T-CHOW AND THE SATURDAY TABLE

CHEF SO HON HUANG, BOB SKURRAY, PETER COX, DORA TAK SUM CHAN, THE AUTHOR, MRS SO (OBSCURED) GI GI TAK SUM CHAN, ANNE SKURRAY, PAUL JAMES (OBSCURED) AND MIN COX - T-CHOW SATURDAY TABLE ORIGINALS WITH THE KEY STAFF

One Table, Two Decades Of Perfect Lunch
A Legendary Restaurant Changes Hands
Ten Thousand Bottles Of Wine Later
by PHILIP WHITE
photographs by MILTON WORDLEY

Sometime about 1990, when I lived in the inner City of Adelaide, I discovered a new restaurant in the Central Market/Chinatown precinct. It was tiny, seating forty or fifty souls, on the corner of Gouger and Market Streets. Its staff were newly-arrived Chinese; its cuisine Chui-chow; its name the appropriately Ockerised T-Chow.

Language was a problem, but it would have been much worse had it not been for Dora, who worked kitchen with assistant Chef Singlet No. 1 and, occasionally, Chef Singlet No. 2. Dora had been a teacher of English in Hong Kong, and soon taught me that this cuisine came from a small part of Canton where not a lot of overt herbs, spices or flavourings were used.

Dora’s daughter Gi Gi, a speaker of perfect English and student of concert piano at the Elder Conservatorium, was a waiter.

Each Saturday morning, I would select a couple of bottles of good wine, walk from my flat to the Central Market, buy my next week’s food, and the day’s newspapers, and settle down in T-Chow to read, drink, graze, smoke, and take notes on the better wines.

A Singha first, with pickled cabbage. Fish skin next: only from the snook, which was used to make the fish balls. Fish balls, I learned, needed to bounce, and the best bouncing flesh came from highly oxygenated fish flesh, from fast fish which lived in fizzy water. Like the snook. The skin was peeled from the fish, and flash deep-fried in a light rice wine batter. It was utterly scrumptious, and its oils helped stave off winter colds.

I ate T-Chow duck, carefully cooked to drain off most of its fat, bones in. Seafood hot pot, with stingray, mussels, prawns, great lumps of bean curd and shiitake. Whole flounder, baked or steamed. Scallops roast on their half-shells with shallots and mandarin peel. Chiuk-sung with Chinese broccoli, shiitake and ginger. (Chiuk sung is like a tiny loofah: the skeletal remains of a sun-dried, cucumber-like gourd which lives as a parasite on the trunks of baby giant bamboo. Rehydrated and cooked, it’s rich in glycerol and fibre, with an inimitable al dente crunch amongst its lovely slime.) Twin pepper pork: capsicum slices with black pepper and ribs cooked and served in a hot pot. Pig stomach soup: pork tripe, cleaned in milk, and souped with mustard seed and black pepper. Ground pork with string beans and Chinese olives. Omelettes: radish or oyster. Perfectly understated food: you’d never leave feeling overstuffed or uncomfortable: click T-Chow on Google, and you’ll get reams of reviews. I’d rub my belly, say “Thankyou. Thankyou. Happy stomach!”, bow to my hosts, and depart.

Once we gathered the pluck to ask for a little bowl of hot chilli in oil on the side, Chef So became very concerned that we thought his food lacked spice. With Dora’s translation, we explained that no, the food was exquisite. But those of us who’d eaten similar cuisine in Hong Kong or China knew that a little chilli was admissable; that quickly became the norm, and everybody was very happy.

T-Chow’s gentle cuisine became renown for its healing capacities, especially on the stomach tenderised by overly enthusiastic imbibition on the previous eve.

As more City trenchermen discovered T-Chow, the Saturday lunch gradually became a ritual, and at different tables, different little groups gradually made it a regular observance. The restaurant air would fill with the smell of everybody’s baskets of fresh vegetables from the market, and mingle, tantalising, with the smell of roasting duck.

Gradually, we got to know each other. It began with the swapping of glasses and bottles, from one table to another, the recommendation of different dishes to newcomers, and, eventually, the sharing of tables.

A critical moment came the day when a bloke I called Buddha - never to his face, but in my notes and my private mind - rolled in with an imperial of Irvine Merlot. An imperial is six litres – eight bottles worth. Buddha earned this private name for his enormous bulk – 6’4” x 24 stone in the old money - and the satisfaction that glowed from him as he ate and drank, and, when he’d finished, the pacific silent humming omm that he radiated as he remembered what he’d eaten. I commented on the notable fact that a diner should arrive to a quiet solo lunch with an imperial.

“Thinking man’s stubby”, he said, offering me a glass.

For international readers, a stubby is a small bottle of beer.

This turned out to be Big Bob Skurray, of Travel International. Skurray knew the numbers of every flight to almost everywhere on Earth, provided there was a great restaurant or winery at the other end. If, for example, somebody wanted to attend the Russian Tea Room in New York to celebrate a birthday, he would rattle off the best flight for that date, explain the best route from the airport to the most appropriate hotel close to the Tea Room, explain how long the traveller would have to shower and change, give the customer a card with the restaurant’s telephone number, advise how far ahead a booking should be made, and everything would be fixed. Over the Saturday Table.

In the early ’nineties, few Australian winemakers had done much international travel. There had been no call for it. Few had even bothered to visit the great vignobles of France whose wines they were, to all intents and purposes, copying. The Australian wine export boom was then but a dream. But the wine industry quickly realised that Skurray was the man to be organising all those tentative, exploratory journeys into the wine markets of Britain and the United States, or tours of discovery in Bordeaux, Champagne and Burgundy. He looked after his charges.

SAYING A HEARTFELT THANKYOU TO A BELOVED RESTAURANT CREW WHO CHANGED THE WAY MANY AUSTRALIANS EAT

By the late ’nineties, for example, a young Californian wine merchant, Dan Phillips, would trust Bob to advise him of which flight to catch in LA so he could alight thirty hours later in Adelaide, and catch a cab straight to the Saturday Table.

In 1993, I was pushing my way through the throng at Vinexpo in Bordeaux, and “BOO!” ... Skurray the giant leapt from behind a hedge of potted kentias, scaring the bejeezuz out of me. We swapped yarns of favourite tinctures we'd tasted in that great hall, and then discussed what we’d be eating at T-Chow when we got home. What we'd drink with it. It felt like we’d just met in the Adelaide Central Market: perfectly natural.

