PRO-PHYLLOXERA LOBBY WILL FALL APART

Master viticulturer Ian Hollick with the precious Terra rosa and limestone/calcrete profile of Coonawarra ... the dreaded Phylloxera doesn't like sand much, but it would revel in this plum layer cake if it were to cross the Victorian border. Like most of Coonawarra, the Hollick vineyards are not on rootstock, and so are highly vulnerable while giving better flavour. The Hollick winemaker, Matt Caldersmith, is "aghast" at the Phylloxera Board's mismanagement and diluting of the rigid regulations which have kept South Australia free of Phylloxera for a century.  Well, so far, anyway. Touch wood.

Vine Pox Invasion Hits Crossfire

Sweaty Board Rethinks Monday

Buggers Nearly Got Away With It  
by PHILIP WHITE

This last week, DRINKSTER's been up to its gullet trying to digest the terrible mess which industry and government have together made of South Australia's previously brilliant Phylloxera laws, and the Board which properly and successfully policed them for a century.  It's now quite obvious that various vested interests are quietly softening the  regulations to suit their desperate new parsimony.  As Dudley Brown remarked on an earlier blog, it's as if the Phylloxera louse has hired its own lobbyist! But good sense must prevail here: we're not only gonna win this, but now we expect resignations.  

Here's a transcription of a discussion which went to air on Adelaide's local ABC891 with announcer Ian Henschke, followed by some further explanations and disgust. It's real long, but it has to be. Chew it up, and get ready to storm the ramparts if they don't reverse the decision. We can win this. Sharpen up the axes.


IAN HENSCHKE:  One of the things you wouldn’t want to discover in South Australia is Phylloxera, because it hasn’t been here. If you don’t know what it is, it’s a disease of grape vines, and er well, it could cause hundreds of millions of dollars of damage according to Philip White the wine writer.  Philip White, why are we worried about it now, seeing that we’ve been free of it for the best part of a century or more?

PHILIP WHITE: Well, we’ve had a really effective sort of self-policing body called the Phylloxera Board, to which all [South Australia] grape-growers have contributed a levy on their tonnes for a hundred years.  And Phylloxera is in Victoria and New South Wales in various places.  Since the wine industry boom of the last fifteen years it started to move in Victoria and it’s sprung up in many – I think there’s been six, seven maybe, outbreaks in different parts of Victoria in the last ten years (1).

Now what’s happened on top of that in the very complex and intricate network of committees and acronyms and stuff which the wine industry seems to thrive on, there’s been a move to actually alleviate or, or decrease some of the very rigid restrictions that we’ve had on the movement of machinery across the border; plant material, like cuttings, and soil (2).

What’s happened is, in a sort of almost secretive way - because nobody was really aware of it, or talked to about it - they’ve lifted some of these restrictions, to make it easier to move (3). 

Which is putting the fear of death into the wine industry here (4), because we have these ancient pre-Phylloxera vineyards that no-one else in the world has – or maybe Chile and Argentina have some – but there’s hardly anywhere on Earth which has these incredible old vineyards like your cousins have in Hill of Grace.

So while you can plant grafted anti-Phylloxera rootstocks and then put your Cabernet on the top of it, that just makes us the same as the rest of the world if we do that.  So people are really really worried.

HENSCHKE (below): Well it seems as if this is going on – and I know you’ve written a blog on this – if this is going on as you say I imagine there’d be absolute fear out there in the grape-growing community.

Let’s go to Matt Caldersmith, chief winemaker at Hollick Wines down in the Penola-Coonawarra region.  You’re not that far from the border, Matt Caldersmith.  Are you worried that you could see Phylloxera coming across the border if we’ve relaxed the rules?

MATT CALDERSMITH:  Yeah, definitely Ian.  It’s a major concern for us, as I think Philip was saying.  We’ve been free of Phylloxera pretty much since inception, and because of that we’ve probably been a little bit lazy with protection, and I can’t speak for all of Coonawarra, but I know that all of Hollick’s plantings are on their own roots, so they’re planted with vines that aren’t grafted onto Phylloxera-resistant stock.

HENSCHKE: So how much damage would it cause, if for example a bit of machinery or some soil came in that carried Phylloxera - because I understand that this particular organism, I think it’s a little tiny insect, isn’t it, it’s so small you can’t even see it – if that got into your vineyard, how much would it cost, for example, if it broke out in the Coonawarra region?

 CALDERSMITH (right): Well there’s been numbers bandied about, you now, in the millions, but the major issue is, and you’re correct, it’s like an aphid:  it’s very small and it lives in the ground and it chokes the roots and stops the water and nutrients from getting to the vine. 

So what happens is you lose production.  The vines generally slowly die and shut down, so you have to replace the vines. 

Now the costs being bandied about really only account for the purchase of the vines.  To replace the vines you’ve got to pull out all the infrastructure: all the water; all the posts, and then go through and replant.

On top of that you’ve got a to wait a good four years before you get any decent crops from the vines –

HENSCHKE: Well that’s extraordinary. If you ended up, say, even wiping out ten per cent of an industry that’s worth two billion and you had to wait four years, you’d be losing a billion dollars.  The figures would be up around that, not allowing for the cost of the labor of replanting all the vineyards.

CALDERSMITH: Oh, it’s potentially devastating.  That’s why we’re aghast at what’s going on.

HENSCHKE: Well let’s go to Louisa Rose now the co-chair of the South Australian Wine Industry Council.  Louisa Rose, how did this come about, that the rules are being relaxed at a time when obviously the wine industry’s got enough problems on its hands with oversupply and low international prices through the high rate of the [Australian]  dollar?

LOUISA ROSE (below):  Hi Ian.  Well look I have to say I don’t know how, particularly how it came about. I’m not up to speed with exactly the history of this.  I know that really it’s the Phylloxera Board that has been you know has been looking at looking at this and it’s my understanding that they went through, you know, a process of trying to – you know, as all government agencies have done – to try to reduce red tape, and this is something that came about after some consultation … and and it has been to my knowledge, you know, available for public sort of scrutiny. 

What I, what I can say, though, is I that know that the Phylloxera Board – and there wasn’t anybody available to speak to you today: I’m afraid they’re they’re travelling but they are meeting on Monday to review the information they’ve been collecting over the past months –

HENSCHKE: And to review the decision?  Is that one of the things they’ll be doing as well?  Because if people like Matt Caldersmith are that upset about it then you would imagine that they would – I mean I understand that the Board is actually funded by grapegrowers’ levys isn’t it?

ROSE:  Yeah.  Absolutely.  And I mean I think that the Phylloxera Board is the grape is the grape industry’s board. So they’re certainly not trying to make decisions that are in any way you know trying to harm the South Australian wine industry.

