BAD BREATH BEATS CANCER OF MOUSE

THIS WOMAN WAS PERFECTLY NORMAL TIL SHE DRANK WINE, SMOKED A JAY, THEN GARGLED TO PURGE HER BREATH

Very Bad Things Happen In Mouths
And Other Bits Further Down
Shock Reports Prove Life Leads To Death!
by PHILIP WHITE - a version of this yarn appeared in The Independent Weekly on 03 APR 09

Now that Prof Michael McCulloch, chair of the Australian Dental Association's therapeutics committee and associate professor of oral medicine at Melbourne University, reckons that the alcohol in mouthwashes "increases the permeability of the mucosa" to carcinogens like nicotine, I made a quick decision.

No more mouthwash.

And to think I gargled only to correct the evidence of the sins of smoke and drink.

Turns out acetaldehyde might be the culprit. "We see people with oral cancer who have no other risk factors than the use of alcohol-containing mouthwash, so what we've done in this study is review all the evidence that's out there” Prof McCullogh said.

"We believe there should be warnings. If it was a facial cream that had the effect of reducing acne but had a four-to-five-fold increased risk of skin cancer, no one would be recommending it."

The Dental Journal of Australia reported that many favourite mouthwashes have more alcohol than wine or beer. Really. Swilling the stuff around the mouth with deliberation seems to be the problem. Which is what professional tasters of alcohol do all the time.

"If you have a glass of wine, you tend to swallow it”, McCullogh continued. “With mouthwash you have a higher level of alcohol and spend longer swishing it around your mouth. The alcohol present in your mouth is turned into acetaldehyde."

Thing is, the mucous in our mouths is a prophylactic, and rinsing it away with strong drink is dumb. Oral cancer mutilates badly and kills half of those affected within five years of diagnosis.

So, surprisingly, what you should do with your drinks – especially strong drinks – is swallow them.

But when I get on the cobweb to check these sorts of things out, whatter I get?

I get the sort of codswallop I reported in last week’s Independent Weekly. As follows:

Jeez. It’s starting to sound like too much booze is bad for you. Scientists spend billions trying to prove this. Others strive to prove the opposite. If the blogosphere’s to be believed, last week’s posts show the wowsers are winning by a pint, but the damn cobweb’s jammed with contradictory shite.

A Kaiser Permanente study revealed polite tipplers – one glass a day - are fifty-six percent less likely to develop Barrett's Oesophagus, where acid reflux removes the protective mucous, leading to cancer. But exactly how wine might achieve this beneficial effect is unclear, Dr. Al Kubo reported in Gastroenterology.

Wine will give you migraine. Oh Really. So can cheese, chocolate, oranges and preservatives. But like the tea and coffee business, the cocoa lobby’s fighting back at those who promote wine’s healthy offerings, suddenly claiming cocoa’s a “superfood”, like the voodoo healers spirulina, goji berries, and acai berries. One lab claims cocoa has 200% of the antioxidant content of red wine, three times the antioxidants of green tea, and reduces the effects of cancer, diabetes and heart disease, by lowering both systolic and diastolic blood pressure. Tumbler of chocmint liqueuer, anybody?

Wine will give you depression. Yep. Another genius claims that too much wine makes you fat - something to do with its “empty” calories - while the University of Porto claims that animals given red wine put on less weight than others who did the same amount of exercise over an eight-week period. Something to do with red wine reducing fat storage by hiking oestrogen.

Tufts University studied thousands of people between the ages of 29 and 86 to report that those who chug-a-lug just a glass or two a day, especially in post menopausal women, had better bone density than teetotallers. Blokes who have more that two a day have lower bone density, but women didn’t have the same response. They too think it’s because some drinking habits boost oestrogen.

A British study claims that a small glass of wine, liquor or beer a day increases the risk of breast, rectum, liver, mouth and throat cancer in women by 6 percent by the time they’re 75. Two drinks a day and you double it. The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle reckons lasses with a propensity to schlück more than fourteen alcoholic drinks per week are 24 percent more likely to develop breast cancer. Another study suggests alcohol-related breast cancer was stronger among women who had used postmenopausal hormones.

Somebody else says it’s red wine that increases the incidence of breast cancer; but because of the good stuff in grape skins, to which red wine has more prolonged contact, the antioxidant component in reds keeps you alive. Similarly, the bitterness of hops in beer can be of benefit.

But new research at one Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and other reports from Germany suggest the acetaldehydes in alcohol are a cancer trigger. This might be why most people are revulsed by the stuff if it’s in wine. You get rid of it with sulphur dioxide, to which some are allergic. Good argument for responsible, clean winemaking, thinks me. Other boffins claim one third of Japanese, Chinese, and Korean drinkers get facial flushing, nausea, and an increased heart rate from small amounts of alcohol, mainly because of an inherited lack of aldehyde dehydrogenase 2.

The Queensland Institute of Medical Research and L'Oréal Recherche, Paris, jointly claim that modest amounts of oily fish and wine may decrease the occurence of actinic keratoses, premalignant actinic tumors of the skin, and work like an internal sun block.

