CONSTELLATION CUTS AT McLAREN VALE

CHATEAU REYNELLA: CONSTELLATION'S AUSTRALIAN HEADQUARTERS. FOR NOW. photo KATE ELMES

From The Vintage Archive: Constellation Kicks Heads;
Hardys Gut Their Own Mother
by PHILIP WHITE ... a version of this story appeared in The Independent Weekly in February

One week is an eternity when you’re in the wine business and you’re looking vintage in the eye.

I’m writing a week before you’ll read this, and the grapegrowers in this neck of the woods – McLaren Vale – can’t believe their fortune. The extreme heatwaves earlier were mercifully brief, and those with a good carpet of sward have seen their earth retain a lot of the moisture from those lovely rains. It’s been humid, like Bordeaux, but persistent breezes are thus far keeping everything clean and dry in the vineyard canopies. Warm days, cool nights – 2010 could be the best vintage in many years. If it holds.

But in the face of what appears from here to be a cracker year, there’s the little matter of financial reality staring the growers down. McLaren Vale, like many other districts, faces the horror of sudden, violent price cuts: there’ll be no new Beemers and Benzes this year. Or next. The wine industry disaster does not stop in the Murray-Darling Basin.

Imagine you’re a Vales grower with, say, twenty acres of something special, and twenty of your cash cow industrial-grade stuff. You’re used to getting, say $3,000 or more for a tonne of your old bushvine shiraz, and $1,500 a tonne for the rest. The buyer from the big company walks in this week and sagely advises that because of the surplus, there’s oversupply, and you’ll be getting, well ... “What say we offer you $1,000 a tonne for the whole lot. Save you the embarrassment of leaving the crap half unpicked.”

You’re barely covering your cost, if at all. If you’re silly enough to grow Chardonnay, $500 a tonne seems magically generous - you can buy finished Riverland Chardonnay from tank for .50 cents a litre.

Constellation Wines, the world’s biggest wine company, competes with Fosters to buy McLaren Vale fruit. Fresh from uprooting John Reynell’s priceless 162 year old vineyard to make way for a yuppie ghetto, this mighty transnational has decided no Vales fruit is worth much more than $1,000 per tonne. Unless you make the cut for the super-premium Eileen Hardy red, you won’t be getting more than $1,000 per tonne, and many will be getting much less. All the medium-grade fruit - McLaren Vale’s specialty - that usually earns $3,000 per tonne (Grade 3) or $1,800 (Grade 4) will be pulling $1,000 max. Even the great prices offered Eileen Hardy quality fruit are to be disbelieved, as Constellation made no Eileen at all last year, and only a relatively tiny amount the year before.

In the letter Constellation sent last week to its growers, it even offers them a one-year break from their contracts, should they find more generous buyers. But like any Indian giver, it announced this news far too late for most growers to find new buyers. Also worth noting, that as far as Constellation is concerned, the discount Oomoo is now on a par with Tintara, with $1,200 per tonne being the maximum “bonus” offer for fruit for both. Which was earning two or three times that price two or three years ago.

Constellation called a meeting of growers at the Tintara Winery on 21 January, and made them an unacceptable offer. The growers left with a promise that Constellation would reconsider. But the forthcoming letter contained precisely what nobody wanted to hear, let alone believe.

“At the meeting, CWAU agreed to increase the price initially offered for Mataro from $1,000 per tonne to $1,100 per tonne and undertook to reconsider prices offered for Cabernet sauvignon, Shiraz, and Grenache. CWAU has now reviewed the initial prices offered for Cabernet sauvignon, Shiraz and Grenache, and believes the indicative prices offered represent fair market prices for the 2010 vintage.” This came from Adam Steer,
Constellation’s boss viticulturist.

So they went soft on Mataro, aka Mourvedre or Monastrell, to the tune of 10% of bugger all. That was their sweetener. If they buy more than 40 tonnes of Mataro this year I’ll drink it all personally.

What they’ve done is remove the heart of the district’s income. Growers were going to great lengths to improve their viticulture and quality of fruit so they’d be nudged up to B and C grade prices, not D-. So there’s only one sort of fruit in the big buyer’s eyes, and that’s that: the mention of the Eileen Hardy name was a huge frigging tease.

“We appreciate your efforts to produce premium quality fruit and look forward to the 2010 vintage”, Steer signed off. “At this point, we will assume that your fruit will be delivered to the Tintara Winery unless we hear otherwise. Please contact me as soon as possible if this is not the case.”

Add all the viticulture consultants, the tractor dealers, the farm supplies businesses, fuel suppliers, hoteliers, restaurateurs and whatnot who will be gutted by this, and you’re only just starting to get the picture.

BEYOND THE FEN LIES THE VINEYARD JOHN REYNELL FIRST PLANTED 162 YEARS AGO. CONSTELLATION HAD IT REMOVED FROM A HERITAGE LISTING LAST YEAR, AND IT IS NOW INTENSIVE HOUSING photo KATE ELMES

And It Got Even Worse
PHILIP WHITE IN THE INDEPENDENT WEEKLY 16TH APRIL

A near-perfect vintage is grinding to its close. But South Australian grapegrowers are reeling from the irony of their lot: while 2010 is one of the best quality harvests in decades, international oversupply puts their livelihoods under severe and immediate threat.

In fact, all the numbers are perfect apart from the price.

The cool, mild weather has kept natural acids high, perfumes pretty, colours and tannins intense, and pH levels easy to manage.

