BASH OUT A QUICK VINTAGE ROUNDUP, SON

Time To Hit The Tiles Big Time

Blogger Burns Out With Deep Vintage Misery

The Year Of Schizo Zin

by PHILIP WHITE

I’ve been out on the slash. The time was up. Enough cabin fever, cowering inside like a fizzer limpet. The time came when a man just had to gird his loins, resin up his bow, take a large bag of gold from the coffer, and hit the Gilded Palace Of Sin.

In other words, your bad correspondent is suffering a severe dose of organ rejection.

Morning sickness. Central nervous system fusion. But he feels better. He can see the evidence in his little camera.

I couldn’t write once the fires started. Like many other Australians, I have been in shock.

This is Wednesday 18th February.

He tells himself ernestly.

It’s interesting, if only with a morbid anthropological fascination, to look back over the last three weeks’ work.

On the morning of Wednesday 28th January I wrote 2009: Another Torrid Vintage Hits – You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

That day, South Australia endured its second day above 44 degrees Centigrade (111.2 degrees Fahrenheit). In the shade.

The Bureau Of Meteorology from Adelaide that morning advised Radio National’s Fran Kelly in Sydney that the heat wave which had just begun its blitz of south-eastern Australia would likely be hotter overall than last year’s fifteen-day record-breaker.

“Daily maxima will be higher”, the BoM said, “and evening temperatures will not offer the respite Australia had last year: nights will be hotter, too”.

With a lump in my guts, I concluded “The implications for the wine industry are horrendous ... It’s obvious. It’s not a wind, it’s a blistering sandblast, and it’s all coming from the vast northern deserts, laden with positive ions, dust, and relentless austral severity”.

On that evening, I wrote Hell on Earth as vintners sweat; winemakers hold their breath. A bloke recorded 54.4^oC (130^oF) under his back verandah, under a spreading shade tree, just over the range at Strathalbyn. It was 50^oC a little further down the Fleurieu Peninsula at Finniss.

As we all know, everything got worse.

The problem ceased to be a vintage niggle, or a base economic threat. It became an unnaturally savage threat to the nature of life in Australia. The thought that this heat coincided with widespread floods in the far north simply served to render things worse, perversely.

Fireys had extinguished over 750 fires in the tiny state of Victoria on the 26^th and 27^th, but the Strzlecki Ranges remained ablaze.

I spent my first decade in the Strzlecki Ranges. They are home. Before the fires, they looked like the photograph below. This was taken by my good cousin John. It’s his dog smiling at him in the rear vision mirror of his water truck. He was a water-carter. Just perchance, he was shot dead by a psycho drug fiend before Christmas, leaving a wife and four kids to dodge the other sort of fire on that woody hilltop.

The murderer went home and suicided. What a hero.

From Monday 2^nd, the “wine industry bodies” began to suggest things weren’t as bad as it seemed, and various regional representatives showed irritation that I had slated the entire vintage far too harshly. They must have the same virus that got Fosters.

That night of the 2nd, as South Australia cooled mercifully, and grape farmers steeled themselves for the rude task of going out to evaluate the heat damage in the morning, Victoria exploded.

The wireless began to announce the death toll.

Those who’d been through anything like this before knew it would tick inexorably upwards for weeks.

In the bits that weren’t on fire, the heat rolled on anyway, falling below the brutal 40^oC a few times, but not by much.

Here, it seemed quite cool for a week. I wore a sweater one day; there was a fine drizzle on another. The heatwave forecast for last weekend didn’t happen, so all our fireys who came back from Victoria to save us if these hills caught ablaze could have stayed there.

You could hear the vineyards inhaling at night.

Now, it’s been in the highish thirties the last two days. Just hot enough to maintain the depression and make the head throb duller.

Somehow, Victoria is still ticking, with fires still blazing, although the Police are saying they don’t expect to find many more dead.

In the meantime, all I could do to maintain a blog was to peel out a few old jokes. Bacchus only knows what I’ve written in the newspapers. There’s no point in wailing about a bad vintage when hundreds of people are being incinerated.

I thought my colleagues in the hack media did a good job of their reportage of this horror. They seemed to fairly quickly understand that all they could do was respectfully wait for the survivors to find their voices, and report their sayings, their memories and pleas and warnings, accurately, and with an eternal sensitivity.

Which is not what I can say about my fellow bloggers. There’s been a lot of indulgent muck on the internet, as amateur busybodies everywhere tried to get their own angle on the tragedy. They’re still at it. I suppose that’s the nature of the new rapid-transfer international shock the internet transmits. People, generally are well-intentioned. But when there’s mass grief up for grabs, everybody wants a slice.