Southampton University claims that long-term daily drinkers are at greater risk of developing serious liver disease than weekly binge drinkers. Researchers in Scotland say heavy-drinking pregnant Scots will hike the number of babies with foetal alcohol syndrome, which promises a life of mental retardation, behavioural issues, heart and brain damage, and the elfin facial defect.

The American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society say two drinks a day for men and one a day for women is good, but claim that if you’re not a drinker, you shouldn’t start, because the risks outweigh the benefits. Another report says it’s better to eat red grapes or drink grape juice. The University of Western Australia says that women who daily consume a small button mushroom cut their chance of breast cancer by two thirds!

“Stick to water and stay away from alcohol like whiskey, beer, wine and coffee” says another expert, obviously not from Adelaide. “They tend to stick to your teeth and cause plague.” Plague eh. I thought you got that from rats.

So I’ll leave that with you while I fatten myself up on slimming biscuits and Vegemite, to heal this hangover I got from far too much organic wine.

And then I’ll clean my perfidious miasma with a good long gruggle of Listerine.

GETTING KRUGGED – VINTAGE ARCHIVE

Whitey Learns A Thing Or Two
Krug And Yabbies At Stephanie’s
by PHILIP WHITE – A version of this was published in The Advertiser 14 MAR 1990

There is a walled village called Mesnil-sur-Oger in the Champagne district of France. Like many a mediæval village, it has a lovely jumbled clutter of houses and alleys, a monastery, an exceptionally good baker and an unabashedly agricultural pace. Except, during vintage, there is nothing that ever needs doing so urgently as to be done before one can select a desirable leaf of tobacco, studiously roll it into a ball, and tamp it down in one’s pipe, carefully applying gentle, even pressure to ensure a cool, slow fire in the bole. Only after this, and a few measured sucks to ensure the whole operation is successful, can one go, slowly, to work. As you would expect of a mediæval village, Valium is not on the agenda.

There is another highly unusual aspect of this village: something about Champagne priorities. It is, in its entirety, built outside its wall. While the beautiful stone houses and barns are exposed to the raider, be he Hun, Viking or Goth, safe inside the wall, in the centre of town, lies the legendary Clos du Mesnil. One of the world’s most remarkable vineyards, this tiny 1.8ha patch of chardonnay produces that true diamond of drinks, the pristine, glittering Krug Champagne Clos du Mesnil Brut Blanc de Blancs. The 1982 vintage is about to be released. I am having a difficult time trying to shake its memory off. Spoiled for life, I think you could call it.

The Krug family has been making various types of exceptionally fine champagne since 1843. Of all the great champagne houses, none is quite so understated, consistent and revered. It is not your trendy rock star label, but a subtle, elegant, wondrous creation that is never taken lightly. If you must relate it to anything other than diamonds, the best I can suggest is Dame Margot Fonteyn.

The wine’s sheer spellbinding, dancing quality ensures that even the most unsuspecting recipient of a glass of Krug becomes a convert, a Krugist, the moment the stuff slides off the back of the tongue. It’s a magical, rare, heaven-on-Earth drink. Once Krugged, always Krugged.

Remi Krug, one of the two aristocratic brothers who run the business, has quite a lot more pace than you find in the narrow lanes of Mesnil, but the same powerful confidence as those somnambulent, pipe-smoking peasants. He is alarmingly candid in his praise for his family’s product.

“It is for people who put taste above status symbol and who don’t drink it to impress with a label”, he told me during lunch last week. “You drink Krug because you are in love with it. Because you like the taste. Because it is your pleasure. It’s your heartbeat; it’s your culture. You reward yourself. You know you deserve Krug. It’s a very personal thing. You’re not trying to wear someone else’s appearance as your own. You’re not dreaming to be James Bond. You are yourself, and you treat yourself with Krug. You drink Krug because you know.”

In an impeccable sidestep to avoid uttering the words Dom Perignon, he surged on.

“I have a friend, a crazy Krugist, who drinks Krug but offers the other champagne when he’s on business. He keeps the Krug for himself. It’s like somebody said to me the other day, ‘You know Remi, it’s not enough to be rich to drink Krug. You must also have taste’.”

Apart from the Clos du Mesnil, there are various sublime Krug products. The Grande Cuvée is a multi-vintage blend of up to sixty different parcels of champagne from six to ten different vintages. The wine is “composed” by Remi, with his quieter brother Henri, “not by science, but by its quality.

“There is no chemistry at Krug, Remi said. “There some oenology behind my brother’s taste to control certain things, but not to decide. What decides the making of Krug is taste – my brother and my father and myself – we taste together, and we compose the cuvees only by taste. Oenology is a number of analyses to control. If these analyses turn out to be great and good in certain ways they go into filing immediately. But there is no chemistry at all. There is nothing to adjust. We adjust things by yes or no, we keep or we reject. By blending we compose.”

Now this may sound like a considerable degree of rich man’s self-indulgence to us chug-a-luggers of drinks much more pedestrian, but the famous Krug family palate has been tested by the wine hacks of Australia and passed with dazzling colours. Offered an unmarked glass with an impish blend of Krug and another champagne at dinner in Melbourne, Henri, without any warning of its contents, sniffed long and hard and announced “Yes. There is some of my wine in here, and some of someone else’s. It’s not so good, eh, this blend?” He thought again and named the intruding house. Of course he needs no chemistry.