A few days later, Monica and I had caught a dangerously late TGV from Bordeaux to Paris, to make a non-transferable international flight home. The train was short when we embarked, and made only two or three stops en route to Paris. I’d scoured my maps of the complex Parisienne railway system, and knew that it would be touch and go, changing varieties of train twice more from the TGV to Charles de Gaulle and getting to the plane on time. When we disembarked, we were shocked to discover the TGV had grown to what seemed to be a kilometre in length. It had picked up many more carriages in those few stops, and now we were at its tail end, with mountains of baggage and wine, and a very long run to make the connector into town. We ran. Halfway along that interminable platform, we came upon a huge shape, punching a trolley vending machine. It was Skurray, trying to get his money back. We didn’t stop. “See you at the Table Saturday”, he yelled, as we scurried by. “T-Chow duck, bones in”. Which we did.

T-Chow became so popular the owners soon rented a much bigger space around the corner, in Moonta Street in the middle of Chinatown. There was misplaced panic as myopic cynics alleged the bigger the restaurant, the worse the food would become. But no. The bigger joint had a bigger kitchen, and the quality, whilst varying a little depending upon the composition of the kitchen crew, remained very high.

Because there was much more room, the tables were bigger, and the Saturday crew from the old premises began to share a round table. It started at eight seats. Big Bob was a founding member. With due deference to the Formula One Grand Prix which took place in the City streets each year, he’d say the grace: “Gentlemen, start your stomachs”, and off we’d go. Occasionally his fiancée of fifteen years, Anne, would join. Peter and Min Cox, also in the travel business. Steve Tracey, wine merchant. Paul James, aka Petshop, because he owned petshops.

We began to invite guests, and over the years, people of every walk of life attended that table. Musicians, winemakers, wine merchants, warriors, photographers, writers, sportsmen, hookers, jewellers, priests, designers, artists, comedians, film-makers, lawyers, pharmacists, private detectives, alleged murderers, depressives, policemen, inventors, chefs, poets, doctors, drug dealers, restaurateurs, nurses, shrinks, builders, publicans, gutter rats, enforcers, martial artists, their trainers, schoolteachers, real estate people, egotistical bastards, newsreaders, politicians, reporters, schizophrenics ... you name ’em, that table’s had ’em.

CHEF SO, THE AUTHOR, AND CHEONG LIEW, DRINKING DELICIOUS TOURIGA NACIONAL FROM OLD MILL ESTATE, OWNED BY PETER WIDDOP, THE GUY BEHIND CHEONG, HIS WIFE VICKY,AND THEIR FOUR DAUGHTERS.

It didn’t take long to discover that Big Bob Skurray was a revered black belt Tai Kwon Do man who had a deft hand at massage and back manipulation that he'd learned in that martial training, so it became a regular fixture that he would throw me around like a rag doll after lunch and then put my buggered back into alignment.

“Now, you might get a bit of deep tissue bruising here”, he’d mutter in my ear, reaching his mighty fingers into one of my lumbar vertebrae, to grasp it and move it back to its proper spot. Then half the staff would crawl over his giant frame, attempting to get their fingers into him.

Bacchus knows, Skurray’s saved me $50,000 of physiotherapy and massage fees in those two decades. He’s literally kept me on my feet.

Nearly a decade back, Leo Davis, a self-confessed statistically-obsessed pedant, and amateur taxonomist, began to attend. Before long, he was keeping a spreadsheet, detailing who attended, who introduced them, which wines they brought, and so forth and so on. He’d photograph every gathering, and keep an amazing record, including the label from every wine bottle consumed; even detailing the nature of the conversations, which were often rather heated.

In his nine years, Leo's spreadsheets show that 523 different people have sat at that table, with a total of 5185 chairs filled. You could add, say 70% of that again and you'd have the gist of how many souls have enjoyed gastronomic fellowship there. Around 1997-99, it ballooned for a while to thirty to forty people per lunch, but eventually settled at a more workable twelve to fourteen. Sometimes it’s a pensive, but delicious six or seven, and we can all partake of every bottle. There are no bookings: you get there after noon, and take a chair. Once the table’s full, you start another. To keep it simple, one trusted regular always orders for the whole throng.

We have watched regular, beloved diners gradually grow ill and die during the life of that table; others were there, fit and healthy one week, only to drop dead before the next. So we grieve. We are good grievers. Divorces and marriages have ebbed and flowed; lovers have come and gone; babies have been born. It has been a whole village; a railway station; and it has most certainly been a Vinexpo: around ten thousand wines, including many priceless treasures, have been savoured and shared, remembered and written about.

Chef So was always dependable for something extra special when Cheong Liew and I organised a Duck Walk.

But the other day – you knew this was coming, didn’t you – the other day, dear Dora, and her longtime partner in the business, the formidable Chef So, did their last shift. They cooked us some perfectly drunken chicken and a juicy farewell pig, closed the kitchen, and retired. Just like that.

It was one of those days. The table filled quickly, so we started another. That filled, too. So we built a bridge to connect the two. Round tables are notoriously difficult to adjoin.

Jack Hibberd, the great playwright and poet, flew in from Melbourne to read us a special poem he’d written to mark the occasion. I made a speech about how that restaurant, those beloved people, had changed our lives. We presented Chef So and Mrs So, and Dora, with framed copies of Leo’s spreadsheets from the last twelve months – the ten year job would have been ten metres long.

We dined once again like royalty, and left. Chef So and Dora locked the door, and went away. There are new owners now, of a different gastronomic persuasion from a different part of China, and I have not yet attended under their regime. I may be brave enough tomorrow.

Many, many waiters and chefs learned their dots in that kitchen, on that floor. Two rival restaurants, Ying-Chow and Ky-Chow were started around the corner by people who got their break in the T-Chow kitchen, and these now have their own pilgrims.

Now that I’ve written this, I know that the story will grow and transform as more memories and sentiments float to the top, and different souls tug my sleeve and say “Whitey, you shoulda ... ”

In which case, Whitey shall. The Saturday Table’s like that.

BIG BOB BUDDHA SKURRAY CONTEMPLATES TWO DECADES OF SATURDAY LUNCHES, NOT TO MENTION SOME 10,000 BOTTLES OF WINE. STOP PRESS MILTON, WHO MADE THIS PHOTOGRAPH, AND BACCHUS BLESS HIM FOR THAT, SAYS WEE RAB WAS ACTUALLY ASLEEP.

PENFOLDS KICKS FOSTERS HUGE ARSE

PENFOLDS' CHIEF WINEMAKER PETER GAGO

















Fosters Aside, Penfolds Has Never Looked Better
Gago's Golden Boys Press On Regardless
by PHILIP WHITE - A SHORTER VERSION OF THIS WAS PUBLISHED IN THE INDEPENDENT WEEKLY ON 06 MAR 09

Of all the wry ironies of agriculture, the weirdest lies right now in that gargantuan stack of contradictions we politely call Fosters.

Fosters, of course, is a monstrous secondary and tertiary industrial body, but it depends completely upon humble primary producers: barley and hop growers, and grape farmers.