But many growers who were getting used to $3000 a tonne are looking at the loss of that last critical zero this year.

Many vineyards have been left unpicked; many are available for sale at ridiculous prices. Some growers cannot afford to hire a bulldozer to clear their land for sale or other uses.

In a real test for the planners, the South Australian countryside is set to undergo a major change of appearance as vineyards disappear.

Tetchy banks will lend you money to buy your little farmlet with its home, garage and pool, but make one mention of the twenty acres of Chardonnay and the loan’s likely to evaporate on the desk.

The record heatwave of early November damaged many vines at their critical flowering moment, destroying most of the Grenache, and various other varieties.

But the following weather was mild and reliable, and most varieties pretty much cruised through. Only to be worth two fifths of bugger all.

Tales of great meanness continually arise. In McLaren Vale, growers are enraged that brokers who offer them $300 per tonne for fruit that has cost them twice that much to grow, then have the audacity to put $150 on their retail price.

“They will get my land”, one tormented grower told The Independent. “I have nothing else to do. The bank will lose patience. My property loses value every day.”

AUSTRALIA LIVES UP TO ITS NAME

research and text by PHILIP WHITE ... click on flag for its history

AUSTRALIA comes from the Greek αυδτηος, through the Latin austerus, which means severe, and gave itself to the Middle English auster, or austere, meaning the south wind and its source. By 1541, austere was also used to mean sour, or bitter and astringent, and harsh to the taste. This gradually came to cover anything that was harsh to the feelings generally; stern; rigorous; judicially severe; grim in warfare; severe in self-discipline; strict and abstinent. In 1597 it meant severely simple; without any luxury. By 1667 austere also meant grave and sober. The Latin austeritas became the Old French austerite, which, by 1590, as the English austerity, meant severe self-discipline, abstinence and asceticism. In 1634 austerity also meant harsh to the taste, or astringent sourness. This soon also covered general harshness to the feelings; judicial severity, or stern or severe treatment or demeanour. By 1713 it meant rugged sternness, and by 1875 austerity also meant severe simplicity or lack of luxury. The Latin australis became austral by the time of Middle English, and was used to indicate something that was belonging to the south. Or was southern. It also came not only to mean influenced by the south wind, but also warm and moist. This Latin australis gave its name to the great continent rumoured to lie in the south, Terra Australis. The French were the first to use Australien, meaning of Terra Australis. By 1693, the English language included the word Australian, also meaning of Terra Australis. The Terra was leaving Australis by 1814, in which time the English-speaking world had begun to use Captain Matthew Flinders’ suggested name for this huge southern beach-fringed slab of sand, dust, and stone, Australia. Now. About those original inhabitants …



Salman Rushdie writes about his visit to Writers' Week in Adelaide in the Tatler, London, October 1984:

‘Don’t you find,’ Angela Carter said one evening, ‘that there’s something a little exhausted about the place names around here? I mean, Mount Lofty. Windy Point.’ On another occasion, Bruce Chatwin said something similar: ‘It’s a tired country, not young at all. It tires its inhabitants. It’s too ancient, too old.’

 Tweet

TOM ANGOVE DIES AT 92 YEARS

TOM ANGOVE: A GREAT WINE MAN, BUT HARDLY THE INVENTOR OF THE BLADDER PACK.




Irrigation Hero Dies In The Riverland ... Great Innovator And Motivator ... But He Did Not Invent The Bladder Pack

by PHILIP WHITE ... a version of this story appeared in The Independent Weekly


Tom Angove did not invent the bladder pack.

The great Tom died in a Riverland nursing home last week, after ninety-two astounding years. He was a fierce fellow; a clever inventor, relentless innovator and a mighty proponent of the irrigated vineyards whose fruit has since filled billions of chrome handbags and silver pillows.

Tom’s role in shaping the modern Australian wine industry is at least as significant as the Chaffey brothers: they developed the irrigation systems; he showed the world how to plant vines: if you stand in the middle of his Nanya vineyard at Renmark, you cannot see the ends of the rows.

He was also a pioneer in the use of stainless steel for large wine tanks.

But the plastic bladder pack had been a common vinegar container in Europe twenty years before Tom plonked it on Australian tables in 1965. About half Australia’s wine is still drunk from much refined versions of his prototype, which didn’t even have a tap.

All these containers evolved from the wine skin of ages past: the South Australian museum has a fine example in its astonishing Aboriginal collection, made from the hide of kangaroo, and used for carrying water. One can’t help wondering how different campfire life would be if the shiny modern replacement contained only water.

In the early ’fifties, another brilliant winemaker, Ian Hickinbotham, left, had played with the notion of using giant plastic bags to line the 30,900 litre wine tanks he’d inherited at the South Australian Grapegrowers’ Co-operative Limited, which he wisely renamed Kaiser Stuhl. These concrete tanks were fine for storing fortified wines: to an extent, their high alcohol prevented overt oxidation. But when the trend to finer, drier table wines took hold, oxidation became a much more confronting problem.

While he left Kaiser Stuhl without perfecting this idea, others certainly finished the job: enormous volumes of Australian wine are now exported in huge bladders within standard shipping containers. In a method fraught with the danger of the product being diluted with poorer, cheaper wine from elsewhere, this is then bottled in Britain or North America and promoted as being more environmentally responsible, trimming the carbon footprint of transporting heavy glass.