While the Grand Cuvée is a blend of wines from the family’s enormous stocks of aging “reserve” champagne, collected from various vineyards and vintages, good years also see the release of a Krug Vintage, a blend of the best wines from just one year. Remi explained the difference: “My grandfather used to say, with a twinkle in his eye, that the Cuvée was the dearest to him because it was his own creation. With Krug Vintage, he said he had to share the compliments with God.”

Krug also makes an extremely rare champagne rosé, which is a devilishly successful bed wine, and occasionally releases some mature champagne from the family’s private stocks to show the world that Krug, unlike most of the lesser sparkling wines, continues to improve for many decades in the bottle, developing an intensely nutty, complex aroma while retaining it astonishingly fresh, uplifting flavour. These wines are too expensive to mention. You must believe me. They are much more expensive, say, than the Grande Cuvée (about $129 a bottle), or the Krug Vintage (about $150). They are even more expensive than soon-to-be-released Clos du Mesnil 1982, which tips the scales at a modest $390 a bottle.

This new wine is everything a pure chardonnay champagne should ever be: pristine, almost crystalline with its staunch acidity, but nevertheless showing incredible delicacy and finesse. It has none of the almost strawberry fullness of the 1981 release, but rather a delicious, lissom stiletto of pure chardonnay flavour that goes singing through one’s soul so simply, just once but forever.

As we sat there savouring this new wonder of the world over a big bowl of yabbies at Stephanie’s, I inquired how much of the wine was made. “Oh, Clos du Mesnil averages about 12,000 cases a year”, Krug breezed. I remarked this figure seemed very high for such a tiny vineyard. “Oh, no, no, no,” he explained. “With Clos du Mesnil there is just one bottle per case.”

CLOS DU MESNIL - click image for link
I suggested that no amount of writer’s skill, or Krug’s eccentric technique of fermenting the wine in thirty and forty year old oak, could ever truly convince a reader such wines are so much better than others as to warrant more expenditure than many folks’ weekly wage. “It’s bloody hard to convince the punters”, I explained. As always, M. Krug responded with great vigor.

“Well the first thing is you must never compare Krug to somebody else’s champagne”, he chirped. “You don’t compare Krug. You only ever compare it to the Krug you had yesterday or months ago. You compare it to your memory of Krug.”

The fellow is infuriating in his insistent failure to name any other brand but his own. But pressed harder, he did eventually manage a comparison, which, combined with a bellyful of yabbies blended with about 500 knickers’ worth of one of the best drinks a chap could ever hope to have, seduced your correspondent completely.

“It’s like music”, Krug pondered aloud. “There is real music, like Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald. And then there is airport music. Unfortunately, too much champagne is airport music. When I met my wife, she drank the airport music, and she always said it gave her a headache and she would not marry me. So I gave her some Krug, and when she had it she said ‘Ah, this is good, I don’t have a headache’, and so she could marry me. Of course when I discovered she did not have a headache, I could marry her. And so for many years we have Krugged along together.”

Half their Kruggin’ luck, I say.

HAHNDORF 155 YEARS ON: MUCH BETTER

HAHNDORF HILL MEN: LARRY JACOBS AND MARC DOBSON; PUTTING SOME ALPINE STYLE INTO THE ADELAIDE HILLS













Hahndorf Hill Adds Alpine Style To Germantown
Strassendorf, Fachwek, Trollinger, Limberger, Grüner Und Max
by PHILIP WHITE - a shorter version this was published in the ADELAIDE INDEPENDENT on 27 MAR 09

It wasn’t quite like this at the time, but once it had sunk in, it retrospectively seemed like all the Hahndorf kids got off the bus one morning and sang in unison “We’re gonna have tourism”. I was just a kid at Mt Barker High and I didn’t really know the word. Tourism. Anything with ism on the end was very suss, like Calvinism, Catholicism, or Pentecostalism.

Their parents must have had a meeting or something, or got briefed by a developer, because it was quick. I reckon it was before 1970. It was not quite a boast, because everything uttered was filtered through a bale of good old Lutheran stoicism. Yet it was more than an utterance, because it contained a degree of emergent confidence, like a boast. Fair though to register the overt uncertainty of a generation promised an improvement which they could not understand.

My school was populated by the pimply kids of brickmakers, miners, abattoir workers, tanners, butchers, smallgoods makers and the freckled milkwashed bubbies of dairy farmers. The cleanest, most polite ones generally came from Hahndorf. We could tolerate ’em. But anybody professing a sudden belief in tourism was up themselves.

They sure got their tourism, “them Cherman kids”. I doubt that any of those old families with the thick accents are still there. They couldn’t afford it. I reckoned even then that the tourism notion was more likely to have squirted from a Duffield than a Schubert.

Hahndorf was, as far as German villages go, pretty schmick. It followed the Strassendorf town plan: fachwerk cottages eave-to-eave up a street, with only 100 metres of long, skinny back yard. Not enough, in other words, to be self-sufficient farm-wise. You could feed chooks and a pig or two from your scraps, and run a veggie patch already, but the men would have to do other work.

