DREW NOON'S PHYLLOXERA STANCE

This is of vital importance to anybody who loves South Australian old vine wine, or any wine made from grapes grown on their own natural born roots:  


15 October 2012

Attention: 

 Alan Nankivell, CEO
46 Nelson St
Stepney SA 5069
admin@phylloxera.com.au

Submission from:

Drew Noon
Noon Winery
P.O. Box 88
Rifle Range Road,
McLaren Vale SA 5171

Dear Board Members,

Re: Submission to the Phylloxera Board regarding risk assessment and the Plant Quarantine Standard

Declaration of interest:

I am a small, independent grape grower and wine maker with old vines planted on their own roots, in McLaren Vale. My livelihood depends on the quality these old vines are able to produce. I do not have the need or desire to move grapes or machinery into or out of South Australia. I have no financial interest in any vine nurseries or the sale of plant material.

Introduction:

South Australia has something special to protect in having phylloxera free vineyards. The Phylloxera Board’s role is to keep South Australia phylloxera free to maintain this advantage. The path that the Board is taking to align South Australia’s Plant Quarantine Standard to the National Phylloxera Management Protocol (as currently written) places South Australia at increased risk of a phylloxera outbreak resulting from the freer movement of grapes, machinery and plant material into South Australia this allows, from regions we’ve never accepted them before. This includes, alarmingly, regions alongside known phylloxera infested zones.

I call on the Phylloxera Board to take a precautionary approach to relaxing the laws which have kept South Australia phylloxera free for so long. If we allow phylloxera in through lack of precautions, it’s very likely there’ll be no going back (eradication is rarely successful). One mistake is forever.

We don’t have to relax our standards. The National Protocol sets out guidelines for the management of phylloxera but recognises that states determine their own regulations. There is no compulsion for South Australia to adopt the National Protocol as our laws.

The Phylloxera Board is promoting “Farm Gate Security” to growers and we all need to practice this but I call on the Phylloxera Board to get on the front foot, at the border and maintain our first line of defence. We expect you to protect our state from phylloxera, we can protect our farm. The Board appears to be walking away from this responsibility, advising growers to provide their own defences when the pest arrives at their door. The battle is lost by then. This approach is not acceptable. This is not what levy payers expect from the Phylloxera Board.

Where is the risk in adopting the National Protocol?

The Phylloxera Board is negligent in its duty in accepting the National Phylloxera Protocol (as currently written) as the basis for our laws. It incurs a heightened and unacceptable level of risk to South Australia in doing so.

There are two principal new risks incurred to South Australia from adopting the National Protocol.

They are:

1. The risk posed by the upgrade survey.

The survey is critical because it is used to establish area freedom.

If an area is considered free of phylloxera by the survey, then it can move risk vectors to other phylloxera free areas (such as South Australia) under the National Protocols (as currently written). The survey needs to be of a rolled gold standard. The problem is the current survey is not good enough. This has been demonstrated in practice in the Yarra Valley (see the Yarra Valley Case Study page 16 & 17 available on the Phylloxera Board website). Subsequent research by DPI Victoria Biosciences Research Division has found both a DNA probe and emergence traps more effective at early detection than the root survey. Even when repeated twice over a three year period as required by the Protocol, there is significant risk that the survey would miss a low level infestation.

The Phylloxera Board has considered the risk posed by the survey in its recent Risk Assessment September 2012 and rated it as LOW. Where is the science behind this rating? What are the confidence levels provided by the survey of detecting a low level infestation? This assessment is subjective and not based on fact. There is no information offered to support this rating.

The reality is we do not have any survey method that is good enough to establish phylloxera freedom and until such time as we have one available, we should not accept claims made by new areas on the basis of the current survey. This represents a big new risk to South Australia.

2. The risk posed by proximity to an infested area (a PIZ):

This is another risk of concern to growers which the Board has considered in its recent Risk Assessment September 2012 and rated as LOW. This defies common sense and invites doubt about the credibility of the Risk Assessment.

One only has to look at where all the outbreaks have occurred in the past 15 years to illustrate that regions closer to the infested areas are at greater risk. This is why the PIZ boundaries keep getting extended. To deny there is a significant proximity risk causes a loss of confidence in the Board and the risk assessment process. Where is the science to support the assessment that the risk relating to proximity is Low?

 
Other new risks flow from these two.

That is:

Because there is a significant risk the survey would miss a low level infestation, the risk posed by allowing grapes, machinery and plant material in from new regions declared phylloxera free on the basis of the survey is too high.

Because proximity to an infested area brings higher risk of an outbreak, we should not allow risk vectors into South Australia from areas alongside infested zones, which you have already sanctioned and is currently allowed. 

What we want:

I call on the Phylloxera Board and the regulators to stop making changes to South Australia’s Plant Quarantine Standard to align with the National Phylloxera Protocol (as it is currently written). I support the Board’s proposal as stated in the “Risk Assessment September 2012” document that the Plant Quarantine Standards “remain as they are now proclaimed as at July 2012.”, provided that South Australia adopts a precautionary principle in relation to new PEZs declared since 2000, treating them as Phylloxera Risk Zones in light of the significant risks they pose as discussed above. I want the Phylloxera Board to promote this change to PIRSA and the regulators so that this upgrade to SA’s Plant Quarantine Standards will be made without delay.

