STACKING UP THE ANCIENT PENFOLDS

GRANGE CREATOR MAX SCHUBERT IN AUSSIE DIGGER'S CLOBBER IN CAIRO DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR










An Overseas Guest
Muscles Like A Cutting Horse

by PHILIP WHITE

March 13^th 2006 I made my annual pilgrimage to Penfolds’ Magill Cellars to visit Peter Gago, taste his new babies, and a few of their great-grand-parents. It’s a zen thing: the pacific sanctuary of the old wood-panelled boardroom; the way Peter treats it like Geoffrey Penfold Highland was still sitting in the office through there, smoking, and Max, dear Max, in the tiny office out there, blending. Always blending reds, Max. Making the best mud pies in Australia.

Down there is the calm blue of the Gulf St Vincent, patron of viticulturers.

Only thing missing is Leonard Cohen. He should be there in the courtyard in his long dark robes, raking gravel.

On the wall is the fierce Mary Penfold, looking rather like Queen Victoria at a funeral. You don’t get cherry red lips like those from suckin’ oranges.

My lovely mate Tony Bilson came too. He was stacking up his ancient Penfolds for his restaurant cellar in the Radisson, in Sydney.

We’d got through all the whites, climaxing – deliberate choice, climax, not just cause it’s got a Max in it - somewhere between the 2004 Bin 04A Chardonnay and the 2003 Yattarna, thinking I preferred the 04A, when Peter came through the door again.

“I hope you don’t mind sharing with another”, he said. “I have an overseas guest.”

Peter’s overseas guests are always worth stopping for.

But I had 28 more bottles to go, so I put my ugly head down and choogled on.

I have tasted in some fairly famous and fusty cellars in my day: this is always as good as the very best; sometimes better. Today looked like better. Koonunga Hill; Thomas Hyland; Reserve Bins; Magill Estate; RWT; Ka-ding! 2001 Grange. “This is what American oak’s for” my notes gurgle. “Making the gums and cheeks gush.”

I can’t stand American oak. It belongs wrapped around a dangerous big lump of bourbon or rye. It’s too coconutty even for Islay single malt. At the risk of upsetting our friends across the big water, I’d like to go and burn Missouri to the ground for what its beloved Quercus alba has done to far too many Australian reds.

So when I praise a Grange for its amoak, everybody should open their duster just a little and rest their spare hand on their piece. I may be taking the piss.

Not that day. In came the guest, a wide, small hardman with a bonedome and muscles like a cutting horse. He spoke in whisper softer’n a rabbit shelterin’ in a holler, and put his nose straight to the winestone. No trouble there. American accent.

And hang on: speaking of the dreaded amoak, where’s the St Henri? That’s the sublime Penfold red famous for not having overt American oak!

Part way through the vertical of St Henri (1958 to 2002) I began getting the feeling that this whispery guy knew his dots on the wine scale. While I gurgled and gooed and kerchoofed and sniffed he simply got quieter. Did the work.

Later, in The Exeter, Dan The Man (who now leads Leader Cheetah) whispered something like “Jeez, Whitey, you’re a dude. Walkin in here with Maynard!”

Around about this time I began to realise who my tasting compadre was. I thought Tony Bilson was famous! But this must be the dude who a coupla years earlier broke the record paid for a magnum of Grange at auction. Rock star from the States. Band name a Tool, whom I’d never heard. I was far too deep in my tenth Tin Huey/Devo/Pere Ubu phase to know much about Tool.

“MAYNARD”, he wrote in my note book, handling my precious antique Rapidograph like a master. “WWW.CADUCEUS.ORG”.

We took lunch, and if anything, his reverent whisper got softer.

1959 Ovens Valley; 1967 Kalimna Shiraz; 1996 Block 42; 2004 Block 42 ... I boast.

Maynard’s delightful partner joined us; we dined. He told me much about how he was planting vines in the high Arizona desert; finding ancient remnant shreds of Spanish varieties that nobody’s ever heard of; propagating; starting from scratch.