And since this has this has come up, in the last couple of weeks, that it’s been you know come through the media and Philip’s blog, and they have been consulting very widely with grape growers in the industry, and with the industry regional bodies (5), and they all their work and the information they’ve collected over the past few weeks, and months, I might say, as part of their ongoing work, you know, it’s going to be tabled at the meeting on Monday and they will they will review that as well as the recommend as the recommendations that you were referring to, and then they’ll report back to the Minister with their, their recommendation.

So that’s what I know about the Phylloxera Board and how that’s how they’re they’re addressing this particular issue.  And they can’t really comment I suppose until after they’ve reviewed that.

HENSCHKE.  Okay. So even if they were available they may not have been available.

ROSE:  Well I think it’s a Board thing so it would only have been individuals that could sort of take individual comments so –

The insidious, tireless, indestructible Phylloxera killing vines at Mitchelton, in Victoria's Goulburn Valley.  All the water from here drains into the Murray.  Sorry about the miserable low res - there's a shocking dearth of proper photographs of this sicko micro varmint and the damage it wreaks, even on the Phylloxera Board Goebbels sheets.  They don't like us taking photographs much. It's obviously a bad look!

HENSCHKE: Well Louisa Rose on behalf of the South Australian Wine Industry Council, you’d represent quite a lot of growers, and a large section of the industry.  Do you think then that we should be as strict as ever on this particular, well, creature, this this microbe that could effectively give the State a massive walloping economically?

ROSE:  Oh absolutely and I don’t think anybody, anybody that’s involved in the South Australian wine industry would have any would have any other opinion, other than that we have to be absolutely vigilant on it.

And as I say, I’m not exactly sure of the history of this particular issue but what I do know is that the Phylloxera Board are absolutely on it.

I’m just wondering Ian if you’d if you’d like a little bit of a rundown on the Board itself?

HENSCHKE:  Well I mean my understanding is that the Board is funded by the grapegrowers.  But we’ve seen, for example, we’ve seen the apple, the apple industry being told that because of free trade between countries that they have to allow certain types of apples into the country, and certain types of plants into the country that might put them at risk.  Is this part of the whole free trade thing between states?

ROSE: No. I don’t - that’s not, that’s not my belief.  That’s not that’s not my belief at all. It is quite important because I think the wine industry is actually incredibly in South Australia it’s incredibly proud of having the Phylloxera Board because it’s been around for over a hundred years.  It was established in, I think it was in 1899, with an absolute mission to promote this healthy, free Phylloxera state.

Almost microscopic Phylloxera devouring a hairline vine root.

It was recognized very early, very early in South Australia history that we didn’t have Phylloxera while it while it had come into other states, such as Victoria and New South Wales, so, for over a hundred years, you know, as the industry, and with a lot of government support we’ve been absolutely fighting this, this little aphid, and it is, it’s an aphid as Matt said, so, so you know to keep it out of the of the state.

So it’s, it is an industry board, or an industry-funded board, and it’s governed by legislation, so it’s there not just at the whim of the industry but absolutely embedded in, you know, you know, in the state.

HENSCHKE: Look er –

ROSE: - and it and it does a couple of things and I just want to - if you’ve got time I’d like to share this because I think as a you know, I always, I talk about this all over the world and how exciting it is because it’s something that nowhere else in the world and nowhere else in Australia has.

They do aerial surveillance of every vineyard, oh, every three years.  So they go along, and they take these aerial images, and they compare them with the same image from three years ago, and any changes in the vigour, which can be measured by infra-red and check things like that, they then go out and they ground-proof.  I’ve heard examples of them going to a vineyard and saying “Look, we’re from the Phylloxera Board and we’ve, we’ve um recognized that there’s a little bit of a change in the vigour in your vineyard,” and they’ve gone in and found that there’s a vine that’s been pulled out. (6)

You know, it’s that sensitive.

HENSCHKE: Okay. Well I mean –

ROSE: - they’re they’re looking at this you know every year.

And they also do, as we were already talking about, you know, you know, look after the Phylloxera Act and the laws and the regulations about bringing things in and quarantine and all of that.

HENSCHKE: Alright.  Look, thanks for explaining that Louisa Rose, co-chair of the South Australian Wine Industry Council.  Just quickly back to Philip White then.  Philip White, want do you think the end result of this will be then?  Because clearly there seems to be almost two agendas running here.  One, we want the place to be completely disease-free, and you’ve got aerial surveillance but at the same time you’re relaxing some of the rulings in terms of transport of machinery and soil.

WHITE: Yeah well I beg to disagree with Louisa, with respect.  This is an indication of, or perfect example of the industry not working together.

It was the Victorian nurserymen who’ve lobbied this change, using free trade as an excuse.  They somehow tried to involve the Australian Constitution. (7)

Now, the reality is that in spite of all this incredible technology, in the last decade, there’s been outbreaks of Phylloxera in all these places in Victoria, and there are actually people in South Australia who are suspicious that the damn thing might already be here.

Now I don’t begin to hope that that occurs, or that it’s true.  But the really difficult bit to face is that these nurserymen stand to make hundreds of millions of dollars selling rootstocks if Phylloxera does spread (8).

So I’m not suggesting that they’re doing it deliberately for that purpose, but if Phylloxera were to appear in South Australia, all the arrows would point to these lobbyists from the state where Phylloxera exists, who’ve managed to bully our board into softening its restrictions.

HENSCHKE: Well look Philip White, we’ll be interested talking to the Phylloxera Board after it has its meeting and I imagine that in the meantime there’ll be a lot of lobbying going in the other direction, now that the lobbyists in one way seem to have got their way, I think things’ll go back the other way.  Thanks for your time this morning.

WHITE:  Thank you.  The wires are buzzin!

And furthermore:

Whether we did it before or not, we might as well get this over with now:

Declaration of potential vested interests:

Ian Henschke has a small vineyard in the Adelaide Hills and is related to the Henschkes of Keyneton. He's the announcer of Adelaide's ABC Mornings show.

Matt Caldersmith works for the Hollick family, making wine in Coonawarra.

Louisa Rose is chief winemaker at Yalumba, which owns South Australia’s biggest vine nursery.  This Yalumba Vine Nursery, possibly the second-biggest in Australia, is managed  by Robin Nettelbeck, chief viticulturer for Yalumba. Nettelbeck also happens to be the Chairman of the Phylloxera and Grape Industry Board of South Australia.

Philip White loves drinking good wine.    

Yalumba's Oxford Landing Estate Manager, Ashley Ratcliff, pointing, and Robin Nettelbeck, manager of the Yalumba Vine Nursery, South Australia's biggest and perhaps Australia's second-biggest. As a Phylloxera-resistant rootstock vendor, Yalumba Nursery is an almighty money-spinner, while Nettelbeck, renowned for his   Macchiavellian management manoeuvrings. also happens to be the chairman of the Phylloxera Board. Don't laugh.  Sensibly hatted is PIRSA viticulture man Mike McCarthy from the South Australia Research and Development Institute. So where's Disco Rob when you need some bright action?


