STEINGARTEN: SAVED; THEN DILUTED

Who's this dude in the Louisiana State prison garb, and what's he doing flapping paper around on the Barossa Ranges?  It's me, offering a white balance (!) for cinematographer Gus Howard while we made the first serious promotional movie to advise the Brits about Australian wine, 1984-ish ... the client was the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation, now called Wine Australia ... that thin green line right behind my head is the once famous Orlando Steingarten Vineyard ... a few years later, I took Victorian winemakers Ron Laughton (Jasper Hill) and Graeme Leith (Passing Clouds) to show them this remarkable and crazy vineyard, planted by Colin Gramp in 1962. Determined to achieve a more Germanic style of Riesling, he'd used gelignite to blow holes in the stone so he could plant this tiny vinegarden which he literally named Garden of Stone. It was revolutionary for Australia.  Its wines were indeed exquisite, varying from year-to-year from flinty, Ernie Loosen Pfalz-like styles to slightly sweet versions more like Mosel spaetlese. But as we arrived through the back gate, from over that range, we discovered a crew of workers in there with a hydraulic pruner, cutting the vines off flush at the ground. Half the vineyard was gone: pathetic little trunks weeping sap into the stone which had somehow nurtured them for 25 years. The workers told us they realised they were wreaking a terrible blow to the heritage of the Barossa, but were under orders to remove the entire vineyard.  To their disbelief, I suggested they should cease the destruction while I drove down to the Orlando head office at Rowland Flat to have a bit of a word with MD Gunther Prass. Which I did, thrashing that ol hemi V8 Valiant police car down the hill like Jehu, my guests cowering and whimpering in the back. I burst into the boss's office in a most unseemly haste; Gunther squirmed, shuffled some papers, showed what I think was genuine shock, and immediately ordered the operation to cease. Since Pernod-Ricard bought Orlando-Wyndham, these imperious Frenchmen have completely buggered the Steingarten brand by using it on an amorphous blend of Riesling from other, more industrial grapeyards, and rebadging it Jacob's Creek Steingarten. Now they wonder why they've lost their market distinction!  If they looked after this tiny vineyard properly, and put a stone wall around it to keep the wind out, like the French would do in their own country, they could be selling this Riesling  for $500 a bottle. I'd love to see that movie again, by the way.  Anybody got a print?  

BLEAT ABOUT BRITISH WINE IMPERIALISM

The British Still Don't Get It:

The Empire Thing Didn't Work

So Why Do Ockers Grovel So?

by PHILIP WHITE

Somebody should tell the wine hacks and merchants of Great Britain that the Empire thing didn’t work out.

I’m sick of ’em.  They pomp on and off our shores as if Port Arthur is only temporarily mothballed. 

Take Jamie Goode. 

Who’s Jamie Goode? Wikipedia says he’s “a British author with a PhD in plant biology, and a wine columnist of The Sunday Express ... Goode also contributes to wine publications such as Harpers, The World of Fine Wine, Decanter, GrapesTALK and Sommelier Journal.” 

And on it goes: “Goode published the book Wine science: the application of science in winemaking in 2005, to wide acclaim and winning the Glenfiddich Drink Book of the Year award, and Wine Bottle Closures in 2006. His website The Wine Anorak and the related blog launched in 2001, are among the internet's most highly regarded wine sites, containing in-depth articles on subjects such as wine chemistry issues.”

Why are we not surprised that a fellow with credentials like that should utter triumphant codswallop like this:

“So there are now 1400 hectares of vines in the UK. That makes it around one-tenth the size of Australia's vineyard area!”

The exclamation mark, which is his, says it all, really.  This was Twitter last week.

“Australian Bureau of Statistics says 156,632 ha are under vine here JimLad,” I explained. “You'll need another imperial zero on your pom plot.”

“You are indeed correct,” he deigned to respond. “One-hundreth the size, not one-tenth.”

After a bit of a think, he came back in with something approaching contrition: “Hmmm, bad maths, make that 1/100th the size of Australia's vineyard area! (Blushes) you are indeed correct, one-hundreth the size, not one-tenth.”