“It’s what I do when I’m not screaming for my supper”, he whispered. “Every Tool tour pays for some more vineyard.”

We went our own ways.

Back at The Ex for a cleanser, I discovered my status had gone strato.

MAYNARD DOES A PHOENIX IN ARIZONA

MAYNARD JAMES KEENAN SCREAMING FOR HIS SUPPER

Tool Man Is Wine's Cool Man

by PHILIP WHITE

This Christmas, one of the Tuscon, Arizona newspapers ran a disbelieving piece about getting an e-mail from Maynard, the mysterious reclusive rockstar winemaker from up in the hills smack dab there in the middle of northern Arizona.

The editors were incredulous. Maynard was warning them about his visits to a few wine stores, where he’d be autographing his newly-released wines.

After years out in the web-free badlands, I now live near the internet, so I squashed Tool’s ode to Maynard’s lovely departed Mum, 10,000 Days, into the CD spinner, wound it up to eight, and got onto CADUCEUS.

Stick by stick, Maynard’s put a very serious, individual vineyard-based premium winery together. With his mates, and saints and angels. CADUCEUS is now the best wine website I’ve seen: every step of the long pioneering process described in a reverential, astonished whisper; every contributor carefully acknowledged; every insect, ridge and stone painstakingly recorded.

Along with his account of that tasting at Magill.

It contains nothing about broadacre monocultural petrochem Nazi grapeyards that strobe as you drive past and make your friggin' brain strobe as you try to kidney filter their fruit.

It is all about painstaking, wholesome goodness.

I turned Tool off, and vaporised into the mystic mountain whoosh of the music on CADUCEUS.

The texts begin with a prayer of awe to Max Schubert.

Everybody in this madhouse can learn from Maynard James Keenan.

TEXAN DOC’S DREAMTIME: COONAWARRA 2

COONAWARRA? RIVERLAND? BOURKE? NOPE. TEXAS HIGH PLAINS...SCORCHED EARTH MONOCULTURE? GRAPEYARD?

Boomtime Bigger Than Texas
by PHILIP WHITE

So who can learn from Maynard?

Texas, that’s who.

Texas has up and got Coonawarra envy.

Another freaky blog in the Jesus’ birthday period came from Houston wineslinger, Doc Russ Kane.

His scholarly piece is at vintagetexas.

I reckon I met Russ and his wife Delia Cuellar over a pit in the Flinders Rangers the year the Space Shuttle exploded. The pit had three big kangaroos in it. My brother Joe McKenzie, senior man of the Adnyamathanha nation, was showing the visiting wine and food writers how to cook roos. He was burning the hair off ’em with a eucalypt fire.

When you burn the hair off kangaroos it stinks.

“Oooh Ma Goodness!” hollered the lady. “Wheredjouwall learn to do that?”

Joey looked at me incredulously.

“Looked it up on the internet, Missus”, he said, expertly flipping the roos by their tails.

Before Texas goes too far down the track of emulating Coonawarra, or, similarly, our Murray-Darling Basin, it might take moment to get on the internet and read CADUCEUS and Wine Biz On The Nose, an angry diatribe I hissed onto this site on NewYear's Day.

“Terroir: A ‘Land – Man’ Conjunction” was the headline that caught my eye. Doc Russ had been up on the Texas High Plains to observe the grape harvest.

“The scenery is dominated by red-brown dirt and sky that gives me the feeling that I was viewing the land that was created very early on the morning of third day of creation. This was before God had yet worked up the idea of making high mountain vistas on the newly created land,” he wrote.

“I also had the impression that this was a very special place….land made of natural elements but where uniquely human elements of grit and determination had been applied”, he continued.

“This region was first used for open range cattle grazing. New technologies – barbed wire and windmills – first looked at with suspicion, led to improved herds and eventually sustained the region’s agriculture boom of corn, cotton, and soybeans. We are now in the offing of a potentially new boom time … for wine grapes.”