MODERN CANARY ISLAND WINE SKIN

In the mid-’sixties, once he’d accepted Max Schubert’s invitation to manage Penfolds in Victoria, Hickinbotham put his mind once again to the bag-in-the-box. He’d been in touch with Waddington Duval, the English company which manufactured the plastic taps used in the European vinegar containers, so this company hired Diemolders of Geelong to work with him. In his memoir, Australian Plonky, Hickinbotham praises the ingenious Charles Malpas: “I was astounded at how quickly [he] could make a new prototype tap: we could have a discussion in my office in the afternoon, tossing ideas around, and he would return with a sample next day.”

While he was eternally frustrated that Penfolds “just could not grasp the importance of the venture” Hickinbotham was keen to use the bladder pack for super-premium wines, even Grange. His proposed box was the same proportion as a house brick: “height was twice width, which was one-and-a-half times depth … that formula was retained for table casks for years”.

In those early days, the actual bag was the biggest problem: ICI seemed incapable of making a film which did not leak. Rather than pursue a superior film, Penfolds launched their “wine cask” in a can about the size of a large paint tin, painted to resemble a barrel, which horrified Hickinbotham. This was to avoid damages claims from people with stained carpets and tablecloths. Nevertheless, the venture was short-lived, and within a few months, Penfolds ceased manufacturing the new product.

At which point another wine genius, David Wynn, entered the picture. Hickinbotham had worked for Wynn at Coonawarra, making the world’s first deliberately-induced and managed malo-lactic fermentations in 1952, so Wynn was aware of Hickinbotham’s ingenuity, and had been following the bladder pack evolution.

Wynn was quick to abandon the ICI film, replacing it with a superior product from Japan. With the driving nous of Tony Herbert, Wynns’ technical manager, they then developed the first sandwich film, further reducing the oxidation of the wine.

Tom Angove certainly rewrote history by giving us his take on the bladder pack, but the story’s not over yet. The next step is to develop film that will not release polyvinyl chloride, will not degrade in UV light, and will not taint the wine over time.

And then, of course, we have to learn to fill these containers with a better product. The thought of a fresh trickle of water entering the Murray, only to be sucked through the roots of billions of vines, siphoned to the berries, and jammed through stark refineries to be pumped mindlessly into silver pillows, somehow seems not quite the celebration all that ingenuity and acuity deserves.

As for intelligent reviews of bladder packs, forget it. There is never any guarantee that the bladder I taste comes from the same tank as the bladder you buy.

VAUCHER BEGUET REWRITES HISTORY

THE FIRST VINTAGE AT YANGARRA ESTATE'S BRAND NEW WINERY AT KANGARILLA, McLAREN VALE, SOUTH AUSTRALIA. LEFT TO RIGHT: WINERIES BY DESIGN'S MD, GERALD ASBROEK, JACQUES BLAIN, CO-INVENTOR OF THE VAUCHER BEGUET MISTRAL GRAPE SORTER, AND PETER FRASER, GENERAL MANAGER AND WINEMAKER AT YANGARRA
  
Vibrators And Hair Dryers ... Handbag Raid Produces Perfect Fruit ... New Aussie Winery Starts With A Deft Polish
by PHILIP WHITE ... A VERSION OF THIS STORY WAS PUBLISHED IN THE INDEPENDENT WEEKLY ON 12th MARCH 2010


In the late eighties, I lived for a while on the edge of Australia's vast Murray Mallee, between Truro and Eudunda. It felt like the edge of the desert.

There were no vineyards within a thirty minute drive, but I always knew when vintage was on. Mighty juggernauts piled with grapes suddenly began to roar by, 24/7, trucking fruit from the over-irrigated Murraylands to the Kaiser Stuhl/Penfolds refinery at Nuriootpa. 

Blokes who normally carted landfill and gravel would seal the tipper flap at the back of their trucks with stuff they called Gorilla Snot – it came from a tube - and suddenly switch to the fine wine business.

Curiously, I slipped in to the winery one afternoon to check the quality of that fruit. After hours of dirt roads, the sticky grapes had gathered a thick layer of dust, which was mud by the time of arrival. They’d break the seal and simply tip the muck into the hoppers, where the great worm screws would force the disgusting load into the winery.

Mud wasn’t the only contaminant. Harvesting machines pick snakes, lizards, rats, mice, snails, birds, earwigs, spiders and everything else that lives in the vine canopies. Everything went through the big worm, with the sugary mud. Unless the wine-makers used various chemicals to remove the resultant protein and filth from the finished wine, we drank it.

No other food industry would permit such contamination.

The machinery has improved since those days, but mechanical harvesters remain indiscriminate. To make better wine, and provide a more marked point of difference, thereby justifying higher prices, proper winemakers still go to the bother of picking by hand. 

There are fewer stalks, leaves and critters, and the beautiful hand-selected bunches I see each year going through the hopper at Penfolds Magill, for example, look as if they have been hand-washed. They are pristine.

For many years the fanatical winemakers of Bordeaux, and other grand French vignobles, have been hand-sorting such carefully picked bunches once more before they hit the crusher. Bunches with botrytis, other moulds, too many raisins, or the slightest blemish get the flick. Australian wine industrialists regard such care as prohibitively expensive.