A village like Lobethal, on the other hand, was a Hufendorf in the planner’s manual of the day. These cottages were a little more widely spread along their street, but most significantly, they had front gardens, and a back yard that was a practical farm, as the ribbon-long block would extend several hundred metres, ideally reaching or crossing a creek before it hit the next lane. Mediæval strip-farming. Even then Lobethal had an early planning advantage over Hahndorf: right from the start, it had inbuilt plans for industrial developments.

I always find amusement in the notion of the Barossa Hufendorfers’ kids, like those at Bethanien, politely leaving their mediæval strip farm each morning, and climbing over the Kaiser Stuhl and Mengler’s to go to work on the rolling park-like estates of the Smiths, Angases or Randall’s, all sitting up there smoking cigars and drinking port. The Germans were always too damned nice to the English.

HAHNDORF VILLAGE FESTIVAL

And the English, of course, knew what a good thing they were on. “Germans”, be they Jew or Gentile, Catholic or Protestant, from Prussia, Posen, Silesia, Brandenburg, Mecklenburg or Pommern, were much better than convicts. They wanted to pay for everything and feed themselves. You didn’t have to lock them up. And they worked and worked and worked.

Look at old Hahndorf now. Germanworld. Shizen. But I quite like some of it. Walk into – no, walk’s wrong. Respectfully enter Max Noske’s butcher shop, for example, and inhale. Not a better smell on Earth. I can’t name a better butcher shop. The Noske’s grow nearly all their own beasts in the hills nearby. Name a butcher who does that. Try Max’s kassler. Then, I love the leatherworker whose sign promises “All our leather was grown on vegetarian cattle”. I love the little breezeblock dairy next to Paech’s that we used to call the Golf Club. I drank Bacardi there while I first listened to a new record called Bridge Over Troubled Water.

At that stage my waters were troubled. I had shit on my liver. Dirty water on my chest.

Now, like Jeremy Clarkson, I’ve written myself into a corner before even mentioning my topic, which is the wineries: Starvedog, Shaw & Smith, Romney Park, Nepenthe and Hahndorf Hill. Hahndorf Hill more specifically. The Burgundy-fetishist’s Romney Park’s had a deservedly good trot in DRINKSTER ; the S&S cousins act as if I hate ’em and don’t spikka; and that fierce lady at Starvedog fanged me a few weeks back for suggesting this was a difficult vintage, which it is, on top of her boyfriend making his dislike of my attitude obvious for those many years when his wines left a bit to be desired, so, well, you know, Nepenthe’s part of the decaying McGuigan empire and Hahndorf Hill is real and it’s good and I’ve not been there for years. Out there on the springy ridges where I used to kiss girls in Spriggy’s old man’s Fairlane. Mmmm.

Marc Dobson and Larry Jacobs came from South Africa via Sydney and bought Hahndorf Hill, a young vineyard of freaky Germanic grapes: trollinger, limberger, and now, grüner vertliner. They got posh French varieties too, but in Hahndorf anything German makes more sense.

After a few years making their wine at the troubled Nepenthe, Hahndorf Hill’s now back at Shaw & Smith, and jesus you wouldn’t believe how good the wines are.

They should be good, mind you. Larry’s a biodynamic viti man, who’s recently left his stint as chair of the Adelaide Hills winemakers’ Environment Committee. Under his leadership, the Hills became the first region in South Australia, if not Australia, to have a functioning and government endorsed Environment Management System available to its members, just pipping McLaren Vale, which is close, but not quite there.

HAHNDORF HILL IN AUTUMN

While being totally snookered time-wise in such a role, Larry managed nevertheless to improve and enhance the Hahndorf Hill vineyard until it became a benchmark of healthy, responsible management, and a grower of fair dinkum flavour.

You must visit the winery and dine, gaze out the window and taste everything, polish up the plastic and stack your cellar with these lovely drinks that are perfectly suited to late summer/early autumn moods and cuisines.

And call in at Max Noske’s before you leave town. Try that kassler. See if you can get it home without eating it in the car.

Hahndorf Hill Winery Adelaide Hills Trollinger and Lemberger Rosé 2008
$19; 13% alcohol; screw cap; 92+++ points
As this is the only incidence of either of these varieties in Australia, I’ll admit it’s difficult know what to compare a blend of them to. Compare? Campari’s a good start. All that blood orange, Curaçao orange and bright lemon, with saffron. And then the fatty acids, adding the smell of soap and rolled cold pancetta porkfat. Take a slug, and ooh! That’s viscosity! Somewhere between rosewater and turkish delight, making sense of the illusion of confectioner’s sugar in the bouquet. But then those citric acids swish back in, adding refreshment to the comforting nature of that viscous texture. Dusty ironstone and podsol tannins, reflecting the dirt outside, play neatly off that acid and you’ve another dead serious, bone dry rosé that will improve with a few more years’ bottle, or knock your socks off if you have it chilled, now. Achtung!