So now that it’s decided that it wants to be in the wine industry, again, why would it simultæneously decide to shop its own incredible library of vineyards, and chase profit by ensuring its huge Bilyara wine refinery at Nuriootpa works at full capacity, twelve months of the year? This, surely, is a straightforward application of beer-brewing mentality to winemaking, the precise antithesis of what Peter Gago and his team do at Penfolds, which must be Fosters’ most profitable brand. It is certainly its most revered.

The purchase-amalagamate-and-shrink dogma imposed by determined, Thatcherite wine economic rationalists, like Randolph Bowen, is nearing the end of another cycle in the homogenisation of the Fosters portfolio. Bowen was part of the team that hired an oil refinery engineer to design the Bilyara refinery, years after I’d got constant flack from Southcorp and Fosters for calling their big wineries refineries. His entry in the last Wine Industry Directory to list him before his departure two years back, says “Beringer Blass Wine Estates t/a Foster’s Wine Estates and Southcorp Wines t/a Foster’s Wine Estates VIC”. I think he was really called Vice President Global Supply Chain.

I spent a morning tasting at the original suburban Penfolds winery at Magill with Peter Gago recently, and at its conclusion, was delighted to announce that of every grand tasting I’d ever had at any grand winery, from the first growths of Bordeaux, through the hallowed halls of Burgundy and Champagne, to the full breadth of Australia, none could match Peter’s Penfolds for quality, amazing range, and sheer shimmering gastronomic brilliance.

How he’s managed to do it in that vicious melee beats me. But that’s not all he’s done. He’s managed to improve it, to add to its incredible brocade of luxury product, and make the whole damn thing more distinctive in itself, whilst rendering its products even more accurate reflections of their many diverse sources. And he’s done all that whilst bringing the most sacred chalices back to the styles of their traditions.

Speaking of chalices, Peter’s even conspired with Jamie Sach, who’s mysteriously called Penfolds Ambassador, to renovate the neat little pressed tin-lined private tasting room that had fallen to bits outside Jeffrey Penfold Hyland’s office. Without any budget from Fosters, They paid for the significant renovation from their own pockets, although Jamie’s Dad, Randall, a glass-blower who does a spot of plastic surgery to help pay for his hobby, contributed the spittoons, which look like they’ve been blown by René Lalique.

ONE OF RANDALL SACH'S BEAUTIFUL MOUTH-BLOWN GLASS SPITTOONS IN THE NEW PENFOLD'S TASTING ROOM. THAT'S ONE OF JOHN BIRD'S RETIREMENT WATCHES ON THE LEFT.

Even the lowly Koonunga Hill has had a lurch toward gastronomy. Peter has released two wines of this brand bearing their original labels from the early ’seventies. These are for sale at cellar door ($17 and $18), in restaurants and duty free stores only, and are exquisite. The white, called Autumn Riesling after Max Schubert’s 1971 Riesling Traminer, and the trophy-winning red, called Seventy Six, after the vintage of Don Ditter’s first red from what was then a new vineyard, are spectacular value for money, and a serious improvement on the standard bottle-o Koonunga wines which are made in much larger volumes. I can see Peter drawing these divergencies together, increasing the quality of the standard lines.

The lower-end numbered bin wines, too, are looking better than ever. The Bin 51 Eden Valley Riesling (92+++), from vineyards either side of the High Eden Ridge, is a beautifully balanced measure of Germanic austerity and refinement; the Bin 311 Tumbarumba Chardonnay (92+++) a similar exercise in the same mood, but Chablisienne. This latter wine is a brilliant entry to the two higher tiers of chardonnay, the Trophy winning 07A from the Adelaide Hills, and the royal Yattarna, both of which will be released and reviewed on May 1.

The entry-level numbered bin reds are also improving apace. From the classic Barossa chocolate of the 2007 Bin 138 GMS (reviewed last week; 93+++), through the tight sandy sparsity of the 2006 Bin 28 Kalimna Shiraz (94+++), and the lighter, more twee 2007 Bin 128 Coonawarra Shiraz (88++) to the incredible perfume of the 2006 Bin 407 Cabernet blend (93+++), these wines are almost disgustingly good value at their recommended prices, which are generally discounted so brutally by the trade that it’s not worth mentioning the numbers on the official Penfolds cellar door list.

Then comes what some naively used to call The Baby Grange: the 2006 Bin 389 Cabernet Shiraz (92+++), to whose score I’d like to add another couple of pluses, but that would set a silly precedent. These symbols are indicators of how many more points the wine may score if properly cellared, and this most Australian wonder, painstakingly assembled from fruit from Barossa, Langhorne, Coonawarra, McLaren Vale, Robe and Clare, had me scribbling “Jesus! Penfolds gets a facial!” This wine’s stunning freshness and intensity somehow sees it brazenly walking the tightwire between the past and future of Penfolds. Rarely have I seen such a brew of modern and ancient. It would make Max giggle, and then go on to grow for thirty years in the dungeon.

Honourably, Peter declined to tell me which of these source vineyards would now be mothballed or sold.

Then, the obvious exclusions aside – I swear to an embargo at this annual tasting, promising not to publish reviews of the next Grange et al until they’re made available for select public tasting late in April – there were many incredible trial wines and barrel samples that I’d be stupid not to report.

Prominent among these were wines from vintage 2008, which, as we all know, included the longest hottest spell on record until 2009.

There was, for example, a pinot noir that was picked in the first week of that heat, in the Adelaide Hills. It looked like Sandro Mosel had been invited to sculpt Miss Piggy from pinot. But given the Gago team and its nous, this wine will end up with the Penfolds’ mark all over it.

I saw two McLaren Vale tempranillos from Don Oliver’s vineyard that are sure to change Australia’s ranking of its temps extant. The 07 smelled like Charlotte Rampling in a bloke’s tux, soused with Deprez Bal à Versailles; the 08 better: no Charlotte; no Zorro; all bull. “But Señor, sometimes ze bull wins!”

McLAREN VALE, NEAR OLIVER'S TEMPRANILLO VINEYARD. THE VALES ARE RIFE WITH RUMOURS OF THE POSSIBLE CLOSURE OF FOSTER'S LOCAL REFINERY, ROSEMOUNT. PHOTO BY MILTON WORDLEY (CLICK FOR GALLERY)

The 08 sangiovese, mainly from the Georgiadis family’s vineyard at Marananga, Barossa, looks even better – more vibrant and intense - than the stunning 2006 (reviewed in DRANKSTER).

There were two breathtaking old vine Barossa cabernets, 06 and 08, which were made completely in French oak, putting them in the cabernet side of the RWT slot, but apparently they’ll cost more than 707. And so they should: they have French oak, which is much better.