I want the Board to get on the front line in protecting South Australian vineyards from phylloxera rather than bowing to pressure from other states interests including nurseries who want access to our market and some big wine companies who want to be able to move grapes into South Australia to centralised processing wineries for financial gain. The Board’s mission is to protect South Australian vineyards from phylloxera and I want you out there doing just that. Not promoting “farm gate security”. That is principally my responsibility. Yours is to make policies to prevent phylloxera getting into South Australia by protecting our borders. Leaving our Plant Quarantine Standards as they are and classifying new PEZs as PRZs would provide strong evidence you are doing that.

Growers I talk to are not silly. They have absolutely no appetite for increased risk from phylloxera and they expect the Phylloxera Board to ensure adequate protections are in place. In particular to protect them from the risk posed by Victoria and the movement of grapes and other risk vectors. If they knew that you were sanctioning a relaxation of the protections that have been in place, they would be furious.

At our McLaren Vale Phylloxera Board stakeholder meeting, one senior grower who sat in front of me during the presentation and didn’t say much, turned around at the end and asked incredulously “who’s paying these guys?”, another during the presentation called out “it sounds like you’re asking us to practice unsafe sex”. Growers (your stakeholders) are not happy with relaxing the standards. They see no benefit to them, only to the other states and big wine companies.

These changes are being made at a time when phylloxera is on the move in Victoria more than at any time since introduction of the pest in the late 1800s.

I suggest that 50 years from the last outbreak would be a good time to begin discussing relaxing the quarantine standards with South Australia’s grape growers and I’m not sure you’d get any sympathy then!

This is certainly NOT the time to be dropping our border protections. Rather, growers would like you to be strengthening them.

Comments on the Phylloxera Boards 10 risks and proposed actions:

I endorse the McLaren Vale Grape Wine and Tourism Associations comments in their submission in relation to these risks and proposed actions.

In terms of priority, these risks and actions should be dealt with after dealing with the treatment of all new PEZs as PRZs. This change in the definition of a PEZ in our Plant Quarantine Standard should be made urgently and completed before January 2013 and the next grape harvest.

Changes required to the National Phylloxera Management Protocol:
 
The Protocol needs changing to protect all members of the industry nationally.

The survey as defined in the Protocol can only establish a low risk area rather than a pest free area. We have no survey methodology at present rigorous or robust enough to establish pest freedom. The difficulty of early detection of phylloxera and the need for better methods is well recognised by research scientists. Hoffman and Herbert (2006) in their paper titled “Finalising and validating a diagnostic tool for the early detection of phylloxera” state that “There is an urgent need to develop a phylloxera-specific detection system…” so that phylloxera detection would not rely on “problems with visual detection…” Until we have such a proven system for early detection, we should not be relying on the root survey as outlined in the National Protocol. It isn’t proven or supported by science and the risks and costs of a mistake are too high.

Therefore, I call on the Phylloxera Board of South Australia to argue this case at the national level, through the National Vine Biosecurity Committee, for a change to the National Protocol to require treatments and precautions to apply to the movement of risk vectors from PEZs declared since 2000 to other PEZs, the same as are applied from PRZ to PEZ, until such time as we have a survey proven by science to be robust enough to establish pest freedom and an on-going survey programme in place to ensure this status is maintained.

History shows that phylloxera has avoided containment all around the world. Australia is in a unique position to maintain its old vine heritage and advantage over other wine producing countries. Our strict quarantine standards have defied the odds so far. Giving up this advantage by taking unnecessary and unquantified new risks would be a tragedy.

The Phylloxera Board and the State Government have a duty of care to apply a precautionary principle in relation to phylloxera risk. Please take this precautionary approach to the national forum to protect South Australia and all regions from a potentially tragic mistake and in the meantime please increase rather than decreasing our own level of protection in South Australia’s Plant Quarantine Standard.

With many thanks,

Drew Noon.

FOR REVELATIONS OF MORE LURID WEIRDNESSES AND INDICATIONS OF EVEN HAIRIER LIKELIHOODS AND CONFLICTIONS, CLICK RIGHT HERE! 

OR HERE.

VALE CRU HITS THE VIC : SOCIAL PAGES

The author with Dudley Brown of Inkwell Wines. Dudley is an activist.  We are not famous for sitting on the fence. This photograph of us sitting on the fence is by Leon Bignell MP, the local Member of Parliament..  All the rest are by Philip White.

MICK MORRIS OAM - FROM THE ARCHIVE

Veteran Rutherglen winesmith Mick Morris was awarded the Order of Australia earlier this year.  The Morris winery at Fairfield Estate was Australia's biggest until the dreaded Phylloxera struck Rutherglen late in the 1800s. Thanks to photographer John Russell and The Border Watch for permission to use this image.