I thought our politicians made utter shits of themselves. Ranty twerps like Rudd and Rann couldn’t help their little macho selves accuse alleged firebugs of things like “mass murder”, meaning the fomenting Laura Norder lumpens will seethe with the same vengeance as the uniformed classes, and those charged will never get a fair trial.

The lynching is never far from the top of Australia's polly swill.

Fact is, successive waves of politicians have wound Australia’s mental health system back into the dark ages.

Anybody who lights a fire when it’s 45^oC is obviously mentally ill. Nuts. Irrevocably cactus in the Jesus Box. Roos loose in the top forty acre. Sandwich short of a picnic. Mad. Like the poor devil who shot my cousin, these people need really good psychiatric care and powerful medication long before they commit their incredible crimes. The paltry mental health budget our smarmy tough guy politicians have struggled to constrict to oblivion now pales into insignificance when compared to the cost of the fires.

We have become a nation of pathetic self-medicating amateurs since mental health assistance has become largely unattainable for most of our sick.

And our tiny, cocky, faux macho politicians are quite happy to leave the mentally ill to the police to manage, which keeps the crime rate nice and up, the community nice and scared, the votes tipping into the bucket, and the rellies of the sick preparing to take up arms to defend their ill kin from government, which, after all, with all its uniformed resources, finds the mentally sick very easy to chase down and nail.

A great blow for Laura Norder, see?

Schizophrenia? You got life, son.

And watch out. One day we'll have another vote on the death penalty.

As for the wine industry? It’s obviously a hellish vintage, although my mates in Western Australia say things are looking good so far. There’ll be a lot of Westralian fruit coming east. Some of it might even find its way into Queensland tanks: Bacchus only knows what the rain’s done to the Queensland vintage.

It’s remarkable how much South Australian fruit survived. Clare seems pretty good, for example. But survive is the word: most of the SA crop looks like it just walked across the Nullarbor by itself.

My dear friend Tony Bilson, the famed Sydney chef, gave it perfectly simple clarity when we toured the vineyard yesterday. It was quite hot: into the thirties.

“But jeez, it WAS hot”, I said, attempting to explain the shrivelled grenache.

“Of course it was hot”, he said. “It was twenty degrees hotter than this!”

Everybody went quiet.

The most common ailment is what my viti guru, James Hooke, calls interrupted veraison. When that first day of 44+^oC hit, on the 27^th, it seems any vines that were undergoing veraison took the biggest hit.

Berries still green and barely-formed tended to survive; those already past veraison turned to jam. But those bunches or berries trapped in the interim, with their skins changing colour and their sugar production commencing, fell into schizophrenic heaps.

The matter of smoke taint aside, it’ll be what I call a zinfandel year: like extreme zin, the bunches have a difficult mixture of totally dried-out skins, raisins and currants, big ripe juicy balloons, and totally unripe pellets the size of lentils. So we’ll have must that’s a weird combination of jam and acid, with sufficient lignin to render barrels redundant.

The bunch below is an extreme example, but it illustrates my point. There are many vineyards with bunches like this.

There are mad success stories, of course. Just as miracle yarns of impossible luck and valour beyond understanding emerge from the bushfires, there are blocks of fruit here and there that seem determined to disprove all naysayers. There’s shiraz and roussanne on this property, for example, that look like nothing’s happened.

It’s the same in other districts. Of course some good wine will be made.

And the really really big story? You mean Fosters? Of course they’ve withheld the wine arm from sale. What is it with wineries and arms? Could this one be Bubba's? It gets smaller every day, by itself. Endogenous shrinkage, you could call it; rather than anything as exciting as spontæneous combustion. Few in Fosters seem to know what to sell, because the size and shape of it changes every day as it shrinks.

Similarly, nobody quite knows what to buy, if indeed bits of it were for sale, and anybody had the money. It’s like the awkward chaos that plagued the preparation of Seppeltsfield for sale, and the consequent dealings. But this one’s infinitely more complex and infuriating for everyone concerned.

Penfolds, of course, is the jewel. The world’s biggest boutique, continuously extant for two reasons. One is Peter Gago. The other is the autonomy Peter Gago valiantly manages to secure for his charge through very hard, persistent, intelligent work.

Damage that, and you might just as well sit back and surrender to the New Heat.

CHILL DUDES! IT’S ONLY ANECDOTAL HEAT!

MCLAREN VALE SHIRAZ PICKED THIS MORNING. THE LEFT HAND BUNCH IS FINE; THE MIDDLE ONE TYPICAL OF THE FRUIT WHICH IS NOT TOO BADLY AFFECTED. ZOOM ON IT AND YOU'LL SEE THE RAISINING AND BAGGING. THE RIGHT HAND BUNCH IS ABOUT AVERAGE FOR THE SORT OF FRUIT THAT WILL BE PICKED THIS VINTAGE. THERE'S A LOT WORSE STUFF LEFT ON THE VINES IN THE HOTTEST PLACES WITH THE HARDEST SOILS.