To balance the mighty ship of state – SA has no other – there’s a Marananga shiraz which echoes the drift of all big companies to get vineyards closer to Greenock Creek, and when you taste it you can see why; and, yes, a 2008 Bin 620 Coonawarra cabernet shiraz, which was good enough to have me scribbling: “50 years under screw – a condescending dream of a wine”.

“So”, I asked. “What? No 2008 60A?”

“Oh”, said Gago. “We do have a Cellar Reserve”.

I felt like asking what his name was.

But, fair dinkum, Penfolds has never looked better. The bewildering muckabouts of Fosters aside, the Penfolds team has slaved away beneath the haphazard influences of decades of the selfish ignorant foolishness of top management, and are now running an incredible tight ship of utter dream wines.

Just for the record, they are Peter Gago (twenty years with Penfolds), Steve Lienert (31 years), John Bird (50 years), Andrew Baldwin (24 years), Kym Schroeter (23 years) and Tom Riley (two years).

They might look desperate, but they still look like they’re having fun.

I tell you, I certainly have fun when I make my annual visit. And I'm desperate.

GO TO DRANKSTER FOR MORE PENFOLDS REVIEWS

DROVING SHEEP IN THE JEWISH QUARTER

Dead Bugatti Haunts Defunct Nosherie Whiteman Removes Vegetables From Live Sheep
by PHILIP WHITE

I was flirting with Rachel in the charcuterie at Jo Goldenberg’s when Jean Bugatti came down the stairs with four beautiful white sheep. I thought the first question would be him asking how long it had been since Jo moved the charcuterie into the cellar, and had trouble deciding what I would say if he did ask me and what Rachel would say if he asked her, because she didn’t even seem to realise that the charcuterie should be upstairs.

But Bugatti asked nothing. He gave me an instruction.

“I want you to look after these sheep”, he said.

I had no hesitation. We were in a charcuterie, and the sawdust on the floor suited the polished hooves of M. Bugatti’s sheep as well as the precipitous Manolo Blahniks I just watched sashay up the stairs before the sheep came down so dainty.

Bugatti left, flicking his lapel.

I’d been watching the sheep for some time before I noticed the lumps. Each beast had a pair of strange lumps just behind its shoulders. I could feel through their wool that this was the end of a flexible slightly springy affair that followed their sides to below the hips, as if they wore some sort of interior sword beneath their skins, and one on each side, by Bacchus!

I sharpened Rachel’s boning knife, and taking the first beast between my knees, pulled the tender wooly hide up above the end of this strange intrusion on her left hand side, and made a neat ten centimetre incision. The wool was arctic white – the beasts had never seen the sun – and surprisingly the flesh was pink and pale blue beneath the white skin and there was no blood.

Rachel screwed her face up.

Feeling that warm exhalation of life that escapes each time such a breach of epidermis is affected, as if there were breath trapped between hide and flesh, I reached into the white wound with my left hand, and grasped something that felt immediately vegetal. It was loose, as if in a sheath within the side of the sheep. I withdrew it and as it slid out quite readily, we were both astonished to see that it was a stalk of perfect celery, the tips just a little more pale than usual, like whitloof.

The sheep was relieved. She shook her head and murmured something in Sheep.

Once I had withdrawn the celery stalks from each of Bugatti’s sheep, they stood there in the sawdust looking thankfully at me, me looking at the celery we’d laid neatly on the table, wondering whether Jo would like to put it in the pot au feu, when the health inspector arrived.

The neat parallel incisions, which never seemed to bother the sheep at all, were clean, not bleeding, and seemed ready to heal without sutures. But they were obvious.

“Who’s been at these sheep?” the health inspector demanded, while Rachel calmly put the boning knife into my right hand behind my back, and with exquisite deliberation, closed first my thumb and then my fingers around its deer horn handle. I can’t work out whether I woke on the staircase or I’d got outside, but when I realised I was suddenly at home I swear I’d heard M. Bugatti’s Royale. No it wasn’t. It was far too raucous.

M. Jean Bugatti with his Royale - 12,763cc; 260 BHP. Having built five Royales, which were tricky to sell in the Depression, Bugatti used the same eight-cylinder engine to drive his fast, modernist passenger trains (below).
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Had they got a new tractor? David Brown? Lamborghini? The Rue des Rosiers aromas still hung on my clothes, just as the notes of the Messiaen piano someone was practising upstairs hang on the cool Kangarilla air in McLaren Vale, Australia. I was surprised that there was no sawdust or blood on my boots.

And in the shed was parked the source of that beautiful noise. Phil Bradey had driven his 1934 K3 supercharged MG to work. 1100cc six, offered without the Rootes-type supercharger poking through the bottom of the radiator (40 horsepower), or with (120 hp), and nobody ordered one without.

The late Phil Bradley's 1934 MG K3 1100CC 120 BHP supercharged six.  Enough said?

It has been cool since those awful firey days. We’ve even had some rain. A cool misty sesh of strong wind and occasional drifts of cloud more than rain drops, but enough to moisten the ground down to about 20 centimetres.

The celery stalks were exact replicas of each other. Fractals again!

The vineyard is not the place it was on Black Saturday. For a fortnight it has been a calm, growing carpet, and even the faint yellow seems to have subsided, revealing a new verdancy. The men have picked delicious chardonnay and some shiraz at almost ideal numbers, and there’s a viognier fermenting on its own yeast with really stony tannins. A few of the bunches on the old bush vine grenache which somehow were post or pre veraison when it went way over 50 in the sun seem to be rejuvenating. There it is again. Juve, Jove ... But Bacchus is my man. Well Bacchus and the Bugattis.

It's raining again.

 

JANCIS: 2009 OZ VINTAGE NOT SO BAD

"We've All Got Some Adjustments To Make"
Fosters Admits Simple Cockups
Pommie Coke Hits £1 A Line
by PHILIP WHITE

Since the Wine And Brandy Corporation AND St. Jancis are saying the Australian vintage is not as bad as some errant scoundrels reported, I knew a brilliant statement from Fosters must be coming next.

It seemed unlikely on the face of it, because Fosters must be all statemented out after last week, with a new business plan for their wineries, and their new wine branch and all, and the terrible challenge of what to call it ... I mean they’ve decided it’s there, and there it must be, like the wine group and everything, suddenly absorbing baby wine marketers like a driver recruitment racket for a stretch limo mob, and it hasn’t got a name? Oh my God.

What comes to mind? Now, let me see ... Fosters? Penfolds? Wolf Blass? Rosemount? Tollana? Jamieson’s Run? Black Opal? Kaiser Stuhl? Andrew Garrett? Tin Men? Repo Man?

But it came! Nah, not the name. That’ll cost ’em $200,000 ... Not for me - I’m not in the league of the winebiz serpent greaser who could sell Fosters its own word for $200,000. I'm talking about the unlikely statement from Fosters, which would once and for all trounce the namby-pamby positivism of our beloved vintage Jancis and the Australian Wine And Brandy Corporation.