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Taking The Mick In Rutherglen

Great Muscats In Kelly Country
Sharing A Few Ancient Tinctures

by PHILIP WHITE – This was written for The Sydney Review in June 1991

The roof is low and it ticks in the heat.  Little bit of a ripple of old galvo; just a flyspot on Aussie.  Underneath, in the dark, the rows of sweaty black barrels suck the light from the air, just as the glowering juice inside them will suck all the water out of your eyes.  

The only brightness in here is where the sun pings through old nailholes, splattering the dirt floor with hot white polka dots.

This is where Mick Morris works.  He comes out of the gloom in his neat olive drills, with ‘Morris Wines’ in racy cursive on the pocket.  He is a nuggety, sun-dried man that looks at you through a pair of squinting eyes that shine, even here, and his hand is like a mechanic’s.  He moves sideways a touch, and one of those inch-wide sunbeams lights up the parting of his short back’n‘sides.  He is shrouded in cobwebs.  They stick to his hair oil.  The brightness of the sunspot hurts your eyes. 

“Would you like to have a look around the winery?” he asks, wiping his hands on a rag. 

You tend to lurch at him when he says it: a rude, lustful, salivatory sort of lunge that you immediately regret, but it makes no impact on Mick.  Happens to him all the time.  ’Cause when he picks up a couple of glasses and that metre of stained plastic hose and leads you off into the dark you know you are a very lucky piglet indeed, and you are about to do some irreparable damage to your old notions of heaven.  Here under this roof, this bloke is the caretaker of one of the galaxy’s rarest troves: a shedful of very old Muscat, some of it pre-Phylloxera. 

The smell of the joint is as vivid as its pictures.  Somewhere there amongst the musty, dusty aromas of ancient oak, hot iron, powdery gunmetal dirt, and a thousand tiny leaks where the good oil drips and weeps, you have a cornucopia of smells, all Australian, and the single absolute essence of this larrikin isle, ca. 1859, which is when this temple opened.

Follow Mick down the barrels, stepping slow and soft to leave both powdery floor and slumbering, sulking Muscat as they are, and you can hear the jangle and clatter of harness and hoof as Ned (left) and the Kelly Gang rocks up for a long slow one.  Rutherglen is, after all, their patch.

There are wines here which began their life in those days.  At the end of your sipping, slurping, sighing lap with Mick, if you’re particularly good, he may take you to one small cognac barrel which seems to be the holiest of holies.  The stuff inside has wasted and evaporated, concentrated and stewed there beneath the baking roof for so long it has turned to treacle.  Its siphoning days are long past: you dip a stick in now and lick it and you know you have, in that drop, the refined spirit of what was once many buckets of ripe, sweet Muscat grapes. 

A spoonful of such concentrate can make a cask of much younger stuff take great leaps toward the sort of magnificence only large age can impart: it is, in fact, concentrated age.  You will taste it for days, and then weeks, and even months and years later, in the supermarket queue, at the dull wheel, in your bed or the pub or the pool, some trigger will squeeze and the grin will spread and the eyes glaze as the flavour and the whiff and the rich, sticky glory of it all comes sweeping back.

Once when I visited, Mick apologised that that muscat in ‘Grandad’s Barrel’ wasn’t as old and pure as it may have seemed.  It seemed very damned old to me, with its gluey, utterly hypnotising nature. 

How, I enquired, could it not be old?

“Well”, said Mick, staring at his boots, “it got so thick a few years back I had to freshen it up a bit”.

“Oh Mick, really?  How long back?”

“About thirty years.”

“Oh.  And what did you dilute it with?”

“Just a little bit of forty year old.”

“Oh.”

But it’s not all muscat there in Mick’s shed.  He has Muscadelle, which they call Tokay in Rutherglen, as old and profound in its intense wicked stickiness, and a hoard of ageing Durif, which he uses in vintage port and dry red table wine.   
   
He came my way recently, and we snuck out to lunch. 

“I don’t make much white, so I’ve brought mainly reds”, he said softly enough for the uninitiated to imagine he was apologising.

“You don’t make any bloody white, Morris”, I joked, knowing his son David does most of that at Griffith.

“And of course you’ve brought ALL reds!”

Those deep cellar eyes did their lightshow and he poured out his Shiraz/Durif sparkling burgundy, and said “This is far too young, this stuff”, and I agreed and it went down like silk, like velvet, like Bess the landlord’s daughter.  The landlord’s black-eyed daughter.

“Now we’ll have the lighter red”, he said, tipping his new Cabernet, the 1988.  It was intense, sinister wine of much proportion: a silky thing, but strong. I said as much.

“Yes, it’s about 15.1%”, he said, apparently oblivious to the rest of the winemakers in Australia, who try to keep their table wines between eleven and thirteen percent alcohol by volume. 

“But if you like the bigger wines, you’ll probably like the Durif”, he said, “They get up above sixteen.”

“Oh.  Doesn’t port start at seventeen?”

“Yeah.  But that’s fortified.  That’s different.”

“Oh.”

I may point out here that one degree Baumé is a level of grape sweetness which, when fermented to dryness, will produce just over one per cent by volume pure ethanol.  The intensely sweet botrytis dessert wines you find in half bottles are not much riper than these black grapes Mick uses to make dry red.  The difference is he ferments all that sugar to alcohol, producing very deep strong wines of great longevity.