Another Day Of Hell

But Cool Respite On The Way!

by PHILIP WHITE

There’s been a little respite from the heatwave since I last wrote here of weather. The daily max actually slumped below 40ºC a few times. Not far below, but mercifully below. Yesterday was back in the forties, and last night was a blisterer.

Winemakers in the Fleurieu Peninsula, McLaren Vale, and up through the Adelaide Hills section of the South Mount Lofty Ranges, through Eden Valley and the Barossa to Clare, have well and truly got into picking.

Or at least selecting which of the least blistered rows to pick.

On the other side of the ranges at Langhorne Creek, nobody wants to talk about it. But closer to the receding Lake Alexandrina, Peter Widdop, world champion battler of Old Mill Estate is candid. “You’ve gotta be realistic”, he says. “This is terrible. But we’ve got some really good fruit. I got up on the roof of the shed this morning and when you look out across the flats you can see where the damage is. It’s highly soil-specific. Our touriga nacional is amazing. And we’ve got really tough shiraz: you can look into the odd vine and say ‘jeez, that fruit’s perfect’. But we’ve lost some of the cabernet that’s on the harder soil.”

On Wednesday, Chester Osborn, of d’Arenberg, McLaren Vale, told DRINKSTER “Nightmare vintage again Whitey. Again. Again.”

“It’s the earliest vintage by a million miles”, he continued. “And it’s very very low. We’ll pick about thirty per cent of what I estimated three weeks back, and that was already reduced dramatically from my previous estimation. Now we’ve got too many pickers. Nothing to pick.

“Anything in shallow hard ground, or reflective sands, with no deep moisture, is over. Bush vines? Poor old buggers! McLaren Vale grenache looked amazing. All gone. The sauvignon blanc’s brown. No flavour. The roussanne died. Viognier? No good, but not bad compared to the rest. Petit verdot? Shrivelled to buggery.”

I live about fifteen kays from Chester as the crow flies – although there’s not much in the way of flying going down in the bird world at the moment: they’re hiding. Here, it’s a bit higher, and a bit cooler, and not nearly so bad.

Most of the priceless old bush vine grenache perished in the first couple of plus forty days: the very sand which reflects light and heat up under the basket-pruned canopies to ensure even veraison and ripening, this year simply roasted them as temperatures in the sun passed 50º C. Unless somebody does a very selective pick of the best sheltered bunches, of which there are some surviving, there'll be no super-premium grenache this year.

But three nights ago the lads picked the first Yangarra chardonnay at 12.5 Beaumé, and near perfect pH and acidity. That went straight into the press, the juice cooled and cold settled, and it’ll soon catch some yeast from the air or from within itself, and begin its blessed tick. For that lot, the torture is over, and it’s now in the cool of the cellar.

The Yangarra shiraz is remarkably well, and the stoic crew are suggesting that in today’s bake it’ll hunker down and close up to retain as much moisture as possible, to then prepare to turn back on and complete veraison in next week’s promised cool, when they think “it could ripen up pretty quickly”. Although it’s patchy, and very dependent on soil types.

The remaining chardonnay is coming on bravely, and the roussane has the punk cockiness of Robert de Niro’s Travis Bickle (pictured) staring himself down in the mirror:

“You lookin at me? ... Who you lookin’ at?”

It’s fit, tight and cheeky.

Around the Vales, I hear good reports about tempranillo, too.

I rose at 0500hrs for a walk before sunrise. Looking across the vignoble, I see growing yellow patches in the canopy above the harder soil types. But there’s still plenty of green here.

In times of such stress, the vines sacrifice the burnt, crisping, yellowing and curling leaves, put their berries on hold, and pump their energy into the remaining canopy instead of the grapes, as they determinedly protect their little babies for another day or two, until the seeds become viable. That’s when veraison

occurs, and the vine ceases production of acid, turns the deterrent green bitter grapes to sweet, juicy, red attractors, and then lies back and hopes the birds will come in, eat them, incubate them in the warm little gizzards, and then kindly disperse them to keep the species going.

Funny thing, nature. Since the vines have trained humans to depend upon them for wine, we coddle the vine gardens, keep the flying incubators off and harvest the crop. We actually kill the seeds in the ferment, but instead of killing the vine as a species we also plant more vines than have existed ever before: there’s decreasing need for the plant to actually bother producing a seed!

Certainly no more need to grow up through the poplars and whatnot.

But back to the weather. By 0600hrs, a full-bore Heat Health Warning had been issued by the State Emergency Service and SA Health, while the three south-eastern mainland states brace for another day of searing, life-threatening hell. Some rural areas have been advised to expect 46+º C, 114ºF in the old money.