Hahndorf Hill Winery Adelaide Hills White Mischief Chardonnay Sauvignon Blanc Pinot Gris 2008
$19; 12.5% alcohol; screw cap; 93++ points
Not to take my name too lightly, this White Mischief’s my territory: intelligent blending: realistic alcohol and a price to match. So we’re off to another good start. That hard ironstone soil makes its presence felt again, with dust, spice, and hessian tweaks at the cutting edge of a perfume that follows with comfy honeydew melon and clingstone peach, and then the isovaleric acid smells that often delude us into imagining we’re receiving a pheremone that makes men drop their voices and become dangerously protective of women while women want to suckle: it smells as fresh and fleshy as a hot scrubbed bubby. As you’d then expect, the texture is fleshy, too, and carries a refined silky polish which gradually becomes velvet as the tannins of the terroir and that steely acid wind up the finish. Stunning. It’s a most intelligent and creative use of three much-abused varieties, with a total that’s better than the sum of its parts. It’s like a really good Alsace gewurztraminer.

Hahndorf Hill Winery Adelaide Hills Sauvignon Blanc 2008
$21; 13% alcohol; screw cap; 93+ points
Amongst the best ever Hills savvy-Bs, this bouquet transported me to Chateau Rahoul ca 1980 when the finicky Dane, Peter Vinding-Diers, was making exquisitely fine, perfumed dry Bordeaux whites that were beginning to change the whole notion of such a beast. Sure, it’s crunchy and brittle, with hints of oxalis and gooseberry amongst the shattered windscreen, but even the bouquet has enough fleshy filling to make very clear this is not your front lawn doused with battery acid sort of HillsBilly no savvy. The palate’s full. Full-bodied. Check that glycerol! It’s almost as if the fruit had a gentle botrytis strike and StepHen Hickinbotham got at it. This is a perfectly-balanced wine in its extreme infancy, and maybe the best sauvignon I know of emerging from the S&S cousins’ weinhaus. And we’re only half-way through. The finish is a real tease: leanly astringent, with that counterplay of citrus and podsol common to all these lovely wines.

Hahndorf Hill Winery Adelaide Hills Pinot Grigio 2008
$24; 12.5% alcohol; screw cap; 93+
If Campari was made from lemons, and not oranges, it’d smell like this. It’s almost limoncello in its precise reflection of lemon pith. Then, this is like garganega, like a really smart, austere Soave without too much trebbiano. Rizzardi. It’s not greasy or slimy, like Kath Quealy’s get-all-over-you slimebombs from Mornington Peninsula. “We deliberately avoided the gris style” said Marketing Marc. No, this is lean, entertaining Alto Adige style grey pinot. Which leads me to ask: “would Australians flock so much to pinot gris and pinot grigio if it was called grey pinot?” Nope. But sauvignon fanatics would like this ravishing palate, that finishes so friggin bone dry it’s like it’s made from smashed up bone china. It’s intensely satisfying, appetising wine.

Hahndorf Hill Winery Adelaide Hills Chardonnay 2004
$26; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; 92++ points
Crême caramel, clingstone pêche, faintly gingery oak, lovely creamy elegance, this is what chardonnay’s sposed to be like: clean and precise in the palate, with really lovely fine acidity and general finesse. Try it with kassler from Max Noske, cool fresh tomato and basil, sourdough from Bullocks in Mount Barker, and a good swoosh of Blair’s Original Death Feel Alive Chilli Sauce. I await more eagerly the chardonnays that S&S will make from HH fruit.

Hahndorf Hill Winery Adelaide Hills Shiraz 2005
$29; 14.5% alcohol; cork; 92+ points
I doubt that slick, polished, silky shiraz like this would ever have ripened in the freezing weather I recall of Hahndorf when I was a kid. Not only the main street has changed. But this sure has ripened, and it’s packed with smooth, harmonious mulberries, prunes and plums flavours; even maybe a little black fig. It has no more tannin than the furry skin of a ripe fig would impart. It’s luxurious, opulent, self-satisfied wine. I can’t help suspecting it would be more entertaining if it hadn’t got quite so ripe. S&S will do a better job. In the meantime, have this with one of Max’s incredible fillets, blue, with blue cheese sauce and capers. Practice cooking them on your own for a few months, and once you’ve got it nailed, ask that one around that you’ve never been game to ask. Clean sheets please.

PETER GOERS: ON THESPIS OF DIONYSOS

Soft Spot For Wrattonbully
And The Sentiments Of The Harassed Rat In Specs
by PHILIP WHITE

Peter Goers, an iconoclastic columnist in Adelaide’s Sunday Mail, and highly amusing evening announcer on the local ABC radio, has big problems with smokes and drinks. Borborygmia and emphysema both come to mind.

His editor once called me late of Friday to ask “Whitey, how do get on with Goers?”

I explained that I had no problem with him, that I had never actually had a row with him, and had, in fact barely met him, and although I frequently found him to be highly entertaining, my attitude to things thespian had probably coloured my opinion, given his overt lust for the likes of Thespis of Dionysos.

“Philip, never trust an actor”, my beloved English master, Billy Brooks, had advised me sagely in about 1970. “How can you measure sincerity in somebody who acts well?”

Having made these confessions to the editor, I asked why he’d enquired.