Any way, we ploughed through various back vintages of Durif, finally lobbing at the 1970, which, for a wicked black thing, actually smelt a lot like a good sauternes, a suggestion at which Mick showed faint signs of shock.  It was rich, sweet, chocolatey wine, naive, sinuous, long, and as clean as a whistle.

“I think that’d be fairly high in alcohol”, Mick warned.

“Oh?” I said, looking quizzically at the label, which clearly stated “13.5% ALCOHOL”.

“We used to out 13.5 on the labels in those days because we thought that was optimal.  We never got that low much, though, of course.  They ripen up quick.”

“Oh.”

“Now.  I’ve brought along a couple of bottles of my Old Show Muscat for us to try.”

“Oh.”

“And some Old Show Tokay.  Bottled it up ’specially.  I actually prefer the Tokay.  You’ll notice... ”

There is no point in writing more about this.

Morris Winery ... now part of the transnational Pernod-Ricard group, whose major Australian winery is at Jacob's Creek in the Barossa.  The current furore about South Australian authorities attempting to relax the regulations on the movement of machinery and plant material from Phylloxera country into Phylloxera-free vignobles reflects the concern of South Australian growers of priceless old vines on their own roots. They feel the regulations should be tightened, not relaxed.

RAY BECKWITH ADMITS TO OLD AGE

Ray Beckwith and Thelma Schubert at Ray's 100th birthday celebration at Kalimna Homestead in February.  Ray made a passionate speech about his discovery of the importance of pH in winemaking before the Second World War.  It was Ray who appointed Max Schubert (1915 – 1994) , Thellie's husband, to his job as chief winemaker for Penfolds at The Grange, Magill, in 1948 .... photo Richard Humphrys

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A century is a long time
by PHILIP WHITE

Genius wine scientist Ray Beckwith has left home. 

Since his 100th birthday in February, Ray has gradually, reluctantly, had to admit that he’s not quite up to looking after himself with the dignity he’d prefer, so he’s has moved up the street into Barossa Village aged care.

“I need a lot more nanna naps now,” he admits with a shy grin.

Ray had been receiving a carer's pension for looking after his disabled son Jim, who's in his seventies.

The man who wrote the recipe for modern winemaking worldwide had been hospitalized three weeks ago.  He finds his energy levels too low to waste them pushing his zimmer frame around, and is preferring to spend whatever vim he has on thinking, talking, and savoring a glass of good red with his meals.

His neighbor and friend, Liz Nash, visits him daily.  “In hospital, he was adamant that he was going to be ‘home any day’,” she said. “Then early last week, he quietly told me that he had reached the age where ‘others’ were now making decisions for him.  He appears to have accepted that he will live out his days in care … mind you he knows exactly how many days he’s been in the home.”

If you’d care to drop Ray a note – he loves receiving mail - or feel inclined to send him a bottle of your best, please do so.  He’s never been a big fan of what he politely calls  ‘the wine that comes in a box’!  

It’s Barossa Village, John Atze Parade, Nuriootpa, South Australia 5355.

We don’t want our greatest living winemaking treasure feeling left out!

Ray and Peter Gago at the 100th at Kalimna ... photo Philip White

BARFLIES: THREE TRUE BEAUTS

The Exeter Hotel, 246 Rundle Street, East End, Adelaide, drawn by Millie The Kid (Amelia Dickins) at 17 years of age, from across the road in 1987, when all the adults she knew drank there. This postcard is now a  precious rarity, and Millie's a grown woman with a family of her own.  Funny thing is she only drew the top floor, which nobody seems to question. I always thought she'd hoped we'd leave the drinks at the downstairs bar, and head up to that balcony for solids.  We were always a bit short of solids.

No Headline Required
by PHILIP WHITE

DATELINE: Mid-to-late eighties. Summer.  Head for The Exeter.  Damn!  There’s a bloke on my barstool in the corner, where I like to sit with my back to the wall so I can watch the door.  He looks sickly, effete, so I stay away and drink further down the bar, with Lawrence.  The next day, the Englishman’s there again.  This is becoming a bad habit.   I sidle closer and make conversation.  He’s a dismissive Pom who seems to think we’re half-witted alien peasants, but he understands architecture: he’s fascinated by the pub’s chamfered corner with the door in it - the door I like to look through from my perch in the corner - and he likes his Cooper’s Ale by the slow pint.  He has the distant smell of the traveler: the man adrift without a bed; almost without interest. He reminds me of the schoolteacher in Wake In Fright.  Day three, I go earlier, to beat him to my spot.  When he arrives he seems irritated to be dislodged.  I explain my historical attachment, and why I like to keep an eye on the door; he seems to accept my theory, but would prefer to have the corner to himself as he’s not too well and would prefer to sit.  We talk about the bush he has just traversed and how big and ancient and overwhelming it is, and the sorts of dried-out people who inhabit it.  He mentions Africa with the sort of disdainful familiarity some folks show their dirty kitchen. He never returns.