The Country Fire Service announced “all resources are on high alert in preparation for today’s extreme weather conditions ... the Bureau of Meteorology is forecasting extreme fire danger across most of South Australia with temperatures above 40 degrees and wind gusts of up to 90kph ahead of a mid-evening change. (!)

“But the fire danger forecast for today may be as extreme as we’ve seen in South Australia for a number of years,” CFS Chief Officer Euan Ferguson said.

“People who live in high fire risk areas will need to activate their Bushfire Action Plans and be prepared to swing into action by either staying and defending their property or leaving early, depending on what’s been decided in the plan.”

Police are on high alert: Chief Superintendent Silvio Amoroso said SAPOL has boosted its number of roving firebug patrols. Pity help any mad bastard that gets caught.

Fireys are fighting forty bushfires across the border in woody Victoria. South Australia is holding its breath.

The Ultra-Violet Index is predicted to reach an extreme 11.

Reports of a blitzed vintage continue to trickle past the spin doctors, who have worked themselves into a frenzy, attempting to convince the world that everything’s cool.

The pinot of the Mornington Peninsula is in deep trouble, with Geraldine McFaul, winemaker at Willow Creek, telling Tyson Stelzer that "any exposed fruit has been completely fried. It looks like someone's taken to it with a flame thrower."

To add insult to its growing phylloxera bloom, the Yarra Valley has been utterly blitzed, with some growers losing everything.

“You have to see it in perspective”, said Tony Brady of the great Wendouree, in Clare. “The end of the world was already nigh.

“The malbec doesn’t like it. It’s very soil specific.”

“But Clare is very very lucky”, David O’Leary at O’Leary Walker told DRINKSTER on Wednesday.

“We had that four inches of rain in twenty four hours in November, which nobody else got. That deep ground moisture delayed vintage, so our riesling was only eight Baume last week. It’ll be above that now, but it was so young and tight and tough it’ll be okay if we get ten days of relief from the heat. If.

“I mean everything’s way down in yield, of course. There’s no weight in it, and we won’t get the flavours we want. But Clare will come out of it quite well if ... ”

Tim Smith of Chateau Tanunda reckoned “Barossa yields could be down forty to fifty per cent”.

While many Barossa white vineyards will not be picked, Tim picked good shiraz on Tuesday at 14.3 Baume, and he said the whites that were coming in had “a shitload of flavour ... But you know what, Whitey?" he continued, “it’s ironic. Those who’d been going for the big yields and pumping the water on big time, so they’ve got much bigger leaf canopies than you’d normally want, will probably come through all right. Like the high-yield chardonnay, which nobody wants, doesn’t have a speck of sunburn!”

So, at a time when there’s barely a drop of irrigation water left in Australia, the bastards who’ve been squirting it on like there’s no tomorrow, going for maximum tonnages to make up for the lowest grape prices in years, are succeeding at the expense of those who were being respectfully frugal with precious water.

This water paradox is also obvious in Coonawarra, and on the Murray. With typical reserve, Jon Angove said “The heat has been very severe. Unfortunately, those who were ekeing their water out, trying not to use too much, have shrivelling crops. Those who’ve kept the water up, and have good foliage, good canopies, are looking alright. We’ve seen this before you know.”

“We’re standing here watching the debilitating effects of earlier heat become apparent”, said Greg Clayfield at Zema, Coonawarra. “There’s a lot of sunburn, yellowing, and shrivelling, and the summer’s just begun. The old bush vines are taking it very badly.”

Some determined district representatives are still struggling to convince the world, and probably themselves, that all is cool in sunstruck Oz. I woke to the five o’clock news to hear a well-meaning hero from Griffith saying leaves were yellow, curled and dropping and yields might be down ten or twenty per cent, “but”, he said, “of course that’s only anecdotal”.

Yep. It’s only anecdotal.

None other than the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation, which is led by a former Minister for Defence, The Hon. John Moore AO (pictured, right), yesterday issued a press release saying:

“Recent reports of high temperatures across parts of South Eastern Australia are likely to impact the predicted yields of the 2009 harvest, however it is too early in the season to make quality assessments and it is clear that Australian wine supply is not threatened.

"Most reports from affected wine regions rate the downgrading at between 10% and 20%. The most likely impact of the sustained period of high temperatures will be to bring the season forward and to shorten it – thereby presenting Australian winemakers with some logistical challenges during harvest.”

Some logistical challenges, indeed. Probably merely anecdotal logistical challenges.

The first recorded use of the term “spin”, or its like, which I have encountered, is in dear old Cicero, reviewing the freshly-published historical writings of Julius Caesar sometime around 50BC.

“They are like nude figures, upright and beautiful, stripped of all ornament of style as if they had removed a garment” Marcus Tullio Cicero (left) wrote.