Neal Newsom, a grapegrower, added “[We have] red sandy loam on top of caliche limestone, which is typical on the Texas High Plains. It is a perfect, disease resistant soil for grape growing since the red sandy soil has good mineral content and drains rapidly. The underlying caliche allows the roots from the vines to easily penetrate deep underground. It also holds on to the moisture draining through the top soil throughout the year, even when the vine are dormant. This can give the vines a source of water that they can use all year long.”

What’s he talking about? Coonawarra? The Murray Basin? Nope. Texas. But he makes the connection:

“The Coonawarra, the most sought-after vineyard soil in Australia, known as Terra Rossa (red earth). It is located in South Australia, some 375 kilometers (230 miles) from Adelaide and slightly further from Melbourne. This fertile soil’s unique rusty-red color is due to its mineral content of iron oxide. It covers bedrock of porous limestone, assisting good drainage but offering summer moisture retention. This has made Coonawarra one of the greatest regions in the world for growing Cabernet Sauvignon. These conditions produce low-yielding and intensely flavored grapes, helped along by the climate of long dry warm autumn days and cool nights during the key ripening period.”

It is this very terroir that makes the Coonawarra little different from the rest of the sedimentary Murray-Darling Basin. Only Coonawarra’s proximity to the sea makes it different. Otherwise, it’s mainly been over-irrigated, minimally-pruned, scorched earth, grossly overyielding monocultural grapeyards that look and feel more like the Nuremberg Rallies than a garden for food.

Just like our Riverland. Which is cactus. You don’t mention ‘boom-time’ in Coonawarra or the Riverland these days.

“Is it any wonder why our very own Texas High Plains ‘Tierra Roja’ has produced rich, full-bodied Cabernets?” Russ asks. “How these particular soil conditions developed on the Texas High Plains and in Coonawarra may be different, but the results are undeniably similar. There are now about 13,590 acres of vineyards planted on the Australian Terra Rossa, half of them dedicated to Cabernet Sauvignon. We have only 3,900 acres planted in wine grapes in all of Texas. Now, the task is ours to work with these special soils to expand and optimize vineyard production and bring these wines to play a great performance on the world stage.”

Coonawarra and the Riverland are as close as Australia’s ever got to that other peculiarly American metaphor Ross aptly includes in his considered piece: the corn boom.

Read The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan. I can’t possibly paraphrase that essential work.... And don't forget CADUCEUS.

COMMENT FROM VINTAGE TEXAS:

Interesting take on my VintageTexas blog on the comparison of the Austalian Coonawarra terra rossa and the Texas High Plains Tiera Roja.

The comparison is not so crazy. I understand that a part of the Coonawarra "terroir" is the proximity to the sea and the cooling effects that this brings.

Texas does not have approximity to a cool body of water. While it has the Gulf of Mexico, it is more like hot bath water most of the year.

But, Texas does have the slant in its favor going from east to west of about 5000 ft. (sea level in Houston on the east and 5,000 ft in west Texas.

The Texas High Plains has a warm dry climate but the elevation provides the nighly cooling and recovery of the grapes, slowing ripening and enhancing the qualities of the grapes.

The other connection, made totally separately from the Coonawarra experience, is the ability of the Texas High Plains to produce the most characteristic Cabernets in the region on par with those from other fine wine producing regions.

Up unil now, this has been our best kept secret.

KIWI DOC WARNS: NO SAVVY SAVVY

BEAUTIFUL, BEAUTIFUL MARLBOROUGH. BUT IS IT TOO BIG? photograph by KEVIN JUDD

Marlborough's Big Tip

“Tip glut wine or Marlborough topples, industry warns”, was Rachel Young’s headline in The Marlborough Express on New Year’s Day.

I don’t want to go on too much about my piece Wine Biz On The Nose, published on the same day in response to a Sydney Morning Herald piece, but I can’t help observing: why are these terrible wine crises reported only at a time when nobody’s reading newspapers, including journalists?

