LOOKS BETTER THAN A PHONE

THIS TELEPHONE COMPANY ADVERTISEMENT REMINDS DRINKSTER OF SOMETHING. WHAT DOES IT HAVE TO DO WITH TELEPHONES? WHY HASN'T THE WINE INDUSTRY, WITH ALL ITS BILLIONS WASTED ON IDIOTIC MARKETING AND ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS, THOUGHT OF THIS?

LIBERTY ATTACKS FRENCH WINOS

Time To Hit The Streets

by PHILIP WHITE

“One day we shall be so angry about it that we are going to do a demonstration in the street only the French can do and the government will have to listen to us this time!”

So says my winemaker friend from Bordeaux, Jacques Lurton.

I’d sent him an AFP article posted from Bordeaux on Christmas eve, “Sour grapes for French wine in 2008”. This sad account of the neo-wowsers eroding the basic cultural nature of wine in France deserved a rapid response.

Jacques is the man.

Savage demonstrations are indeed due. If the French fall, Australia’s wowser interferist exclusive Brethren pinko humanist Ruddy do-gooders will have a field day. That lot are already on the march. Against the wine lover.

The AFP article claimed wine, “a once proud symbol of the nation's identity, is now swirling in a cocktail of alcohol abuse legislation. Long viewed as a quintessential part of the French lifestyle, along with fine foods and good living, wine is slumping so low in the national esteem that winemakers have even complained of being treated like drug dealers by the government, and their websites put on a par with porn.

“One recent survey highlighting the change in popular attitudes to wine showed that 51 percent of people now considered the national drink ‘risky’.”

“It is a very well documented article and yes it is true”, Jacques shot back. “When you look at it from the angle of a foreign reader it looks like this is a nightmare situation!

“But in France people who want to get drunk never use wine as it is considered a drink to pair with food. Only if you go to a wine producer’s place for dinner or lunch you will be asked if you’d like a glass of wine for an aperitif but in every other private house or at the bar people drink other kinds of alcoholic beverages.”


Raphael Berger, of the statistics centre on living conditions, CREDOC, which issued the study, said "Wine in France used to escape the negative perceptions of being an alcoholic drink ... much of the change in attitude was related to ongoing government efforts to control alcoholism and abuse”.

France's Health Ministry has been reasonably successful in its recent blitz on drink drivers, and “spent much of 2008 preparing new laws to curb teenage binge drinking and alcohol abuse”.

This year will see the legal age for purchasing alcohol increased from 16 to 18, a ban on happy hours and open bars (with a flat fee to drink as much as possible withing a limited time), and a possible prohibition on free wine tastings.

“While French doctors once tolerated a few glasses of champagne during pregnancies” AFP said, “new legislation now obliges producers to print a ‘no drinking during pregnancy’ logo on bottles”.

This new low for quality French producers was previously the domain of the USA alone, which the French had found quaintly ridiculous.

“We all know that 90% of road accident due to alcohol drinking is not caused by wine but vodka and other strong alcohol beverages” Jacques retorted.

“Have you ever seen a young French drinking wine in a night club? If you look at what people buy in supermarkets for parties this is never wine but cheap whiskies, vodkas, cocktails etc. ... mixed with Schweppes”.

"Instead of encouraging moderate drinking, we are frightening people and demonising wine," Georges Haushalter, head of Bordeaux's Wine Merchant Union, told AFP.

France’s wine consumption has slid steadily to 64 litres per person a year from 75 litres in the early 1990s. While this margin was once easily mopped up by export, South America, South Africa and Australia have invaded those low-price markets traditionally regarded as safe property by the French, leaving the monetary collapse of 2008 to savage the upper end of the French portfolio.

While even the Chinese felt wine to be a safe investment haven, the last few months have seen the Liv-ex, the leading fine wine exchange, get big-time jitters, in October recording its largest fall – 12.4% - since its inception in 2001. Liv-ex fell another 5.5% in November, while Bordeaux prices fell 25%.

In value terms, the director of the Federation of Wine and Spirit Exporters (FEVS), Renaud Gaillard, told AFP he sees “a zero increase for the end of 2008 ... The potent mix of negative conditions for 2009 is even more worrying, he said. "There is no indicator we will be coming out of this crisis quickly."

As if all that wasn’t bad enough, 2008 was a difficult vintage in Bordeaux, throwing frosts, hail, torrential rains, and resultant mildew and botrytis at producers. While some winemakers are almost happy, the “vintage was expensive and one of the lowest on record, leading to supply problems and shortages of certain products such as Bordeaux whites”.

