FILLING CABERNET'S ANNOYING CAVITY

Dr. A. C. Kelly's   Wine-growing In Australia, and The Teaching of Modern Writers on Vine-culture and Wine-making (E. S. Wigg & Sons, Adelaide, 1867) personal first edition copy of Rev John Ignatius Bleasdale DD ... photo Philip White (click image to enlarge)

Plugging the hole in Cabernet

Avoiding routines of the Father

'Twas all written out long ago
by PHILIP WHITE

Chris Carpenter, the celebrated Jackson Family Estates Cabernet master of the Napa Valley, last week flew in to check the 2012 Cabernet sauvignon wines he’s making from the Hickinbotham Vineyard at Clarendon. 

It’s been fascinating to watch a fellow as intelligent, sensitive and, well, fanatical, being confronted with a vineyard so utterly removed from the prized California mountaintops which are his normal currency, but he seems quietly assured that his new Australian babies will be fine once they’ve taught him a thing or two.

With some local winemakers, we attended a tasting of some of the best new and forthcoming Cabernets of McLaren Vale in the cellars of The Victory.  While these were all admirably sound versions of the variety, and a few were really something, Chris remarked that many suffered what Strayan plonk patois calls “the donut”. This is the infamous hole in the middle of the Cabernet palate: unless the viticulture and location is spot on, the wine can be all pretty florals and blackcurrants and whatnot to sniff, and dry and tannic at the other end, but in the middle of the flavour, where we need some smooth plumpness, there’s a yawning, astringent gap.

Which led me to consult one of the single biggest influences on Australia’s preference for growing Cabernet, Wine-growing In Australia, the 1867 work by that pioneer of McLaren Vale viticulture and founder of Tintara, Alexander C. Kelly M.D.

“The Cabernet withstands both drought and heat well,” he wrote, “soils dry and warm suit it admirably; it flourishes in a light sand better than any other, but its wine is not so full-bodied as when grown in a stronger soil; it thrives above all in the graves (gravelly soils).”

And then, as a footnote, he adds “This vine is principally suited to a ferruginous [irony] soil; it is almost the only one in which it prospers.”
  
Publishing this recommendation in a new colony made principally of irony sands baking beneath a hot sun in strings of infuriating droughts had exactly the influence Kelly sought.  Put simply, Cabernet was tough and easy to grow, and it was indeed the great red grape of Bordeaux. But in exchange for these practical advantages, the vigneron would have to put extra work in to blend a wine with no hole in the middle if indeed the vineyard management failed to plug it.

Quoting extensively the great French ampelographer, M. D’Armailhacq, Kelly painstakingly studies the other red varieties of Bordeaux.  As we read on, we discover that the Cabernet he first praises he later names Cabernet gros, which he then suggests may tend to crop much higher than the Cabernet sauvignon, but shares its flavour profile, hardy nature and soil preferences.  He makes no mention of Cabernet franc, so he could be referring to that high-yielding aromatic cutey, or he may refer to the grape we now call Bastardo.  As far as I can ascertain, there has been no Bastardo in Bordeaux at least since the phylloxera plague struck in the later 1800s, whereas Cabernet franc's been there all along.

The next Bordeaux variety he discusses is Carmenere, a late-ripening type which is also drought-resistant.  “Its flavour is excellent and better to the taste than that of the Cabernets; he writes, “the wine from it necessarily reproduces these qualities: it is mellow, and at the same time full and strong-bodied.  It mixes well with the Cabernets, to which it gives more fullness; it keeps almost as long, and gains much by age.”

In the colder vintages, Bordeaux growers found this variety reluctant to ripen: not much was planted there after the phylloxera tragedy.  It grows well in Chile, and now we see some Bordeaux viticulturers showing renewed interest as it seems to suit the new heat.

Kelly then moves on to the “the Merlau or Merlot” which ripens so early it took its name from the merle, the blackbird which eats this variety first.  He says it’s more delicate than the Malbec, and “it has not the perfume and the flavour of the Cabernet, nor yet its keeping quality, but it possesses greater softness.  Combine with the latter, it gives and agreeableness which it does not possess when made of Cabernet alone; the mixing is therefore advantageous.”

He is not a big fan of Malbec, “as the fruit is wanting in mucosity, so the juice is limpid, and the wine has but little body; it is light and wants fullness.”  No plumping of the Cabernet there: more of the same but not so good, eh?

And then Kelly addresses Petit verdot, the Little Green One.  Like Carmenere, this type is a very late ripener, and had almost disappeared from Bordeaux until recent climate warming has seen some resurgence of interest.

Unless proper ripeness is achieved, he suggests, “it has a greenness which may injure instead of improving the wine of the grapes with which it is mixed ... nevertheless, when the Verdot is ripe, it possesses so many good qualities that, notwithstanding this drawback … it gives to the wine body, fullness, and vinosity; it has, above all, a very agreeable flavour, so that it unites well with the cabernets, and makes an excellent mixture.”   

I cannot recollect Kelly referring specifically to the Bordeaux habit of also using Syrah shipped in from Hermitage to fill the Cabernet hole; perhaps this was discontinued by his time, or merely never admitted to.  But this is where the earliest settlers got the idea of blending Cabernet with Shiraz.  It was certainly not an Australian invention, but a blend still common and celebrated much by the likes of the top end Wolf Blass reds and spectacular triumphs like Penfolds Bin 620 Coonawarra Shiraz Cabernet 2008, which is briskly selling out at $1000 a bottle.