“His [Caesar’s] aim was to provide source material for others who might wish to write history, and perhaps he has gratified the insensitive, who may wish to use their curling-tongs on his work; but men of good sense he has deterred from writing.” from Brutus (262)

It's 0922 now, 41ºC, and the foreboding calm of the dawn has been invaded by a savage northerly, coming in off Australia's vast baking centre. It dries the eyes to a sand-blasted painfulness within minutes, and in it you can smell an acrid, fearsome reek, like the hot metal and brick of a blast furnace.

POST SCRIPT:

2020HRS: I have just turned the exhausted air-conditioning off and opened my windows and doors for the first time since January 28th. There's a beautiful sou-easterly breeze coming in from the Gulf St Vincent (appropriately patron of viticulturers, lost things, schoolgirls and vinegar-makers), and the crickets are singing with glee!

I can almost smell the whales' breath.

In the last couple of hours, as the northerly wore itself out and swung about to the south, the temperature has taken a merciful plunge. It's now 18.6ºC, and the relative humidy has risen to a comfy 71%. At 0930 it was 12%! The Bureau of Meteorology says temperatures will stay below 30ºC until Friday, and ease up to 37ºC next Saturday.

My asthma has gone, the prickly hay-fevered skin is beginning once more to feel liveable, and my eyes suddenly require no lubricating drops. The wee berrudies are chattering delightedly in the gloaming, and from my desk, through the French doors, I believe I can hear the vines sucking in their first big gulp of cool air in a dozen days.

It will take the survivors a day or two to return to normal functions, and then winemakers hope they'll begin smoothly to stack on some sugar without shedding all the precious acidity that remains.

Baz White, from Gomersal Wines in the Barossa called to say that once it was cool enough, he'd taken a walk in his normally schmick vineyard, and discovered that his vines had been auto-aborting bunches all day: each vine has shed two or three bunches. And he keeps them running fairly minimally at the best of times, so that's a big crop loss before he gets down to individual row or even individual bunch selection at harvest.

"We'll just have to see how we go", he said sagely.

Peter Gago called this afternoon from Penfolds, where he makes the legendary Grange, the Magill Estate red, St Henri, and all the Penfolds numbered bin premiums. He'd just done a lap of his wide-spread minions.

"The Magill Estate crush is over", he said of the vineyard surrounding the grand old suburban winery and the tiny Grange cottage of the original winemaker, Mary Penfold. "We beat the previous earlist crush record by two days, and it's not looking too bad at that!

"We've got five open fermenters initially hovering around Baumes of 14.1-14.3, thankfully without any greenness."

Peter had been in the south-east and Coonawarra earlier in the week, and says it was "quite encouraging" since the best Fosters vineyards in the district have in recent years been returned to more modest viticulture with single-wire trellis systems.

"Yesterday in the Barossa it was, not surprisingly, more variable", he added politely.

Now the radio says that as the cool change moves east into Victoria, the cooling wind which brought it will actually inflame the many bushfires raging there. Many vignobles are now surrounded by savage conflagrations, and the poor old Yarra Valley, on the edge of suburban Melbourne, which has been strugging with phylloxera, then a record heatwave that scorched its crop, now looks like getting more than its share of smoke taint, if indeed it doesn't burn down.

Vineyards near Bendigo and Keyneton face the same threat.

Hundreds of thousands of Victorian householders have been warned to prepare for evacuation, or rigidly enforce their emergency bushfire plans if they choose to remain. Melbourne's major power supply lines are threatened at several points, and the open pit coalfields of the La Trobe Valley are being licked by uncontrolled bushfire.

The head of the Victorian fire services has just warned that the cool change has made the State even more treacherously dangerous.

"The wind is what we don't need ... and fire at night is a lot more scary than fire in the daytime", he added flatly.

Somehow, miraculously, South Australia stayed free of big fires today.

Now, with intense pleasure and relief, I'm going to put some clothes on and taste a few reds. It's that cool.

I may even risk turning the stove on to cook something.

Anecdotally, of course.

AND FURTHERMORE:

The radio has just reported fourteen people confirmed burnt to death in Victoria, with another thirty unconfirmed.

And the floods which have just subsided in northern Queensland are rising again, as some districts report two and three hundred millimetres of new rain.

.

.

SAME OLD SAME OLD DOWN THE WOOFER?

WITH BUNCHES LIKE THESE BUGGERED EDEN VALLEY SHIRAZ EXAMPLES TYPICAL OF WHAT'S GROWING - OR DYING - IN OUR BEST VINEYARDS RIGHT NOW, SURELY THE NEW WFA PRESIDENT COULD CONSIDER MATTERS OTHER THAN OVERSUPPLY?

Old Southcorpse Takes Over Winemakers' Federation

Somebody Please Tell Him About The Vintage

by PHILIP WHITE

This morning the Winemakers Federation of Australia announced the appointment of Bruce Kemp to its presidency.