Apparently learning from China’s skills in stifling political discussion on the internet, France continues to fail to legally legitimise the Internet as a medium for alcohol publicity. AFP reports “draft legislation leaked to the press earlier this year, which attempted to legalise wine ads, proposed limiting access to wine sites to certain hours -- the same regulations proposed for pornographic sites” ... and, it continues, “self-censorship is rife since Heineken, Moet and Le Parisien have all been convicted of “promoting wine drinking.

“A national magazine article about a Books and Wine fair, which carried the fair's wineglass logo, was also forced to carry a government health warning ... and the Ubifrance 2008 report on exports concludes with a warning that reads ‘This is not intended to incite consumption of alcoholic drinks’."

In October, winemakers in Bordeaux, Champagne and Burgundy painted over road signs pointing to their regions as a protest against wine censorship, and the new wine tax.

“Alleged government hostility to wine reached such proportions in 2008” AFP continued, “that two prominent wine journalists accused the government of hindering wine consumption to boost sales of anti-depressants in order to pander to the stronger pharmaceuticals lobby ... winemakers claim they have been relegated to the category of dealers and angrily complain that France's leading export is no longer trumpeted by the government”.

"Viticulture products are placed in the same category as drugs," Jean-Charles Tastavy, an independent wine producer and member of the Council for Moderation and Prevention, recently said.

The outlook for the future is not bright despite good demand for his wines, Thomas Duroux, director of Chateau Palmer, told AFP.

"In terms of communication, 2008 has been a horrible year," he said. "France is the world's most important wine producer, and we have the most restrictive advertising legislation. Is this because (President Nicholas) Sarkozy doesn't drink, or because our system of (anti-alcohol) lobbies is too strong?"

Sarko? Doesn't drink? Bullshit! Click on his name - that was the second image Google suggested when I asked for "French people drinking".

Back to our friend Jacques.

“It’s a crazy situation” he said, “and nonsense, as wine is so much part of our culture. The wine industry brought more money into the external French balance last year than the entire Airbus business. This has nothing to do with our actual president as this anti wine campaign started long ago when we had a socialist prime minister and Chirac as a president.

“I must say our president wants to help the wine industry to export” he continued “but he is not showing strong signs of changes on the domestic market because it is not a popular subject.

Agriculture in France is less than 7% of the active population and we are seen as people living on subsidies or we are considered very wealthy if you own a chateau so our image is not good enough for the politics to show us as victim. It is true the French wine industry has been too long subsidised and some producers - mostly from the south of France - have given our industry a bad image.

“At the moment the French market remains the largest in the world and there is still possibilities to sell wines in France” Jacques said.

“The problem is more for the large negociants, with their big brands, and champagne producers, who have came to the point of a very expensive product due to grape price, assisted by the export market buying at any price.

“But if you talk to a little producer who cultivates relationships with his clients in France by visiting them an serving them directly? He is still selling wine!

“Another aspect which hasn't helped our wines to be exported is the euro currency which has been too strong for too long against every other currency. Now things are better but it is too late as the world collapse has slowed every thing down.”

BEST MERLOT: USA OR BETHLEHEM?

FROM WHICH TERROIR WOULD YOU PREFER TO TAKE YOUR MERLOT? BETHLEHEM (top) OR THE USA (bottom)?

AMERICAN MERLOT

Felix Salmon in Conde Nast Portfolio

(comparing the new US trend to seek apartments in shopping malls):

“The history of the wine market in America (bear with me here) has a central role for merlot: a relatively sweet and easily-drinkable varietal which got Americans -- who had been more accustomed to beer and sweet white wine -- comfortable with the idea of red wine. Nowadays, merlot has something of a bad name, but it's still hugely popular.

“I think of these mall condos as the urbanist equivalent of merlot: a gateway, if you will, to the urban lifestyle, without the tannic downside.

"I'm not sure they'll ever become quite as ubiquitous as merlot. But they're clearly part of America's real-estate future.”

DRINKSTER finds this amusing because:

1 Merlot is neither sweet nor more easily-drinkable than other wines. It is a tannic grape variety from Bordeaux, with flavours of chicory and rocket when young. Properly aged, these phenolics oxidise to take on a character akin to bitumen or dark chocolate, adding astringency to red fruits that plump out the rest of Merlot’s aromatic and flavour structure.