Current members of the Phylloxera and Grape Industry Board of South Australia:

Robin Nettelbeck, Chairman

Pete Balnaves, Deputy Chair

Geoff Raven

Ashley Chabrel

Ashley Keegan

Cassandra Collins

Elise Heyes

Narelle Borgmeyer

Raegan Noon

Most of these people are unknown to me.  Please let me know any details which may be helpful in further research: leave a message below, or send to whiteswine@hotmail.com

FOOTNOTES:

(1)  “Around Australia phylloxera is clearly being mobilised. Previously confined to North Eastern Victoria Phylloxera is on the march ... Phylloxera was first detected in Australia in 1877, in Geelong, and was responsible for the near destruction of the Victorian wine industry in the 1880s. Until fairly recently it was confined to small areas in central Victoria (Nagambie, Upton, Mooroopna) and northeast Victoria (Rutherglen, King Valley), in southeast New South Wales (Corowa) and in Camden and Cumberland near Sydney. However, there have been several detections in central Victoria in the past 10 years (Buckland Valley 2003, Ovens Valley 2003, Murchison 2006, Yarra Valley 2006, Mansfield 2010).” James Hook

(2)  The Australian wine industry is not what it was.  Desperate problems with irrigation water supply, floods, totally unpredictable weather patterns, the Australian dollar going back up to where it obviously should be, and an international oversupply of grapes has played havoc with the balance sheets, particularly of the big companies, whether public or private.  This has forced many to regroup their corporate philosophies, and in the lunge to remain viable, quite dramatically restructure their businesses.  At the risk of compromising flavour and quality, this includes the prophylactic planting of vineyards on Phylloxera-resistant rootstock, to avoid more trouble. It has also forced centralization of processing like never before, a desperate drive to automation, and the sale of the many satellite, or regional wineries where grapes were traditionally vinified closer to their source.  So large winemakers with Victorian vineyards, or which buy Victorian or New South Wales fruit, have an obvious desire to limit unnecessary restrictions on the efficient transport of grapes, to begin with.  As these giants can usually afford to graft nearly everything to rootstock, as they frequently own giant vine propagation nurseries, they do not suffer from Phylloxera damage; they suffer only from the inconvenience of the restrictive Phylloxera Board regulations.  Jacob’s Creek (Pernod Ricard), Wolf Blass (Treasury) and Yalumba (S. Smith & Sons) are examples.  Richard Hamilton (grape boss at Fosters, owner of Wolf Blass) was chair of the Phylloxera Board previous to Robin Nettelbeck (Yalumba). 

(3)  Since 2009, the Phylloxera and Grape Industry Board of South Australia (PGIBSA) seems to have lost much of its power to the bureaucrats of Primary Industries and Resources South Australia (PIRSA), whose Minister they answer to.  In that year, however, when the current act was passed, the initial ruling to monitor imports of grapes and grape products into South Australia by transport manifests was soon dropped as there were too many manifests.

(4)  “If the South Australian Wine Industry is serious about preventing a Phylloxera outbreak then shouldn’t ALL interstate transfer of grapes or vineyard machinery be banned? We should be increasing the measures of protection not decreasing them.  I am very concerned about the relaxed attitude that seems to be descending on this matter. I am unsure what I can do as an individual but I offer my support to you wholeheartedly.”  Justin Lane, Alpha Box & Dice

“The national body, the National Phylloxera Technical Reference Group has changed the classification of the Heathcote region which will allow importation of grapes and grape material from there. However we have seen the spread of Phylloxera to new areas in Victoria over recent times and, as it takes up to 10 years for Phylloxera to be apparent in vine decline, Phylloxera may already be in these areas which will be allowed to send grapes to the Barossa for prcessing ... The Phylloxera and Grape Industry Board of South Australia has the brief to ensure that prococals exist to pretect South Australia from the pest. However a number of members of the South Australian board and also members of the National Board making the changes. The South Australian Board is funded by a levy on growers but how can we expect them to protect us if the are members of the group putting us at risk ... The Chairman of the national body, who is also a member of the SA Board, was quoted as saying that the protection for South Australia has been strengthened and that all people importing grape material need to register with the State Government and will need to comply with the standards ... There is sure to be a lot more to be said about this situation. It is a very very serious matter.” Anon., Barossa

“The weakening of the state's phylloxera protection measures are even worse than first thought, and as highlighted by Whitey, Wayne Farquhar and Drew Noon it should be ringing alarm bells for all old-vine growers throughout South Australia (and all wine lovers who value these drops made from pre-Phylloxera age vines). It's the sort of thing that deserves a full-on protest outside parliament, it's that serious ... How the hell can the powers that be significantly weaken the rules protecting our grape and wine industry from Phylloxera without consulting or informing the state’s primary stakeholders in this area, the grape growers and wine producers? Are these idiots completely unaware of the history of the recent movement of this destructive pest into the Yarra Valley in 2006, or are their heads too far up their own arses to care? … Once this threat appears in this state that's it, it can't be treated, it cannot be cured, it will very probably destroy our oldest vines first and take away the one truly unique thing we can promote on a world scale - a large resource of old vines on their own natural rootstock (as opposed to American rootstock that has to be grafted to in Phylloxera afflicted regions). A small example of what we stand to lose - Hill of Grace, Mt Edelstone, Kay Bros Block 6, Penfolds Block 42, Wendouree, etc, not to mention the many old vineyards that haven't had their name on a label but have been equally important in making our top wines and establishing our reputation here and overseas - imagine if the lot were gone? The recent efforts to increase the value of what we sell overseas based on terroir and uniqueness can be flushed down the toilet, and we're back left competing with the likes of Chile and Argentina in the race for the bottom, wall-to-wall bulk booze to line the grocers' shelves labelled as "sunshine in a bottle" with a critter label and a $2 price tag. Game over ... A couple of years ago I remember talking with Franco D'Anna and being shocked when he said they were grafting all of their vines on to American rootstock, and his comments that it's only a matter of time before everyone in the Yarra Valley had to do the same because it was in Fosters (now Treasury's) vineyards and eventually it will be everywhere. Perhaps that's something Gail Gago should have thought of before defending the slackening of these protections, if Phylloxera makes its way into South Australia it will eventually strike her husband's most valuable Penfolds vineyards, no matter what security measures they take." Ian Hickman

