WET: DUDLEY BROWN CLEARS THE WATER

DUDLEY BROWN AT WORK AT INKWELL WINES ... CLICK IMAGE TO SEE A VIDEO OF HIS PRESENTATION AT TedX DUBBO

Wine Water Tax And Politics
Dudley Brown At TedX Dubbo
Pity He Didn't Mention Religion

Below is the full text of the former Chairman of the McLaren Vale Grape Wine and Tourism Association's speech at the recent TedX Dubbo conference

My name is Dudley Brown. I am a wine grape grower and winemaker in McLaren Vale, South Australia. Please ignore the accent, its Australian. I’m just a bit confused. In fact, I’m a lot confused. That is how I ended up speaking at Tedx. They actually invited me to share my confusion with you.

Before I became a farmer, I was in recruiting for start-ups in California. As my business education was in wealth creation and not wealth redistribution, I was poorly prepared to understand the politics of agriculture in Australia.

I moved to Australia in 2003 not long after I realized that my three biggest expenses in California were my mortgage, property taxes and wine. The idea was to raise my kids in a beautiful place and eliminate my biggest expenses by buying a vineyard and drinking my own wine. What could go wrong?

I considered three wine regions in California and five in Australia. I hired a viticultural expert and researched grape and wine quality, soils, climate and water before choosing McLaren Vale above all others.

My plan was to eke out a living selling grapes and building a very small high-end wine brand to support my family.

After arriving, I worked as a laborer in my vineyard for three years improving so-so vines into some of Australia’s best using principles we now call sustainable farming.

In 2005, the risk of water shortages resulting from the drought made me realize that I could be driven out of business and lose my life savings. Mains water then cost about $900 per megalitre. It’s now approaching $2500 per ML – high enough to have put me out of business.

The good news was that I had an alternative – a privately owned reclaimed water system was nearby. The bad news was that it would cost $100,000 just to connect to it.

Reclaimed irrigation water has two advantages for the world:

1) It decreases demand for drinking water

2) It reduces the amount of pollution that flows into the ocean.

I helped start a plan with other small farmers to ask our governments to match investments made by us to substitute our irrigation source. Our approach was market based – the government’s investment would be about the market price for permanent river water rights at the time. The pollution we prevented was a bonus.

We pitched state and federal politicians on the idea but our plan became a “policy issue” to be studied by the bureaucracy. In short, it went nowhere.

In the lead up to the 2007 election, Anthony Albanese’s advisor called me out of the blue one day to ask for a meeting with Anthony the next day. After the announcement that Labor supported our plan, a political bidding war broke out that resulted in $4 million in funding from the state and federal governments for our plan. That was when I learned something big.

Big idea #1 – Politics matter more than policies. Policies don’t change until politicians need to win an election.

Four years on, we have permanently substituted around 500 million litres of drinking water – enough for 2000 households - per year and we are only halfway done.

This little project initiated my un-holy descent into the politics of agriculture in Australia.

Hopefully, you’ll understand why I was slow to catch on to my Big Idea #2. It may come as a serious shock to some of you too.

Big Idea #2: Wine is not Food.

Australia does not need more wine. It does need more food.

These two Big Ideas inform my view of three policy areas that impact the wine and grape industry – water, tax and land use.

My confusion is local in nature but has national importance. As Tip O’Neill famously said, “All politics are local.”

The wine grape industry is in long-term oversupply. Approximately 1/3 of the wine grapes grown in Australia are not required by wineries for wine. Because most grapes are substitutable for grapes from other regions, the effect of this is to drive down grape prices in all regions.

As a guy with pretty strong free market beliefs, I know that low prices drive out inefficient and unprofitable producers. But confusingly, in Australian, they don’t. Why?

In discussing this problem with those in government, their stock response is: “we’re not in the business of picking winners.” This led me to big idea # 3:

Big Idea #3:

Government policies pick winners - whether they do something new or not and whether they mean to or not.

Current taxation of wine in Australia is done on the basis of the value of the wine, not on the amount of ethanol it contains.

The rest of the ethanol industry – beer, spirits, etc - is taxed on the amount of ethanol it contains. The effect of the current tax policy is to make low priced wine – particularly cask wine - the cheapest way to get drunk in Australia.

Ethanol is a dangerous and addictive. Those with the least money and biggest thirst for ethanol logically buy cask wine. Despite their logic, these folks need help, not cheap booze.

The outcome of current policy can be most visibly seen scattered across the outback in the form of empty casks, ruined lives and decimated communities – particularly Aboriginal ones. However, the costs are spread across the entire population in the form of healthcare costs, broken families, crime, drunk driving deaths and homelessness to the tune of many billions per year.

While the wine industry isn’t solely to blame for this, it insists on maintaining its tax-advantaged status as Australia’s low cost provider of ethanol. On the other hand, it asserts that wine is a hedonic product – that we buy and drink wine because we enjoy its flavor and alcoholic properties and that overwhelmingly, we do so responsibly. Fair enough. My confusion is this: if wine tastes better and is taxed the same as other forms of ethanol, why is the wine industry worried about competition?

The second aspect of the current tax is the 31% WET rebate. The intent of this policy is to refund taxes paid by small wine producers – who generally produce higher priced wines – to compensate them for the high expense of the value based rate of tax they pay. Yea, I know – it’s confusing!

As growers have found winery buyers of grapes vanishing, they are increasingly lending their grapes to middlemen who offer the grower the proceeds from making their grapes into bulk wine a few months later less the cost of production. What could go wrong?