2 Americans still don’t know that Merlot is a serious red grape variety with astringency akin to Cabernet Sauvignon. Real merlot is not mellow.

3 If you’re comparing Merlot to real estate, check Chateau Petrus, where 11.4 ha of vineyard produces a maximum of 2,500 dozen bottles a year. The 2004 Chateau Petrus is available from $A1,200 - $1,600 a bottle; the 2006 from $2,160 to $5,300.

BETHLEHEM MERLOT

(from a Vatican blog)

Austen Ivereigh writes about the Cremisan winery of the Salesians of Don Bosco, who make merlot on a hill outside Bethlehem. It is a wine of choice for Christians clustered in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and those in Israel.

"Cremisan's distinctive 'David's Tower' and 'Shepherds' Fields' wine is a vital symbol of the identity of Arab Christians: Drinking Cremisan wine sets them them apart from Israeli Jews (who have kosher wine) and from Muslim Arabs (who do not drink alcohol).

“Moreover, the wine has begun to be exported to Germany and the United Kingdom to compensate for the drop in Christian visitors to the Holy Land. Cremisan's "Messa" altar wine has proved popular with abbeys and large churches in the United Kingdom, who buy the wine as a means of directly supporting the Christians of the West Bank.

“But since early November, Israeli soldiers have been refusing to let the wine through the Hebron checkpoint.”

Cremisan wine "has an important social value," said Father Franco Ronzani, the Salesian rector. "The ones who profit from the wine sales are not us."

Some 30 families depend directly on the winery, which supports many projects among the poor in Bethlehem, including a technical school and a bakery where the poor gather to collect loaves.”

It feels like the final straw for the elderly Italian Salesians living in the friary.

The house looks out over the 30-foot-high concrete Wall of Separation, which the Israelis say is necessary for their security; but its path makes clear that its purpose is also to protect illegal Jewish settlements on the West Bank, and to annex lands that once belonged to the Christian families of Bethlehem.

The loss of Christian lands, and therefore grape supplies, combined with the obstacles to free movement of people and goods since the intifadah in 2000, is the main reason why Cremisan production has dropped from more than 700,000 bottles to just 200,000 in recent years.

When it is extended next year, the wall will snake behind Cremisan to include an illegal Jewish settlement, thus severing Cremisan from Bethlehem -- and from the workers who tend the vineyards and make the wine.

If it is unable to reach its customers in Israel and abroad, the winery will be forced to close; and its demise will be a major blow to the continuity of the Christian communities in Palestine and Israel.

Father Ronzani puts it simply. "We want to continue to exist," he said. "We've been making wine for 120 years, and we want to carry on for another hundred."

DRINKSTER abhors this because:

It’s just a tiny addition to the towering stack of steaming shit behaviour the Israelis have built for us all to admire this Christmas.

CHINAMAN BUSTS AIRPORT WINE RECORD

CARTOON BY GEORGE GRAINGER ALDRIDGE

Staff at Paris’ Roissy airport liquor store are still bemused at the record-breaking customer who whizzed through on Christmas eve. A mystery Chinaman broke his dash to a Beijing flight to spend $A89,013.00 on wine for Christmas, doubling the previous record spend on the good oil at an airport. Our thirsty traveller’s cache included 1991 La Tâche, a 2002 Romanée-Conti and a 1947 Lafite-Rothschild. No doubt the world’s most famous winemaker, Jesus Christ, would have been delighted to see his birthday celebrated so heartily by a wine man from the east. One wonders about the Christmas dinner menu. In Australia, the airport anti-terrorism droogs would confiscate the wine before he caught the plane, and it’d be back to that sweet Damascus rosé for the next birthday clambake with the lads on Galilee shore.
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THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY

Philip White Sees Encircling Gloom in 2009

a version of this story appeared in The Independent Weekly on 19 DEC 08

Next year? Next year’s already been buggered by this year.

Ignoring a few modest-scale exquisities, like the early-picked rieslings of Clare and Eden, 2008 was a disgusting vintage. Even the degree of industrial accidents soared as winery workers endured impossible shifts, trying to get everything turned into wine before the heat turned it to currants.

But in spite of the empty river and the drought, Australia’s crop was up one third on last year, and yields per hectare went up by a quarter. Where the water came from beats me. Then, export volumes went down 9%; and domestic sales down 5%, leaving us with 2 billion litres of wine to drink.