Oldest trick in the book. They can say “I told you so”. But they didn’t. They didn’t even tell themselves.

But Whitey noticed.

Dr. John Forrest, of the winery bearing his name, said Marlborough's wine image could be forever tarnished if the export market is flooded with cheap sauvignon blanc.

Plenty of that in my in tray. From Marlborough. Already. About the same quality as your average Adelaide Hills sauvignon. Piss on the nettles.

“Marlborough's vintage size increased by 61 percent from last year to a record 194,639 tonnes this year which has caused talk of excess wine and oversupply within the industry”, the Express reported.

“Forrest said oversupply could cause major problems for Marlborough's image and the price it could demand for future vintages ... most wineries took in more fruit than they needed, of which he estimated about 20 per cent was of compromised quality ... this compromised wine should not be blended with good wine, he said.

"If you believe that by flogging cheap 2008 when the 2009 is available and waiting will not compromise the long term viability and profitability of the New Zealand wine industry then I think you are kidding yourself.

"How do we save the Marlborough and New Zealand wine industry from slipping down to produce bulk white wine like you can buy for around 3 to 5 in the UK from Chile?" the Doc asked.

"I feel like we are standing on the edge of a cliff and once we go down I don't see how we can come out of it."

So does he have any solution?

Yep. Tip it out.

Ask our Riverland, and Coonawarra. And give Texas a call. And check CADUCEUS.

ARGENTINA MALBEC NEXT WINE LAKE?

MENDOZA VINEYARD FOR SALE

Following Australia Down

The San Francisco Chronicle ran a piece by Lynne Char Bennett on New Years’ Day

Between 1990 and 2006, it reported, Argentina's Malbec plantings increased 133 percent. Today, Mendoza - Argentina's most renowned winegrowing district - leads the way with 83 percent of the country's Malbec vineyards.

“In 2007, Argentina exported almost 51 million liters of Malbec valued at $160 million, $50 million of which went to the United States, Argentina's most important market”, Bennett wrote.

“Malbec, one of the six red Bordeaux grape varieties, has come into its own in Argentina. It is usually used as a blending grape, except in Argentina and the Cahors region in southern France, where it is vinified as a stand-alone varietal. The grape, which now has 22 recognized clones in Argentina, came by way of Cahors. The Argentine clones produce smaller clusters with thinner skins resulting in sweeter tannins than that of Cahors fruit.

“Argentine Malbec, with its rich, dark fruit and relatively soft tannins, is sharing the stage with New World Merlot as an accessible, easy-to-taste wine, though there are many "serious" Malbecs with complexity and structure to age. Some of those wines are being produced by renowned winemakers - California's Paul Hobbs and Bordeaux's Michel Rolland - who are consulting and making wine alongside the Chilean wine giant Montes.”

So why are there prime malbec vineyards for sale all over Argentina?

Drinkster sees a malbec ocean welling ... can’t they learn from merlot, chardonnay, Australia, Europe, New Zealand?

Have they read CADUCEUS, for Bacchus’ sake?

CHRIST'S BLOOD GOES FIZZY FOR SCOTS

CHRISTCHURCH SHOULD TAKE COMMUNION FROM EDINBURGH

Dry Midwife Gives Kiwis Proho Urge

Fully Burgundied Jap Snots Wife

Scots Give Sparkle To Communion

by PHILIP WHITE

“This is the most alcohol-driven country I’ve ever encountered” recovering alcoholic Susan Parker - sober for just 27 years – told the New Zealand Herald yesterday. A midwife who’d lived previously Britain, Ireland, Denmark and the USA, Susan said Christchurch’s drinking is "even worse than Ireland".

Just why the paper asked her was not reported. I mean, if you’re looking for a comment, there’s no shortage of drunks in Christchurch.