But, crucially, the middleman then pockets the 31% WET rebate on the sale price. This money is earned with almost no capital invested and no risk while the people who have invested their lives in their vineyard just get even lower prices the next year because the wine glut grows.

The net of this is that the taxpayer is funding middlemen who have no capital at risk and grape growers with unviable businesses to make our very worst grapes into wine to be sold around the world with “Made in Australia” stamped on every bottle for as little as 50 cents per litre. Which winner has the government picked? Do they even know?

In the 2011 vintage, it is believed that about 900,000 tonnes of wine-worthy (this means disease free) grapes were harvestable for table wine this year. Despite this, Australia processed over 1.6 million tonnes of grapes. This means that as much as 45 million cases of truly awful wine was made and added to the oversupply.

The only “demand” for bad fruit in 2011 was from rent seeking middlemen who made common cause with desperate farmers to take taxpayers’ money legally. Unintended consequences are called unintended for a reason. They’re unintended! Is this outcome what taxpayers’ want?

In the grape growing industry today, inland regions use seven to ten times more irrigation water to grow one dollars worth of grapes than coastal regions like the Barossa or McLaren Vale. If you factor in reclaimed water usage, inland regions today use up to 25 times the amount of drinking water to grow one dollar’s worth of grapes as in McLaren Vale.

Twenty years ago, McLaren Vale produced similar yields of grapes with similar amounts of irrigation to many inland regions today. But, we realized we were destroying our aquifer in the process. To protect our long-term sustainability, we limited water extraction in the nation’s first managed basin. The effects were:

1) Prices for McLaren Vale grapes rose as quality rose

2) Growers suddenly owned water rights worth $15,000 per megalitre instead of nothing

3) Our aquifer is re-charging, even in drought years

4) Water restrictions wrecked our lower value almond growing industry

This step change in water management led me to:

Big Idea #4:

Regulatory changes can be a good thing as long as they are applied broadly and equally.

The saying on the River Murray is “if you’re downstream, you are dirty with everyone upstream.”

To understand inland water usage, up to 1000 litres of river water are required to produce one litre of wine that sells for less money than one litre of bottled water in the UK or the USA. Confused yet?

Here’s a silly idea - why don’t we cut out the winegrower and make some real money selling a thousand bottles of water?

The peak bodies of the wine industry have defined the industry in terms of cool climate coastal regions vs. warm climate inland regions. But, the consumer doesn’t care about the climate of the region of production – they value price and quality.

But, if we extend this industry definition to the analysis of serious data, what we discover is that the highest value coastal regions create 4.3 times as much economic value and 5.5 times as many jobs “per grape” as low value inland regions.

Now, I want you to think like a business owner for a minute - if you owned Australia, would you want to invest in those that create more value, jobs and trade from wine or less? Would you use your scarcest resources to grow food or un-needed wine?

As it stands, SA Water is entitled to extract 200 GL – that’s two billion litres - of water from the River Murray for free every year. Even in drought years, Adelaide didn’t need a lot more than this because of local catchments.

Now, SA Water is building a 200 GL desalination plant to “drought proof” Adelaide for $1.8 billion plus annual operating costs in the hundreds of millions, whether the plant is in use or not. On top of that, South Australia has had to build new gas fired generators to make up for the expensive “green energy” that the de-sal plant bought. Most folks up the river think these are responsible ideas.

Instead of a de-sal plant, the government could have invested the same amount by buying water licenses totaling 200GL from unprofitable grape farmers in the Murray Darling basin by paying them above market rates of $2500 per megalitre for their permanent water entitlements.

Under this approach, these farmers would have been able to retire in dignity with their mortgages paid off or been able to purchase annual water to grow food on their land.

The entire national grape surplus of 500,000 tonnes of annual production could have been wiped out and the wine industry restored to a profitable level of production.

Australia would not have lost one calorie of food production.

And Adelaide’s water needs would have been met in perpetuity.

Now, here’s the pointy bit – after buying these water rights and solving the wine industries problems, the government would have still had $1.3 billion left over. This is almost enough to build the new Royal Adelaide Hospital without Macquarie Bank’s assistance. But, governments would have had to pick a winner.

So, whether you care about the wine industry, CO2 emissions, inland communities, the water supply, the health of the river, banker’s profits, better health care or your tax dollars, these choices matter.

The truth is that there has always been plenty of water in the river – we’ve just let the government allocate it very poorly. As Ronald Reagan once said, “if we put the government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years we’d have a shortage of sand.”

Which leads me to:

Big idea #5 - let the government do what it does best – collect taxes – and let the market do what it does best – allocate resources.

For instance - what if we put a $50 per megalitre levy on all water extracted from the Murray Darling system and put the money into a trust fund? If this seems like a lot of money, remember in Adelaide we pay $2500 per megalitre for city water.

Then the government could hold auctions where water license owners voluntarily tendered their water entitlements to be bought by the fund until permanent environmental flows were guaranteed on the river.

The levy would immediately drive the most inefficient and unprofitable water users to sell entitlements for the most efficient price, while those who stay on the land would have a permanent guaranteed water supply as well as incentives to invest in efficiency and quality.

The caveat to this would be for flood based crops like rice and cotton - we could give them free water in flood years. And, because water would be in the river all the time, floods would be more frequent and more water available for annual purchase.