“Well, he’s written a column about you. You might want to take a look at it before we go to print.”

This was fair, considering I wrote for the Mail’s sister paper. Same building. Same proprietor. Same lawyers.

The article began with doggerel as dilly as “I wish I could be like Philip White, and be carried home drunk every night”, and proceeded to put in the boot for about a thousand extra words.

I advised the editor to publish it immediately. My readers would love it, and with my out-of-court settlement from Rupert, I would never have to work again. Of course it was promptly withdrawn, Goers had to think up another page, and I was obliged to carry on with my work.

As you can see.

Although he didn’t directly name me, he had another go yesterday, this time confessing his doctor had given him the proho word in 1987.

“If I was only allowed one drink a day I was already up to June 30, 2097”, he wrote. “I was a lousy drunk ... I had no appreciation for wine and the cheapest plonk was as good as Grange to me”.

“I’m appalled by the galling pretention of many wine writers who stretch metaphors into the absurd”, he continued. “We remain amused by the a wine writer’s famously witty remark that a wine had the bouquet of ‘a whore’s handbag’, but our most famous SA wine writer once wrote that a wine has ‘a taste of lignite in its swampy bouquet.’ Yuk.”

I seem to recall this descriptor amusing, nay, confounding Goers in that previous column, but thought I had set him right since, and explained how such a metaphor was perfectly apt.

Grapes, as he still fails to appreciate, are full of lignin. Lignin gives plants their stiffness, and makes up the skeleton of grape skins and pips. It also forms oak, as in barrels, and makes matches stiff, and holds tobacco leaves together, although it has been chemically removed from cigarette paper, leaving the cellulose. When it oxidises sufficiently in the right conditions, lignin becomes peat, then lignite, and eventually maybe anthracite. It’s full of volatiles which easily convert to liquid petroleum, or alcohol. Wine is made from grapes which are made from lignin. It contains alcohol. It oxidises as it matures. Big deal.

While his affront this time was much more measured, I was surprised to see such a determined teetotaller launch into your actual wine appraisal. “I have a soft spot for the nascent Wrattonbully wines from Naracoorte”, he says of a district plagued by endless industrial monoculture and vineyards for sale. He then claims the Barossa to be our only traditional wine district, which is patent crap, and launches into a comparison of the value of the almond tree vs. the vine, much preferring the former.

Goers gets stuck into McLaren Vale big time. He calls it ugly, which, of course, the main street certainly is, as is the brutal, dumb ribbon development between it and McLaren Flat, which is being destroyed by mindless villa rash, some of it in a swamp. And he calls the road between Willunga and Port Willunga “the ugliest road in rural SA”, which it could well be. Many of the vineyards in that awful black cracking dirt, in what I call The Wok, would be much better replaced by swamps and native veg.

But McLaren Vale, the district, has as many beautiful corners and vistas as any vignoble in Australia, and is a fore-runner in green awareness, native reveg, water recycling, and putting an end to the old petrochem spray regimes that dominate places like Wrattonbully.

It was the efforts of McLaren Vale that have just halted the University's sub-development of Glenthorne Farm, and McLaren Vale negotiators have convinced the government to halt the impending villa rash on Bowering Hill, giving it one last chance to tastefully fulfil its slogan "Where The Vines Meet The Sea". As far as wine regions go, internationally, McLaren Vale is amongst the best.

Goers then suggests wine should be taxed as heavily as cigarettes and carry similar health warnings with photographs of gizzards and the like, and complains of the “horrible stinky breath” of drinkers, which is a nice thing, considering his peculiar miasma is that of the chain smoker.

Anyway, true to form, Goers has got the whole wine industry, and all who work in her and around her, completely off side: so much so that some who normally hate me have suddenly sided with me today, expecting a retaliatory spray. It’s a huge relief.

But I don’t see much point in losing any temper I may have had. Having examined this column closely, I think it has the form of something which was cobbled together in a rush, as if Goers’ editor had trashed his first attempt at “pompous catering to the worst excesses of the chattering classes”, leaving him to come up with something else rather quickly, off the top.

Which he's very skilled at: he gives really good wireless. I love him with The Girls.

But I think research would show the handbag line referred to my grandmother, and a wine full of florals and powdery whiffs. She was a street preacher’s wife.

Russell Maloney once wrote of James Thurber that he was “a tall, thin, spectacled man with the face of a harassed rat”. But it was Thurber who drew the inspired cartoon with the caption that best summarises the sorts of things that seem to trouble Goers: “It’s a naive domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you’ll be amused by its presumption.”

WINE LIGHT - THE WHITE IDEA FOR RIEDEL

Genius Improves The Wine Glass
Dry Your Glassware With A Ring
by PHILIP WHITE

Apart from my dark suspicion that on a good night, somebody like Geoff Merrill might attempt to drink from one of these, designer Guido Ooms has had a bright idea.

Each of these US$120 glass-globes contains twenty warm white high intensity light-emitting diodes that might last a decade, or 30,000 hours, whichever comes first.

The next step will be to offer them in a range of colours: Oloroso, Aged Claret, Burgundy, Rosé, and for the darkest, naughtiest night, Barossa Black Shiraz.