"This fight is never over it seems. But we can never stop trying. Ever. South Australian wineries never talk about the fact that the wines you taste are some of the only vineyards in the world that taste as they should - from own rooted vines. My little (4 acres) own rooted Primitivo / Zinfandel block is a wonder to winemakers from the arguable ‘home’ of zin - California. If we lose this uniqueness, we lose all. And we don't even talk about how amazing this is. We just accept it. We can't accept our good fortune and hard work of 113 years - we must honor this bequest and fight for it." Dudley Brown, Inkwell Vineyard

"At recent Phylloxera meetings held in South Australia by the PGIBSA, Dr. Kevin Powell Australia’s top researcher into Phylloxera said that the Phylloxera outbreak in the Fosters Vineyard in the Yarra Valley probably occurred in 2001 and was only visible in 2006 a total of 5 years from infestation to detection. Under current protocols a PRZ can gain full PEZ status only after 3 years of surveys to detect Phylloxera, and new emerging regions after only one year, yet Dr Kevin Powell is indicating minimum of 5 years or longer which would also depend upon the soil type, moisture and temperature ... So Phylloxera could have potentially crossed from neighboring effected areas into Heathcote/Bendigo regions and not have been detected yet, and while they have PEZ status under the slackened measures heavy equipment and grapes could travel into South Australia without compulsory inspection and cleaning at the border. For all we know, with the complete lack of checks it may already be here and is biding its time to announce its presence in another five years. Anyone in the wine industry and wine lovers in general should be outraged and horrified by these decisions by the Phylloxera board?” Wayne B Farquhar (upper left, with family), Barossa vine nurseryman at Elite Nursery, owner Frill Hill Vineyards - Home to 145 year old Grenache and 118 year old Riesling

“BIG thumbs up on this one. You definitely have our support- in our view the enormous risk to SA’s own rooted vines far outweighs the desire for ‘easier’ equipment/grape movement.  We see our old vines as one of our most precious assets. Please let me know if there is anything that I/we can do to assist. Corrina Wright, winemaker, Oliver’s Taranga (170 years of family grapegrowing in McLaren Vale)

Corrina Wright, left with sister Briony Oliver and father Don: this family's been growing grapes on the same McLaren Vale land for 170 years - photo Philip White.

“We applaud Victoria’s efforts to survey its wine regions for phylloxera but we cannot accept the claims that these new interstate areas are phylloxera free ... As noted Phylloxera is a tricky problem that can take several years to be detected ... The surveys provide a guide only and are not a guarantee. Opening our border to free trade with these regions is not worth the risk with South Australia’s old vines.” Glen Harminson, Angaston Vineyards

“We all know phylloxera would devastate our old vineyards and probably a lot of livelihoods along the way if it got into SA ... I think we are being somewhat polite about the whole thing and have taken our (SA Industry and quite obviously Vic. - All inclusive) foot off the pedal for the last 10 years ... In more recent times lobbying from SA has been ineffective which has resulted in us getting to where we are now, This strongly points towards the Phylloxera Board which seems to be wanting to please all parties ... This will be the downfall of our current Phylloxera free status … I think we need to have a strong, well distributed and understood message in our own region(s) to give us more strength.”  Michael Paxton, Paxton Wines
 
(5)  The Phylloxera Board is required to have Regional Committees (Phylloxera Act Section 15.1), but they have shut these down.  DRINKSTER cannot understand how how they managed this.  If these committees still existed, growers wouldn’t have to be learning about threats to their livelihood on this blog, which is still the only journal in the country to be running this treacherous story. This battle will be won only when healthy communication via regional committees is re-established, and the South Australian regulations dependably and fiercely protect this state from imported grapes, machinery and other phylloxera risk vectors.  (Remember 2009 when it all got swept under the carpet).

(6) While the precision of aerial surveillance is admirable, it obviously cannot detect Phylloxera in vineyards grafted to Phylloxera-resistant rootstock – vineyards of the type developed on a vast scale by the big wineries who can afford such luxury and compromised flavour, and whom are the most likely to be shipping whole fruit and plant material across borders.  Vineyards in very good country adjacent to places where Phylloxera is extant are obvious choices for rootstock viticulture. Aerial surveillance can only detect Phylloxera once it has infected vineyards on their own roots. Once that’s happened, the grower has no choice but to uproot the vineyard and replant it with grafted rootstocks which must be bought from a big nursery. The Phylloxera never goes away.

Kym Ludvigsen, right, picks up his Distinguished Services Award from Wines of Victoria ... his 2010 piece below, published in the Australian and New Zealand Grapegrower and Winemaker may be a clue to why they admire him!

(7) “In recent years, Victoria has made huge leaps in managing Phylloxera … The Victorian wine industry worked for years to convince the Victorian government of the advantages that would flow … The discussion was successful because it was based on realistic aims and sound business sense, including issues linked to market access, the movement of machinery, nursery materials, grapes, grape products, and elimination of conditions that resulted in restriction of trade between the states … [South Australian restrictions] are particularly galling issues for grapegrowers and wine industry contractors from Victoria, who see business opportunities in other states but are unable to easily access them … this is an intolerable situation requiring attention by the national and state governments … One wonders if South Australia doesn’t trust the Victorian government officials and certification processes … It is becoming increasingly plain that South Australia is acting to protect its grape industry and is denying market access to contractors, second-hand machinery dealers, nurseries, wineries and grape growers from other states ... there is no logic in their actions.”  Kym Ludvigsen, Ludvigsen Viticulture Services, Grampians, Victoria, chair, Australian Vine Improvement Association (vine nurserymen's lobby), Treasurer, Grampians Winemakers Inc; Victorian Regional Grape Supply Manager, Southcorp, 1994-02, writing in The Australian and New Zealand Grapegrower and Winemaker, October 2010.

(8) Grape vines grafted to Phylloxera-resistant rootstocks cost about $5.50 per cutting to purchase from a nursery.  Vines are commonly planted at about 2,000 cuttings per hectare.

ARABANA - ODE TO THE MARREE PUB

 .

The Marree Hotel

 
If Australia has a ship of state,
it must be the Marree Hotel.
With her green and gold VB ensign at the top mast,
and her stack all black and white for Port,
she sails silently across the empty stone ocean of old Aussie,
wearing the vast brute down speck by speck.
 
In her hold are hard, quiet sailors:
shoulders to the slow bar.
Four-wheel-drive tenders nudge her rubbing strakes,
discharging envoys from Oodnadatta and beyond,
messengers adrift without city.
 
About her, like ladies in waiting,
sit E. G. Kruse's mail Blitz,
sinking into the desert,
and the engines of a train long left without rails.
 
You could think the only politics are the whoosh of space
and the soft weep of power lines loosening,
bored against the blue.
 