This approach offers pain and gain for everyone. Everyone would have an equal incentive to be more efficient while guaranteeing Australia’s long-term food supply and the health of the river.

The reactions to proposals for step changes to current policies are predictable: “we’ll bankrupt farmers and destroy communities” and “we don’t pick winners.”

The short answer is this - we’ll get these outcomes anyhow – just more slowly and less rationally and with worse outcomes for taxpayers, the rest of the agricultural industry and the environment.

In Australia, the best regions for agriculture are mostly near the coast because they have more rainfall. This is also where it is cheapest to dig mines or drill for gas because of access to transportation. Unfortunately, this is also where 90% of us live.

Our best land and food security is being sacrificed for housing estates and mining because:

1) The government is usually the owner of the land and needs the money to fund infrastructure for bigger cities and mines

2) The government earns stamp duties and royalties from these projects, which it uses to fund infrastructure for bigger cities and mines

Does anyone else see a pattern here?

In McLaren Vale, the Labor government just sold land for a 1000 house estate on some of the best cropping and viticultural land in the world despite furious local opposition. An adjoining property grows grapes that end up in wine that sells for $250 per litre – 500 times the price of the drek produced by our tax incentivized middlemen.

The new housing estate will be on land classified as “low value” because the government only share-farms grain on it. The fact is that if agricultural land isn’t in highly valued use, it gets sold for housing.

The only serious solution is to embrace denser, smarter cities where the best agricultural land is ring-fenced in perpetuity from urban sprawl.

DUDLEY BROWN (LEFT) AT LAST YEAR'S TRACTOR ACTION DEMONSTRATION OPPOSING THE SA LABOR GOVERNMENT'S PROPOSED SUBURBAN DEVELOPMENT ON PRICELESS AGRICULTURAL LAND AT SEAFORD HEIGHTS, McLAREN VALE. ALSO PRESENT (LEFT-TO-RIGHT) ARE LAURA JACKSON (WE OPPOSE SEAFORD HEIGHTS), GRAPEGROWER JOHN HARVEY, PHILIP WHITE, AND PETER DAWSON (CHAIRMAN, AUSTRALIAN WINE RESEARCH INSTITUTE) photo LEO DAVIS

Having lived in California, I’ve seen the best and worst models for protecting valuable land in Los Angeles and Napa Valley. We have a choice.

In McLaren Vale – agricultural land has risen 30 times in value in the last 40 years. We have prodded the current government to embrace a long-term protection strategy for our best land after a five-year campaign. It isn’t law yet bit it’s a Big Idea we stole from the Napa Valley where agricultural land has increased in value by 300 times in 40 years under a similar protection model.

The nexus of interests between treasury departments, developers, engineers, construction companies, miners, unions and “planning departments” may be too strong for this to change. Maybe.

This leads me to revise Big Idea #1: Politics matter. But, politics - and politicians - could matter a lot more if we make Big Ideas political ideas.

Tedx is a brilliant forum to air the Big Ideas governments find unthinkable - taxing alcohol rationally, building denser cities, ending the dream of endless sprawl, putting levies on irrigation water, spending the proceeds to future proof our food and water supplies, protecting people without means from cheap ethanol, picking real winners, whatever.

This will only work if you leave Tedx and start thinking the unthinkable, saying things your neighbors won’t agree with, calling your MP every week (ask mine, I call him at least three times a week), building new kinds of community groups, blogging, writing, talking, and generally upsetting people. This also means bypassing traditional industry and policy structures.

Politicians, not bureaucrats, need to know that they need to change their policies or that they will be changed out at the next election. Voting for the party you have always voted for ensures that you keep getting these same crappy results because of:

Big Idea #6:

Politicians take you for granted and your silence as permission.

The truth is that you own this country. You are the person who can turn Big Ideas into political ideas. Politicians and bureaucrats are your employees. Its your job to make it clear what you want and to keep Big Ideas in the air and on the table.

It’s no fun figuring out whom to upset every day but neither is running out of great land, clean water or healthy food.

Or, good wine. Now, that would be disaster. Thank you.

SAUVIGNON BLANC? GO KANGAROO ISLAND!

WHITEY RECKONS AUSTRALIA'S BEST SAVVY-B COMES FROM KANGAROO ISLAND. CLICK IMAGE TO VIEW CLIP OF HIS VIEWS OF TWO FAVOURITE EXAMPLES

ETHANOL DEALERS: NOTHIN' NEW ABOUT IT

Water, Environment, Greed
Old 99 Speech Still Scathing
Still The Same Old Same Old

The wine industry and urban and rural South Australia ... Speech to planning students at the University of Adelaide, Wednesday 13th October, 1999. A slightly shorter version of this address was delivered to the Australian Institute of Urban Studies, S.A. Division, at Chesser Cellars, Friday 26th March, 1999.
by PHILIP WHITE

YOU MAY be surprised to hear that I'm deeply interested in water. I pay particular attention to the Murray Valley. During the last vintage, I flew its length, boated upon it, and traversed and criss-crossed its valley by car.

Beginning at its mouth - which discharges nothing more than idiots on jet skis who swarm through to infuriate surf fishermen enjoying the isolation outside - I have travelled upstream, if stream is what you would call it.

Cancerous bowel is more like it.

The first point of interest, beyond Tom and Wendy's boat thing, is the vineyard district called Langhorne Creek, whose size was always limited by the reach of the flooding of the Bremer.
There was a good fresh aquifer there, but greed and ignorance saw it sucked until it turned too saline for use. So the local politician, the then Premier, Dean Brown, arranged new irrigation permits with the Murray Darling Commission, permitting new pipelines to irrigate the higher ground with water from Lake Alexandrina.