It seems pertinent that these lessons of old be reinforced and relearned by many makers of Australian Cabernet, who are aware that the variety is dead easy to grow, so simply turn their gastronomic brains off at that point. 

“It is a notorious fact that modern science has not found its way into the cellar of the vigneron,” Kelly warned, “who follows exactly the same routine that his fathers have pursued for centuries.”

It hasn’t been centuries since the great pioneer took up his pen, but surely sufficient generations of Australian donut Cabernet makers have forgotten his blending instructions, just as their fathers habitually did. 

I wonder how long it will be before we see an Australian blend of Bastardo/Cabernet franc, Cabernet sauvignon, Merlot, Shiraz, Carmenere and Petit verdot, and whether or not a little limpid Malbec also finds its way in.  It can add a pretty perfume, even if it does lack mucosity. 

After they’ve slumbered away a year or two their posh French barrels, it’ll be fascinating to see whether Chris Carpenter eventually decides that his first Australian Cabernets need a little tweak of this or that.  I’ll keep you posted.

ECONOMIC BOTANY BRINGS STOCK BACK

Some important visitors came to Yangarra to pick the organic brains of viticulturer and vineyards manager Michael Lane: above, in the High Sands 1946 Grenache  Vineyard: left, Andrew Carrick (Manager, Collections and Horticulture, Botanic Gardens of Adelaide), Michael Lane, Stephen Forbes (Director, Botanic Gardens of Adelaide) and Alexander Rix (General Manager, Planning and Property Services, Urban Renewal Authority). I love the body ling in these snaps: the sceptical scientist, the director, and the government bloke.  I learned a lot in this interchange.  Below: Rix, Lane, Carrick and Forbes discussing the science of growing grapes without herbicides and other common farming petrochems.  During the winter, when forage growth is normally prolific, these vineyards are now sensibly weeded by cattle and sheep, whose only residue is fertiliser ... photos Philip White ... Speaking of the Botanic Gardens, you have til 4PM this Wednesday, August 15th, to catch Banks’ Florilegium: a very special exhibition of illustrations from Captain James Cook’s First Voyage 1768 – 1771,  from Sir Joseph Banks’ specimens and Sydney Parkinson’s illustrations of Australian flora.  The  à la poupée printing technique involved uses up to ten colours simultaneously on one copper plate. It's in the beautifully-restored Santos Museum Of Economic Botany in the centre of the Botanic Garden on North Terrace. One of this State's best treasures.

 

NICELY SOPHISTICATED AND MINERALLY

Calcrete and limestone in Coonawarra ... photo Milton Wordley

Another linguistics skirmish

The inadequacies of English

Always best to look stuff up
by PHILIP WHITE

Twitter was the scene of a linguistics skirmish amongst wine hacks last week: we concentrated our fire on the use of the current international wine buzzword: mineral.  Regular readers will be aware of how this nonsensically vague term drives me really twisty.

“A beautifully perfumed, seductive and minerally wine,” is a typical back label usage.
 
My riposte is always to ask which mineral they mean; there are many. I suspect they usually mean something like chalky or slaty.  But they could be referring to the sulphate minerals, or the sulphite minerals … is it calcium or ammonium chloride they mean?  Phosphorous, arsenic or even hydrogen oxide?  In its solid form, dihydrogen oxide’s commonly known as ice: frozen water. It’s officially a mineral.

Ironstone, like this stuff at Yangarra, gives a very different range of aromas than do the calcereous chalky plains of Coonawarra ... photo Philip White

The English language is barren of words which relate specifically to aroma or flavour. We must use metaphors and similies, leaving plenty of space for confounding ambiguities.  Even when we grab innocent-looking adjectives like nice we do it ignorant of the word’s primary meanings.  The Shorter Oxford on Historical Principles lists these, from the top, as “1. Foolish, stupid. 2. Wanton, lascivious. 3. Strange, rare. 4. Tender, delicate, over-refined.”  The list goes on to cover everything from “difficult to please” to “not readily apprehended”.  Not until number #13 do we get “Of food: dainty, appetizing.”

Sophisticated is another bugbear.  Those who claim it perfectly describes their wines may be alarmed to discover it means “mixed with some foreign substance, adulterated, not pure or genuine … falsified”, all terms which frequently apply much more appropriately to the product than the marketer would ever intend.

Accuse me of being picky, but consider.  However slender the likelihood of your marketing writer bothering to consult the Oxford, what say your new Chinese agent encounters words like these in your propaganda and bothers to consult that bible of the English language to discover exactly what you mean.

It’s not as if they’re rare descriptors, but pity help the poor bastard who happens to have sophisticated and nice on the same blurb.

It always pays to look things up.

Savoury is another trouble.  Whether they use this, or its American spelling, savory, I reckon most wine people who use it think it means sophisticated and/or nice.

Lesser dictionaries than the Oxford generally agree it means “attractive to the sense of taste or smell.”

It gets tricky when it gets more specific.  “Salty or spicy.  Not sweet … dish served as an hors d’oeuvres or dessert.”  “Not overly sweet.”

The Oxford works through “Spiritually delightful … of saintly repute or memory” before hitting “Used in contradistinction to sweet, as the epithet of articles of food having a stimulating taste or flavour.”

Dig around the Latin roots and you get reams of words that sound alike.  But in the crosshairs, it’s sapor, saporis saporare, “delicacy, taste, refinement”.  Sapa is new wine. Sapiens is wise, discrete.

If I use savoury I try to limit it to something you can actually smell, the herb called savory, Satureja hortensis (above).  It’s a very fresh meadow smell as green as tarragon.  You put it in olive oil and goat cheese and use it in salads, soups, stocks and stuffings.