JACQUES BLAIN AT THE YANGARRA ESTATE REVIEVAL HOPPER. THE GRAPES ARE PREMIUM HAND-PICKED GRENACHE FROM THE HIGH SANDS VINEYARD: ALL UNIRRIGATED BUSH VINES PLANTED IN 1946

Enter a suave French engineer, Jacques Blain, of Lyon. He runs a company called Vaucher Beguet, designing and supplying the best wineries of France with grape processing machinery.

We sat chatting in my patio last week, a short stroll from the new Yangarra winery near Kangarilla. Inside that handsome building sits a glittering example of Jacques’ ingenuity: a Vaucher Beguet Mistral grape-sorter. This single invention is changing winemaking forever.

“A customer in Bordeaux complained that human grape sorters were far from perfect,” Jacques said. “They talk with each other, you know, tell the jokes, take their eyes from the work, and still we see imperfect fruit getting through. So they ask me to design a sorting machine. We have three weeks to deliver.”

Jacques sat down with his business partner, Gerard Vouchet, and designed a machine that destemmed the grapes, then vibrated a sloping perforated steel panel which let the smaller imperfect berries fall into a bin before the better fruit went into the crusher.

THE WASTE FROM THE SHAKING TABLE: BOTRYTIS BERRIES; EARWIGS; MILLIPEDES, ASSORTED GREENERY, AND ONLY BACCHUS KNOWS WHAT

“It did not work very well,” he explained, “because all the leaf and stem and other contaminant still come through with the must. So I say to myself ‘We should try with wind’. Gerard said ‘Give me five minutes’ and he soon came back with his wife’s hair drier. It worked. I patent the machine and we delivered ... In 2005 we have sold seven sorters: four in France and three in the USA. Now we have sold 300. There are six in your country.”

GREEN WASTE AND MUCK BLOWN OUT BY THE MISTRAL FAN

I can watch this machine for hours: it’s hypnotic. Other wine-makers can’t wait to put their fruit through it ... there’s a queue. 

There are four bins surrounding it. One fills with the stalks from the destemmer. The next fills with a shitty grey pulp of raisins, unripe berries the size of lentils, crawling with earwigs, snails and whatnot. The third fills with leaves, more stalks, petiols, bits of critters, mucky broken berries, more earwigs, snails, and numerous surprising unmentionables. There was one perfect kidney in there last week.

WASTE FROM THE MISTRAl: PREVIOUSLY, ALL THIS ENDED UP IN THE FERMENT

And the fourth bin fills with perfectly-matched individual grapes, looking as if each one was hand-selected and polished clean. It’s incredible to think that it took so many centuries of dirty wine- making to see the need for this improvement, and get on with designing and building the machine.

But the biggest shock came not with your average machine-picked fruit, but the first batches of fastidiously hand-picked whole bunches. 

Stuff that we’ve always regarded as clean, perfect material for the very top shelf, suddenly began spitting out the hidden greeblies from within each bunch: not quite the volumes of contaminating crap the harvesting machines deliver, but enough to make all who see it curse in disbelief.

The ferments are brilliant.

FINISHED POLISHED GRENACHE

 

my picks

Dowie Doole Tintookie McLaren Vale Chenin Blanc 2008
$30; 11.5% alcohol; Diam cork; 94+++ points

Brian Light makes this beauty the old way, with wild yeasts, lotsa lees, some old oak, and the best handpicked old vine Chenin Lulu that Lunn and Drew Dowie grow on the deep Semaphore sands of Blewett Springs. It’s still grainy, like an old Bunuel movie, but finer and less agricultural than the 2006, which I pointed equally, but has the same propensity to age for decades. It has the perfectly pithy dry finish that makes the drinker feel starved for fresh char-grilled seafood, and the darned thing sits in your mouth like a belligerent squatter, long after the eviction order has been issued. A new benchmark!

S. C. Pannell Adelaide Tempranillo Touriga 2007
$27; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 93+++ points

Adelaide is an appelletion super-zone, covering everything from Clare to Kangaroo Island. Steve Pannell made this from Spanish and Portuguese varieties grown there, in respect of the mighty but rare Wendouree pressings reds. Since wendouree is a western Victorian aboriginal word meaning piss off, it makes those wines seem rarer still. This is not quite so scarce. But it has all those magnificent bone dry tannins, in a boisterous, forceful mouthful with still retains some berries, natural acid, and right royal poise – it’s not based on brute alcohol. I could utter many fulsomely profane curses here. Go buy!

AUSTRALIA'S FEAR OF NATURAL ACID

THE GREAT RAY BECKWITH AT 98 YEARS OF AGE: STILL DROPPING IN TO THE PENFOLDS WINERY FOR A CUP OF TEA AND A SNIFF OF THE NEW VINTAGES

"Piggy's Dead, Ray!" ... Ocker Mob Still Running With The Parkerilla ... But Faint Glimmers Of Hope In The Better Balance Brigade

by PHILIP WHITE - a version of this piece was published in The Independent Weekly On 7th MARCH 2010

One blistering summer early in the ’eighties, when the grapes were ripening with unseemly haste, I happened to be at John Frada’s McLaren Vale winery, where I made two very big mistakes. John, flustered by the extreme heat, was trying to squeeze too much fruit through his limited machinery. Outside, Enzo Berlingieri and Katrina Bickford were planting native shrubs. Both operations came to a halt when a cloud the colour of an aubergine engaged its handbrake immediately above us, and, in the time it took to smoke a cigarette, relieved itself of an inch of rain.