POST SCRIPT: It was at least a year later when my copy of Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines arrived.  It had been much discussed: the great Brit travel writer focusing his sentimental gaze on Australia’s relationship with its original peoples.  I had devoured his In Patagonia, The Viceroy of Ouidah, and On The Black Hill, but they’d been in paperback.  This time, I’d gone the whole posterity hog and paid full tote for the hardcover.  It had the author’s photograph on the back.  I’d never seen a photograph of him before.  It was Bruce, the Pom in the pub.  We had never discussed our professions.  He died in 1989.

DATELINE: The Exeter, early ’nineties. “Hey Philip,” a mate says.  “There’s an interesting bloke in the saloon.  Big hat.  Cowboy. Wonder who he is.” Eternally curious about potential drinking compadres, I lurch through for a look.  He’s denim from arsehole to breakfast, and sure, the hat’s big.  He’s got his worn-out ostrich skin cowboy boots up on a chair, and he’s stretched out, reclining, back to the wall, drinking a short whiskey on ice.  He’s legit.  I am too close not to offer a howdy.  “Howdy mate,” I say, awkwardly.  “Where you from?”  “I live in a trailer in Willie Nelson’s backyard,” he drawls in a smoky baritone.  “Where you from?”  When I shake hands, I realise there’s not much of his right one left: it seems all little finger and thumb.  He holds it up.  “Never try to stop a .44,” he says with a laugh.  “I’m Billy Joe Shaver.”


POST SCRIPT: I couldn’t believe my luck.  This was the dude who’d written songs, not just for Willie, but for Elvis and Kristofferson and Waylon and the lads.  

They revered him.

His album Old Five And Dimers Like Me was an outlaw classic; among his more memorable couplets is the inimitable "The Devil made me do it the first time, second time I done it on my own".  

We drank awhile and talked of my heroes and his, and later clomped around to the Queen’s Head where he held a plectrum with that claw-like thumb and finger and played his hits to about forty of us, mainly women.  He seemed to lose interest in singing after a while, and took most of them back to his hotel.   

Somehow, Billy Joe’s still alive. Having repeatedly married and divorced his wife, Brenda, she eventually died of cancer; their beloved son, his regular guitarist, Eddy, died of a heroin overdose. Billy Joe survived a heart attack on stage in Texas and continued to record.  Bob Dylan boasts of to listening to him in I Feel A Change Comin On. He appeared in Robert Duvall’s brilliant The Apostle, amongst other movies, and was most recently in the spotlight a couple of years back when he was acquitted of shooting Billy Bryant Coker in the face in Papa Joe’s Texas Saloon. Billy Joe’s defense was self-defense: he said Billy Bryant pulled a knife on him.  Dale Watson famously recorded Where Do You Want It?  to immortalize the event.  The story about Billy Joe having his hand shot off was bullshit: he’d lost it in a sawmill accident.

DATELINE: Kinselas, Sydney, mid-’eighties.  I’m drinking cognac in the cocktail bar with Adam Wynn: we got a late start: it’s 2AM. A short Indian fellow approaches.  He’s in dark blue blue drill shirt and pants, like an electrician wears - just like Allan Ginsberg wore continuously through his stay in the early ’70’s - and he’s carrying an airline bag stuffed with newspapers.  “Gentlemen,” he says in a perfect Trinidad-Indian-Oxford-English, “I admire your attitude to cognac.  May I buy you a drink?” We hit it off like a house on fire.  The guy’s so funny, slapping high fives and hollerin’ “Get down” in faux hillbilly.  We drink and laugh; laugh and drink until they gently usher us out into the skinny morning light of Taylor Square.  As we bid our farewells I tell Adam “I’ll see you back at the winery on Wednesday,” referring to his new venture a thousand kays away, on the High Eden Ridge at Mountadam.  Our Indian mate suddenly shows a new interest.  “Oh,” he says, “do you gentlemen have contacts in the wine industry?  I plan to visit the South Australian wineries in a few months, when I have finished my work in the Northern Territory.”  I mischievously suggest that between Mr Wynn and myself we could arrange the odd good day at a winery sort of thing, and enquire as to the work in the Territory. “I am writing a book about Australia,” he says, “about the relationship here between black and white.” Which triggers a raggedly unison “Well who the hell are you?” He puts forth his hand.  “I am Shiva Naipal.”

POST SCRIPT: Shiva, the younger brother of V. S. Naipal, had written two novels, but I knew him through his prickly acuity in The Spectator, and his two riveting travel books, North of South and Black and White. The former was wry account of travels in Africa; the latter a terrifying history of the Rev Jim Jones, and Naipal’s account of visiting the Guyana jungle as officials were still cleaning up bodies after the horror of the Jonestown Massacre.  Once his tour of the north of Australia was cut short, Shiva took the spare room for a time in Adelaide while he drank my cellar dry before going back to London to finish his highly contentious and much-publicised book.  

But he died suddenly, of a heart attack, at his desk in August ’85.  His widow, Jenny, later forwarded me an unposted letter she’d found in his papers. 