But hit Wiki and you’re quickly into “umami, or savoriness, a type of taste.”

Umami, a term I use sparingly on wine, is more common than you think.  It’s the smell and flavour of the glutamates, including the monosodium sort.  MSG occurs quite naturally: you’ll get a good solid dose eating a beautifully ripe tomato.  If you blanche and peel ripe tomatoes, dice them, and let their free-run juice drain through muslin you get an exquisite clear syrup which is not much like tomato juice at all.  Somewhere between there and the flavour of clarified chicken or fish stock is pure glutamate territory.

Tomatoes from the Settlement Wines garden

Glutamic acid is among the many amino acids that make up the proteins of yeast cells.  When yeast cells die, their proteins disassemble back to the amino acids that formed them in the first place.  This occurs when your yeast become the dead lees left in your wine barrel after ferment, or in that vegan delicacy, Savory Yeast.  From here we get the chicken or fish stock texture of some wines, which gives a comforting feeling as much as a flavour.

You’ll get small amounts of the monosodium glutamate, as well as the others, in lees-stirred barrel-aged wines, red or white.

I started with a whinge about the lack of English words specific to aroma and flavour.  With perfect Puritan parsimony, topped by some classically Victorian anti-Darwinian denial of human as animal, we pared flavour back, officially to four: sweet, sour, salt and bitter.  They still commonly teach that these are only things that we are capable of tasting.

Which doesn’t explain our appreciation of pure water, or chilli heat.

It was Professor Kikunae Ikeda (left), the Japanese chemist, who discovered in 1908 that the principal component that gave a common flavour to tomatoes, seaweed and meat was glutamate.  He applied the word umami to the sensation it provides.  While it simply means “delicious” it’s also perfectly onomatopœiac, sounding like the mewl of a suckling babe, whatever the language.  There are at least twenty amino acids in breast milk.

As the Prof quite sensibly went on to patent his technique for manufacturing MSG, western science was so reluctant to admit a fifth member to their quartet of dull English words for flavour that once they had niggardly admitted that we must be able to taste something else they applied the word savoury, because that’s what they thought umami meant in English.

In other words, if you were careful, you could use umami on a back label in Japan, especially if it’s a major component of your wine.  But try it on a pious and greening west, and risk the foodists discovering it’s MSG?

Better stick to savoury, methinks, and trust Bacchus that nobody ever looks it up in a dictionary.

TREASURY BEDS CHAMP'S ACCOLADE

"And I will shew wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and the terrible day of the LORD." Joel 2:30-31

Biggest rivals head to bed

Hardcore beefcake action

Scary progeny guaranteed

by PHILIP WHITE

For many, it was a great and/or terrible week.  There’s been plenty of smouldering rage and dark feelings of war in the last days of Chateau Reynella, but that’s only what's happened on the face of the Earth.  Recent big signs in the heavens have included the whole of Constellation itself becoming Accolade, which comes from the French accoler, which came in turn from the from the Vulgar Latin accollare, which means to squeeze the neck. (*1) 

Another is this matter of the choker’s owner, the private equity outfit gaily known as CHAMP, formally getting into bed with its biggest Australian wine rival, Treasury Wine Estates.  This is not just two humungous beefcake models lying back to read to each other, this is hardcore.  In a classic act of Apollonian trajectorialism, they’re gonna squirt into each other’s containers!

“If I made wine from a vineyard I grew and loved, like I do at Marius, and I got it right, and I was proud of it,” my sage mate Pike asked as we wondered at these signs, “if it meant anything to me at all, what would the most critical thing be after growing it and making it?  

“Bottling it myself!”

Small premium producers like Pike dream of affording the luxury of owning their own bottling line.  Contract bottlers can, and do, wreak havoc in batches too small for them to properly notice, but just big enough to provide a meager income for blokes like Pike if the bottler can get it into the bottles unadulterated.  Pike's wines are beautifully bottled, but it’s a fraught scene.  

Woolworths owns Vinpac, by far the biggest contract bottler in the country.  It sees and samples your wine long before you get it on the market. Any bright upper-echelon manager who didn't consider keeping an eye on this to steer Dan Murphy's purchases and the styles of wines Woolworths makes at their giant wineries in the Barossa should be hauled before the shareholders.

On the other hand, surrendering the precious juice of one's toil and soil to one’s foremost rival, or indeed outright enemy, for the final ritual of packaging and sealing seems nuts.

But that’s modern business for you.  CHAMP’s Accolade exports more volume for less money than Treasury; Treasury exports lower volumes for more money than CHAMP’s Accolade.  CHAMP owns the perfectly-named Accolade Park, a huge, fast, bottling and packaging factory in Bristol, UK, which could use some more work; since it now exports so much wine in bulk, Treasury’s bottling line at Wolf Blass in the Barossa could be busier, too.  

So CHAMP shuts Chateau Reynella, as this writer has long maintained it would relentlessly do, and sends that wine to Treasury for bottling in the Barossa, in exchange for Treasury doing its UK bottling in Accolade Park in Bristol. As indeed Tony Keyes prophesied in his essential  Key Report a month before they'd admit to it.

This announcement, along with the news that set the southern Vales smouldering - the bit about 175 people getting the flick - was made in a masterpiece of sophisticated manipulation of media, workmen and women, and message, which they said was necessary to avoid  trouble at the Stock Exchange.  Man, it was crisp!

But it leaves the local wine business reeling with wonderment and terror.  If these two arch rivals can do their swapping of juices business in the name of heightened efficiency and economic rationalism, what other signs and wonders will they provide?