It’s as bad as Aberdeen of a Saturday night, when the North Sea oilers all come through town on their way back from a week in Barcelona or somewhere, and they dump all their powder in that grey old burgh before they catch the big choppers back to their rigs.

The kids get it into them however they can, dilute it wiv powerful spurruts and maraud in raggedy kilts and Doc Martens. Their parents all work as security guards, lined up outside the restaurants and bars in tuxedos to keep their kids out. And the coppers patrol in nervous teams of twelve, reluctantly interfering now and then to save both lots from killing each other.

Plenty of work for plastic surgeons in Aberdeen.

I was in Christchurch one horrid night after the Christchurch Cup, and if it wasn’t red-nosed hacking-jacketed plaid-tied farmers vomiting very fresh suds at me – no diced carrot – their awful over-dressed wives would bash me with their handbags, just for attempting to get out of their way. I stayed in the best hotel in town, and by 10PM the concierge was cowering terrified inside the door, refusing to open it to anybody. I had to phone him to convince him I was a guest, alone and relatively harmless.

That probably answers my question: the NZ Herald reporter obviously asked the only sober person he could find in Christchurch on Monday morning.

The Kiwis are having one of their little waves of awkward guilt about their boozing.

Where most of Europe has what has been called a "wet" drinking culture based on wine with meals, the Herald reported, New Zealand and other Anglo-Saxon countries are said to have "dry" cultures - where drinking is discouraged but most alcohol is consumed in periodic binges where drinkers actually aim to get drunk.

“Alcohol is literally in our blood” the paper confessed. “Our colonial forebears brought a culture of heavy periodic drinking with them from Britain, which even today consumes about 6 per cent more alcohol per capita than we do.”

So there’s some margin there. You can hear the reporter sigh with relief.

“Broadly speaking” he said, “our consumption seems to have levelled out at around nine litres of alcohol a head, compared with a world average which is now around five litres.”

Gerard Vaughan of the Alcohol Advisory Council told the Herald “it’s is not our total level of drinking, but the way we binge-drink to get drunk. As the AAC's hard-hitting TV ads put it, ‘It's not the drinking. It's how we're drinking’. With five standard drinks you are six times as likely to be injured, and with seven standard drinks you are 10 times as likely to be injured compared with not drinking at all”.

Somebody should have told this to the wife of Japanese businessman Yoichi Shimamoto, who this week sued United Airlines for serving him fine Burgundy at twenty minute intervals between Tokyo and California.

This generosity, he claims, was so good he beat up his wife as they walked through customs at San Francisco. Shimamoto was charged and sentenced to 18 months probation following the incident. He wants the airline to fork up US$100,000 for his bail and defence costs.

Jean Medina, of United Airlines, said: "We believe a lawsuit which suggests we are somehow responsible for the consequences of a passenger's physical assault on his own wife is without any merit whatsoever."

The gentlemen farmers of Christchurch will enjoy that news.

As this parable began in Christchurch, it’s appropriate we should finish in South Leith Parish Church in Edinburgh.

Rev Ian Gilmour, God’s man there, will pour champagne at communion to celebrate the kirk’s 400th anniversary.

"We are going to use it to emphasise the party aspect of being together", the preacher said.

To show their support for his unitarian vision, congregations from other Edinburgh churches intend joining in.

An estimated 20,000 people – people married or baptised in the church, or immediate relatives of those buried without - are eligible for the most formal celebration. The most celebrated of these seems to be young Alistair Stewart, son of Rod, who was christened there in June 2006.

Rev Gilmour said: "I'm not sure what we would do if all 20,000 turned up to be honest.

"Rod Stewart certainly will be contacted though. It would be good if he could come.

"The congregation of South Leith Parish Church is very hard working," said Rev Gilmour. "Some organisations last for little longer than a year, but we've gone on for 400. There are a lot of reasons to celebrate."

Tell that to the good Christians of Christchurch.

CARTOON BY GEORGE GRAINGER ALDRIDGE