To put that in scale, Italy’s just beaten France to become the world’s biggest winemaker, its production up 8 percent to 4.7 billion litres. While Italy has reduced its vineyard area, its quality is steadily increasing. To add insult to alcohol producers everywhere, French heart specialist Dr Olivier Ameisen, 55, is claiming that by taking a muscle-relaxant called baclofen, he’s lost his desire for alcohol, and wants his theories tested on more thirsty people.

And now I hear the price of temporary water from the River is less than half the price it was last November. I know where that’ll be going.

There will be plenty of wine to drink next year, and a lot of utter swill from that heatwave, industrially corrected to varying degrees of digestibility.

But in the face of increasing large-scale vineyard plantings, and grape prices at rock bottom, many, many family-scale specialist grapegrowers will hit the wall. As Foster’s disappears and Constellation withdraws, towns will empty.

Nevertheless, 2009 will be the year the lumpen mass will wallow in lousy cheap wine at the expense of the Australian countryside, setting alcohol-related public health costs through the roof. Those of the rest us who miss out on Dr Ameisen’s tests will be furiously trying to drink our favourite specialist wineries through the crisis. Small, high-quality producers will need faithful support like never before.

We will see the continuing, phenomenal rise of China as a player in the wine market. The first paper to report those Italian figures, for example, was the Shanghai Daily. They’re onto it, and they’re increasingly getting into it.

As for the little matter of all the money in the world suddenly disappearing, Tony Bilson says his three-star temple of gastronomy in the Radisson in Sydney is still packed with tourists at dinner, but the business gamblers who’d filled it for years each lunch - at, what? $200-$500 a head? - are now down at his Number 1 wine bar on Circular Quay, hassling the staff about the price of cleanskins.

We will see the continuing tightening of control of restaurant outlets, with wine lists being bought and chopped up by one or two of the transnationals, who might then allow a big family show, like Yalumba, Taylors, Angove's or McWilliams in to add a bit of colour. Unless you can buy your way in, new producers with wines over $25 can pretty much forget it. That, of course, will include hundreds of brands which are hobby or vanity additions to family vineyards planted in the wrong places to the wrong varieties for all the wrong reasons of fashion and whimsy.

The liquor retail world will continue to constrict as Coles and Woolworths ruthlessly undercut the indies with their share of that 2 billion litres. Desperate money’s flying everywhere in retail, as floor and shelf space goes to the highest bidders. Check out the brochure Yalumba’s just produced for The Edinburgh – there’ll be more of that. If you have a specialist wine store that stocks your favourite littlies, coddle it.

Which is not to say that the big guys are limited to swill: the phenomenal cheapie imports Jeremy Stockman buys for Vintage Cellars and 1st Choice have staggered me this year for their range and quality. The exotica they’re bringing in should inspire our winemakers, providing lots of ideas for new flavours.

In the kiddylikker sector, expect a return to the original coolers of the late ’eighties, when they were made from denatured or disguised wine bases rather than spirits, and tasted pretty much the same.

In the premium regions, led by McLaren Vale, we will see more determined replacement of the old petrochemical spray regimes with an internationally-unprecedented wave of rigorous organic and bio-dynamic techniques. Margaret River, Clare, the Victorian Alps ... more and more regions are seeing this beautifully healthy and brave conversion.

And, fittingly, 2008 will see McLaren Vale – Trott’s View sell out. You can buy the last copies at Wakefield Press in Kent Town. This beautiful volume of photographs of the late Trott’s favourite folks, events and locations is our last glimpse of the Vales that used to be.

The fight to retain what’s left will reach fever pitch in 2009.

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ANCIENT FLAVOUR WHEEL PROTOTYPE

DRINKSTER has just unearthed this early prototype of the flavour wheel. While digital hand-held computers seem set to replace these quaint old devices, we feel certain they will eventually have their day, as they require no batteries, are fully water-resistant, and are available in Braille forms for those whose eyes have been damaged by the glory of it all.

SAUVIGNON KING LEAVES CLOUDY BAY

KEVIN JUDD will be spending a lot more time on his brilliant photography. Check out his work by clicking on this image.

Juddy Mosies On

1984. Kevin Judd, probably the quietest man in the wine business, walked into my office grinning like a giant clam and said he was into this new thing with David Hohnen of Cape Mentelle. But New Zealand? Yep. A place called Marlborough.

“We’re gonna plant sauvignon blanc”, he gurgled through his smoke. “Best place for it.”

I liked two sauvignons blanc: one yellow softy made at Angle Vale by Rocky O’Callaghan; the other was Hardy’s tawny fortified made from Bob Hardy’s ancient vines at upper Tintara. Wolf Blass had been buggering about with some, blended with riesling and aged in mostly American oak(!).