It was perhaps not quite a fluke that this news came the day before Caltex announced it would be closing its oil refinery.  Australian drivers would be henceforth buying their fuel from foreign refiners, whose costs were lower.  Just as oil refineries make raw oil sufficiently explosive and clean to be safely used in motor vehicles, so wine refineries clean and sanitise grape ethanol to make it safe enough for human consumption, with or without explosions.

And that's somebody's oil refinery at the top by the way.  Wineries look like this:

As CHAMP’s Accolade seems intent on leaving Reynella and indeed the historical Tintara winery in the main street of McLaren Vale, both sites ripe for the type of lucrative subdivision we saw fester on the site of John Reynell’s heritage vineyard, why wouldn’t they use up some spare capacity in Treasury’s arsenal of refineries to save a little more money?  If thousands of little guys can get by without the inconvenience of owning your actual  winery, why can't the big guys?  There’s room at Treasury's Rosemount, for example, at McLaren Flat, to make heaps of wine for Accolade.

These huge companies already trade enormous amounts of bulk wine, or buy it from the same grey market traders.  They don't like the cost of running wineries.

Increasing the business of CHAMP’s Accolade Park in Bristol obviously makes it a juicier morsel for sale, just as Treasury’s Wolf Blass bottling hall becomes more alluring.  But showing the world that these two awkward giants can get along so nicely may well be presenting acquisitive companies like China’s scarily-named Bright Food with an even tastier titbit.  This state-owned leviathan is busily buying into the Bordeaux trade; it is often cited as a likely buyer of Treasury.  

Watching James Packer’s Treasury share trading is probably a good barometer.

Now that Treasury has appointed itself some flash new internationalist directors (*2), it will be even more signs and wonders, methinks, and that smoke billowing on the horizon could well be Accolade.  To start with.

There’ll be more human casualties every time a bomb goes off.

It may suddenly seem sensible to have the bottom 80-90 per cent of Australia's wine made in one big factory, and then divvied up.  It would be in the shareholders' interest.

As for moving your refining offshore to save your shareholders a few cents per litre, how long will it be before Jacobs Creek or Bright Foods or somebody starts exporting wine made in China into Australia?  

Forgive me Lord for my impertinence. And praise Bacchus for showing me the light.

*FOOTNOTES: 

1. Pardon my stutter while I repeat my suggestion that big wine companies seem intent on branding themselves with the sorts of names you see on Korean cars.  Which may go part of the way to explaining why they also share the same sort of resale values ... Accolade is a true-blue screamer, and a very good reason why experienced writers should be engaged when boozemongers enter the words business.  I may be overestimating them, but apart from their ignorance of the necking implications, those responsible for Accolade may have been of such sophistry as to imagine their new name had subliminal implications of naughty alcohol and safe lemonade, not to mention the obvious inference of the clap. There already was a Honda called Applause, so I suppose they held back on that. What the hell was wrong with Hardy's Wines?

 2. Non-executive director Paul Rayner will become Treasury chairman, replacing the outgoing Max Ould. As of September 1st., the three new non-executive directors will be Ed Chan, a former president and chief executive of Wal-Mart China, Garry Housell, director of several companies such as Qantas and Orica, and Michael Cheek, a former chairman of Finlandia Vodka Worldwide.

A WEEK OF FEVERISH WOWSERISM

Grenfell Street, Adelaide, 1974.  Adelaide has seen a steady decline in the number of its beautiful old pubs, losing at least 40% of its stock over the last century ... photo Philip White.

Politics and public drinking

Adelaide loses more pubs

Business hard, says Exeter

by PHILIP WHITE

I’d not seen a week of such feverish wowserism for a very long time.  It started with the death by violence of the unfortunate 18 year old, Thomas Kelly, during his first night out without his parents in Kings Cross.

The New South Wales Minister for Hospitality, George Souris, sounded suddenly like that great slave of the big publicans, Premier Sir Robert Askin (right), whose 60s and 70s rule saw him promote himself as a libertarian hero by abandoning the six-o’clock swill and extending liquor licensing hours for all the biggest players.  But little guys getting new licenses?  Not a hope in hell.  Bob Askin’s licensing thugs ruled Sydney with the same rum-riddled brutality that was rife in the days of the Rum Rebellion and the Holey Dollar. 

After Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore’s drive to admit more little independent bars to trade, Sourois made clear his sentiment when he accused small bars of having ''a lower level of surveillance, a lower level of supervision, a lower level of compliance'' … he went on cite the big old venues from Askin’s day as being ''better policed, better supervised than those smaller venues''.  He attacked Moore’s 2008 change of laws to make it easier, cheaper and quicker for small independent operators to get licenses, and made outrageous statements about people drinking Chardonnay.  Put short, he looked really bloody foolish.

This panic was followed by bad Adelaide news.  Chesser Cellars, the genteel timbered gaslit buffet pub for conservatives who couldn’t get entry to the Adelaide Club went down, as did that ancient temple to judicial intemperance, the Crown and Sceptre. Other great pubs are teetering.

Which took me back to the days of the Aurora Action Group, which was formed to save the Aurora Hotel from demolition on the site where Wolf Blass House now sits in Hindmarsh Square. While this became became an outspoken conservationist action group the like of which we have never seen again, it gradually lost steam and fizzled.

 It was the colonial NSW governor Sir John Robinson (1816-1891, left) who best encapsultated South Australia’s early attitude to the booze. 

“None of the men who in this country have left footprints behind them have been cold water men,” he wryly observed. At that point, Adelaide was more a city of pubs than churches.