 
Philip White




This was written upon visiting Marree with ABC radio colleagues Phillip Satchell and Ian Doyle nearly fifteen years ago, when we were trying to draw big city attention to the work of the Flying Doctor service.  E. G. Kruse for decades delivered the mail in his Blitz truck; VB is Victoria Bitter beer; Port is an Adelaide Aussie Rules footy team.  The original owners of this country, the Arabana people, were just beginning their long, eternally patient  struggle toward staking their rightful native title claim, a move then considered audacious, even insulting to the whites.  There was much brittle friction in the air in the pub that day, but little discussion.  So it's a great feeling to hear that today the Arabana, who have lived on these hard grounds for many millenia, have finally signed the deal, and swapped their rights to the town of Marree (pop. 70)  for some 70,000 sq km of what looks like mere desert to the white man. Apart from Lake Eyre, of course, which many whites like to visit or fly over when it contains water - even sail upon: there is a local yacht club. I understand there's a very different atmosphere in the front bar of the pub tonight, not to mention the huge party the Arabana are having out on the lake's shore!  I've been drinking to their success as I write, and wish them the very very best in the forthcoming millenia.  No outback voyage is complete without a night or two here. You can make contact with folks of all hues, and if you're polite, get shown around the nether regions by somebody who understands.

Flag: The Spirit of Ballarat, used with kind permission of the artist, Peter Clarke.

PHYLLOXERA: SOME GOOD SENSE AT LAST

James Hook at work crushing his Lazy Ballerina Adelaide Hills Pinot

The Nurserymen's March Falters

Phylloxera Board To Reconsider

Hook Talks Sense On Radio Nash

by PHILIP WHITE

Tonight on the ABC Radio National current affairs program PM, presenter Mark Colvin revealed that the Phylloxera and Grape Industry Board of South Australia (PGIBSA) will reconsider its agreement to relax the laws limiting the spread of the deadly vine louse, Phylloxera.

The board will meet within the next few weeks.

Concerned McLaren Vale winemaker and vine scientist at DJ's Growers, James Hook, explained that "Phylloxera is kind of a super pest; almost microscopic, you can't see it ... in the last couple of years ... these no-go zones have been classified, 'yes, they're ok zones.' And so now there's a whole ... large spectrum of Victoria that you can ... take material into South Australia from.

 "The concern is that we know phylloxera isn't in South Australia because we've got 100 years of knowing that it's not here. We don't have that with Victoria. There's regions that ...  make a lot of people very nervous because they're either geographically very close to areas that have Phylloxera or that they're areas that have only really had grapes reasonably recently."

In the last weeks, led by the respected McLaren Vale grower/winemaker, Master of Wine Drew Noon and his wife, Rae, a rapidly-growing band of famous South Australian wine identities has grown increasingly enraged and vocal about the board they expect to be protecting them from Phylloxera.

Every South Australia grapegrower pays an annual levy to the PGIBSA to police the movement of machinery and plant and soil material into South Australia from the Phylloxera-infested states of Victoria and New South Wales.

Growers were aghast to accidentally discover that PGIBSA, influenced by vine nurserymen, had quietly agreed to relax the restrictions on the movement into South Australia of material and machinery from vineyards close to Phylloxera-infected areas.

As DRINKSTER reported last night, whether they like it or not, the vine propagation nurseries stand to make vast amounts of money in the case of Phylloxera spreading to South Australia.  To Phylloxera-proof Coonawarra alone would cost that region at least $60 million. This figure is for the purchase of grafted Phylloxera-resistant vine cuttings alone - it does not include the costs of clearing the diseased vineyards or their replanting, or cover the loss of income in the duration.

Very obviously, many hundreds of grapegrowers would go to the wall; given the ravaged look of the industry as whole, it seems possible that the South Australian wine business would never recover.

Since it was smitten by Phylloxera brought in from the USA in 1877, Victoria has never regained its position as Australia's biggest wine producer.

And it has never forgiven South Australia for taking that position from it while Victorian growers spent many decades struggling to regroup and replant.

Of DRINKSTER's Coonawarra estimates, Hook told PM "that's just one region. So you could imagine what the cost would be in an area like the Barossa Valley or the state's largest grape growing area, which is the Riverland - it would be many, many times that; it could be as much as $600 million."

Reporter Tom Nightingale interviewed Victorian vine-grower Kym Ludvigson, Chairman of the Australian Vine Improvement Association (AVIA), an umbrella group of vine propagators and nurserymen whose mission is "to provide the Australian viticultural industry with the highest quality grapevine propagation material available," and whose responsibilites include

* The management of a National Vine Accreditation Scheme – on behalf of Vine Improvement Groups;

* The negotiation and making of agreements with grapevine breeders for the appointment of the Association as the head licensee for the production and marketing of grapevine varieties in Australia; and

* The facilitation of the equitable distribution of high quality propagation grapevine and rootstock material to all producing areas in Australia.

When quizzed on AVIA's confidence about certain source regions in Victoria being Phylloxera-free, Ludvigson said they checked  "Every third vine in every fifth row, or every fifth vine in every third row, I'm not absolutely sure on that, so they're very thorough."

AVIA was one of the outfits which "pushed South Australia to change its laws."

Ludvigson said this was "So there's less red tape in moving vines and machinery around Australia; and that it's fair, that everyone has the same level of regulation."

In lieu of any of the wine industry's intricate network of councils, bodies, committees and publications advising their South Australian members what's going down, DRINKSTER will continue to follow these developments closely.

To hear the ABC PM program, and read a part transcript, click here.

PHYLLOXERA MUSTA HIRED A LOBBYIST

Dark clouds: Dudley Brown, proprietor of Inkwell Wines in McLaren Vale, can't help thinking that the killer vine bug, Phylloxera, must have hired itself a lobbyist.  "Imagine what would happen to the vineyards around here if it arrived," he demands. "The one thing we have which is totally unique in the world -  old vines on their own roots, and the special flavours they offer - would be gone.  Just gone." Dudley is a former President of the McLaren Vale Grape, Wine and Tourism Association.

More Questions Than Answers

Who Wants Old Laws Softened

What Do They Stand To Gain?

by PHILIP WHITE


“I too thought we had nailed this back in 2009 but the attempts to change this stuff are as persistent as the louse itself - who knew Phylloxera had its own lobbying group?” asked McLaren Vale grapegrower and activist, Dudley Brown. 

He referred to Wednesday’s Legislative Council interchange between Robert Brokenshire MLC and Minister Gail Gago, whose portfolios include Agriculture, Food and Fisheries, Forests, Regional Development, Tourism, and the Status of Women.

Brokenshire lives on the edge of McLaren Vale, and knows well, and constantly mixes with  the winemakers there.  He speaks fluent wine.  Minister Gago is married to Peter Gago, the chief winemaker of Penfolds, who has just won the international Winemakers' Winemaker Award from the august international Masters of Wine.  This is the highest award available to winemakers.  These people are not new to wine topics. 