Then came the radical Vales blitzkriegs Iain Riggs made in ’81 and ’82, at Hazelmere Estate (now Serafino Maglieri’s). Riggsy used fruit from the Edge Dennis vineyard that d’Arenberg has just bought. He picked it into milk crates so the grapes wouldn’t squash and oxidise, chilled it, then gave it the Oenotech treatment devised by Dr. Tony Jordan and Brian Croser, using their distinctive R2 yeast. The wine was a blast: crisp, grassy and fresh as a lemon, with all those alarming R2 whiffs of banana and passionfruit.

R2 had been isolated by Croser at Chateau Rahoul near Sauternes in Bordeaux, where Len Evans was spending Peter Fox’s money. But the financially-challenged Fox solved his Adelaide Holdings problems by driving his Ferrari flat out into a concrete wall, and Peter Vinding-Diers bought Rahoul, to make exquisitely fine, almost brittle sauvignon blanc. The savvy-B explosion ignited, and soon Rob and Michael Hill Smith had a great lunch at Yalumba, where they served Vinding-Diers’ inspiration: “Y”, the dry savvy-B from the mighty home of sticky, Chateau d’Yquem, in Sauternes.

Sometimes d’Yquem picks its sauvignon early in the vintage to make a dry wine, rather than letting it botrytise with the semillon and go into the mighty sticky for which that Chateau is revered. There have been only 23 vintages of “Y” since the first in 1959.

So we guzzled our “Y” while the Smiths quizzed us over the chance of dry savvy-B becoming the next chardonnay. Rob eventually went in the viognier direction, and while I have a tape recording of Michael deriding savvy-B that day, he went on to make it a stalwart at Shaw and Smith. There was much discussion of the cat’s piss grassiness of the variety, which comes from its natural methoxypyrazines (3-isobutyl-2-methoxypyrazine and 3-isopropyl-2-methoxypyrazine). These compounds are common to cabernet sauvignon, soursob, rhubarb, tomato leaves, and grass. Hemp, and jute, or hessian, is full of it, and sometimes austere sauvignons smell rather like superphosphate sacks, which combine the remnant methoxypyrazine with the smell of guano, which I reckon comes from combinations of sulphur, soil, and yeast.

Humans detect methoxypyrazine at around one part per trillion, which is like smelling one grape in the entire Australian crush. The grape manufactures it to deter predators, and only when the pip is ripe enough for germination does the vine suddenly cease its production and instead pumps sugar to attract said predators, which become incubators for those seeds.

Vignerons panic if they can’t get their savvy-B off quick enough in heatwaves, as the plants quite abruptly cease manufacturing this compound. On a hot day, the value of a crop can plummet in hours. The winery wants the methoxypyrazine for its distinction, but suddenly it disappears, leaving the grower with a grapeyard full of sugar but devoid of character and smothered in birds.

“I knew Stephen Hickinbotham was sniffing around Marlborough - he knew sauvignon had a future there”, Hohnen says. “He was first into everything. Kiwi sauvignon had the eyebrow factor: nose in the glass and up goes the eyebrows. But it was all too sweet and too acidic.

“Juddy instinctively knew what to do. He’d worked four vintages with Merrill at Reynella, then went to Selacks in New Zealand. We found three or four growers with 120 tonnes. They didn’t know what to do with it. Juddy made it after work. We built Cloudy Bay in ’86, and off it went.”

Kiwi savvy-B is now an international hit. Hohnen sold Cloudy Bay to Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessey in 2000. In the twelve months to October, Australia drank 26 million litres ($206 million worth) of Kiwi white, most of it sauvignon blanc. Like Hohnen, Juddy’s off to make a little wine for himself, and get on with his first love, photography.

I would have liked to talk to Juddy about all this, but at the time of writing the Cloudy Bay people haven't responded to my enquiries.

You couldn’t squeeze another grape onto the Marlborough plain now - the vineyards are climbing over the hills. Google Yealands and you’ll get my drift. But too much of it’s mean greed, all acid and sugar, devoid of soul or balance. Same old tale.

At home, the world’s biggest wine company, Constellation, just won the top sauvignon blanc gong in the Adelaide Hills show with Oomoo, and while Rob Hill Smith’s waiting for viognier to become the next chardonnay, he still imports d’Yquem and, when they make one, the crunchy “Y”. They’re only $685.

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