“Adelaide’s traditional respect of a good beer was always reflected on her street corners,” I wrote in  The Adelaide Pub Guide a decade back, “where beautiful bluestone and sandstone pubs stared at each other through their lacy verandas.”  In 1900, there were 128 pubs within the City square mile.  Paula Stevens of the Adelaide City Council says there are "approximately 79" left, but I think it would be fewer.  And Bacchus only knows how many wine bars we had; they were everywhere.

I asked Kevin Greg, publican of that mighty thirst emporium, The Exeter, why the new slump.

“I don’t know other people’s business,” he said, “but from The Exeter’s point of view there’s no doubt that the cost of business is skyrocketing.  Drinking a beer in a pub is now an expensive luxury.  But it needs to be.  It’s quite alarming, but we must charge enough to pay for the cost of simply doing business.”

Erstwhile landlord of Adelaide's famous Exeter Hotel, Nicholas Binns, with the late Gabriella Bertocci ... Binns  stacked his list with 100 Parker pointers at ridiculously low prices, the cheapest Krug on Earth, house wines by Greenock Creek and Wendouree, Cheong Liew in the kitchen for a while, then Jules Zukelis with her possum pies ... It's always good for hearty food ... if you're looking for lost wine scribes, check The Ex



While it's been a revered rock'n'roll temple to the organoleptic arts and passionate discourse since Binns' day, the Exeter, remember, has no pokies. Few people realize that one of the things that makes the pubs of the East End unique is their absence of gambling machinery – in the ’80s the residents of the precinct lobbied to have this ban imposed on all licenses there.  The Ex has never even had a television.  Which is why it is so special; people love it.  But Kevin rattled off an incredible list of costs and charges and limitations imposed by one interferist bureaucracy or another, and continued with a prophecy of further gloom.

“It’s a fact of life.  I think we’re at the start of quite a significant downturn.  People struggle on, but when times are tough they curtail their discretionary spending and one of the first things to go is the beer in the pub.  The publican’s turnover drops.  It was already tight, but suddenly it’s too hard to pay the rent or the power and you come to work and the landlord’s changed the locks.”
 
This deadly combination of wowser interferism, restrictive legislations, meddling bureaucracies and ridiculously complex business regulation is killing the pubs of the United Kingdom, too.  Perhaps simply because there are fewer left to fail, pub closures there have slowed from 25 per week in 2010 to 12 per week in 2012.

And what’s the main excuse for these restrictions and crippling regulations? Tragedies like Thomas Kelly’s death never help.  Precincts devoted to sex, drugs (incuding booze) and rock’n’roll inevitably develop as cities change and morph, simply because a certain percentage of the population needs such precincts.  We are humans. We self-medicate and party.

Because of their bohemian atmosphere, these precincts confound and annoy all sorts of sanctimonious and pious brethren, many of whom savour the chance to say “I told you so” at terrible accidents like Kelly’s death, or the jobbing of the former Treasurer of South Australia during one of his famous midnight carousals.

“And it IS an accident,” Kevin Greg explains.  “A shocking, unfortunate accident.  Nobody goes out to kill anybody by punching them.  It happens.  It’s not the first time and it’s not the last.  We all feel terribly for the poor victim and his grieving family, but what about the perpetrator?  Has he got mental health issues that are not dealt with?

“When these things happen we should take a deep breath and step back and consider.  We should think of the parents and sisters and brothers of the kid that has done this terrible thing and work out how to help them and support them, too.  It’s never simple.  Instead you’ll have a queue of politicians looking for a sound grab!” 

I’m sure things would be very different if some our politicians had been publicans instead of lawyers.  But then, as Bob Askin knew so well, the big publicans, and their union, the Australian Hotels Association, can be very powerful lobbyists indeed.  Maybe they don’t need to become politicians.  I do seem to recall one big pokies publican, Rod Hurley of the Arkaba, as head of the local AHA, even taking a seat on the board of the ABC for a few years.

Obviously an expert at public broadcasting.

Illegal, but hardly a capital offence: the author learning a little pub culture with a refreshment on his way to school ... not a drink of water man ... photo Stephen Sprigg

BIG WINE FESTIVALS HARDLY LEGAL

Far too many folks have a great day out, but they recall only a blur of wine festivals they attend ... photo Philip White, who, through many years of diligent field work, knows.

 Giant wine region plonkfests?

Outside the spirit of the law

Anybody remember any wine?

by PHILIP WHITE a version of this story appeared in InDaily

When Remy Martin, the family-owned French liquor giant, bought the jewel of Clare, Quelltaler, from Nathan & Wyeth in 1982, its Australian manager, the colorful Francois Henri, appointed a brilliant Alsace winemaker to run the show.  He was Michel Dietrich, from a family-owned winery in Kayserberg.  He left Alsace in a winter of blizzards, arrived in Adelaide in 42 degree heat, hired a car and drove to Clare.

Although it took many years for his impact to properly settle, like decades, really, Dietrich revolutionized Clare white wine-making.  First thing he did was get holes dug in the vineyards and check the geology.  To the ridicule of many locals, he then picked the vineyards accordingly. This had never been done before. Once he’d raised the French tricolour above the old Springvale House, the home of the pioneering Sobels family, he got straight down to making stunning Rieslings with yeast he’d brought from home, and the best ever Semillons in good French oak.

Sobels, as in Carl, had been the winemaker for William Jacob at Jacob's Creek in the Barossa. He'd come from Silesia, just as Dietrich came from Alsace, only 135 years later. 