THE MURRAY MOUTH A DOZEN YEARS AGO ... ITS 3375 KILOMETRES ACTUALLY MANAGED TO FLOW INTO THE OCEAN FOR A WHILE, DRAINING ONE SEVENTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN LAND MASS

That saw the Creek explode in a rush of prospective viticulture that seems to dwarf the gold rush which helped set the whole neighbourhood on its feet last century.

In 1991, there were 471 hectares of immaculately tended vineyard at Langhorne Creek. This area had been restricted and limited by the amount of available water. But by mid 1997, with the Premier’s extra squirt, there were about 2,500 hectares, and the locals thought that might double, by 2002, to about 5,000 hectares.

But at the closing of vintage 1999, vignerons counted 4317 hectares, most of which has yet to bear a commercial crop.

That's tenfold in eight years, with no mention of stopping. Nobody in the Creek knows how much has been planted this year, but it’s huge. In one $30 million hit, Peter Pargeter, of Vinescape Management Services, planted 320 hectares for the Guild Pharmacists’ superannuation fund, on completely unproven land. Orlando's new vineyard alone involves 200,000 trellis posts, 1,000 kilometres of drip line, and 50,000 kilometres of wire.

Among the new speculators are some of the country's biggest wine names and some notorious abusers of water. Some vineyards are already weedy and unkempt, but because most of them are yet to produce a berry, nobody really knows whether the flavours of the bold new irrigated world will match the classic trophy-winning mudflat characteristics that led them to this district in the first place.

There is one advantage these new, slightly higher vineyards have over those on the traditional floodplain. Until the stagnant Lake itself is poisoned, they will escape, for a short time, the pollution that will come down the Brukunga Creek and the Bremer from the two leaking mine tailings dams there. The Kanmantoo dam holds millions of tonnes of arsenic, copper, detergent, reagents, lead and lord knows what. Under light rain, it leaked 300 gallons per minute when I worked there in 1972. Nobody works there now, so nobody sees.

THE EARLY SEVENTIES KANMANTOO PIT WAS CLOSED WHEN THE CIA KILLED CHILE'S PRESIDENT ALLENDE TO HAVE RE-OPENED THE WORLD'S BIGGEST COPPER MINE THERE IN THE ANDES ... TO FIGHT WARS, YOU NEED LOTS OF COPPER, AND WHEN ALLENDE CLOSED THE MINE TO HAVE BETTER SAFETY STANDARDS IMPOSED, COPPER PRICES ROSE BEYOND WHAT THE USA GOVERNMENT CHOSE TO PAYE ... THIS KANMANTOO PIT WAS VIABLE ONLY WHEN CHILE WAS CLOSED .. SLOWLY FILLING WITH SULPHURIC ACID, THE PIT'S ABOUT TO BE EXPANDED TENFOLD

Leave the cowboys of Langhorne and fly north to Wellington. The Lake's surprisingly healthy green may be broken here or there by some algal bloom, until the Murray oozes in like a twist of pus.

Last summer, its water was yellow.

Follow it to Morgan, where Southcorp recently sold 1,200 hectares of vineyard. This was mainly used for cheap bladder pack wines, but Southcorp finds it better business now to source that fruit in third world countries, where there are few restrictions on irrigation and few environmental controls. And the peasants are not so greedy about wages. Across the river, BRL-Hardy plans to stick around.

When it bought the over-grazed Banrock Station and took the sheep off to make way for irrigated vineyards, BRL-Hardy discovered the reeds and native vegetation along its significant river frontage regrew. This is now being championed internationally as an environmental triumph.

Early Banrock bladder packs were made with wild seeds impregnated in the cardboard, so they'd grow if you soaked them in water. Advertisements for the clean green Banrock hit even the pages of The National Geographic. And yet Banrock is still a high-yielding, scorched earth policy vineyard, with nothing organic about it. It's sobering if not outright depressing in its dull monoculture, and it's irrigated with water from a river that carries over two and a half tonnes of salt - per minute - past you as you stand there at the huge pumps.

Cross the vast reaches of dead salinated riverflats toward Renmark and the east, and outside the river channel, you'll see new vineyards crawling towards all horizons, across marginal, or seriously arid land. Mr. Goyder has long been forgotten.






















This growth mirrors the rest of Australia's viticulture. In 1995, prominent wine industrialists devised a thirty year plan for the growth of the wine industry. They called it Strategy 2025, and preached that gospel so loudly to politicians, speculators and tax dodgers that we now have thirty years worth of vineyard expansion suddenly undertaken and complete, with no planning nor overview, in just four years. Nobody really knows how much has been planted, but estimates of an increase of between 25% and 30% are not considered wild. I could think of more edifying ways of spending a billion dollars.

At Mildura, plantings are so profuse that there’s one unexpected result which reminds the community of its excess every day when the soil dries out enough for the automatic irrigation switching to turn all the new pumps on. In the old days, human nature saw pumps turned on and off all day, depending on what time the farmer crawled from bed. Now that it’s automatic and preset, and all happens at once, and you get an electricity discount if you install a bigger pump, Mildura’s lights go out when the pumps turn on. There’s not enough power in the grid to drive the pumps.