For over a century South Australia has been free of the dreaded micro root louse that killed the vineyards of France and Victoria in the 1800s, and burst out again various times during this last decade in Victoria; perhaps most infamously in a Fosters vineyard in the Yarra Valley.  The sole reason the plague has not crossed into South Australia is the extremely rigid restriction on the movement of machinery, dirt and plant material from places where phylloxera lives to places where it doesn’t. 

“Around Australia phylloxera is clearly being mobilized,” McLaren Vale vine scientist James Hook explained  during the 2009 scare. “Previously confined to North Eastern Victoria Phylloxera is on the march ... Phylloxera was first detected in Australia in 1877, in Geelong, and was responsible for the near destruction of the Victorian wine industry in the 1880s. Until fairly recently it was confined to small areas in central Victoria (Nagambie, Upton, Mooroopna) and northeast Victoria (Rutherglen, King Valley), in southeast New South Wales (Corowa) and in Camden and Cumberland near Sydney. However, there have been several detections in central Victoria in the past 10 years (Buckland Valley 2003, Ovens Valley 2003, Murchison 2006, Yarra Valley 2006, and Mansfield 2010).”

While I'm waiting to take a photograph of James Hook, take a look at this photograph he took.  This is Mitch from Calgary, tenderly poking some goodness into James' Lazy Ballerina red. photo James Hook

There’s the key.  The dreaded louse barely moved for a century, thanks to the rigid restrictions on moving plant material, soil, grapes and machinery.  These were largely imposed by South Australian winemakers through their Phylloxera Board.  Every South Australian grapegrower pays a levy to fund this policing body. 

But in the very years in which the industry made its biggest, most risky and hurried national expansions, Phylloxera suddenly appeared in five very popular interstate vignobles, where it will probably thrive forever.

Nevertheless, somebody away back in a smoke-free room somewhere has managed to have the restrictions eased, so it’s now possible to more easily move stuff from near where Phylloxera lives, if not from precisely smack bang in the middle of the infection.  Pardon my ambiguity in place of rigorous delineation, but it is in this no man's land where the threat is feared to lie.  South Australian grapegrowers with ancient pre-phylloxera clones still growing on their own roots are waiting for their government to prove to them that there is no Phylloxera in the dubious border country, and that the relaxation of the restrictions on the movement of machinery, for example, is no threat to their livelihood.

Having never been consulted about the proposed changes, and certainly not advised of them until Drew and Rae Noon began asking questions and DRINKSTER broke the story a month back, South Australian winemakers and grapegrowers are aghast to discover this, and think the science applied to justify the change is dodgy and highly suspicious, as Phylloxera can be extant in the ground for years without being detected.

Brokenshire posed a question that many South Australians are very keen to see answered.  He wanted to know whether anybody in government had protested about the wine industry’s relaxation of its own Phylloxera control regulations, and whether the Minister would reverse the decision “as, for instance, her predecessor did in relation to the proposed overnight closures of fruit fly inspection stations in the Riverland?”

If Phylloxera does move, the vast vineyards of the South Australian Riverland will probably be the first to go.  Apart from Coonawarra, they are the closest to Victoria's Phylloxera country.  The state's vast volumes of cheap wine come from the Riverland; its most expensive wine - Penfolds Bin 620 - comes from Coonawarra.

You can read the entire parliamentary interchange on DRINKSTER.  Both pollies have a reasonable grasp of the face of the situation.  While Minister Gago was handed the Agriculture portfolio and several others only recently (upon Jay Weatherill's ascendancy to the Premiership), the President of the chamber called her response “very thorough.”

“My understanding is that the protocol that was put together did a full risk assessment and has put in place the protocols that are necessary to continue to protect the Phylloxera spread,” Minister Gago concluded. “The changes that the honourable member alludes to are those involving equipment between zones that are Phylloxera free.


  
“The Phylloxera board itself, the industry itself, decided that that was a reasonable thing so long as the equipment was certified to have not been in a Phylloxera area. The industry itself has established these standards. The industry itself has looked at these protocols and approved them. South Australia's Phylloxera board, our own South Australian industry, has approved of this and said that these are suitable protocols to continue the protection of our viticulture interests.”
 
Dudley Brown disagrees about the alleged consultation: “There has not been any meaningful consultation with ‘the industry’ as a whole,” he said “but clearly someone in ‘the industry’ has an outsized role in this matter. I would be keen to know who exactly. All [South Australian] growers are levy payers [to the Phylloxera Board] - all deserve a voice in any meaningful change, not just the few who are inconvenienced by regulations that protect us all.”

“I can only reiterate that it was the Phylloxera board that approved these protocols,” Gago told the House. “They are significant leaders within the industry, so it is a protocol that is basically developed by the industry and endorsed by the industry. I think it would be incredibly foolish as a minister (even though my husband is a winemaker, I do not think that gives me the authority) to overturn an industry decision that has been considered as thoroughly as this decision has.” 

But thoroughly considered by whom?  And on what account?  For what reasons?  This writer has spent years attempting to unravel the arcane tangle of committees, bodies, councils, cadres and infernal intrigue that between them moved to relax these vital regulations.

As Brown reminded me, we entered this battle in 2009, when moves to relax the protocols came to notice by sheer chance.  Wayne Farquar, a passionate and highly-respected Barossa vine propagator who owns Elite Nursery, not to mention priceless ancient vineyards of pre-Phylloxera stock – the very sort that Phylloxera will destroy when it crosses the border from Victoria – then wrote a critical letter of concern to the Phylloxera and Grape Industry Board of South Australia (PGIBSA).  This letter, which asked questions about due diligence, and showed deep concern about the relaxation of restrictions, was acknowledged, but never answered, although the acknowledgment note promised an answer would be forthcoming.  Uh-huh.

“For some reason they invited me to a meeting,” Farquar said last week of his 2009 discovery. “That’s when I realised they were trying to relax the regulations.  It was just by chance that I found out ...  

"And now, look Rae Noon’s on the board and she only found out by accident that they were at it again ... It’s all by accident, so you can’t possibly say there’s been real consultation.  

"The Minister has to discover that it’s not really the industry doing this - it’s individuals, and it’s very hard to find out just who they are.”

Phylloxera management in a zone where Phylloxera lives.  The buyer is supposed to ask which parts of the country the grapes can be transported to without breaking the law. South Australia doesn't even rate a mention.

Drew Noon wonders who could possibly profit from a phylloxera outbreak.  This query offers not so clear an answer as his subsequent query.

"Who doesn’t?  South Australian growers (especially those with old vines on their own roots) who are rarely or never involved with moving grapes or machinery from interstate and have everything to lose from a Phylloxera outbreak?  What level of risk is acceptable to these SA growers who have everything to lose here?"