“Life has been hellish,” he’d written, “and somewhat unreal since my return.  Hardly had I unpacked my bags when Indira Ghandi was assassinated … the next day, at the behest of The Observer, I was on my way to Delhi … not surprisingly, given the events of the last few weeks, the Antipodes receded from the foreground of my consciousness.  I am now faced with the not too easy task of restoring those six months to their proper place. If all goes reasonably well, it should be done by the autumn of ’85.”  It wasn’t of course.  Imperfect skerricks of it eventually found their way into An Unfinished Journey, but I think to this day his book would have blown Chatwin’s clean outa the water.

Once one had won his trust, and grown the confidence to ask him, Shiva spoke much of his fear of visiting India.  He felt it would flood his writing brain, so nothing else would fit.  He'd been born a Brahmin in Trinidad, and admitted that he would never be ready to visit India.  It seemed to terrify him. His travail, to look at Indira Ghandi's blood for The Observer, must have been deeply confronting.

His was the most challenging, entertaining, vivid intellect I have encountered.  

Click the image for precise view.

WHISKY EXPLOSION: SHRAPNEL WOUNDS

Beware The Whisky Explosion
Many New Brands Dodgy Mixes 
They're Draining The Big Stacks
 by PHILIP WHITE

Noticed new brands of whisky on the shelves of your local?

Beware. Scotch whisky’s booming like never before.  When there’s a surge like this, quality drops.

Sales of whisky from Scotland, of both the premium malt type, and the bulk blended sort, are exploding.  Consumption of premium malt whisky in bars and restaurants soared by 31% in the UK in the year to April; Scotch whisky in general saw an export increase of 23% last year, earning £4.23 billion.

This is in spite of the inroads Irish whiskey has made into the huge USA market. Last year, Irish whiskey sales there increased by 24%, surpassing Scotch single malts for the first time.

This has led to the big French companies buying Scotch distilleries. After twenty years of decline - sales crashed by one third from 1992-97 – the French Cognac business is finally enjoying something of a renaissance, but they’re hungry for more of Scotland. Pernod-Ricard, which owns Jamiesons Irish whiskey, at last count also had eighteen Scotch distilleries. Louis-Vuitton-Möet-Hennesey owns Ardbeg and Glenmorangie; and still smarting from its loss of the latter, Rémy Cointreau bought that beloved pearl of Islay, Bruichladdich (below), in July. After Jim Beam had let it fall to the point of dereliction, Mark Reynier, a London merchant, and some bright privateer mates bought Bruichladdich for £4 million in 2000, and after twelve years of smart and enlightened management and a sharp hike in quality, let it go to Remy for an incredible £58 million. 

 
But all this is nothing compared to the ravening British lion, Diageo.  Not only does this monster own 34% of the Möet-Hennesey part of LVMH, but it owns Smirnoff (the world's biggest-selling vodka), Baileys (world’s biggest liqueur), Guinness (world's best-selling stout) and little old Bundaberg rum.  Not to mention Johnnie Walker (the world's top-selling Scotch). 

Like Diageo’s other blended whiskies - J&B, Bell's, Black & White, White Horse, Vat 69, Haig and Dimple, Johnny’s a mixture of cheaper grain whiskies, blended with malts from Diageo’s phenomenal mob of malt distilleries.  These happen to include Auchroisk, Banff, Benrinnes, Blair Athol, Brora, Buchanan's, Caol Ila, Cardhu, Clynelish, Convalmore, Cragganmore, Dalwhinnie, Glen Albyn, Glen Elgin, Glenlossie, Glen Ord, Glenkinchie, Lagavulin, Linlithgow,  Lochnagar, Knockando, Mannochmore, Mortlach, North Brechin, Oban, Port Ellen, Rosebank, Royal Strathmill, Talisker, and Teaninich. 

Malt distilleries are mothballed and rekindled according to the booms-and-busts of the international economy.  There are barrel houses full of ageing whisky all over Scotland – at least half a million barrels at any given time.  When there’s a boom, like the current explosion, with very aggressive inroads being dozed into India and Asia, these vast stores are pillaged.

Put crudely, whisky is vodka made from grain - some of which has been smoked over peat fires - stored in barrels for a minimum of three years. It is coloured and sweetened with caramel and then watered down for bottling.

Given the parsimony of the Scots, the whisky business was never big on expensive new oak.  Traditionally they bought old barrels from the sherry makers of Jerez, bolstered by an endless supply of cheap throwaways from the corn distillers of the USA, where local laws usually  determine that barrels can be used only once, and it's probably just as well - made from fast-growing Quercus alba, these are spongiform, like balsa.  

But as the British post-war vicars and their wives died out, so did much of the sherry business, meaning that, used bourbon butts aside, the cheapest barrels on Earth ran out.  Good clean sherry barrels have become rare and expensive.

This meant an inevitable change of flavours.

Enlightened distillers, like the Bruichladdich rebels, went to other parts for their oak.  As well as trialing new American barrels, which tend to give whisky a distinctive citrus tinge, they bought old wood from the wineries of France. Suddenly we had whiskies that carried flavours of Bordeaux and Burgundy, even Sauternes. 