Something really bloody gut-wrenchingly depressing!

It came. It was magnificent when it came. It even trounced the hot slow news of how the fair Jancis narrowly survived Black Saturday. It came from Group Director James Lovell, who today told the Australian Bureau of Agriculture Resource Economics Outlook 2009 conference:

“We've all got some adjustments to make".

Does he know something Jancis and the AW&BC don't?

“Our competitive advantage has gone and our competitors are catching up”, he said.

Dr Lovell must have verged on bitter regret when he then went on to explain that Australian wines were “a bit the same”, that drinkers were “looking elsewhere”, and that Australia needed to push and "rebuild brand Australia” by promoting luxury wines and making wines with a broader ranger of flavours and styles.

This astonishing revelation came hard on the heels of that same Fosters, Australia’s largest sudsmonger, admitting it had completely buggered up when it shrunk the Cascade stubby by 45ml from 375ml to 330ml without dropping the price accordingly.

James must have been completely shagged after the humiliation of admitting that Australian wines are a bit the same, so another Fosters person, Felicity Watson, took her turn at the Gatling and admitted that when Fosters shrunk the stubby by 12%, sales dropped by 33%.

In a more or less blondish moment she said they’d shrunk it to “give the bottle a more European appearance”.

Why didn't she say it was an attempt to stem binge drinking?

And Tasmanian beer? European? I thought it had a Tasmanian tiger, a thylacine, on the label. European? With the help of the swarthy Armada Irish, the blonde European settlers killed all the poor bloody thylacines by 1936!


Highly retouched, Thylacinus cynocephalus, above, [Greek: dog-headed pouched one] is what we call the Tasmanian Tiger. Fosters put 'em on its Cascade beer label, long after they were all dead by 1936. And then the boofheads cut the volume of the stubby by 12% and left the price where it was!

Anyway, Fosters will gradually reintroduce the 375ml stubbie for the thylacine freaks, without increasing the price. Talk about capitulation!

You’d think that at a time when so many great minds are completely contrite and freshly focused on the brave new hyperprofits of tomorrow, they’d have the brilliance to just go that little bit extra and realise that they’re all in the business of flogging really cheap recreational drugs which are in fact dangerously depressive. So the cut in volume could have been sold as a socially-responsible manouvre. No?

Okay. Try this: Why not sell cheaper, stronger, arguably safer, much more reliable stuff that won't cause depression?

The Babyboomers need pain relief!

The British Home Office has just admitted that the street price of both cocaine and heroin has fallen by half in a decade, with cocaine now available for £20 a gram, down from £77 ten years back.

So when a takeaway bottle of execrable Australian plonk can set you back £2 to £4 in a London Tesco, a glass of said swill at a bar £3.50, and a pint of lager around £2.75, a line of coke will set you back just £1. Glass of water, line in the bogs, go home sober without your head kicked in, still do the bedroom business, and save money, see?

In a stroke of analysis whose brilliance could only be matched by Fosters, the Home Office suggested that drug prices may be falling partly because fewer people are buying drugs.

So why are previously reliable British plonk discounters’ not restocking shelves? Why do five British pubs go bankrupt each week? Eh? Don't try to tell me it's not 'cause cocaine's the better buy.

Are we all incapable of stretching our tiny minds just that one extra inch? Bugger this pretending vintage is lovely and Fosters will get better, and Cascade drinkers can count ... why don’t we all work together to sell beautiful Tasmanian Government heroin to the rest of the world? We can make cleaner hospital grade opiates than Afghanistan in Tassie, and we do!

You might think I'm getting off the track here, but please bear me out. This is lateral thinking, and, as my dear departed mate Stephen Hickinbotham used to say, "one lateral kiss is worth a thousand standing up".

Over thirty years, the Tasmanian opiate industry has grown to a $200 million a year business. Best pain relief on Earth, so America insists it should remain illegal.

Funny, really. The American wowsers are encouraging Tassie to bugger its beautiful opiates business in much the same way Carlton United Breweries, now a Foster's subsidiary, mucked up the Tasmanian hop business when they monopolised it and tried to control the market, and the flavour of all Australian beer, by making an essence from all the hops and selling only that to anybody who needed fresh hops.

Imagine Coopers having to buy industrial hop essence from CUB.

Pretty soon all Australian beer tasted like Carlton Draught, so we flocked en masse to Coopers, and to European lagers. To discover why, CUB got into bed with Interbrew, the Belgian Beer Cafe mob who owns nearly every interesting beer. They set up Belgian beer pubs around Australia to learn about the premium beer market. They even tried to buy The Exeter!

So soon we had the new smaller Cascade bottles filled with beer which the labels boasted was lovingly hand-crafted with only the best fresh hops from Europe.

The USA, which runs the world's opiates business, buys 80% of its hospital-grade opiates from India and Turkey, whilst much of its street hammer comes from Afghanistan. It strictly limits the amount of opium poppy Tassie can grow to supply the rest of the world's hospitals, using the excuse that stuff might seep onto the streets of Emurka. We wouldn't want to interfere in the Afghan trade, now, would we. Nope.

Now, driven by their paranoid fear of morphine, the Americans are gradually relaxing their 80-20 rule on the proviso that Tassie grows more of the tricked-up opiate-free Thebain poppy, which is used to make the drug OxyCodon, which is not as intense in its pain-relieving capacities as morphine or the old Nepenthe hospital grade heroin, which the pious and sanctimonious USA also put an end to.

It's like the genetically modified Canola business, or the corn/petrochem industry.

Mallinckrodt and Noramco, the Johnson and Johnson subsidiary, report that last year their sales of OxyCodon increased by 95% to suddenly make it a $1 billion business.

Anyway, I reckon that with CUB's raw experience in the Tassie hops racket, and the brilliant marketing skills of Fosters, who know how to provide less for more, then replace it with more for less and get everybody feeling sorry for them, we should nationalise Fosters, liberate the Tassie poppy farms, and flood the UK and USA with pure Tasmanian Government grade heroin, using Fosters' expansive international distribution networks.

There are those among us, after all, who cannot forget the pristine beauty of Sandoz, the USA goverment branded LSD, which was second only to Owsley's in quality.

Sandoz, eh? ... Mmmmm ... Fosters posh new wine division, whatever they eventually call it, could distribute the Thylacine Superior brand, which would be in a pack just 12% smaller than the Tassie Devil Magnum, which would be the bigger pack, but cheaper, and distributed by the beer division.

This would return Australia's competitive advantage, and destroy the traditional marketplaces of all other purveyors of the Dreaded Devil's Brew.

We've all got some adjustments to make.