A peanut as innumerate and slydexic as this writer is not your ideal statistician, but the mushy old brain still works sufficiently to justly beg how, in the names of Bacchus and Pan, how a fellow of Goode’s influence and experience could imagine for a second that Australia’s vineyard totals only 14,000 ha.

It’s a mindset more than a mistake.

Repeating that I’m no statistician, it seems to me that if Australia sells roughly 250 million litres of wine to the parsimonious British each year, from 14,000 ha, we’d be picking something like 17 tonnes per hectare.  While that sounds reasonably profitable, one can’t help wondering where Goode imagines we get the wine we drink, let alone the extra skrillion litres we export to other little-known countries like the USA, Canada and China.

More sickening is the way my fellow countrymen grovel to these imperious tykes.

Never does a Royal Australian Wine Show (that’s what they’re actually called, Royal!)  never does one dribble to halt without the guest Pom taking the lecturn to officially advise us what we should be doing; how we should be making our wine; how we must keep those prices down and whatnot.

Now we have another about to tour:

“Leading wine commentator Andrew Jefford will travel to Australia’s major capital cities later this month to present at this year’s Wine Communicators of Australia annual lecture,” trumps today’s Daily Wine News.

Church of England Bishop chatting up a few Adelaide shielas in 1923 photo from the State Library of South Australia ... thanks Premier Weatherill for the tip!

 Dangerously presuming numeracy, again, I estimate that Jefford’s won eight times as many Glenfiddich Awards as Goode.  “He is also very familiar with Australia,” DWN continues, “having spent 2009 as a senior research fellow at the University of Adelaide and Wine Writer in Residence to the Wine 2030 Research Network.

“His address, titled Wine and Astonishment, will also cover the role of alcohol in wine as well as wine from a science and poetry viewpoint ...

“When I was last in Australia,” Jefford is quoted, “I lectured quite a lot on questions of terroir, so I thought it might be interesting and useful to tackle wine from another perspective on this occasion … That perspective is, broadly speaking, philosophical – but the aim is a practical one; namely, to refresh some of our thinking about wine, and to try to make wine new for us all again or at least help us all to look at wine in a new and unusual way.”

“Jefford joins a long list of previous esteemed Wine Communicators Australia guests to Australia, including Robert Joseph and Jancis Robinson MW,” the story gloats.

Aunty Jancis probably enjoys coming to Australia more now that the pugnacious Len Evans is not around to bully her to tears, but he was another Brit.  It seems like only weeks back that she came all the way to Tasmania to make a bit of a speech about what they should be doing down there, but I have yet to see any great difference she has made to Australian winemaking, other than to offer reasonable encouragement.  At least Bobby-Jo consults to McGuigan.  I can’t wait to taste the results of that affair.

Jefford’s a really good writer, of poetry as much as boozelit, and I can’t wait to read his book about the terroir of Australia, which one presumes he mastered during his year here.  You might read an eager anticipation and discussion of these matters in Australian terroir – a gift from Blighty. 

This parade of Poms began its modern fervour in the late ’eighties, when Senator Amanda Vanstone brought Auberon Waugh here.  This was not for him to tell us what to do.  He wouldn’t.  He was far too polite to presume, but that was another age.  We expected to tell him what to do, as in go home and promote our good wine to his readers in The Spectator Wine Club.

Which he did, of course, but only after marveling, in his first classically sarcastic piece, at the idyllic lives of our aboriginal people, lolling about the beautiful public parks of Adelaide as they enjoyed endless blind tastings of our incredibly low-priced and aged fortified wines.

Original Australians picking up some British habits in George Street Sydney ca 1830

Bron’s efforts certainly triggered a renewed wave of British interest in our wine, but his biggest achievement seemed to be putting an end to the epidemic of Repetitive Strain Disorder we then mysteriously suffered.  People were wearing plasters and various ornate devices on their arms and hands to correct the agony they incurred performing ordurous tasks like typing or playing tennis.  The disbelieving Bron called this Kangaroo Paw, and his incredulous writing on it seemed to trigger a such wave of embarrassing disbelief internationally that we now rarely see anybody with the ailment.