 Every time a Phylloxera outbreak occurs, the vines must be removed and destroyed.  Then you engage a nursery to propagate non-grape-bearing American vine rootstocks which are Phylloxera-resistant, and then employ specialists to graft grape-bearing varieties onto those rootstocks.  Then you start your vineyard again, enduring the inconvenience of steam-cleaning machinery, and vegetable material, every time you leave the area.

Like, you gotta disinfect your truck every time you drive to the shop. 

Or you should.

 
Phylloxera would just love the precious Terra Rosa, limestone, and calcrete of Coonawarra ... photo Milton Wordley 


If Phylloxera were to move from the Victorian regions where it thrives, say to Coonawarra, a few hours' drive away, the vignerons would have to re-plant the region, only five per cent of which is already planted on Phylloxera-resistant rootstocks. 

A cutting grafted to Phylloxera-resistant rootstock, ready to plant, costs about $5.50.  

Coonawarra has around 5,427 hectares of vineyard that would require replanting.  

Presuming an average vine intensity of 2,000 per hectare, that’s about a $60 million gross income for the vine nurseries, without considering the cost of vineyard labour or machinery.

Or the loss of production the growers would face during the many years the changeover would require.

And that’s just Coonawarra.  South Australia has 72,000 hectares of vines.

So there’s a lot at stake for the losers, and a lot of money to be made by the winners when the little louse hits the road.  

When Phylloxera crosses our border, a great deal of forensic energy will no doubt go into locating the people who made it all possible.



.

TYPEWRITER SKULL BY JEREMY MAYER

Perfect way for an old word piano to decay ... I found this on the delicious Boing Boing ... Mark Shield woulda loved one ... due for a drink, poor bastard, but it runs everywhere

SWISS ARMY KNIFE - NEW ETHNIC MODELS

Above, the convenient handbag-sized De Luxury Swiss Army Knife; middle, the DS-23 French Army version, and bottom, The Barossa, where I've seen good strong women bite the ends off a Tim Tam, jam it in a glass of muscat, and suck. 

ANYTHING BUT ORDINARY CHARDONNAY

Putting The Spin On Chardonnay

Bigger Than Shiraz Now In Oz 

Keep Shovelling In The Sawdust

by PHILIP WHITE

  
“The ‘Anything But Chardonnay’ days are long gone,” wine marketing consultant Trish Barry tweeted yesterday. “Time to rediscover this fabulous varietal on 24 May.”

She referred to the third annual World Chardonnay Day. Funny how the ethanol peddlers presume special days to assist them market stuff they can’t sell as easily as they’d first hoped, back when they ripped out the native veg and installed the irrigation system.  I mean Chardonnay Day?  How does that look against International Day of Zero Tolerance to Female Genital Mutilation,  or the International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficing, not to mention World Suicide Prevention Day?

“Hang on a bit,” I shot back. “Most of the Chardonnay made in Oz is still execrable industrial piss. You've been hoodwinked!”

Australia now produces around 405,000 tonnes of Chardonnay per year: for some dumb reason it has surpassed Shiraz as our main wine grape.  Imagine 300,000 pallets of it and you’re close.  Most of this is grown in the hot inland, the desert currently drying out after two years of record flooding.  The desert is not the place for Chardonnay, which comes from Continental Europe: Champagne, Chablis and Burgundy – places where it snows. 

You could argue that we should have stuck with the previous biggest Australian wine grape: Sultana. Sully loves the desert when it’s flooded.  When it’s not flooded naturally, you can flood it by emptying the River on it.  You can get over 20 tonnes per acre!

But the punter is not a mug. The Anything But Chardonnay movement sensibly began to form up about a decade back.  So Australia’s excess “Chardy” went to export, until the Anything But sentiment justly followed it. Winemakers panicked.

This is why, a couple of years back, somebody obviously wearing a tie obviously called a meeting in their smoke-free room and decided that it was time people in the wine industry began talking Chardonnay back up.  Whoever barked the order got what they wanted: it went first through the Chairmen of Judges on the national wine show circuit.  One after another, they briefed their teams to be kinder to Chardonnay, and one after another, the teams responded with bling which the Chairmen could then boast of in the round-up speeches and droll propaganda that oozes out through the presses and the screens and phones.

Then the wine hacks who grovel to get judging berths at these huge wine races obediently went back to their editors with obsequious nonsense about Chardonnay coming of age or however it comes.

“Maybe I've been drinking the good stuff over $10 (can't comment below that),” rattled Trish, “but in my opinion lots of great options.”  Rather than waste good guitar-pickin fingernails typing the sordid details of the swill below $20 that I swim through each week, I suggested “Judges, Wine Australia, Wine Communicators, all decided eighteen months ago they'd begin saying ABC is dead. Musta worked!”

She quickly shot back “Surely that's a better message for industry to be sending than all doom and gloom.”

“I don't work for the wine industry,” I responded. “I work for my readers. The Oz wine industry as we knew it has failed. It IS doom and gloom.”

New old-style French oak fermenters at Kooyong, Mornington Peninsula

There is no doubt that Australia is producing better Chardonnay than it did.  It's not saying much.  But so it bloody well should make better wine from it, having dedicated so much precious farmland to it, most of it inappropriately irrigated with water we don’t have. 

A few - just a handful of Australian winemakers of rare gastronomic intelligence – and I mean RARE: these are the MENSA dudes of wine smarts – are making stunning Chardonnays, many of which would stand their own in Burgundy, from whence we pinched the variety in the first place.  

Unfortunately for everybody else, and most of all my beloved readers, most who entered this racket never bothered to work a vintage or two there in Burgundy to learn about what they were trying to copy, so they made a terrible hash of it from the start.

Adam Wynn was first in with a serious purpose-planted high, cool-country Chardonnay vineyard at Mountadam, which his father David began in 1969.  By 1983 he was home from duxing the Bordeaux University winemaking course, bolstered with serious experience in Burgundy.  He was the first Australian winemaker with the intelligence, money and terroir to really understand the relationship between the best French barrels and cool climate Australian Chardonnay. 

Stephen Hickinbotham was another who’d studied and worked hard in Burgundy in those early student years, and was just beginning to get the fledgeling Mornington Peninsula and Bellarine Chardonnay vineyards together with his brother Andrew, who was planting them for people like Bails Myer, when he (StepHen) was killed in a plane crash.    

Australian wine would be a very different thing if Wynn and Hickie were still in the business: they provided a serious intellectual and spiritual counterbalance to the arrogant Evans-Croser axis, and from the start made wines of much more adventure, finesse and feeling.

Wynn went on developing a solid Burgundy style until a burst of ill-health forced his retirement, which was another terrible pity; at least he survives.  