These experiments are often sold as novelties, so single-barrel bottlings and small batch blends proliferate, filling the market with a baffling array of new premium whisky flavours at an equally astonishing range of prices, from expensive to stellar.  In the twelve years of his management of Bruichladdich, Mark Reynier and his master distiller, the legendary Jim McEwen, released well over 200 such products.

But in those huge stacks of slumbering barrels elsewhere round Scotland, there are hundreds of thousands of barrels that would not, shall we say, make a responsible blender’s top cut. 

The styles of the cheaper blended whiskies are jealously protected.  Like Guinness, their characters may change slightly from market-to-market, but within each of those it is important that the product retains a constant aroma and flavour.  While it’s possible that dud barrels can be lost in such mega-blends, they can’t take many risks.

It seems to me that the risks are being taken much further up the price range.  If your new small-batch product can bring you twice the money of your constant cheap blend, you can push it into aspirational markets obsessed with exclusive luxury goods but which are naïve about what they should in fact be getting for their bigger spend.

In other words, if you’re going to take a risk, you might just well make a bigger profit from it by flogging it to ignorant show-offs.

In recent years, we’ve had a proliferation of expensive small-to-tiny batch whisky releases in special crystal and whatever, at prices which can hit the tens of thousands of pounds.  Most of these, no doubt, are exquisite and unique. A beautiful example is the $17,500 Highland Park 50 year old pictured.  Having Shetland blood, I'm rather partial to a dram of  Highland Park, from Kirkwall, Orkney.  That's our closest distillery.  With a license.

But back to the whisky shelves: tucked in, lower down, above the blends, amongst the more common and famous malts and whatnot, we’re seeing new house brands at alluring prices, especially in the giant chain stores.

Many of these are dodgy assemblages of the sorts of rejects and second-rate barrels that makers would never risk on their best, most jealously-guarded products.  Amongst them you’ll find the taints of brettanomycaes, the enemy of winemakers.  It lives in oak and kills wine flavours.  As it does with whisky.  This is best hidden in whiskies boasting peatiness: a novice will often fail to tell the difference between the acrid yeast and the smoky peat.  You can even lose cork taint in such styles if they’re flogged to novices, like the disbelieving storekeeper who looked at me as if I were mad when I took a badly corked Ardbeg back to his shop for a refund.  He took a dram and told me you couldn’t get corky whisky.  “Especially in a malt. Not one this good.”

 
Which leads me to the Japanese. When Brian Morrisson sold that other pride of Islay, Bowmore, to Suntory in 1994, there was a sudden change of style as the economic rationalists from the huge Japanese brewery had their way.  Amidst much rumour and argy-bargy, the legendary stillmaster, Jim McEwen, abandoned the retirement monies he would soon be due after 37 years there, and moved across Loch Indaal to Bruichladdich.  Since its phenomenal sale in June, it would appear likely that Jim now has some retirement money. And he’s left his reputation untarnished.

But not all malt lovers run from the Japanese, and not all Japanese whisky-makers are economic rationalists.  One of the more reliable and loveable whisky characters of these risky boomtimes is the crusty Scots blogger, ralfy.com, who publishes inimitable whisky reviews on Youtube.  In his appraisal of the new Japanese Yoichi 15 year old pure malt whisky, he makes various wise references to many of the matters I discuss above.

In Japan, he says, “the quality of the casks used is absolutely first class. And that is simply not always the case when it comes to Scotch whisky ... Japanese whisky is produced by design; Scotch whisky is produced by default.”

Check him out by clicking here.  

The Bruichladdich motto, by the way, is Clachan a Choin, meaning Dog's Bollocks.  To read my 2009 report of the Bruichladdich revival, click here.  To read of recent manoeuvres  at Johnny Walker and a weird whisky adventure in the outback, click here. That's the wild Islay coast near Bruichladdich below.

PHYLLOXERA BOSS HITS McLAREN VALE

Waiting For The Big Outbreak
Phylloxera Boss Has A Preach
"Public Consultation" Manqué
by PHILIP WHITE

It’s hard to grasp what Alan Nankivell thinks he did in McLaren Vale last night.

As fifty heavy wine industry farmers and makers gathered at the meeting in the Bocce Club, Nankivell, the CEO of the Phylloxera and Grape Industry Board of South Australia, filled the doorway with his large frame, ticking names off a list on a clip board. 

“You didn’t tell us you were coming,” he said as I took my turn.

“I didn’t realise I had to RSVP.  I thought this was a public meeting.”

“If you’d really been invited you would have known we expected an RSVP,” he snorted.  He couldn’t very well bar me, as he’d just performed the same strange ritual on Dudley Brown (Inkwell grapegrower and winemaker and former chair of the McLaren Vale Grape Wine and Tourism Association), and his partner, Irina Santiago, the Sustainability Officer at the same organization. 

After a talking-to, he’d let them through, too.

Nankivell had been told by his Minister, the Hon. Gail Gago MLC, (below) Minister of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries, Forests, Regional Development, Tourism and the Status of Women, to get back out into the industry and find out why many were showing deep concern about his board’s quiet softening of the regulations which were in place to limit the spread of Phylloxera, the tiny vine root louse that killed all the vineyards of France over a century ago, and infested parts of Victoria and New South Wales soon after.