Michel and Isabelle Dietrich getting to know the rocks at Quelltaler, Watervale, Clare, on a freezing morning in 1983 ... photo Philip White

Dietrich also brought a tale of an ancient vintage celebration. Each year, when their ferments were complete, the people of Kayserberg would stroll through their winding hillside village, tasting each other’s wine in the cellars common beneath their story-book houses, with their fachwerk walls and steep, curvy tiled roofs.  Of course every host supplied the best food they could manage.

It’s 28 years since Dietrich, with the assistance and drive of Jane Mitchell, convinced the winemakers of Clare to emulate this cosy gastronomic celebration with the first Clare Gourmet Weekend.  Same as Alsace.  But in Clare, you drove. 

It's a long way from one end of Clare to the other.

But driving big distances didn't matter. It wasn’t long before the Barossa, pushed by Robert O’Callaghan, had one too.  The tourism bureaucrats hopped aboard, seeing these fixtures as a great way of promoting South Australia, and they’ve never gone away.  I mean the weekends still occur, but the bureaucrats are still there, too.

Then there was the irony of the poor responsible but infectiously jovial mob who'd hired a bus in the Barossa, and their driver blew way over.

Just where the customers came from, and then went back to, was deeply interesting to me.  The promoters, especially those in government, seemed to believe they came from interstate and overseas. In the late ’eighties, Kay Hannaford & Associates conducted a poll, and interviewed a percentage of the visitors at many Barossa cellars.  As I suspected, the vast majority of them were graziers and graingrowers from nearby farmlands: they were almost locals, and simply needed a good excuse to get out and spend a day in the wineries.  Many brought friends from a bit further out, and used it as a get-together. 

And then, many were very local, and didn’t have far to go at all.  Doug Lehmann, for example, then winemaker at Basedow's in Tanunda, voiced delight that it had given him an excuse to visit Bethany Wines for the first time in his life.  It's all of five kays away.

McLaren Vale fills up with many folks from the seaside suburbs which remove its vineyards  from their gulf: I wonder how many times these return, to buy wine, before the next annual gooze.

The ideal size for a small regional wine tasting: the Vale Cru mob offer their wares at The Victory Hotel, Sellicks Hill, McLaren Vale.  No food outside, but if you'd booked, you could enter the pub, sit down, and dine ... photo James Hook

Last week, InDaily reported the kerfuffle amongst the Barossa winemakers, who are disunited about the viability of their event.  Many are disinterested.  It’s the same in McLaren Vale, relative to their Sea and Vines festival.

There's constant rumbling, too, in the smallest mobs, like McLaren Vale's Grand Cru, who do a great presentation of lovely rare wines from deadly producers, but struggle about promotion budgets and never manage to please all their constituents.

Same on the grand scale.  While the huge extravaganzas certainly employ many locals, from security dudes to musicians, chefs, waiters and drivers, they rarely make their participants much profit. Perhaps because of this, they’re regarded purely as promotional events, but other than that poll in the Barossa, all those years ago, I know of no proper investigation made into just who attends, for what reasons, and what their attendance does to consequent wine purchasing.

Casual carousing tourists drive serious wine buyers away.

The old notion of carnivale – the death of meat, and its gluttonous consumption before Lent – and the feasting of feastival always involved wild revelry and over-indulgence; invariably, the modern “gourmet” weekends teeter on the verge of affording a little too much respect to this history.  Ask the security guards, or the poor old traffic police who have the unseemly task of ensuring the roads are free of drunks without making enemies in tourism or amongst the winemakers themselves. 

The riotous Barossa Vintage Festival of old always occurred at the end of Lent. After all that abstinence, and the hard work of vintage, Easter sometimes arrived in time for everybody to overdo it at an officially-sanctioned local bacchanale. If the timing was wrong, you did it anyway. 

Vintage lunch amongst the brimming  fermenters at Petagna Wines, Sellicks Hill, McLaren Vale. The soulful  chef Nigel Rich, centre, blue, cooked meaty perfections with Paul Petagna, head of table.  (Nigel's opening a new joint in the main street of McLaren Vale this Friday.  It will rock.) True wine lovers seek memorable, intimate experiences like this when they attend wine festivals, but they often get mass idiocy with folks they don't particularly like  ... photo Philip White

In that Barossa poll, the average number of people in each car was around three.  Nobody was happy at my suggestion that this meant that one in three of the visitors attracted could not partake of the product being promoted without breaking the spirit of the law, if not the law itself.  Not a popular score.  But the superintendant of Traffic Police of the day agreed wholeheartedly.

South Australia’s determination to be the Festival State has always puzzled me. Everyone gets their turn, and then seems to be expected to fade until the next big festival.  It seems that after our annual or biennial celebration of one lot or another, they should then retreat, to let every other mob have their go.   Writers get a week or two out in the light, for example, and then politely disappear for twelve months.

The Yearlings laughing through a perfect afternoon at Yangarra, at Sea and Vines.  The music's easy: you hire good musicians and give them support at the gig.  But feeding the throngs, and keeping everybody tidy, and off the roads, is a lot more difficult on a big scale ... photo Milton Wordley
 
Michel Dietrich returned to France to make wine in Bordeaux in 1987, which he does to this day at his Château Haut Rian. If we paused long enough to consider his original idea, and its source in that fairytale village on the mountain away off in Alsace, we might begin to consider festivals which people can attend on foot if the organisers can't arrange responsible transport.  Go smaller; go sub-regional; have more of them ... and make it really hard for anybody to drive themselves.