But back to wine.  One of the most sickening grovels occurred  when some of the winemakers of Clare put their Rieslings under screw caps for the first time in 2000, and gave the credit to Charles Metcalfe or somebody from England.  As a writer who respected and jealously protected his readers from the obnoxious rip-off of cork for some twenty years before that, tirelessly promoting the sanitary screw over the spongiform hive of Iberian germs that was cork, I was fascinated, but hardly surprised, to discover that they’d grovel to England before they listened to the local hack.

So there’s some shit off my bursting liver. Just don’t get me started on the Pommie merchants, the buyers, who expect ever-descending prices married to permanently-increasing quality, not to mention the red carpet.

If we DID give Port Arthur a bit of a scrub, and locked a few more thieving Brits in there, this writer doubts that once they’d done their time, they’d be of the quality required to build a nation like Australia.

But I suppose if we bought Aunty Jancis a riding crop, some jodhpurs and a bullwhip, she’d be the ideal Nurse Ratchid, keeping the cuckoo’s nest in order, while dear Jefford taught them about the stone in the walls and read his lovely poetry to them at night.

Details of Andrew Jefford’s lecture schedule are available on the Wine Communicators website ... and check out his   Decanter piece on corrupt winewriters ... for a recent example of why the influence of alcohol on original Australians is no joke, click here ... and just to show that the British Left can be as imperialistic as the Right? Check this.

MARSHALL AMP FRIDGE - I WANT ONE!

... but Budweiser? Uh-huh ... when I was a kid I used to drink a can of Bud in the shower on real hot days, but I've never found another use for it ... I'll have mine stacked with Goodiesons McLaren Vale Pale Ale, please Mr Stage Manager ...  you'll find their cute little brewery on Sand Road, just east of Paxton's gate ... and wind her up to eleven!

PIE DIAGRAM: GAY MARRIAGE RESULTS

I thank Stephen Fry for this perfect piece of graphic art (above) and Dudley Brown for offering the informative work below: 
 

NEW SCREW CAP FOR CHAMPAGNE & FIZZ

Viiva La Revolution At De Borts!

Twisty Aussies Screw Old World

A Safe Sanitary Sensible Fizz Cap

by PHILIP WHITE 

Sparkling wine corks kill about two dozen humans each year.  Bacchus only knows how many pops it takes to hit that score, but the part of France they call Champagne alone produces over 400 million bottles annually.

The idea of a totally unnecessary ethanol drink coming in an explosive container is freaky however you look at it; one which will remove your eye if you look at it head on while you’re trying to get the contents out is even more ludicrous.  I can’t find a figure for the number of eyes lost to the fizz, but big city emergency wards always report an increase in bust orbs on the occasion of Jesus’ birthday, and other times of ritualised paganism.

I knew two rather colourful one-eyed winos who lost peepers to the celebratory pop.  The great Kit Stevens MW - whose desperately moist career selling Deutz Champagne ended only when he fell drunk down the stairs in Church Gate House Sussex and died of a broken neck - had by that sad stage already lost half his vision to a bottle of sparkling orange pop, of all things.  In Hong Kong, of all places.  Betwixt the pop and the drop, Kit sported a rather fetching eye patch occasionally featuring an advertisement for Deutz.  The other veritable Cyclops, last spotted in a Chilean phone box trying to buy Allende’s telephone network for that Ocker crook Alan Bond, was the mighty Mark Babidge of Wynn Winegrowers.  This is off the track, but I once asked David Wynn what he thought his biggest mistake had been.  The brilliant Wynn shot back "Sending Babidge to business school."

Imagine if fizz had not yet been invented, and you were launching it now, like 2012.  In a brittle glass container with about the same pressure inside as the tyres on your car.  You put a plug in the end with a steel cap on it, like an armour-piercing bullet.  Then you wire it down. 

It would be outlawed immediately. 

