Trevor O’Hoy’s cerebral humility.

It’s a ruder, truer measure of the real value of Foster’s.

An environmental triumph

by PHILIP WHITE
This was fisrt 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.

my picks

Coates Organically Grown McLaren Vale Shiraz 2005
$30; 14.5% alcohol; diam cork; 93+++ points
Duane Coates’ third release from the organic Strachan vineyard on the Willunga escarpment proves the provenance of these wisely sensitive minds and some very special soil. Made with wild yeast and zilch intervention, filtering or fining, it smells earthy and wholesome, with the truffly, mossy forest floor aromas you’ll find in great Rhone Hermitage, like the 1978. Judicious oak – some Russian - has given it a fine layer of old spice box. It’s lush, but not too syrupy, with the sorts of velvety tannin and staunch natural acidity that can’t help but make you hungry. Uncommonly fine wine. Pork cutlets, lots of crackling. www.coates-wines.com

Lazy Ballerina McLaren Vale Shiraz 2006
$25; 15.5% alcohol; diam cork; 93+++ points
James Hook, vine scientist, wrangles this California Road vineyard, mostly for a local refinery which uses the fruit as a strengthening essence. Nothing industrial about James’ share: fanatical environmentally-conscious detail to growing, minimal watering, and on through all the traditional winemaking you can think of at Redheads Studio. I wonder how much that shagged dancer’s drunk: this sets MY feet tapping. It’s beautiful, wholesome, dense shiraz, and quite rightfully, the one per cent viognier adds only fine tannin, not the sickening peach syrup some boofheads insist on. A year or two of dungeon will see this glory really glow. Cassoulet. http://www.lazyballerina.com/

Mountadam Eden Valley Shiraz Viognier 2006
$25; 13.8% alcohol; screw cap; 93+ points
Con Moschos, formerly one of Croser’s valkyries at Petal, finally moved to a more impressive Valhalla at Mountadam, and has quickly set the cosmos rippling with this vibrant cracker. It breaks all my rules about this blend requiring only a few per cent of viognier: I couldn’t believe my sensories when Mosh smugly informed me this contains ten per cent! Mountadam’s so lofty and cool the slender vio adds only tannin to a lighter, cool climate shiraz. So much so, the wine’s more along the lines of a racy north Italian nebbiolo, whose DNA is almost identical to viognier’s, after all. It’s lovely, appetizing, crunchy wine. Hare, or venison. www.mountadam.com

Yangarra McLaren Vale Grenache 2006
$28; 15% alcohol; screw cap; 94+++ points
Jess Jackson, the patrician USA supermarket chain owner and grenache tragic, owns this amazing vineyard on the big Blewett Springs sands dune at the Kangarilla end of the Willunga Basin. 60 year old bush vines and canny Vales winemaker Peter Fraser add up to one of the best grenaches I know. In the world. These miraculous sands give burnished hints of Parade Gloss and Marveer, lavendar, rhubarb, cloves, anise, chocolate and nutmeg - an overall feeling that’s more your hot-blooded flamenco dancer full of tapas and tempranillo than your usual cherry and raspberry bomb grenache. Knockout! Tapas; Iberian ham; beef haunch. http://www.yangarra.com/

O’Donohoe’s Find Tom’s Drop Organic Mourvèdre Shiraz 2005
$20; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 94+ pointsMichael O’Donohoe’s vineyard’s been certified Level A organic since 1990. The soil below his mulch hasn’t been disturbed for 26 years. Infinitesimal watering, an absolute maximum of two tones of fruit per acre, and an obsession with maintaining a vineyard that’s “a polyculture of trees, vines, plants and creatures” gives us a hearty, characterful, beautifully balanced living red with a bouquet of cosmetics and cream as much as wild live berries. But they’re there: under that heady perfume, there’s a plump Christmas pudding of nuts and fruits. Sinuous, lithe, perfectly tannic: it’s a miracle. And it comes from the Riverland. http://www.tomsdrop.com.au/

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