I could get my lovely Mum Drinksy (top) out of the pinot vat long enough to pose for some poppy shots for the "Put An End To Depression" advertising campaign, and Brand Australia would once again conquer the world ...

CHAPEL HILL VICAR CROSSES THE WOK

MICHAEL FRAGOS: SOFTER FOCUS AFTER A VICAR OR TWO

Michael Fragos Emerges From Dunsford Half-shell
Chapel Hill Learns The High Kick
by PHILIP WHITE

It’s years since Pam Dunsford retired from winemaking, barrel-mongering, show-judging, and arguing with boys, and left her managing role at Chapel Hill, so I was overdue to visit the new crew and winemaker Michael Fragos. I’d been there recently for one spectacular dinner, cooked by that mighty elvish genius, Cheong Liew, to celebrate the Fleurieu Biennale, but I needed to kick some barrels.

No. Stop. I should use that dinner to explain the resort. Chapel Hill has a luxurious set of residential suites dug into one of its stony hills. They’re grafted onto an immaculate stainless steel industrial kitchen, complete with a little indoor grandstand where guests can sit to observe and learn. It’s called the Chapel Hill Gourmet Retreat, and groups book it to be trained in the gastronomic arts, under the sage tutelage of Pip Forrester, the venerable McLaren Vale chef who for years ran the stylish Salopian Inn which Kerry and Zannie Flannagan restored in the early ’eighties.

Other chefs might be invited to partake, too. But putting aside the special retreat periods, the place never operates as a restaurant, other than when the proprietors decide to take some friends to dinner and hire a chef for the evening.

We shared a table with two couples we’d never met that night, and I shall never work out what the hell they were doing there. Every time another exquisite dish glided to the linen, one woman would screw her face into a dishrag and grizzle “Yecccch! Look at that. I dunno howyoozudeedit!” She never tasted one single dish. Not one. Many she’d preemptively decried by reading their descriptions on the menu, if reading is a word applicable to such a withering lack of its evidence. Between major adjustments of her warpaint, the other slewed a little sideways in her chair to distance herself from her whingeing friend, and made it look as if she could tolerate the food, but soon rushed off to bed with a migraine. Leaving the husbands, whose dribble insinuated their collective intent on taking my partner off to their beds, as if their wives were not already there.

As if I wasn’t sitting beside her.

The beds are very beautiful, mind you.

CHAPEL HILL GOURMET RETREAT - CLICK FOR LINK

If you took that scenario as the very basement of the night’s scale of perfection, the food was at the other extreme. And the Chapel Hill wines came in just behind the food. Which is where almost every other good wine in the world would be lined up. Not many winemakers can keep up with Cheong.

Which is not to say the wines have a problem. Pam’s regime was pretty much old school – she was no radical experimenter. Her wines were very highly regarded, but that soon becomes “used to be very highly regarded”. And after a few years’ free rein, I thought, it must be time Michael’s getting some arse kicked in the winery department.

Which he most certainly is.

He presented an 2008 verdelho from Mt Compass and Kangarilla, part of it picked earlier to supply the neat crunchy acidity that variety can produce. At $16, it’s a sauvignon blanc alternative in a way, with all those verbena/lemon pith/lemon slice flavours.

Pam had promoted her unoaked chardonnay as if she’d invented chablis, and while she was proud of its cellaring potential, it never managed to transport me to Chablis. Michael’s 2008, from McLaren Vale, Kangarilla, Adelaide Hills and Coonawarra, had a pleasant balance of leesy wax with its neat acidity, but it didn’t take me to Chablis either. Not for $16. It’s a tidy drink for the price, but not a patch on the bench sample of his wooded 08 which came from a north-facing, windswept Onkaparinga Gorge vineyard near the winery, and from down the hill in McLaren Vale. Hazelnuts and honeycomb were all over its tight fruit; it didn’t need malo.

The sangiovese rosé, Il Vescovo 2008 seemed a little more accomplished than the whites, while maintaining their mercifully modest alcohol levels. Its strawberries and hessian, its puckery, appetising acidity, and its saucy delusion of sweetness had me hanging out for smoked trout or salmon with a little sour cream, a slice of Spanish onion, with a caper, on a toast.

There’s a full-blooded dry red sangiovese, too: Il Vescovo 2006. This had just the faintest whiff of the feathers I smell in my favourite sangers. I am a feather perve. But it’s mainly a chubby black sambucca sort of drink, although totally dry, but with as much juicy-juice as a super-kolossal olive to carry all that aniseed.

Another step upwards to Bacchanalia came in the form of the 2007 $30 bush vine grenache, from 85 year old vines beside the Bethany Church near Wirra Wirra, with extra fruit from the 45 years old Johnston Block behind the McLaren Vale Hospital. It’s dramatic wine: as black as sin and soot, and smelling like a hot tractor in the rain, but with rolls of chubby flesh and comfort cuddling the drinker into assuredness before that tight tannic tail turns into a bullwhip.

The McLaren Vale cabernet 2007 ($30) was more austere and intense, and may even have earned a use of the word elegance if it wasn’t so piously masculine. Stacked at the front with the leafy methoxypyrazines of cabernet – deadly nightshade/hemp/tomato leaf – and drawn out with their grainy tannins in its finish, it simply demands five more years of sinbin.


And the shiraz, which, this being Australia, must come next? It took me straight to Vacqueyras, actually. Up that stony bright hillside in the sun, where I always feel like I should hire a donkey and a painter’s sheet and ride into town with a thirst like Jesus Christ’s. At a trim $30, the wine had none of the jam that curses Barossa shiraz, and a lot of McLaren Vale’s. It’s rather a hunger-promotion device, a savoury, edgy, teasy sort of a brute who’s slightly less masculine than the cabernet but is still most certainly a boy. Or a yoof, really. A yoof wiv grease on one hand and a prune-flavoured frail on the uvver. Waiting for Jesus to come up the hill, outdrink him, and redeem him. And the frail. So they could be married.

Which is where the Vicar should be – up the hill, I mean, Chapel Hill – although we nearly got there before him, me as Jesus, Michael, the yoof, and said yoof’s stroppy frail on my rented donkey.