These globes are a lurvly kitsch partner for the doorbell Peter van der Jagt designed in 1994. It can be mounted as a hanging, upright, or horizontal ringer, and ideally should be set to gong every morning at elevenses, as well as advising you that a potential drinking compadre is at your door.

That’s all very well, but the obsessive hot-rodder within would have me quickly attempting to replace these rather utilitarian glasses with mouth-blown Riedel crystal. You could change your ding-dong at whim: you know, on a sombre day you’d have the solemn leaden gong of the Bordeaux Grand Cru on one side, and the Burgundy Grand Cru, with its pouty twisted lip, on the other. Feeling more sparkly? Try the crystal chime of the Riesling Grand Cru playing tintinnabular counterpoint to the svelte Vintage Champagne.

This would present a challenge to the Riedels, who, after all those long years blowing glasses, must by now be running out of ideas, or at least getting tired. They could then concentrate their austere Austrian technocracy on ensuring that every glass has perfect pitch, which would add some interest for the teetotaller or musical drunk as well as making the world a better place.

I was once introduced to the great Gorg Riedel, who appeared to click his heels before shaking my hand. Having congratulated him on the beauty and craft of his glassware, and praising him for the fact that I have yet to encounter a leaking Riedel, I explained my technique for removing the canker from the impossible-to-reach reaches of the beautiful Ultra Magnum ship’s decanter, which is a gorgeous thing to tip wine into, then observe and adore, but nearly bloody impossible to pour wine from. You can never empty the last glassful from the damned thing without inverting it the full 180º, at which point it presents the table linen with a flow about as precise as your average Tyrolean cow.

Anyway, I explained that the cleansing trick is to empty the lead shot from a carton of twelve guage duckshot cartidges, spill them into your beautiful Ultra Magnum with some warm water and detergent, and simply swish it about awhile. While he gradually turned his head away, his eyes gazed intently at me, widening, transfixed.

Before his eyes followed the aversionary motion of his head, I suggested he produce a firm glass with the bowl of, say, the Tinto Riserva, but with a thick glass base in place of a stem. These, I suggested would be so successful that the return customers he’d lose through diminishing breakages would be easily replaced, and more, by others suddenly confident enough to risk a glass that looked nowhere near as dangerous a proposition for the enthusiastic drinker with a limited receptacle budget.

Receptacle brought me to spectacle, and before he turned and fled I explained that in Australia we call spectacles glasses, so he should do a line in designer shades and prescription eyewear. You know, we could then choose to wear The Nebbiolo, The Fino, or the Vintage Port. Riedel wine glasses! He’d make a motza!

Now that I notice my penultimate suggestion is well and truly in production, without so much as a thankyou Herr Weiss, I trust my dear friends in the Riedel family are hard at it, working on the mouth-blown, hand-made drinkers’ eyeglasswear, comfortable in the knowledge that there’s no fee other than their service of my trust that they never ever let Austria be naughty again.

But I’d still love a pair of Riedel Nightsight Grüner Vertliners with cross-hairs in the lenses.

Once they've perfected those, they can begin work on the perfect wine closure.

UNI LEARNS THE MEANING OF SOLEMN DEED

GLENTHORNE: NOW FOR SOME VITI RESEARCH - PHOTO by LEO DAVIS

STATEMENT from the offices of the Premier Mike Rann and Hon Paul Holloway, Minister for Urban Development and Planning
Tuesday, 24 March 2009

GLENTHORNE FARM DEVELOPMENT REQUEST DECLINED

The State Government has today declined a request from the University of Adelaide to set aside a section of Glenthorne Farm for housing.

Premier Mike Rann said the University had requested that some of the farm near O’Halloran Hill in Adelaide’s south be redeveloped to fund its Woodland Recovery Initiative.

“The Government has declined that request and has instead offered to work with the University to find alternative sources of funding for its aim of reafforesting the property to create native
woodland,” Mr Rann said.

“Glenthorne Farm has a special relationship with the community in the southern suburbs as well as the winemaking industry at McLaren Vale.

In 2001 Glenthorne Farm, the former CSIRO research facility at O'Halloran Hill, was handed over to Adelaide University by the State Government for use as a vineyard and winemaking facility.

The former State Government purchased the 200-hectare property from the Commonwealth in 1998 after CSIRO’s decision to quit the site.

Minister for Urban Development and Planning Paul Holloway says the proposal put to the State Government by the University failed to meet the terms of the deed and land management agreement signed at the time of the transfer in 2001.

“The State Government's view remains that the land was transferred to the University on the basis that there would be no housing on the site and that it would become a teaching and research centre for the wine industry,” Mr Holloway says.

“The University proposes to reafforest 150,000 hectares of woodlands in the Adelaide Hills face, a concept which has some merit.

“I have written to the University vice-chancellor offering to work with his staff to identify Alternative funding through research grants that can finance the woodland recovery initiative without requiring any of the land to be sold off for housing.

“The State Government supports the retention of open space within the metropolitan area.

“We remain committed to ensuring that the pressure to develop land within the urban growth Boundary is balanced by the retention of sufficient public open space for community use.”