Since his role as chief executive of Southcorp Wines from 1992 to 1999, Kemp has been busy in his Global Wine Advice consultancy, and has been chairman of Pipers Brook Vineyards and Anthony Smith & Associates, a manufacturer of synthetic wine stoppers.

"I am honoured to be invited by the WFA to take on this critical leadership role at a time of great challenge for the Australian wine industry," Kemp said.

"The industry's oversupply, policy risks associated with growing community and government concerns about binge drinking and better integration of our key industry bodies will be priorities during my term."

Oversupply?

Will somebody please tell him what’s just happened to the 2009 vintage?

One of his notable statements came in 2001, when Fosters Berringer were about to move on Southcorp, which he’d just left.

“I think what we're seeing is some consolidation within the industry as major companies try and increase their size and scale to ensure that they are going to be able to move what is going to be significantly increasing volumes of wine into the international market”, he said.

The BMW motorcycle addict (that's a tick!) has had eight years to learn that you can’t continue to move significantly increasing volumes of wine into the international market.

As Fosters are beginning to discover.

But one would have thought that the blitz of heat destroying much of Australia’s premium crop, right now, might have earned a mention in the new president’s first major statement. No?

Or the little matter of the death of the River? Or the phylloxera?

Or the consideration of the sudden disappearance of all the money in the world?

The Winemakers Federation grew out of the Small Winemakers Federation, a group initiated in the mid-eighties by the late Greg Trott of Wirra Wirra, which formed because the big industry councils consistently failed to protect the interests of the small winemakers and growers.

At its seminal meeting in McLaren Vale, guest chairman Brian Croser suggested the proposed members size limit of 400 tonnes crush was far too small for such a group to have any punch, and immediately insisted that wineries the size of Yalumba should be included.

There went the Small Winemakers Federation.

It will be interesting to see precisely what "better integration of our key industry bodies" involves.

NEW HEAT BLITZ FIRES UP DOWN TALK

WE KNEW THE MURRAY WAS CACTUS. NOW EVERYTHING'S CACTUS. OR IS IT?

Are We Really In Hell Daddy,
Or Is This Simply Limbo?
by PHILIP WHITE

Its disastrous business and economic implications aside, the unprecedented heatwave currently blasting south-eastern Australia’s vintage to hell is giving rise to two fascinating problems.

The first is a communication and marketing conundrum; the second is an illness.

Put simply, (1) how much honesty can the wine industry afford to use in its descriptions of what’s going down, and (2), how in the hell, because this is hell, with all due deference to (1), how in the hell is the wine business and the wider society going to handle the clinical depression which is sweeping through whole winegrowing communities?

The industry bodies usually left with the job of making public statements have long been in denial.

This is because all of them are burdened with intricate conflicts of interest.

This was best manifest with the seepage of waves of terrible news about the industry’s parlous state over the Christmas break, when no reporters are at work, nobody reads newspapers, and nobody gives a shit about news.

The huge weight of public relations inertia was again evident during December’s Yarra Valley phylloxera outbreak, when Decanter magazine, in London, was the first journal to follow DRINKSTER in reporting the implications of this epidemic.

The responsible bodies, with the tacit involvement of politicians like South Australian Premier, Media Mike Rann, were deeply intent on keeping any sense of bad news well out of the general Australian media, at the risk of the dreaded bug spreading to phylloxera-free regions.

They succeeded!

DRINKSTER teased this issue out as it proceeded otherwise unreported. While tens of thousands of Victorian vehicles came from phylloxera-infected regions to sit in phylloxera-free vignobles in South Australia to picnic in the vines and watch the famous bicyclist, Lance Armstrong, return from retirement and whizz past in the Tour Down Under peloton, industry bodies and policitians failed completely to effectively advise these travellers to clean their cars and boots before they entered South Australia. In their fey anxiety over avoiding any rain on this glamourous PR parade, all bodies and governments missed an unequalled opportunity to advise an ignorant public about the dread realities of the vine-killing insect.

So, has the bug come to South Australia? If it has, we won’t know for years.

Type phylloxera in the search box at the top left, and read about it.

Now we have a heatwave utterly unprecedented.

But was it unpredicted?

“Budburst hit the bellwether vineyard opposite The Salopian Inn on August 1^st.”, DRINKSTER reported on 27^th August last year.

“Last vintage, I reckon it was the 15^th.. And look what happened then. One of the earliest vintages ever, starting out cool in every sense of the word, then suddenly coming over all hellfire and brimstone when the record fortnight of heat hit.”

There is no satisfaction in “I told you so”, but this seems to keep happening.