This made time for conversation. My first crime was mistaking Katrina, whom I’d only just met, for Mrs. Berlingieri. This greatly amused Enzo, who thought it wasn’t such a bad notion. (Leer would be an appropriate word here.) But Katrina’s feisty Russian genes saw it another way, and she shrivelled me with a look as brief and sharp as her guttural curse.

The second sin was suggesting the rain had conveniently doubled the volume of John’s fruit. I imagined he’d left the full bins outside to quite naturally increase his tonnage. But no, he said, the heat had pushed his sugars far too high, and the water would bring them back to a palatable level, so his alcohols would not be so overwhelming.

Otherwise, in those glory days, over-ripe ferments, which would eventually have far too much alcohol, were given a bit of the old black snake. This was the insertion of the rainwater hose. Hoses were black rubber.

Twenty years after the Frada episode I sat with a cuppa in the calm household of the great Ray Beckwith, at Nuriootpa. Ray was only about ninety then, and he produced ream after ream of beautiful copperplate handwriting on foolscap paper: his scientific notes from before World War Two. One of this country’s first true wine scientists, he spent his life working in the labs of Penfolds. His discovery of the importance of pH in ferments, and the methods of adjusting it to a narrow, ideal window, revolutionised winemaking, first at Penfolds, and then the wide world over.

To this day winemakers everywhere blithely use Ray’s formulae, with no idea whatsoever of where they came from.

He produced a more recent document. This was his record of the average alcohols of Barossa shiraz released in the preceding decade. He shook his sage old head and tutted, and remarked on how stupid it was that the alcohols had marched so determinedly upward, year after year. They had, in fact, lurched from 13.5 per cent to the high fifteens.

We talked of how this was the industry’s response to the ornery American critic, Robert Parker Jr., whose palate is addicted to very high alcohols, seemingly irrespective of whether the wines are in true balance, with life and natural acid and appropriate pHs to guarantee harmonious structure, drinkablity, and savoury gastronomic pleasure.

We commiserated about the servile nature of our rockstar winemakers who greedily sought the international recognition a high Parker point would bring them; the glossy magazine attention they’d thus get; the adoration they’d enjoy when they hit the wine stands in the States.

It is an exemplary tale of the weirdness of industrial psychology, this blind lurch from savoury to soused. Winemakers blame it on global warming, which must take a shred of the blame. But my attitude has always been contrary. I think that, lacking any true gastronomic education, the hard-hatted industrial chemists pumped out by the Adelaide University’s winemaking course simply managed, in blind mob mentality, to feed each other’s belief that higher alcohols were not just the way to go, but the only thing possible.

The Lord Of The Flies comes to mind. It’s high time somebody uttered the essential “Piggy’s dead, Simon.”

Apart from the blistering freak heatwave of early November, which killed most of the setting Grenache in McLaren Vale and the Barossa, this vintage is proceeding with ideally warm, breezy days, and cool, breezier nights. If the weather patterns hold, it could be the best year in many. And you heard that from my mouth, not from some dumbarse PR blomo.

But I have also munched on vibrant red berries whose skins are still thick, well-formed, and resistant to the teeth; whose pips retain that lovely puckery nuttiness that will give the wines natural balance, and guarantee good long lives in the right cellars.

Most importantly, I have relished their beautiful mouth-cleansing natural acidity. There is no substitute for this. It will lock their myriad flavours together, and train them to sing in harmony. Which shovelled corrective tartaric acid additions, as taught rotely, can never really do. Added acid always looks awkward and angular, never really harmonising.

This is why, in many of the colder premium French appelletions, the addition of sugar before ferment – chaptalisation – to replace unobtainable grape ripeness, is permitted. These winemakers, after two thousand years of trial and error, have understood that natural acidity is not just better, but essential, even if it means occasionally adding sugar, which will eventually be fermented to dryness. So they prefer the colder sites for their top-grade wines. Even chaptalised wines end up better balanced and gracious, as the sugar melds better into the wine’s form than added tartaric acid ever will. So the addition of acid to chaptalised wines is illegal.






















In Australia, chaptalisation is illegal. But, anticipating the rote addition of tartaric or citric acid at some point during the winemaking process, we generally ripen Shiraz grapes until they “bag up” on the vine. This is when their skins begin to wrinkle, shrivel, and dimple, like a golf ball. I’ve sloshed such grapes through my mouth this vintage, from vine and hopper, and to me it’s obvious. They’re too far gone. Their pips have lost all their savoury walnut edge, and their skins have shed their drying, preserving tannins.

Robert Parker Jr. will love their finished product.

If you were to open your fridge and find a tomato or a strawberry there that looks like that, you’d avoid it and select find a fresher, tighter one.

Infuriatingly, given the ideal vintage conditions so far, I have also seen very expensive fruit that was quite baggy and hyper sweet – enough to make a wine of, say 15.5 per cent alcohol – but with pips that had never ripened, and were still very bitter. This is often the result of the refinery grape purchasing officer wandering blithely through the grower’s vineyard at one stage or another, and ordering some change to the viticulture, like “turn the drippers off, we want this raisined.” Against the better wisdom of the grower, the vines go out of balance, stress, and desperately make sugar before their pips have developed sufficiently.

The wines will be awful.

But I have one sweetening yarn for Ray on the occasion of his ninety-eighth birthday. Last week I phoned ace Vales winesmith Steve Pannell.

“Whitey,” he said, “for the first time I can remember, I’ve just crushed red grapes at 13.5 per cent, and guess what? I’ve got the best flavours ever.