Twenty or thirty per cent of Australia's total vineyard has yet to produce a berry. South Australia leads the way, with 47.1% of the nation's new plantings for 97-98. More of this has occurred in the Upper Murray than in any other district. It's interesting that the most popular varieties planted, Cabernet sauvignon in the reds and that weed, Chardonnay, in the whites, both require good French oak for proper maturation. Just as an indicator of how utterly stupid this development has been, consider the oak forests of France. In 1991, for example - the most recent figure I can procure - France harvested enough oak to make about 250,000 barrels. If the 20,000 hectares of Australian plantings yet to produce a berry eventually produce 12.5 tonnes per hectare, which is modest, and all this was the great quality stuff they're promising, and it all got the "new French oak" treatment which the back labels promise, and Australia by miracle took possession of ALL of France's annual barrel make, then we'd be about 300,000 barrels short.

And we're talking only of the 20,000 hectares which have not yet produced a berry.

No effort was put into exploring premium grape varieties which provide flavours that don't require French oak. No effort was put into selecting varieties or clones which do better in marginal land, or which require less water to thrive.

This sort of blindness is best reflected in a recent remark of Dr. Richard Smart, Australia's pre-eminent viniculturer. Dick pointed out that the trendy world of microbiology, cloning and DNA manipulation now uses most of Australia's grape research dollar, while there are at least 10,000 grape varieties known on earth which have never been trialled in Australia.

But back to wood. Wine and wood have an even more perverse relationship. A year ago, Tim Frazer, the Murraylands Regional Investigator for the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, grew sick and tired of Riverlanders whingeing about how slow he was to process their applications for new native vegetation clearances for viniculture. So he went public in what he thought was the least sensational manner, and told his local Riverland ABC radio that his apparent sluggishness occurred because he was too busy pursuing illegal clearances, which it was his duty to prosecute. By the time I'd reported this in The Australian, just a few days later, Tim had been silenced. "He's not allowed to talk to the media", a telephonist politely explained.

Word was he'd been despatched to the Gammon Ranges, handed a Winchester, and told to shoot goats.

When a reader of my columns wrote to Premier Olsen and Minister Kotz for an opinion on such deviant mutterings of mine, relating to illegal clearances and published in The Advertiser, they said I used too much journalistic flair. The Premier announced that I was simply incorrect.

But back to the water. Cross the border to Wentworth, and you'll see where the pus has been coming from. To the east, the Murray's a murky brown. But at Wentworth, the jaundiced clay-filled Darling comes in from the cotton fields of Queensland. Some bright spark recently decided to give the Darling such a flush that thousands of red gums along its banks have collapsed into its stream. But this doesn't stop the viniculturers, who are spreading in desert land between Wilcannia and Bourke, all sucking the last few drops of that yellow muck through their huge pumps.

And on it goes.

The Barossa's Viniculturer of the Year 1998, Prue Henschke, called for a national ban on native vegetation clearance for new vineyard development. You can hear the moans: she's fortunate that the Henschke families did their clearing long before her marriage to Stephen, so she now has the run of such enviable heritage vineyards as the Hill of Grace.

The Barossa vignerons are peeved because the McLaren Vale district this year surpassed them for total plantings. Once again, this is determined by available water resources. So the Barossa has set up a private company of interested vignerons who are planning a new pipeline to suck in more of that salty water from the Murray, just to set the numbers right again. Old Barossa Lutherans cleared vineyard blocks as deftly as they cleared church and school land, because everything was done to the glory of God. It seems that the Australian wine industry has changed dieties since.

Henschke's comment followed that of Michael Himsworth, Chairman of the Riverland Wine Grape Council, and Deputy of the Wine Grape Section of the S.A. Farmers Federation. He made a bitter complaint about short-sightedness plaguing the biggest Murray Valley wineries, souring vintage 1998. "We've seen vineyard area nearly double in response to industry calls", he said, "yet the wineries certainly haven't doubled in processing capacity, so they're telling growers they should leave their grapes on the vines and wait."

He went on to say, and I quote: "The winemakers have become incredibly arrogant. They order more fruit than they can process properly, especially reds. They can't cope when vintage happens all at once, like it's happening all around Australia now."

The growers' critical moment is that short climax of ripening, when the grapes' sugar and acid levels, and their pH, are at the optimum. It's vital that they should be picked and processed at that point. Beyond it, acids fall, sugars rise, berries raisin, weight drops, and skins may split and moulds occur if it rains. The wines are jammy and dim, and require a great deal more chemical manipulation. A day or two of typical summer can make the difference between glittering trophies and pitiful bladder packs; between Jimmy Watson’s and Victoria Square.

"And these buggers are expecting some growers to wait not just a day or two, but two or three weeks after ripening", Himsworth said. "By that stage you can kiss it goodbye."

And that was 1998. 1999 was much, much worse. Next year makes people quiver.

These matters deserve immediate attention. The wine industry councils have no chance of addressing them while they refuse to admit that these dire problems are the direct result of their gung-ho management regime. Not to mention the little matter of over-production leading to certain grape price slumps, especially in a place like the Mallee, which the industry approaches like a mine for cheap legal sugar. You can hear the lips smacking.

These problems are occurring at different intensities right across eastern Australia. I think I have made my point. But governments regard the wine industry as vital and wise advisors in other industries, too. The same people responsible for this economic and environmental time bomb are now being regarded as tourism and cultural experts.