I shall never forget the lunch Tony Bilson gave Paul Bocuse and his senior staff and about six of us antipodean yokels at Bilson’s on Circular Quay in the late ’eighties: I worked Australian wines in with Tony’s astonishing menu. When we poured the Mountadam, Bocuse could not grasp that the Chardonnay in his glass was not from Burgundy.

Bilson and White, 25 years later at O'Leary-Walker in Clare ... enjoying a glass of Nick Walker's racy Hurtle sparkling Chardonnay/Pinot from Oakbank, near Hahndorf in the Adelaide Hills ... photo Matt Walker

You normally see livelier eyes in a fishmonger’s window, but at that Mountadam High Eden Chardonnay 1984, the old Lion of Lyon positively sparkled. 

He left wearing an almighty, if slightly bothered, smile.

It was Len Evans, the pugnacious Welshman, who pushed this whole C-word thing along.  He up and offed from his job as storeman in the Mt Isa mine, then waddled around Australia like a bumptious missionary, preaching that Chardonnay would be “the vanilla of the Australian wine industry.”  He eventually began boasting that his early Rothbury Estate versions were exemplary.  They didn’t ring any bells for me, however, and when I found myself in his lab in the early ’eighties, innocently signing the delivery chit for a shipment of plastic drums I later discovered were labelled “Essence of Oak Chips”, I began to realise the root of the Evans faith: he was obviously an artificial vanilla essence man, not a fair dinkum vanilla pod worshipper. 

Essence of oak chips was illegal in wine.  “Oh no,” whimpered the lab rat, when he realized what had happened.  “I only use that to work out how many barrels to order.”

I suggested he’d bought enough to turn Sydney Harbour into Chardonnay, and asked if he would pour me a snifter of the dark stuff, so I could see which forest they’d distilled. 

Seemed like Missouri to me.

As he went on to take control of the Australian wine show circuit, Evans ensured that his dogma was adhered to: everybody planted the stuff, and the peachiest ones with the most overt oak won all the bling.  Some blokes, it seemed, even went as far as to use barrels.

Evans mouthing off

We should sigh a heave of relief that those scarce serious gastronomes I mention above are making stunning wines.  Vanya Cullen’s got it nailed in Margaret River; some think Leeuwin Estate does it too.  Vasse Felix is a sure triumph.  Then we see marvelous works of epicurean art like the Chardonnays in the new Penfolds premium release: drinks which really do raise the national bar. And do yourself a favour and buy a full set of the single vineyard Oakridge Yarra Valley Chardonnays: David Bicknell is gradually unleashing a suite of brilliantly distinctive wines from individual sites: they all rock.

To go from one Oakridge bottle to the next is like taking a stroll down a back lane in the Côte-d'Or, cellar-to-cellar; vineyard to vineyard.  If David can keep this up, these wines will be the first set of Australian Chardonnays to sell out each year.

Closer to AddleAde, get into the new Romney Park Hahndorf Blanc de Blancs fizz: a pristine, elegant, totally disarming Chardonnay which must surely be the most stylish suds made this side of Tasmania. It takes me immediately to Mesnil, the heart of Champagne’s best Chardonnay patch.  
 
There are others, of course, and so there should be.  We have over 2,530 wine producers now; 1,707 of them have at least one Chardonnay.

But let’s just pause a minute.  Apart from Tasmania, and a few isolated bits of Australian upland, we have no climate which gets close to Champagne, Chablis or Burgundy, the places where the Chardonnay templates, like it or not, were set.

Apart from wines like that Romney Park and the exquisite sparklers that Ed Carr somehow continues to make for Heavens Above or Universe or the Milky Way or whatever Constellation’s now called – think Arras and Bay of Fires – we have little in the way of really good Champagne-style Chardonnay, and little chance of making much more.

We could follow the Chablisiennes, and make high acid Chardonnays without oak, if only we had enough cool climate vineyard to guarantee the high natural acid that makes Chablis special.  But we don’t, and generally, we can’t.

Which leads us to Burgundy, which is highly reliant upon the skill of its unique coopers, the tonnelleries.  It’s not uncommon to be tasting there in a cellar there with the winemaker when somebody else lets themselves in with a key, and starts tasting barrels on their ownsome.  That’ll be the local consulting cooper, making sure the wines fit the wood flavours he’s chosen, and vice versa.  "I think I'll put one more stave of Vosges forest in next year's barrels." You don’t get too much of that sort of service or trust in Australia.

New egg-shaped French oak fermenters from Taransaud

Which leads me in turn to the matter of oak.  We can’t make Chablis.  We’d be better off sticking to Riesling if we want unoaked, steely whites.  Fizz needs no new oak, so we can approximate Champagne in Tassie and Hahndorf and the odd spot here and there, but not much of it.  So we attempt, to varying degrees, to make our Chardonnay after the style set in the slightly warmer Burgundy, where some new oak seems essential.

When you ferment wine in a good barrel, and leave it there on its yeast lees, an electro-static reaction not only attracts the dead yeast lees to the inside of the staves, but makes them cling there.  Stir the wine – a nine iron is perfect – in the act called battonage, and the skeletal remains of the dead yeast form a thin calcarious film which lines the entire barrel. It moves up the sides, covers the heads, and stays there.  So when your Chardonnay soaks into the oak, to derive those lemon, spice, ginger and caramel flavours that make the great wines of Burgundy what they are – even soot, if the barrel’s been toasted – it must first pass through that natural chalky filter.  When it oozes back out of the wood, it must pass through the same layer again.

This is an absolutely vital key to good wooded Chardonnay.

A little well-placed wood can get you a long way

So here comes that doom and gloom: Australia has 405,000 tonnes of Chardonnay.  Say we extract 700 litres of wine per tonne on the average, and ferment that Chardonnay in 230 litre French oak barrels.  My figures err to the conservative side.  The average French oak tree harvested for cooperage is 170 years old and produces nearly enough staves to make two barrels.  We’d need well over 600,000 170 year old oak trees per annum to properly make our Chardonnay in the manner we’d like everyone to imagine we do: over  1,200,000 barrels.  But regardless of the French being the best forestry managers on Earth – silviculture, it’s prettily called - France can’t even get its total barrel production up to 300,000 units per year – 250,000 is more like it. 

Which means that if Australia’s Chardonnay makers got every French oak barrel produced in France, and there were none allocated for any other winemakers on Earth, including the French themselves, Australia’s Chardonnay would still be a million barrels short.  Every year.

So where do all those new French oak barrels come from that we read of on the back labels?   It’s simple: sawdust, shavings, splinters, chips, cubes, planks, inner staves, “wood derivatives”, “tea bags” … these are very much cheaper, but they do not work like a barrel.  There is no electro-static reaction. There is no calcarious filter between the raw sap and the Chardonnay.  Especially if you use essence of oak chips.