“You know what I reckon?” he continued excitedly. “I reckon this whole business has convinced itself that natural acid means unripe!”

Piggy’s dead, Ray.

my picks

J. de Villaret Brut Crémant de Loire $28; 12% alcohol; cork; 91 points Chenin blanc grows well amongst the Loire’s royal palaces and châteaux, traditionally making intense, fragrant, steely wines of serious longevity for the likes of Leonardo da Vinci. Chenin’s stiff natural acidity makes it ideal for crunchy, austere wines like this sparkler, which is half Chardonnay. It’s a complex, alluring, perfectly yeasty drink. It’s like a properly characterful Champagne, falling short, but heading determinedly in the Krug direction – with Chenin doing the job of Pinot meunier. It’s certainly a better-formed drink than the many of the megabulk cheapies from the big refineries of Reims: a dry, finely-moussed fizz at a price that makes me snigger. Go, buy!

Clancy Fuller Two Little Dickie Birds Barossa Rosé 2009 $??; 12.5% alcohol; screw cap; 93 points The Dickie Birds are Paul Clancy, founder of Winetitles, and Peter Fuller himself, owner of SA’s other wine publishing and propaganda mob. Peter Schell made it from their old vine Mataro (aka Mourvédre or Monastrell) and Grenache, on the fast-draining rubble of the Barossa piedmont. It’s a classic bone dry pheasant-eye style, after the beauties you sink with saffron-rich bouillabaisse in the bistros of Marseilles, a Gauloise smouldering threateningly on the side. It’s as acrid as a burlap superphosphate sack, with cute maraschino, framboise and cranberry filling the middle, and very fine stony tannins to finish, like the alluvium from whence it came. Adults only.

BASKET RANGERS TUSCANNED RIGHT OUT

BASKET RANGE






Hillsbillies Polish The Snifters
Thirty Years Of Uphill Toil
Brodericks Catch The Sun
by PHILIP WHITE - a version of this was published in THE INDEPENEDENT WEEKLY


“This place was Doug Watson’s orchard,” Phillip Broderick said into the stiff mountain breeze.

“It grew great apples, raspberries and cherries, so thirty years ago we planted some grapes. It was pretty poor country; all cleared by hand in the 1920s … People worked very bloody hard in those days.”

Last weekend, Broderick, and his wife, Mary, staged a “bit of a tasting” for the hard-core fans of their brave Basket Range reds, beginning with the 1989 vintage. As we nudged the glasses there beside the vintage shed in the bonnie sun and the summer gusts, even the most casual glance about the place revealed that the bloody hard work has never ceased.

There were very few vineyards anywhere in the Hills thirty years ago. The current plague of tax-evading industrial grapeyards and hobbyists had yet to hit malignancy. But Brian Croser was busy filling the Piccadilly Valley with vines for his beloved Petaluma; Steve George and Peta van Rood were well underway at Ashton Hills; Tim Knappstein, the Henschkes and Geoff Weaver were nose to the winestone a few ridges away at Lenswood, and at Clarendon Brian Light and Alan Hickinbotham were also beginning to capture the advantages of higher, cooler viticulture in their racy new wines.

“Croser was always very supportive”, Phillip said. “The first time I picked a couple of tonne all those years ago he gave us a corner of his new winery and said ‘Put it there, and if you can’t always get here to plunge your cap, give me a call, and I’ll get somebody else to do it’.”

Some of last week’s throng had visited Basket Range before; the first gathering was in 1986. We met then at the other side of the hill, in the bottom of a gully in a long, dark sandstone house. The first little vineyard snuggled alongside in the scrub, facing north, but often struggled to reach full ripeness at such a lowly, sheltered location. Since then, the Brodericks have planted a bigger, breezier, happier twenty acres on top of the hill, and moved to a brighter house on its shoulder.

“Everyone was pretty much Tuscannned right out by ’98”, the wry Phillip reflected. “It’s a better life up here.”

















PHILLIP AND MARY BRODERICK AT THEIR VINTAGE SHED

The notion of soil is a joke at Basket Range. Here and there a few inches of it have somehow evaded being washed or blown away, but mostly it’s pure and simple: massive sandstone with the odd ironstone intrusion. Sandstone holds water; ironstone adds might and intensity to red grape flavour.

Broderick’s intent has always been the elegant intensity of the great red blends of Bordeaux, so the vineyard is set accordingly to grow Cabernet sauvignon, Merlot, and Petit verdot. The Cabernet is classically leafy, with the methoxypyrazine flavours of the nightshade family: tomato leaf, hop and hemp atop a cherry and blackcurrant juiciness. Merlot is more earthy, with mossy, mushroomy soul, while the Petit verdot – “little green” - adds complex tannins of the vegetal sort. This latter variety, always the last in Bordeaux to ripen, might seem an unwise selection for a place where full ripeness is elusive, but here it performs a clever service of the Tuscan sort. Somehow the tannins of these wines are akin to the structure of the great Nebbiolo wines of northern Italy. Where, say, a fat Barossa shiraz is packed with tannin from the base up, these elegant Italians seem to sport a cloud of savoury tannin that floats above the juice, providing a more ethereal and entertaining effect.