Let's talk for a moment about culture and tourism and the wine industry. Tourism, I presume, is travelling for pleasure. If that be so, the success of all tourism depends upon food and wine. As a person whose profession requires the constant pruning back of stories, I should stop there. My theorising is complete. But what leads me to continue is the sad fact that food and wine operatives are rarely expert at tourism. In fact, most of them are not even expert at food or wine.

I first visited the Barossa in 1959 and lived there for the latter half of the eighties. I soon discovered that a newcomer was anybody who did not arrive on the first ship, or their descendants. A stranger was somebody who’d lived there for twenty years or less. Everyone else is a tourist.

Except for black pudding, schwarzrtbrot and metwurst, the Barossa ate bland white food: cauliflower, white sauce, cabbage (fermented to sauerkraut in wooden troughs by aproned ladies in the local factory), pickles, pork, fritz, chicken, potato, grain - and its white products - onion and a little garlic. Since the advent of wine tourism, the sauerkraut factory shut down, along with most of the wurst houses. The health authorities advised Fechner’s Apex bakery, which still uses a woodfire oven, that its wholemeal bread didn’t meet the government fibre regulations, and suggested the addition of some chicken feathers if the local stoneground flour couldn’t come up to to the grade.






















I knew it was over when I received a complaint about my review recommending that a certain local spatlese riesling - the traditional German style - would go very well with saeurkraut and smoked wursts. A local Schlinke or Schluter said I was being patronising.

Many Barossans cried foul when I argued for the retention of their ancient settler’s cottages against the wave of triple-fronted cream brick veneers in which they all quite sensibly sought to live. So up went all those perfectly clean and tidy new houses, leaving the perves called Cultural tourists with no old walls to peer over. The Barossa now has the worst Chinese restaurant in the world, and the second worst pizza restaurant. It has no licensed premises specialising in Barossadeutscher cuisine. Its best indicator of some level of handling of the tourist boom is the fact that Penfold’s, the biggest winery in Australia, has done away with the four bays in its cellar sales area. These were designed to hold one busload of sweet sherry drinkers each. I think that was called experiential tourism.

Across the Valley, the tiny cutesy pie, custom-built heritage cellar of Rockford erected a sign to announce that buses and limousines were not at all welcome. The Barossa has become famous for Shiraz, Grenache and Semillon; three varieties it swore would never sell again, a dogma that led to government paying growers to uproot these, farm by farm, with the encouragement of the wine industry, just a dozen years ago.

This was an attempt to reduce the number of peasant-scale growers each company dealt with, and contain the threat of increasing prices.

In those days, Penfold’s paid about $186 per tonne (minimal grape pricing) for Grange Hermitage quality grapes; the same price it was paying for Sultana in the Murray Valley. The 83 Grange was soon selling at $180 per bottle. That Vine Pull was a very immediate threat to the very lure of the Valley. The crisis of confidence which that uprooting installed has ensured that, a few acres of Viognier aside no other grape varieties have been tried in the valley ever since. And the Barossa Resident’s association which was formed to fight the vine uprooting scheme on planning grounds, and land useage, and amenity, now fights to limit vineyard expansion by opposing the removal of any trees. So we have the ugly situation now where vineyard expansion is being limited by the residents, led by a few self-interested prominent vignerons who seem to believe they don’t need the new competition. These folks hold demonstrations with their kiddies to stop the bad man chopping a tree down, while the local golf course, at which many successful winemakers play, hired a well-known Adelaide kick-boxing champ to remove mature trees at the rate of about one per day for a month, and nobody complained. Not one squeak. Except for the day when the heavy rang me at 8am on a Saturday and demanded to know whether it was correct that I was planning to write a story about what was going on. So what would the experiential tourist here? Demonstrate, chop, or wallop?

Jump to the Hunter in 1982 - when I arrived for the first of many intensive inspections, the tourism boom was beginning, and the better cellars were already complaining that the tourists were driving serious wine buyers away. I use the Hungerford Hill winery complex as my example - it was winner of many tourism awards, but the reality was:

1 Cheap wines at the front. These entertained the flood of tourists which washed in from the seashore whenever the weather there turned bad. They were not Hunter Valley wines, and they were usually sweet.

2 Commercial wines in the inner sanctum. To get in here, you had to be a member who’d learned a few skerricks of knowledge about the stuff out the front and passed some sort of test or spent a certain amount of money.

3 Good wines out the back. In this very special sanctum you could get to taste the local wines this company sold in its normal marketplaces, with a fussy interferist coach. Anybody who was used to drinking these wines quickly learned that if they visited the winery, they’d be trapped in this room with a mob of pretenders and a coach that would put them off drinking that brand ever again. They felt that if the people in that room were indicative of the types who regularly drank that brand, then it was an urgent matter of INCLUDE ME OUT.

This sort of behaviour pattern soon led to Murray Robson erecting a sign at his winery gate which said:

No sweet wines
No drink-now wines
No fortified wines
No cheap wines
No single-bottle sales
No buses
Visitors welcome

I think government planning and tax regimes should be restructured very quickly, dividing wineries into two categories. Historical, boutique, and tourist wineries should be one thing. Enormous wine refineries, like the 75,000 tonnes per annum monster which the Premier’s special projects unit has just approved for Mildara Blass, against all local argument, north of Nuriootpa, should instead be built in hidden industrial parks. As a local, I watched that Bilyara site sink beneath a metre of floodwater on numerous occasions.