An obvious possibility exists at my back door, here at Yangarra Estate, smack on the faultline at Kangarilla. Spread along this escarpment are a string of delicious little wineries that many have never heard of.  These could get together, work out how many people they could comfortably accommodate at any given time, and sell tickets in advance.  According to the schedule so derived, people could catch a charter bus from the city, gather on Eyers Flat common near Kangarilla, and in small groups proceed from cellar to cellar by feeder buses as the day goes by.

And you know what?  It'd be better if not everyone was in it.  Break it up. Make it smaller.



Jay Hoad plays for the ladies at Settlement Wines, McLaren Vale photo Philip White

I’m sure to miss some, but Yangarra, Hugo, Pertaringa, Noon, Marius, Whitefeather, Halifax, Battle of Bosworth, Danshie’s Rise, Lot Thirteen, Cradle of Hills, Cascabel, and Petagna could be in this, with everybody finishing at The Victory to savour Douggie’s Rudderless reds, grown right beside the pub.  Bus back to Eyer’s Flat or the city.  Done. All included in the cost of the ticket.

Such an event - call it The Faultliners - would have a consistent terroir theme, as all the wines would be from that peculiar piedmont, just as the Kayserberg wines come from vineyards snaking along their stony hillside. It would invariably attract wine buyers more than revelers. And it would open the gate for other small manageable festivals with similar themes.  So, as far as the district went, it wouldn’t all happen at once.  Properly marketed, such focused nuts-and-berries events would also attract more serious interstaters.

By Jingo winemaker John Gilbert tweeted this week that the best food and wine festival he’d attended was in the small Victorian Alps appellation of Heathcote, where they simply set the oval up with a circle of marquees, and people wandered about, grazing and tasting.  This reminded me of the old days of the maypole on Tanunda Oval, where things had a true village ring about them.

Sure, there would be misdemeanors.  But if you did it like that, both security and public transport would be much easier to manage, and remove many of these disputes which are inevitable as long as we insist that the huge piss-ups of yore are socially responsible or sustainable.

And, like, do they draw many serious long-term customers?

Big Bob McLean hosting a fair dinkum winery lunch at McLean's Farm in the High Barossa ... small is more fun, people never forget, they buy more wine, word-of-mouth applause goes on and on, and everybody can do it by bus ... photo Milton Wordley

THE CITY WENT SOFT ON COFFEE: A LAMENT

The author visits Adelaide's East End to do heavy Mines Department drilling business in the pre-latte Bat Chain Puller days ... obviously something rather heavy in the back of the ute ... I seem to recall a Terex diff crownwheel ... photo Chris Langman; artwork: Maire Mannik (left)  ...   The following is a 1996 letter to that inveterate writer of letters to the editor, Edgar Woods Castle of Tungkillo, in response to the alarm he wisely showed at the conversion of a classically-cluttered inner-city electrical repair works to a sanitary chrome and glass coffee joint.

Losing our mysto-letric 'hood: 

Letter to Edgar Woods Castle

Coffee corrupts wires and chains 

Dear Edgar,

Whatever did happen to that temple in Pulteney Street? I mean, the guy could've died - which seems unlikely, given the weight of wireless activity he conducted over the years - but even then the sheer mass of the valves and wire and housings - which would have been dangerously left to vibrate without his management - wouldn't have tolerated the sideways motion essential for transport. 

Meltdown.
    
The other one was the Central Saw Works opposite the divers' chandlery just there off Gouger Street. That guy did die physically, leaving something like seventy six thousand giant teeth unfiled. Apparently these surrendered the remnants of their bite and gradually dulled away and resumed enough for the Officials to interrupt and come in and move them, although a couple of the huge sawmillers' band saws - I witnessed him wrestling a twenty four footer across his leather apron once - came over quite snakey when the bailer twine gave way and the damned things unwound and lashed about like giant serpents from Hell. 

They reckon the Officials went into the corners fairly quickly. 

Levitate or shred?
    
I also recorded a fairly serious draw whilst attempting to pass Adelaide Chain Pullers in Hindley Street. My calculations suggested it had something to do with the amount of  pointillismic energy which builds up around unused tackle blocks and heavy duty chain tensioners, but Mum said it was just dirt. She shoulda known: her Dad made coil springs for trains when he wasn't preachin the gospel.  Nowadays I can't even work out where that place was: no matter how slowly I move, I can't recieve anything and you'd think there'd be some sort of trace of it remaining there amongst all the shish kebab joints and whores. One Grote Street premises brings it to mind, along a bit from the Opera. Mainly Sidchrome stuff there though: big workshop kits, and nowhere near the force. Not enough chain.
    
But if it's just Pulteney Street you're talking, the old Poultry Association Hall was always fairly powerful, even though the marriage of poultry and Pulteney had a slightly dodgy sort of poofy fluffiness about it. I liked the big wall plaques which listed the Grand Champion chooks of generations of full-time fowl wranglers. Empty, she was as good as a Buffs' Lodge. The only times I ever saw her full was when the Old Man would bring us all down from Kanmantoo and rent her for a Revival, and he'd be out the front screaming Hellfire and Jesus' Blood, calling on the fire of perdition to drive the stray souls a-crawling down that sawdust trail past the lists of the great roosters of Australia. I couldn't get the cupboard open but I reckon they kept quite a few stuffed chooks in there for special rituals.
    