The first wine poured, the 1989, looked Italianate, but in a nutty Dolcetto way (and I mean very fine Dolcetto): its flesh and primary fruit was truly fading, leaving the tiniest lozenge of blackcurrant jelly in the middle of the tongue, whilst the sides were worked by fresh, vigorous tannin. The Dolcetto analogy applied too to the 93, a cooler year wine which had started life quite green, and is only now softening sufficiently to reveal its soul. Like most of the wines, this has an array of confectionary musk and mints decorating its pretty bouquet.

The younger wines boast another adornment: they smell of face butters and creams, and the alluring sniff of R. M. Williams’ leather dressing. While the fruits – cherry, blackcurrant, raspberry and blueberry - are presented like fresh Medlar gels, these fleshy facecream extras are obviously the result of the better ripening now achieved. These are best seen in the current release, the stunning 2006 I raved about here a few weeks back, but looks like being even more elegantly intense and tantalising in the 2007, which time may show to be an even better wine.

If your penchant is refined, beautifully balanced reds of modest alcohol and price, and you have the patience to lock a portion of what you buy in the dungeon for a few years, Basket Range is amongst the very best our Hills have to offer.

MURRAY WATERERS SHOULD ADMIT GUILT

LEON "BIGGLES" BIGNELL, MP, THE PARLIAMENTARY MEMBER FOR THE SEAT OF MAWSON, WHICH INCLUDES SOUTH AUSTRALIA'S McLAREN VALE WINE DISTRICT. photo KATE ELMES, INDEPENDENT WEEKLY. click on image for link to the INDY website for daily SA election updates.

Biggles Flies Straight Into 'Em Bright Polly Says What His Electors Daren't Jittery Grapegrowers Clam Up As Multi-nats Clean Up
by PHILIP WHITE ... a version of this appeared in The INDEPENDENT WEEKLY

Last week Leon Bignell MP, the Labor member for Mawson, made a statement that was bigger than any made by any politician about wine since the ’eighties Vine Pull Scheme.

In his parliamentary report, G’day, UK, Bignell suggested that Riverina grapegrowers with unsustainable irrigation schemes should be forced to put warnings on their wine labels.

“It is time for the federal Government to mandate the amount of water which grapegrowers can use on each hectare of grapes”, he wrote. “Those who exceed the allocation should have Unsustainably Grown Wine stamped on each bottle.”

Bignell was reacting to newspaper advertisements he saw in London last year. The Sunday Times Wine Club was offering Riverina wines at less than $A100 a dozen.

“Bonzer!” the ad read. “Grab them while you can. The smallest grape yield in Australia for 30 years has put real pressure on stocks and that means prices have been going through the roof.”

“There is no shortage of Australian wine” Bignell snorted. “We’re in the middle of the biggest glut in history.”

Bignell’s southern seat, Mawson, is Labor’s second most marginal: a mere 2.6 per cent swing would see it lost. It awkwardly includes suburbs packed with working families and strugglers, like Hackham and Woodcroft at one extreme, with the silvertails who own the posh wineries and vineyards of McLaren Vale at the other.

“Woodcroft’s got the biggest Primary School in the state”, he said. “960 pupils, with both parents working. There are a lot of very clever small to medium-sized companies like Krix hi-fi speakers, and Boart Longyear which exports really smart mining technology to places like Canada. Dinky Di Engineering at Lonsdale makes precision mining equipment, but also produced the international yo-yo of the year in 2008!”

Bignell, who has surprised the wineries with his untiring fight to protect their vineyards from housing, and assisting them export to new markets like Russia, takes great pride in McLaren Vale’s status of making wines at good profit using no Murray water. In a brilliant first for Australian wine, McLaren Vale increasingly incorporates recycled water from the seaside suburbs in its irrigation regime.

Bignell has been instrumental in extending this recycling scheme for the good of all.

“Making ordinary wine in places grapes weren’t meant to grow does immeasurable harm to Australian regions that do produce top quality wines,” he wrote. “The UK market seems more than a little schizophrenic with its approach to sustainability. There is a lot of talk about airmiles and the need to eat food and drink wine that hasn’t travelled around the globe but, when that argument doesn’t suit them, they revert to selling cheap wine that has actually cost our country millions of litres of valuable water.

“While UK newspapers fill their features, news and opinion pages with missives about sustainability they don’t mind peddling unsustainable goods when they are profiting from our environment.”

While mainly delighted with his outrage, the growers of McLaren Vale were singularly silent in response. They need the best wishes of Fosters and Constellation to survive, and the dramatic cuts to grape prices they’ve just been dealt, in one of the best vintages in decades, has left them dumbfounded and jittery. Since a respected grower suicided last week, locals are quietly gearing up to assist each other fight depression.

The gossip and mumblings within the wine industry councils has been more overt, but again, all off the record.

“Yeah, but who’s paying them?” Bignell responded. “The big guys are their biggest constituents by far.”

VALE CRU GATHERING OF McLAREN VALE'S SMALLEST, HIGHEST QUALITY WINEMAKERS, MOST OF WHOM CANNOT AFFORD MEMBERSHIP OF THEIR REGIONAL ASSOCIATION, WHICH KOWTOWS TO CONSTELLATION AND FOSTERS AND STAYS SCHTUM WHEN CONSTELLATION RIPS VITAL LOCAL HERITAGE ITEMS APART AND SUDDENLY CHOPS PREMIUM GRAPE PRICES BY HUNDREDS OF PER CENT, IMMEDIATELY BUTCHERING THE LOCAL ECONOMY.