Now we see the many industry bodies struggling to admit there’s a terrible problem with the heatwave, but they don’t want anybody to imagine there’s anything sick in the vineyards. Their blithering underestimation of the Australian public fails to appreciate that we can actually absorb news of a bad crop without thinking all the wines will poison us.

We understand fruit fly, for Bacchus’s sake!

Perhaps this is an innate component of this very complex business which in essence masquerades as a provider of healthy gastronomic delights made by fresh-faced artisans and crusty environmentalist heroes, when in reality it sells one of the most dangerous addictive recreational intoxicants and depressants known to man, which is manufactured by technicians in hard hats and safety boots in glittering refineries. You might see them admit that half of Australia’s crop still goes into goonbags, but they’ll never give a skerrick of credo to the thought that one can also have alcoholism troubles with premium bottled wine.

And they act as if everything in bottles is premium.

So, presented with the dread reality of this literal hell on Earth which has just blitzed their whole business, they struggle to actually say things are as crook as they most obviously are.

It’d be funny if it wasn’t so frigging tragic.

DRINKSTER has been hard onto the heatwave and its implications since January 28^th . Today, five days later, we had press statements ooze out from Executive officer of the Riverland Winegrape Growers' Association, Chris Byrne, and Mark McKenzie, executive director of Wine Grape Growers Australia.

Dudley Brown, the impressive new Chairman of the McLaren Vale Wine Grape and Tourism Association, has shown skill in being honest without sensationalist. He sent a message this afternoon which was pure zen in its simple understatement and monumental implication.

“The Phylloxera meeting scheduled for 13 Feb is cancelled as it was a pre-vintage meeting”, it stated.

(Vintage could well be over by the 13^th.)

But from the top, the wine industry seems keen to impart the impression that there will still be great wines made from 2009. This was possible in 2008, when smart cookies picked before the fifteen day heatwave, which seemed terrible then, but looks piffling now.

I’d like to see a list of vineyards which have somehow missed out on this dusie first grade triple-A with a bullet king hell bitch of a heatwave which looks like going for at least another week if not forever.

As DRINKSTER reported yesterday, such fey blatherings will of course backfire when the same people who are insisting that there will be great wines in 2009 later attempt to get financial assistance from government, as grain farmers do with drought relief.

“Mallee wheatboys never pull any punches when they know their season's cactus”, the DRINKSTER said. “Winemakers could learn something from the disarming honesty of the graziers, pastoralists and grain cockies, but I doubt it'll happen this year. Just depends on how bad things really get.”

That aside, we then address the matter of depression, diagnosed, denied or whatever.

The Australian countryside was already littered with broken households where broken farmers struggled with the black dog.

Now the beast has jumped into the wine basket, and great care must be exercised to limit its destruction.

Any business afflicted with the sort of abject rote denial the wine industry tends to display, seems, on the face of it, unlikely to capably handle such a seeping terror.

Once again, McLaren Vale’s Dudley Brown seems best to have his brain around this threat, calling meetings of growers and makers to instil a feeling of togetherness as much as anything else.

Other regions should follow his example.

The councils at the top don’t seem to acknowledge depression.

Maybe it’s something to do with industrial liability.

COMMENT:

"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy." - Martin Luther King Jr.

February 3, 2009 1:03 AM

ANONYMOUS

SOUTH EAST OF OZ CONTINUES TO FRY

FIRES BLAZING IN GIPPSLAND, VICTORIA, LAST NIGHT THREATENED KEY LA TROBE VALLEY POWER STATIONS AND BURNED MANY HOUSES TO THE GROUND

Victoria’s Gippsland Ablaze

Picking Begins In Intolerable Heat

by PHILIP WHITE

In spite of two slightly cooler, breezy nights in the ranges, South Australia’s vignerons have started to pick what’s left of a horrible harvest.

2009 looks like being the earliest vintage on record.

As vulnerable people are dying in this unprecedented fiery furnace, the Bureau of Meteorology has begun issuing a new warning atop the usual ultra-violet warnings, blackout forecasts, and pollen counts for asthmatics and allergics: this is called the Heat Health Warning.

The Adelaide interstate bus terminal, which is air-conditioned, has opened its doors to offer the homeless some cool respite on its concrete, cold drinks from its faucets, and a shower in its travellers’ amenities.

In the fledgeling cool-climate viticulture region of Gippsland, east of Melbourne, Victoria, bushfires are threatening the power supply lines and generating stations as the precious cool-climate rainforests of the Strzlecki Ranges explode in flames.

We expect another day over 40°C today (Sunday 1^st February), and consistent high thirties or forties through the next few days. The optimist may believe forecasts of mid-thirties temperatures later in the week, but optimism is thin on the ground this vintage.

Old unirrigated bushvines, the heart and soul of much of South Australia’s super-premium fruit, are taking the record heatwave very badly. Common misunderstanding about the resilience of the oldest strugglers includes the notion that such vines are somehow tougher than modern, trellised, irrigated vineyards.