This is serendipitous, when you consider that one tonne of grapes requires about 1.5 tonnes of washing water for manufacture. I am not including the irrigation water it takes to grow a tonne of grapes - just the water needed for washing and rinsing during vinification.

BRL-Hardy is now locked in a new environmental struggle - in the Barossa - which offers it a golden opportunity to show the true hue of its Banrock Station greenness. It wants a new 9,000 tonnes capacity winery at Marananga. The winery would be directly opposite the heritage-listed Seppelt family’s mausoleum, on a road hedged by the magnificent heritage-listed Seppelt’s palms. It would occupy a currently empty field in the heart of the Greenock Creek/Seppeltsfield vignoble, which is right now earning unprecedented international admiration for the astonishing quality of its Shiraz and Grenache.

The winery would be directly opposite the Marananga Lutheran Church, which is the most famous and most photographed of all the Valley’s churches, and which features constantly in government promotional material.

Unfortunately for Hardy’s, many of the neighbours work in the wine industry, and, being good Barossans, with a work ethic unmatched, declare with open throats that they are most certainly NOT anti-development. They include the likes of John Vickery, the great riesling maker of Leo Buring and now Richmond Grove; and many local winemakers, including Richard Lindner, Malcolm Seppelt, Michael and Annabelle Waugh, Brian Falkenberg, and David Powell.

These folks are quick to list concerns about the Hardy plan. They want it moved to an industrial zone. They say the proposed 20 acre woodlot is unlikely to healthily sop the 15 to 20,000 tonnes of waste water that such a factory will exude each year, as the local moisture-retentive soil types will not handle such a system.

And of course the joint will grow, once it’s approved and up.

Residents don’t want the stink of vintage, nor the extra demands on their water and power. They already complain that their water mains manage only a dribble at the height of summer, and when the Seppelt refrigeration plant kicks in their lights already go dim. They say the poor tourism roads are nowhere near adequate for the industrial traffic such an instalment will require - it has no bottling line - and that their council will have to pay for constant rebuilds. These neighbours don’t want the huge floodlights such a factory involves, nor the constant roar of cooling plants and trucks which will echo down the natural ampitheatre below the site, where the heritage listed cottages of the Vickerys, the Falkenbergs and the Craigs have slumbered since the beginning of the colony.

Consider these proposed buildings. One will be 135 metres long. They’ll be 17 metres high. Not only will they obstruct a famously uninterrupted rural vista, but they will be made from that famously heritage Barossa shedding, colourbond.

It’s easy to understand how our big wineries have gathered the confidence to mount such audacious projects, right in the face of the very communities upon which they depend. The Olsen government froths at the bit to bash things through for industry, and the $40 million four-story office block taxpayers are shouting the wine business in our own beloved Botanic Gardens is just one indicator of their lofty presumptions. That building, coincidentally, will be about the same size as the colourbond job at Marananga. But if it’s cool in the sacrosanctity of the Botanic Garden, it’s a breeze in the Barossa countryside, eh?

ENTRANCE TO THE NATIONAL WINE CENTRE, BOTANIC GARDENS, ADELAIDE ... THIS ALARMING UNFINISHED LOOK IS SUPPOSED TO REFLECT THE ATMOSPHERE OF TRADITIONAL WINERIES, BUT IS PERHAPS A BETTER REFLECTION ON THE NATURE OF THE WINE BUSINESS AS WHOLE

Ironically, these Barossadeutschers are the same people who practised what was probably the world's most organic dryland viticulture methods for the 130 years preceding the invention of the broadacre vine trellis. The trellis, by the way, was made essential by the invention of the grape-picking machine. The invention of the grape-picking machine was made essential by the introduction of equal pay for women, thankyou Gough Whitlam. The trellis made possible the age of minimal pruning, which brought about the age of moulds and fungicides and sprays of every nasty description.

So the Hunter has become a sort of WINEWORLD, where everything is expensive and pretentious, nothing is real, and you never see a real local human out and about. The Barossa seems confused about whether it should be GERMANWORLD or WINEWORLD, but it'll be interesting to follow nevertheless.

And now these great brains, these planning gurus, have brought their vast sensitivity and expertise to our Botanic Gardens, where we shall pay to install them in a wine industry headquarters designed by the man responsible for the architecture of the Rundle Mall.

I've had some experience in government sponsored wine centres. I was invited to assist in the planning and content of the interpretive display there in the Fleurieu Visitors Centre. Here we saw government unite with local wine identities to spend $1.3 million on a tasting room which also houses a display. When the building, which brings to mind a southern Californian petrol station, was called finished, which it wasn’t, the budget not stretching to accommodate much of the original plan, there was $70,000 left in the kick for the experiential displays, photography, videos, web-page and all the informative display texts within. I’d still like full payment for the texts, but they never seem to find any money left at the bar, which I notice is sponsored by a brewery.

I'm also stupidly responsible for the National Wine Centre. Back when Valmai Hankel, the librarian who keeps the rare and precious books and the wine collection, was trying to find a use for what had formerly been the State Library reading room on the corner of Kintore Avenue, we worked together on an idea for a wine centre for visitors to Adelaide who didn't have the time to visit any of our wine regions.

If it didn't work in the Library, I thought, the then derelict Botanic Hotel would do the job. I called Brian Croser (left) about using the Botanic, and he suggested nobody would pay for the development.