And if you attempted to sell, as a sort of celebratory joke, the explosion commonly involved in liberating the drink from its container, or promoted a ridiculous gay ritual like you see at the end of one of those car races?

Your product would be regarded as an improvised explosive device disguised as lemonade but laced with ethanol: awkward, clumsy, inefficient, but certainly fitting the anti-personnel category, and subject to the restrictions of the Ottawa Treaty, otherwise known as the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines.

De Bortoli Wines yesterday released something that looks like sorting all this, once and for all: a new screw cap for fizzy drinks in a custom-designed lightweight bottle.  This first model bottle can handle four of five atmospheres of pressure; the cap has been tested to ten atmospheres.  The developers are already working on a heavier bottle. 

It looks like any screw cap, any ordinary wine bottle.  But as you twist it, there’s a cross between a snappy crack and a pop, accompanied by a satisfying hiss as the wine exhales.  This occurs almost immediately on applying your twist.  Because the cap is merely loosened, it cannot fly free, as the threads of the bottle neck retain it until you wind it another 450 degrees, by which time the gas has escaped, and the whole business is pretty much inert.  Disarmed.  Defused.

Inside the top of the cap there’s a glossy plastic disc, thicker than the one in your ordinary screw cap.  If you’ve left your resealed bottle in the fridge, and go back for another glass, that disc is soft enough to allow a turn of a few degrees before the compressed CO₂ fully exhales.  It’s all very satisfactory.

And safe. 

Not to mention the lack of rotten cork.

The Spaniards and Portuguese will have another excuse to leave the filthy bark on their poor old cork oaks while the fizzmakers of France suddenly look like ordnance manufacturers whose extremely expensive product comes pre-spoiled by the germ warfare saboteurs of Portugal and Spain.

And who knows? Stalwart traditionalists who prefer their fizz spoiled by trichloranisole or ordinary cork flavours could be sold this same closure, but fitted with a cork wafer in place of the food grade plastic.  

So they butcher their sensories while the package saves their eyes.

Champagne does itself no favours in packaging.  In this age of occ health and safety, green awareness and carbon footprint and whatnot, I notice that rather than develop a similarly safe and sanitary closure, Piper-Heidsieck is currently flogging bottles coated with rubber moulded to look like red crocodile skin. More bling shit.

Screw Portugal and Spain.  And screw Champagne, too, unless they slim up and get with the twist. 

  

De Bortoli Wines developed the Viva^TM  screw-capped sparkling wine bottle with Guala Closures Australia and the glass manufacturer, Owens-Illinois.  The wines are coming onto the market as I write. This initial release is obviously for lower-priced fizz.  I'm sure more ornate and luxurious versions will follow.

ADELAIDE ADVANCES - MOVIE FROM 1954

Henley Beach, Adelaide, in the early 1950s ... click here to view a 1954 documentary featuring Sir Hans Heysen, the Oakbank Easter Racing Carnival, the Holden motor body works, the ships we were expert at building, the Waite Research Institute, and the burgeoning Penfolds winery at Magill, where the brilliant Max Schubert was nose to the winestone, hard at work on the fourth vintage of his beloved, but increasingly ridiculed, Grange.  Eighteen months later, he would open the fateful letter from Penfolds' Ice Queen managing director, Miss Grace Longhurst, advising him that he was to cease its production forthwith. Praise Bacchus that the Barossa blacksmith's son had the pluck to disobey her!

TUK TUK VENDO - IDEAL PICNIC TRUCK

Tuk Tuk Factory, a Dutch outfit, is offering this electric catering vehicle for about 24,000 euro.  It has a 60 km range and can be fitted with a solar panel roof to top the charge and keep the fridge cold.  Delivery is about three months after order, which means DRINKSTER's pinstriped version should be here in time for spring, giving us time to select the most appropriate driver and design the uniform ... something steely long and Nordic in jodhpurs with a crop, methinks ...  just as long as she gets away well ahead of the other three-wheeler, which is electric in a completely different way ... get on here and have fun designing your own ... Krug with the crepes and caviar, please dear sweet Gunnhild.