The Vicar’s the biggest tease in the folio, really, named as it is after the leaders of the straight old Bible-pokin’ Bible Christians who built the Chapel Hill Bible Christian Church there in the first days of the colony. It was the windows of that chapel I once sketched for Pam, suggesting that should be the label. Which it quickly became, without so much as a thankyou mate. Happens all the time. Anyway, at $60, The Vicar’s all shiraz from the vineyards at the rim of the contrasting hell that I call The Wok after the Black Saturday heatwave. The Wok is the bottom of the Willunga Basin: the black cracking crap dirt where once was almonds, between Willunga, Sellicks, Port Willy and Aldinga, where dumb, dull, industrial grapeyards now seem to ceremoniously hari-kiri each summer. It fried this year, and last year, and it’ll fry again. It should be all almonds, olives and native veg. It should house a string of beautiful swamps. It should not have a vineyard in it. These should start uphill, above the line where the alluvial piedmontese gravels and loams overlie the clays. This line seems to follow the creek below Paul Petagna’s vineyard, just down the hill from The Victory. If you were standing on the doorstep of the chapel at Chapel Hill, you could gaze south across to these landforms at other side of The Wok, the opposite end of the Willunga Basin, thirty kilometres away. The safe, top edge of The Wok curves from Petagna’s past Cascabel around to Willunga village in the east, to great mysterous miracles like Roger Pike’s Marius Vineyard, smack on the faultline, and at the western Gulfwards edge fades into the terra rossa and calcrete of Dudley Brown’s Inkwell Vineyard. So the bottom of The Vales is down there at the bottom of The Wok. Hell. But uphill, around its edge, live some of the best vineyards in the state. Those higher ones at the other end are the vineyards The Vicar comes from before taking his posh surrey across to this northern side and up the safe hard hill to his Chapel, to be made in the image of God. Which is a long, fine, silk-and-dust dry red the like of which only Australia can grow. Because this wine grew. As Michael said, “It was not made”.

He showed me barrels of 2008 tempranillo and sangiovese, and a freaky old vine grenache, then kindly drove me home along the edge of the Onkaparinga Gorge to my place. A fortnight later, on Australia Day, while Leonard Cohen was playing in the field

LEO DAVIS PHOTO OF LEONARD COHEN PLAYING IN THE DOCTOR'S FIELD, OPPOSITE THE SALOPIAN INN, McLAREN VALE, AUSTRALIA DAY, 2009, WHILE WATER BOMBERS EXPERTLY EXTINGUISHED THE FIRE IN ONKAPARINGA GORGE, 20 KILOMETRES TO THE NORTH. BUT AFTER THAT, WE GOT HOTTER AND HOTTER.

opposite The Salopian Inn, some berk lit a fire in that Gorge between Chapel Hill and here, and from there the heat went so far up I still can’t really remember anything else.

Although I doubt very much that the Bible Christians would have named anything, let alone anybody, The Vicar. I reckon they would have called addressed their preacher as Pastor, not Vicar. Vicar was far too Anglican.

And Chapel Hill? It’s slowly but very steadily and confidently changing direction. If the new open fermenters and some practical, unsophisticated winemaking equipment are installed and roofed, Michael will be much better able to play his crisp, structured solos. I know. I’ve heard them before.

When that happens, this joint will fully ascend the altar of pulchritudinous luxury. So far, it’s still got a bit too much chapel and vicar.

Cheong Liew At The Chapel Hill Winery Gourmet Retreat

MENU

Kumomoto Style Oysters
Chapel Hill il Vescovo Albariño 2008

Ceviche of Garfish Salad
Calamari Kimchi
Chapel Hill Fleurieu Verdelho 2008

Venison Croquette with Vinegared Green Capsicum,
Fried Yabbie Tail, Fisherman’s Rice
Chepl Hill McLaren Vale Chardonnay 2008

Salt Crusted Whole Mulloway with Roasted Vegetables,
McLaren Vale Bush Vine Grenache 2006

Biodynamic Angus Beef with Spring Vegetables
McLaren Vale Cabernet Sauvignon 2006

Pork Hock with Wood Fungus
Chapel Hill Reserve Shiraz 1990
Chapel Hill The Vicar Shiraz Cabernet 1998
Chapel Hill The Vicar Shiraz 2006

Epoissè Coupe Perriere and Rossini Blue
Semi-dried Figs and Walnuts, Sultana Clusters in Brandy
Chapel Hill The Devil Tawny

82 NOTCHES ON BRIAN BARRY'S CORKSCREW

BRIAN BARRY PHOTOGRAPHED BY KATE ELMES FOR THE INDEPENDENT WEEKLY, WHERE A VERSION OF THIS STORY WAS PUBLISHED LAST WEEK.










Brian Barry Pours His Watson Winner
Our Greatest Palate Still Sniffs Em Out
by PHILIP WHITE

When winemaking friends marvel at the mad slurp and crash that mark my repetitive passage from squalid depression to brittle ecstasy, I tell ’em the columnist has at least one deadline per week, whilst the winemaker has just one per year.

Not that I seek sympathy. The wiles of vintage aside, the wine business has been a fairly reliable clock, bringing a skeleton of longer-term rhythm to my irregular life. So far.

Winemakers have added various repetitive milestones to their cycle. They go to the Royal Adelaide Wine Show, for example, at the same time each year. Then there’s the London Wine Trade Fair, regular as clockwork, coincident with cricket. And bottling, and the bloody bank, and the interminable PR/sales tours.

Many, whose properties are now on the block, will never know that cycle again.

My fear of deadlines – which are inevitably met, if bent - feeds my addiction to any irregularity I can get, so I avoid most of these groundhog winebiz fixtures.

But there are some which are annual treasures beyond belief. Like the day, just before vintage, when I lunch with Brian Barry OA, to celebrate his birthday. Apart from this horror vintage being almost over before the birthday, his 82nd went pretty much like the others: me marvelling at his amazing history of service; both of us marvelling at the old glories he pours on the day; a little private chortling at the antics of the odd pretender, and more at the miracle of our survival.

Brian was born in 1927. He was dux of Roseworthy in 1948, and chairman of judges at the Royal Adelaide from 1974-79. He blessed many other shows with his amazing sensories. He was the Chairman at the inaugural National Wine Show in Canberra in 1976, and presided there for many influential years.

He has the best palate I’ve encountered in Australia: intensely intellectual and analytical, but priceless in its ability to name the sensual delights good wine unveils.

Brian quit wine shows a decade back. At his 73rd birthday lunch, he said “It’s extremely disappointing now. Faulty wines get awards, and very high quality ones are overlooked. The classes have become so huge, and time is so restricted, that the judges can’t possibly do all the wines justice”.

His 1999 Jud’s Hill Clare Riesling had just come in equal first (94++ points) in my 1999 Top 100 tasting. “That wine’s truly beautiful”, said Ernie Loosen when I poured one for him in The Exeter. “It would look beautiful anywhere in the world.”

But the Adelaide Wine Show judges gave it only 15.2/20, indicating a faulty wine unworthy of bronze. At the same show, Joe Grilli entered his colombard in another class prescribed for riesling and carried off one of the two gold medals awarded to that class!

“For twenty years or so, we entered our colombards in the colombard class at Adelaide”, Joe said at the time, “and it was never awarded. The judges seemed to feel that no colombard could ever win gold, because they regarded it as such a second-class variety”.