Eventually, in a futile attempt at cynicism, I suggested that Tram Barn A might do. The idea proposed a tasting room where your could see a flight, say, of rieslings, choose which you liked best, see a video of its source, and the B&Bs you could use there if you had the chance, order the wine for delivery from the maker to your door in New York or Paris or wherever, and begin planning a more leisurely return trip.

Dean Brown took the Liberals to election on his promise of demolishing Tram Barn A and that awful retentive Victorian pile beside it, in spite of Philippa Menses' unpopular National Trust plans to have them retained. But once elected, the new Premier blanched, uncertain of the real public attitude. You could hear the minders ponder: "What's popular? What can we use it for? Wine! Bewdy! Didn't somebody suggest a Wine Museum? Whitey! He'll back us! Let's go!"

And off they went. So what started as a simple, profit-making service for visitors quickly became a State-funded wine museum, which quickly reverted to an office block for bureaucrats and mandarins, partly because nobody thought the word museum was much good in this modern age.

On the committee I joined at Premier Brown's invitation, the first wine centre committee, the word museum was abandoned because nobody really knew what it meant. None of those great brains had heard of Zeus, or Jupiter, the boss of the heavens, nor of his wife, the Goddess Mnemosyne, or Memory. They didn't realise the daughters of this couple, the cover girls of their day, were the official inspirers of all poetry and art. Cleo was the trigger of history, Thalia of comedy. Euterpe was the source of all music; Urania of astronomy, and so on. They were called the Muses, just like my much uglier lot's called the Whites. The Muses lived in the Museum. No good, no good. It'll have to be the National Wine Centre.

It'll have to be in the Botanic Park because:

1 The Gardens already attract 1.3 million visitors a year - more than any other government-owned property;

2 The East End is already a famous tourism and gastronomic precinct (The Universal Wine Bar's there), and

3 It's a nice place to have your offices.

They overlook the fact that the East End is rapidly becoming a violent drug-crazed mirror of the old Hindley Street, where a good deal of the working community are the enthusiastic users of a constant wave of powder drugs; and they don't realise that the very reason that 1.3 million people visit the Botanic Gardens each year is that there are no industrial headquarters, office blocks, car parks, conference centres, or monorails in sight.

Don't laugh - a monorail was seriously suggested, to siphon customers from Rundle Street across the Botanic Garden, which is a dry zone, to the Wine Centre. This was seen as a possible solution to the car parking problem in the Garden. Nobody listened to the traders' complaint about the loss of business in Rundle Street, because there's no real parking there, either. Anyway, show me a monorail and I'll show you a Premier who's just lost power.

The initial concept for a straightforward, self-funding facility for wine enthusiasts was sufficiently attractive to lure a horde of self-interested political amateurs and industry mandarins, whose clumsy and transparent manoeuvres in pursuit of taxpayers' funds and sacred inner city parkland, abuse not just the clarity of the first proposal, but snigger in the face of the uncommonly tasteful and discerning community of Adelaide.

After five years of squandered expense and volunteered energy, this centre is further from its origins than credibility extends. The citizens of Adelaide now face the construction of an industrial headquarters in their extremely popular Botanic Garden. This $40 million-plus tax-payer-funded Xanadu will have little purpose beyond housing the bureaucrats who will be responsible for the next taxpayer-funded Vine-pull Scheme. There has been no consultation with the neighbours, none with the community at large, nor anything vaguely resembling consultation with the wine industry proper. The old buildings wisely rejected by the wine industry will now house the unfairly misplaced botanic scientists whose perfectly suitable, unobtrusive buildings and laboratories will be demolished to make way for the imposing new wine industry headquarters.

THE NATIONAL WINE CENTRE: AN UNFINISHED SUBURBAN GRANDSTAND WITH ITS BACK TO THE PEOPLE AND NO ARENA ... NOW A POPULAR PLACE FOR WEDDINGS, IT IS LEASED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE FOR $1 A YEAR

Those who intend moving into this facility, like Wine and Brandy Corporation Manager, Sam Tolley, refer to it as their "new offices". Winemakers Federation of Australia Chairman, Brian Croser, admits privately that the centre, as imagined by him, does not "necessarily have to be in the Botanic Garden". Margaret Lehmann went on the record on ABC radio earlier this year saying that she was not convinced that the Botanic Gardens site was appropriate. A fortnight later she was the Marketing Director of the same damned thing.

[IMPORTANT: Margaret has since maintained this is not true. I made my initial comment after hearing her sound like she was defending the project in local ABC radio 891. PW: 1 Sep 11]

And driving force Ian Sutton, Chief Executive of the WFA, Wine Australia Pty. Ltd., Australian Wine Foundation and the Australian Wine and Brandy Producers' Association, says "My job's not to consult the wine industry -- my job is to represent the wine industry".

Now that Glenthorne Farm, a perfectly suitable alternative site for a self-funding centre has been found and purchased on the old CSIRO research site at the top of Flagstaff Hill, those who would raid the public purse, not to mention the Botanic Garden, have become more secretive and even more determined in their nefarious pursuit.

I have a sick dream. It's punishment for having the idea of the wine centre in the first place. In it, Brian Croser, Ian Sutton, Ann Ruston, Margaret Lehmann and Sam Tolley all go to Alice Springs, where they build their glittering shangri-la in the bed of the Todd River. For there, indeed, lies a perfect example of the target market of all those cheap plonks made in our devastated Mallee, or imported from Argentina, Moldova, Italy, Spain and Chile.

What began with the gun is being finished by complacency, and the great Australian Wine Industry profits every inch of the way.