News Release

www.premier.sa.gov.au

for background to this strange odyssey of humans vs. hubris type Glenthorne Farm in the search box top left corner

"THEY SAY IT’S THE ’EAT" WARNED CHIPS

ROBERT PARKER Jr.

Will The Ockers Listen To Anybody Who Isn’t Bob Parker?
Maybe The Heat Of ’09 Will Flush Out Some Lighter Wine
by PHILIP WHITE
A version of this story was published in The Independent Weekly on 20 MAR 09. I shall post a much extended version soon.

“They say it’s the ’eat” croaked Chips Rafferty, the dehydrating copper, explaining the suicide rate in The Yabba, his blistered patch of outback. “I like the ’eat.”

This was Wake In Fright, the profound 1971 film which launched Australia’s modern movie industry. While buffs raved internationally, Australians hated it – it was far too frank an appraisal of our condition. Our disgust was more overt because the movie had been highly-anticipated, being a British and Canadian endeavour.

All known prints were let rot.

We’re addicted to blithe praise from famous others. It’s sick. Press, pollies and public beg foreigners to like us, tell us they love it here, that we put on a good bicycle race, a great festival, world-class tucker. Mike Rann formalised this grovelling by spraying money at his Thinkers In Residence, shiny foreign carpetbaggers who pick the brains of anyone who can think who actually bothers to live here. They transcribe and paraphrase our ideas, hand it in, pick up their two or three hundred nicker, and mosey back to the Old World. If they are critical, we never hear.

One foreign critic influenced South Australian life more than any of Rannbo’s mercenaries. The American Robert Parker Jr. changed the way our winemakers make red when he fell in love with the highly concentrated tinctures of a few of our best tiny winesmiths.

Parker made these famous; the wines sold abruptly, some people made good money, and within a few years, in the fey hope that they’d also get rich and be beloved by foreigners, everyone’s red was suddenly above 14.5%.

Recently I posted to my blog an archive story about Mick Morris and his very strong Rutherglen durif. “Yes, it’s about 15.1%”, Mick admitted, “... apparently oblivious to the rest of the winemakers in Australia, who try to keep their table wines between eleven and thirteen percent alcohol by volume.” That was 1991. By 2000, 15.1% was standard.

As Parker has withdrawn hurt, and now sends Jay Miller to taste Australia, his influence is receding rapidly, and a new wave of critics is rising. As an highly-unpaid thinker in residence, I’m humbled by these great foreigners finally agreeing with my tiny provincial attitudes.

The USA blogosphere now fizzes with disdain for the sorts of wines they call “Dan Phillips gobstoppers”, referring to the Californian merchant who first took those strong specialist reds to the Parkerilla. And, finally, major newspaper columns are begging for wines of more finesse, better balance, and less dumb thickheadedness.

WAKE IN FRIGHT WAS SCREENED AS OUTBACK IN NORTH AMERICA

“Finessed and Light: California Pinot Noirs With a Manifesto” was the headline on Eric Asimov’s piece in last week’s New York Times. “I could see my fingers on the other side of the glass ... It was vibrant and refreshing, nothing like the dark, plush, opulent wines Mr. Guthrie used to make ... ‘It got to the point where I didn’t want the wine to be fatter than the food’, the winemaker said.”

The Washington Post is on the delicacy bandwaggon, too. In his piece, The Trouble With Syrah - which is shiraz - Dave McIntyre took a blast at “syrupy monsters, with alcohol levels often exceeding 15 percent but not enough fruit ... winemakers need to stop deadening our palates with excessive alcohol and learn to leave the finesse in the wine. Until they do, here's my advice: stick with proven winners, and always check the alcohol level on the label before buying.”

Which won’t work here - our winemakers are permitted 1.5% “error”, so 14.5% can be 16%; 15.5% might be 17%!

Appreciating that rare strong wines have sufficient natural acidity to balance their mass, McIntyre conceded that “some syrahs succeed in that fashion ... if anyone should offer you a glass of those hard-to-find rarities, don't hesitate to accept”, citing Sequel, John Duval’s 14.7% alcohol Washington state shiraz. (Since he quit making Grange, JD also has his own formidable John Duval Barossa brand.)

“But poor imitations abound”, McIntyre wrote. “ ‘Food friendly’ used to be a politely dismissive term to describe wines that show poorly in competitive tastings against big, floozy blockbusters. It's time to elevate ‘food friendly’ to the top rank of praise and reward wines that complement, rather than obliterate, dinner.”

See? He likes to eat. The lighter move is on, heavily.


Ocker winemakers might just manage to follow this criticism, even if it’s coming from the USA. They have a really good excuse. They can blame it on “the ’eat”. Scared of a repeat of last year’s record heatwave, thinking winemakers picked earlier this year, and from the hottest vintage ever, they’ll release wines two to four per cent lower in strength.

Prepare your sensitivities for these promising delicacies, and for the freshly-restored print of Wake In Fright, screening soon. I’m afraid we’re still very much the Australia portrayed therein. Like too many of our dumb, clumsy, dehydrated wines.

http://vimeo.com/3519159
http://people.famouswhy.com/chips_rafferty