So they awarded a colombard gold, thinking it was a good riesling, and begrudged a seriously good riesling any medal at all, because they thought it was faulty.

This year, Brian poured a Jud’s Hill Clare Riesling 2001, which unravelled one’s socks before stringing them on the lightglobe. Which it had failed to do when I first tasted it, almost immediately after bottling, in that year’s Top 100. But in the next year, I awarded it 93+++, and Brian re-entered the show circuit with it.

Back then, on the occasion of his 75th birthday, I suggested we should direct ourselves forthwith to The Exeter Thirst Emporium for the odd celebratory ingestion.

“Thanks, but I’ve already had a few”, he confessed without contrition. “They reckoned I oughta head up to Sydney for the Wine Show lunch, and I’ve just come back with four trophies. Not a bad birthday present!”

We attended The Exeter anyway.

And now, he poured that eight year old birthday present again. It absolutely sang: bright, crunchy and fresh, reeking of roses and citrus, with formidable acidity and length and that tantalising, unlikely mixture of sassy tease and austere Germanic authority. It’ll live another twenty beneath that trusty screw cap.

And so, too, will the rieslings he’s released since.

But while riesling’s the king of all grapes, Brian has earned great success with sorts much more lowly.

In 1972 he was winemaker, with offsider Orgy Williams, at the Berri co-op on the Murray. Orgy was at lunch, too. They made a 50-50 shiraz cabernet using the radical cold settling method Brian had been working on. By leaving the chilled juice to sit quietly, he permitted the delicate water-soluble aromatics – the florals: violets and lavendar etc. – to dissolve into the wine before the alcohol-soluble aromatics - the coarser tars, lignins, licorices and whatnot – took over during ferment.

“Mick Auld rang and said he’d got some good Barossa-cured German oak” Brian said, as if that were yesterday. “You’d have to be bloody stupid to say no ... oooh boy, you could put your nose in the bung and it was bloody beautiful!”

“The co-op bosses wanted me to start showing our wines at Melbourne so I resigned from judging there and the other judges gave my Berri wine the Jimmy Watson Trophy! We were selling it for 89 cents! It won many, many awards!

It was already on the market when we won”, he reminded us, offering a stark contrast to the way the trophy these days goes generally to barrel samples. “Because of the nature of the fruit, it was possible to release it very early. It was an experimental cold-ferment wine: the same technique the winners often use these days. The runner-up was ours, too: a straight cabernet made the same way.

“And here it is”, he said, pouring that old winner.

That’s the only time the auld Watson mug’s visited the River, which is little wonder when you consider the industrial crap they tend to make these days in the tortured desert of our biggest valley. And there we were, drinking the last bottle in captivity from that trophy-winning batch, thirty-seven years later. Tired, but dignified ’neath its soused cork, it rose for a final fragile bow after thirty minutes’ air, gave us one fleeting glimpse of its pretty primary fruit, and departed.

It would have been breathtaking under a screw cap.

If you have any Brian Barry locked up anywhere, liberate one now. The ’03 riesling’s undressing as we speak.

BLACK SATURDAY PHYLLOXERA PROTOCOLS

CHATEAU YERING AT YERING STATION IN THE YARRA VALLEY: DID ANY FIREMEN WALK HERE WITHOUT CLEANING THEIR BOOTS? WERE ALL THE TRUCKS WASHED BEFORE ATTENDING THIS PROPERTY? WERE SOUTH AUSTRALIAN BRIGADES HERE? CAN FIREMEN REALLY BE EXPECTED TO OBSERVE PHYLLOXERA PROTOCOLS AT THE HEAT OF EXPLOSIVE HOLOCAUSTS LIKE BLACK SATURDAY?

Did All The Firemen Wash Their Boots?
Top Bug Man Quick To Respond
by PHILIP WHITE

Curious about the phylloxera protocols observed in the Yarra Valley during the peak of the Victorian Black Saturday bushfires, I wrote the following note to Alan Nankivell, Chief Executive Officer of the Phylloxera and Grape Industry Board of South Australia:

QUESTION ON NOTICE:

Dear Alan,

I was wondering what phylloxera protocols were in force during the fighting of the bushfires in the recent Yarra Valley conflagration.

I would be very pleased to discover what occurred.

I await your response.



RAPID RESPONSE:

Dear Mr White,

Thank you for your enquiry.

The Country Fire Authority (CFA) of Victoria, have the “Incidence Action Plan” a process in place where fire fighters are briefed before commencing their 12 hour fire fighting shift. The details of the Incidence Action Plan, highlight matters of safety, endangered plants and animals and potential risks such as diseases that the fire fighters will need to be aware of and manage whilst they are carrying out their duties. The information contained in the Incidence Action Plan is primarily provided by the Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE) and the Department of Primary Industries- Victoria (DPI-Vic).

In respect to the recent “Black Saturday” fires, the CFA have advised that they receive ongoing advice from DPI-Vic regarding Phylloxera in the Yarra Valley and other Victorian locations to be incorporated in the Incidence Action Plans. I am advised that the Kangaroo Ground Incident Centre (responsible for the CFA’s operations in the Yarra Valley) had incorporated the Draft Maroondah PIZ (Phylloxera Infested Zone), released by DPI-Vic on 23 December 2008, into its spatial maps and when the Maroondah PIZ was formally updated and gazetted on the 19th Feb. 2009 , DPI-Vic provided the Kangaroo Ground ICC with a new map boundary with instructions outlining steps to prevent the spread of Phylloxera during fire fighting and mopping up operations.

BLACK SATURDAY IMAGE BY JASON SOUTH

The protocol provided by DPI-Vic to CFA has the following instruction:

It is important that all fire fighters are aware of the risks of spreading Phylloxera.

Steps to prevent the spread of Phylloxera during operations:

* People/machinery/vehicles or equipment should not enter a vineyard (i.e. area planted to vines) within the Phylloxera Infection Zone unless absolutely necessary.

* If this is un avoidable, fire fighters should avoid driving vehicles off formal farm tracks and avoid working or walking between vines.

* If this in unavoidable, fire fighters should make every effort to contact the vineyard manager to determine vineyard disinfestation protocols.

* Any vehicles, machinery or equipment that has been on a vineyard in the PIZ, must be washed down with a hose and must be fully cleaned with all soil and plant material removed before entering another vineyard within the PIZ, or vineyard region outside the PIZ. All soil should also be removed from boots.

*All out of area crews must be vigilant of the Phylloxera procedure and ensure all vehicles, machinery equipment and PPE are adequately cleaned prior to leaving the PIZ.

I trust this information assists in your discovery.

Yours sincerely,
Alan Nankivell,
Chief Executive Officer,
Phylloxera and Grape Industry Board of South Australia.