Nineteen ninety I actually moved from Mount Crawford to Hurtle Square - everything came along without much resistance - and during the ensuing years wandered quite a lot of Pulteney en route to Binnsy's Thirst Emporium, and over and over I remembered those moments of enlightenment in the Chook Hall and compared them to the constant hum all those wires and valves built up in your man's place. The simmering power of that barely contained electricity won hands down, which to me seemed to be a good indicator of how religion falters when you take too much of the mystery out of her. She needs quite a deal of arcane mumbo jumbo, and not all that black and white hot and cold Talk Straight To Jesus bullshit the Old Man shouts. Which is why the Greek Orthodox, just as an example, usually get a pretty good mob. The Roman church suicided, admitting the English mass. Although Rome had been uncertain really since stoicism degraded to dogma and Marcus Aurelius said: "Blessed be the partial, for they shall inherit the earth". My Old Man would probly get along okay with Marcus Aurelius. 

Not a bad bloke, really, Marcus Aurelius, but no great shakes with the religion. Stoicism worked best as a rumour. Another thing he said - and it's fair dinkum this time - was "All things are the same: familiar in experience, transient in time, sordid in their material; all now such as in the days of those whom we have buried". And he said: "Accept without pride, relinquish without struggle." And furthermore: "To acquaint yourself with these things for a hundred years, or for three, is the same". I can see him there on a quiet night on the Germanic front, casting aside his cloak to take up the clay and carve out another pristine meditation by the fire. I'm sure he was a resumptionist, too, but somehow the purple job of Emperor led him to literacy, and his faith degraded to dogma as if to prove itself, resuming to its own gravitas. 
    
Top half of Nicholas Binns' Exeter by Milly the Kid 1987

Nossir Edgar, I reckon that if he did die they never could've got the stuff to move laterally to the truck, because it was all connected up and the force would've kept it tangled and glowering, right where she was. Pretty frightening: considering the danger the Officials were in, and the fools never realised. Probly in white coats and everything. So I'm buggered if I know how they converted it to a joint where all these mugs sit, eating cake: bastards must be hard as nails. Or maybe just so stupid they never realise that their motions don't set properly and float. Nor that their girlfriend hates their breath. Probly blame the coffee. And go back for more, day after day. Jesus. Hell.
    
One of the reasons is I've got this domestic Kingsley shelf wireless - the one about eighteen inches long, with the tuning dial about the same size as the speaker - is that it was Pat Dadonna's down at the Royal Oak. He'd sit there with his hand on it, stroking the race results out, the other one working his smoke. It'd get so bloody cold there the topless barmaid would don a guernsey once everybody'd got their drink and she'd take it off just to serve you and then put it back on again and sit there on a stool down one end while Pat sat up the other in the dark, long brown hand on the Kingsley. Listening. If his equus got up he'd pat that wireless like a good little boy, and we made jokes he never understood about Pat being an abbreviation of Pasquale, which was his real name. That Kingsley's got his beautiful Italian hand grease all over it and it's number five seven one zero four one. Talk about patina. I took a sheilah down there who was a Professer of language from Italy and she couldn't understand a word old Pat said. Dialect, she said. She was pretty weird anyway: rough trader. There's a scrap of a sticker on the back of it that says BUY BETTER AT BAILETTI'S 192-4 Hindley Street CYCLES FIREARMS ELECTRICAL. Anyway, the bloody thing keeps fading in and out and I can't part with it because when Pat eventually sold the pub and took his wife to New York for the first holiday of their lives he dropped dead of a heart attack in Times Square and that was that. Monica reckons I should clean it up if I want to listen to it but she doesn't understand all those years of goosebumped barmaids shivering in the dark and Pat just sitting there smoking, talking a lingo that nobody else in the world could understand. Just before he went away he cleared out the cellar a bit and put a bottle of Sedna on the shelf, as if it was brand new. He eventually found a catalogue old enough to list a price and I bought it. The stuff hadn't been manufactured for twenty years, but when I asked if he had any more he said something about getting more in, as if you could do it just like that. Karl Seppelt named it Sedna because that's Andes backwards and the cola nuts came from the Andes. I could never work out why he put cows on the label, but I enjoyed being able to purchase it in chemists when I was just a kid. They knew I had a serious respect for Pat so they gave me his wireless and some other bits and pieces when they cleared the whole joint out. Anyway, Edgar, in the absence of BAILETTI'S CYCLES FIREARMS ELECTRICAL I could use that bloke in Pulteney Street, because I know he'd fix that little Kingsley in a zip, and he'd never clean any of Pat's grease off it.     

Another great wireless was the one the proprietor of the Ceylon Hut kept on during the cricket season. He set it up on one of the dining tables in the middle of the restaurant, with stacks of dockets and newspapers and stuff all around it. It was a beaut white bakelite job, and he lit her up with one of those old fashioned gooseneck desklamps with a globe no stronger than about fifteen watts. Hairoil bloke, he was, glasses, proper part on the left. He managed to make cricket become part of the flavour of his curries and I'll bet you not a soul knows whatever happened to that wireless when he left and it resumed.
    
Some of this is really hard to come to grips with but I trust you, because I have faith in your theory of resumption. Just never let it decay too far into doctrine -- we don't require such vivid proof. Very few can really come to grips with it, but I'm right in there with you. 

I lived out of a fine Saratoga trunk from nineteen eighty five through to nineteen ninety, when a mate demanded it back because he reckoned he'd never ever given it to me in the first place. I reckon that if a bloke can't live comfortably out of a Saratoga there's something wrong with him. And if another bloke gives you one because he found it at an auction and he reckons you could use it and appreciate it better than he could and then he turns around and says he never gave it to you in the first place then he probly believes in resumption, too, even if he dies without ever understanding any of it.

Keep that stylus honed, Edgar. I like it.
 
Philip White,
Adelaide.
Wednesday 19th of December 1996.