His report explains that wineries using sustainable practices struggle against non-sustainable plonk “because there is no onus on the latter to do or say otherwise ... The Australian wine industry has largely been taken over by international conglomerates. They behave more like oil companies than traditional wine organisations. They have plundered our land, our heritage, our workforce and scarce water resources in the desperate scramble to make money.

LAST YEAR: JOHN REYNELL'S ORIGINAL VINEYARD, A CONSTANT PRODUCER OF SUPER-PREMIUM CABERNET SAUVIGNON AND MALBEC FOR 161 YEARS, AND SOURCE OF AUSTRALIA'S REVERED REYNELLA SELECTION CABERNET, WHICH IS NOW PLANTED IN MOST PREMIUM DISTRICTS ACROSS THE COUNTRY. THIS PRICELESS HERITAGE ITEM WAS RECENTLY FLOGGED FOR A FEW BRIEF MILLION BY CONSTELLATION TO MAKE WAY FOR AN INTENSIVE HOUSING GHETTO. WHILE THIS IS NOT IN HIS ELECTORATE, BUT THE NEIGHBOURING ONE, LEON BIGNELL LED THE CHARGE TO SAVE THIS IRREPLACABLE GARDEN, YET THE JITTERY McLAREN VALE GRAPE WINE AND TOURISM ASSOCIATION REFUSED TO SUPPORT ITS RETENTION (SEE BELOW) photo KATE ELMES, INDEPENDENT WEEKLY

“These big companies have also hi-jacked industry associations throughout Australia,” he continued. “The small and medium sized operators are drowned out by the people paying the biggest slice of the membership cake. Growers often refuse to speak out against the actions of the big companies as they fear they will have nowhere to sell their grapes.”

Which is rather more precise than the retort of Liberal agriculture spokesman, Mitch Williams.

“If somebody's suggesting that water that comes naturally from rain fall in a place which is fortunate enough to have a high rain fall, as opposed to somebody irrigating, changes something fundamental about the reason why somebody would buy a bottle of wine, I think is nonsense,” he blustered on the ABC’s Lateline. “I think, to be quite honest, I think this is a desperate act by somebody who wants to play politics.”

Bignell’s bosses haven’t done much better. As his report circulated, another came jointly from the SA Wine Industry Council and Paul Caica, Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries.

Wine: A Partnership 2010-2015 is a shiny “statement of intent” arising from countless hours of committee meetings. This document fluffs on about “increasing awareness” and “continuing to work to inform ... compile and disseminate ... support information flow” and myriad other vague marketing and environmental goals so ambiguous their success can never be measured.

But the biggest, most glaring hole concerns tax. While it suggests the maintenance of “a watching brief” and confoundingly lists the objective “Recognition as an advocate for the reduction and/or removal of barriers to trade”, the new report makes absolutely no mention of Ken Henry, Kevin Rudd’s favoured policy mandarin in the Federal Treasury.

As published in Thirst a few weeks back, Henry, as part of his mammoth rewrite of the entire Australia tax system, has wisely recommended that all alcohol be taxed by excise. This means the tax is paid on the volume of pure alcohol sold, and no longer on the price per unit. Expensive wine would be cheaper, and the cost of the irrigated cheap stuff would soar. We would no longer be able to buy wine at the price of bottled water.

Under the excise, the cost of the unsustainable $14 four litre bladder pack would double, to $31.07, while a $30 bottle, as produced from recycled water in McLaren Vale, would fall to $27.53. Half of Australia’s wine is guzzled from bladder packs. Henry’s proposal would quite simply close the Murray-Darling irrigated wine business down.

While this would see an instant ocean of water flowing toward the Murray Mouth, Premier Mike Rann has made not a bleat about the proposal.

As the member for Mawson makes clear, there’s no doubt about the stance of the wine industry councils.

JOHN REYNELL'S OLD HOMESTEAD AT REYNELLA, NEAR ADELAIDE. CONSTELLATION IS REPLACING HIS ORIGINAL VINEYARD WITH A CLOSE-SPACED HOUSING ESTATE, AND HAS REMOVED AND SOLD (FOR SWEET FUCK ALL) THE BEAUTIFUL ANTIQUE FURNITURE INSTALLED HERE SINCE THE HOME WAS RESTORED BY THE HARDY FAMILY, WHOSE FOUNDER, THOMAS HARDY, FIRST WORKED HERE IN 1850.

The following is a letter sent by Dudley Brown, below, Chairman of the McLaren Vale Grape Wine And Tourism Association, in answer to a New Zealand journalist, Sally Marden, who had written urging the association to oppose the uprooting of Reynell's 161 year old vineyard. Brown sold his fruit to Constellation until a dispute over his grape quality four years ago, soon after he arrived in Australia. He came from the same upstate New York school as the Sands brothers, chairman and MD of Constellation, which was founded by their father.

Dear Sally,

Thank you for your note.

As our Association represents the interests of multiple industries, we have long had a policy of not commenting on commercial matters of members or disputes between industry groups except to the extent that they violate the law.

Constellation’s forerunner company, Hardy’s, has been a member of our association in good standing since the inception of our forerunner bodies.

We have and continue to actively lobby on matters of urban encroachment in our region (including the recent Glenthorne Farm matter) where and we can.

Dudley Brown

Chairman

CARP ON THE MURRAY FLOODPLAINS ... WHERE'S CONSTELLATION'S MIGHTY IRRIGATED ENVIRONMENTAL TRIUMPH, BANROCK STATION, NOW, EH?