The hellish heat of the summer of 2009 puts paid to such naive shibboleths: many of the grandest old vineyards have fruit that’s cooked and shrivelling before they even reached veraison.

The ones that might survive with tolerable quality are those with the best balance of leaf and fruit; carefully-managed canopies for shade, a modest supply of water, and an aspect that shelters them to some degree from the worst afternoon heat.

Breezes that move the leaves are good, as the leaf surfaces don’t simply take the full blast of the sun at the same angle all day, but then the horrid northerlies that have been blasting in from the vast central desert simply dehydrate everything they hit, and quickly.

Vineyards in reflective soils are the worst hit: the grapes are being roasted top and bottom as leaves roll, droop and fade. In normal conditions, such reflective soils are a boon, ensuring smooth, even ripening.

Heat susceptible varieties, like viognier, are unlikely to be picked. Growers of chardonnay in anything other than very cool places are wondering whether to bother picking at all.

Newly-planted vines are perishing in their grow tubes.

My bellwether vineyard, opposite the cool Salopian Inn in McLaren Vale, this vintage had budburst a fortnight earlier than the previous year, when harvest was the earliest on record and a fifteen-day heatwave blitzed everything that wasn’t picked early.

This year, as DRINKSTER then predicted, harvest is yet another fortnight earlier.

There is little traditional Aussie humour on the grape receival aprons and hoppers; stoic sobriety hangs over the whole wine industry. This will be a year when depression is as big a threat to vignerons as financial stress and the usual vintage exhaustion.

But before breakfast, I called Michael Waugh, of Greenock Creek in the Barossa, and he’s still showing his usual droll digger’s wit.

“We’re not crying in our beer”, he chuckled. “There’s nothing we can do about it. But, you know better than anybody, all our vineyards are on different soil types and they’re not all reacting terribly badly. And we only grow reds, which are tougher.

“The sauvignon blanc next door looks dead, but then sauvignon blanc in the Barossa never made much sense to me.

“The modern vineyards that are generally over-watered are carking it – they spoil them with too much coddling and the poor vines have no physiological resistance to conditions like these. They just fall over.

“But, you know, our acids are holding – last week that was all we had, bloody acid – and later this week they reckon it’s going to cool down.

“So, no panic here.”

Michael promises to report later today, once he’s done a thorough inspection of his priceless suite of vineyards, so watch for a later post.

Another wry exception to the fact of this stressed-out, deeply-shocked and exhausted community came by SMS yesterday. My mate Pat Conlon, the wine-loving Minister for Transport and Infrastructure, who has no reason to laugh as his systems grind to a halt in the heat, sent me the following message:

“The Premier has urged people to make sure they check on elderly friends in this heat. So. You OK?”

This came to my phone five hours before the message to which he referred.

“For urgent assistance”, it said, “phone 000. Do not reply to this message. IMPORTANT SA GOVERNMENT HEAT HEALTH WARNING: Heat Stress Can Kill; Stay Cool; Stay Inside; Drink plenty of water; Check the safety of vulnerable neighbours; Listen to your radio.”

STOP PRESS

NOSES TO THE WINESTONE: DRINKSTER BODYGUARD PETER PAYE, (L), WITH PHILIP WHITE AND PENFOLDS WINEMAKER PETER GAGO (R) IN VINTAGE 2008, WHICH WAS EXTREME, BUT NOT AS EXTREME AS 2009.

Last year, Penfolds winemaker Peter Gago told DRINKSTER that for the last fifteen vintages, he’d had to annually readjust his definition of extreme weather.

He’s just done it again.

“We start fermenting at Magill on Tuesday”, he told DRINKSTER this morning.

“Not unexpectedly, this is the earliest vintage on record.

“We had some shrivel in the most stressed vineyards yesterday, but miraculously, it’s not excessive.

“Even though the heat has been hauntingly constant, we’re seeing quite a lot of variation between vineyards.”

Typical of Peter's usual calm politeness, this matter of "quite a lot of variation" leads me to wonder just how far the winebiz spindoctors will go in their attempts to suggest things aren't as bad as they initially said.

Various regions are already sending out the message that they're on top of it, or that they're not beaten yet. The more brazen tuggers will soon be saying it's a great year for this or that for whatever magical reason.

Such fey blatherings will of course backfire when the same people later attempt to get financial assistance from government, as grain farmers do with drought relief. Mallee wheatboys never pull any punches when they know their season's cactus.

Winemakers could learn something from the disarming honesty of the graziers, pastoralists and grain cockies, but I doubt it'll happen this year. Just depends on how bad things really get.

But Peter Gago's guarded optimism - or hint of it - echoes Michael Waugh’s Greenock Creek report. Check back later today for Michael's full round-up.