In other words, scrap the secrecy, open up to those thousands of winemakers and grapegrowers who pay your wages, and do the consulting you were always expected to do.

Gago ordered that they re-instate the pre-November 2011 Plant Quarantine Standard, and to quote the board’s own propaganda, “examine the industry’s concerns in detail and consult with the industry” before getting back to her.

South Australia’s rigid anti-Phylloxera regulations have kept this state free of the deadly bastard of a pest for a century.  Elsewhere, governed by the national Phylloxera regulations, the disease has spread.  Under intense lobbying from the huge vine nurseries and their lobbies and associations, and the biggest wine companies, who revile costly paperwork and restriction and responsibly look for every cent they can flick on to their shareholders, the South Australia board has been pressured to adopt the national protocol, which is not so rigid. 

 

After it entered Australia through the old Swiss grapegrowing settlements around Geelong, the Phylloxera bug soon made such a wreck of the Victorian wine business that South Australia took its place as the country’s major wine producer, a position it has never let go, much to Victoria’s chagrin.  

Phylloxera spreads via transported plant material, soil, machinery, cars, shoes and such.  It can live undetected in the soil for twenty years.  There have been at least 7 new phylloxera detections in Australia in the last 10 years but prior to that it had not moved for almost 100 years. The only way of removing it is to kill and destroy the vines it feeds on.  The only way of growing grapes in Phylloxera-infested ground is to graft wine varieties onto non-bearing Phylloxera-resistant wild vine rootstocks originally from America, a dramatic and expensive exercise which changes the flavour of the fruit.

Aficionados prefer wine from old pre-Phylloxera vines on their own roots, like the great collection of old vine vineyards spread about South Australia.  Natural vines, if you like.  France can no longer boast such flavours, as virtually its entire vignoble is on grafted rootstocks.

Some believe Phylloxera has never entered South Australia; it has never been detected here.  Some seem certain it’s already here, waiting to emerge. Many growers, particularly those with these priceless old vines, were aghast to discover that the Phylloxera board had softened the restrictions on the movement of machinery, grapes and plant material.

There is constant pressure to do this.  Big transnational companies like Pernod-Ricard (Jacob’s Creek) and Accolade (Hardy’s), and Australia’s Treasury (formerly Fosters, including Penfolds, Wolf Blass etc.) depend upon rapid and easy movement of machines, cuttings and fruit across the whole south-eastern corner of Australia.  Their wineries are in the Barossa and to a lesser extent, McLaren Vale, but they take fruit from all along the big rivers, right up the east coast and down into Tasmania.
. 
“Historically, the board’s role is about preparing for a potential outbreak.”  
Alan Nankivell, CEO, Phylloxera and Grape Industry Board South Australia

The Phylloxera board is chaired by Robin Nettlebeck, who manages South Australia’s biggest vine nursery at Yalumba, another huge fruit shipper. He was preceded by a Foster’s man, Richard Hamilton (not the Coonawarra/McLaren Vale winemaker). Because they own big nurseries, and can afford it through economies of scale, the vast majority of the vineyards owned by these leviathans are already on Phylloxera-resistant rootstock. They may have some old vine vineyards for showing off when the gastroporn cameras are flashing, but these are infinitesimal when compared to their vast holdings of modern industrial grapeyard. Both men were present last night, watching the CEO deliver his message to a disbelieving audience.

Which is what he did.  He preached.  Hectoring, bombastic, dismissive.

Perhaps to disprove this description from the start, he surprised us all by beginning with “any questions?”

As the questions gradually emerged from an audience who’d reasonably expected to be asking their questions after his presentation, Nankivell responded with repeated versions of “Okay we’ll be answering that later ... yes, good question, I’ll be answering that soon ... any more?  Yes, we’ll get round to that … ”

He wobbled racily through a hazy history of his organization, and while he mentioned many events which occurred before his time there - back when he ran the Alzheimer’s Association - or other issues which he plain couldn’t remember in detail, he went to great lengths to explain that “historically, the board’s role is about preparing for a potential outbreak.”

As the questions now came steadily, his tone became even more hectoring.  When Drew Noon MW, revered grapegrower and winemaker, interrupted and asked if he could make a comment, Nankivell shot back “A comment or a question?”

“A comment,” repeated Noon.

“Well it better be brief”, spat Nankivell, who showed more obvious tetchiness while Noon methodically and calmly made point after pertinent point.

Without mentioning the fact that the big nurseries (like the one the board’s chairman manages for Yalumba) would stand to make embarrassing millions selling grafted rootstocks if Phylloxera did perchance cross the border, Noon put the very simple question:

“What benefit does South Australia get from this change?  Who benefits?”

More irritation.

When Nankivell said “We have no evidence of the restrictions being breached,” Noon gave an example he said he’d reported to Nankivell, who reacted as if Noon was delusional.  He did eventually admit to a major breach committed by the giant Bunnings hardware and garden supply chain which was caught illegally selling vines from a Phylloxera-risk zone in Victoria through four South Australian stores.  And then he recalled others, but the whole attitude was one of “trust me, trust the board” as he waved the Phylloxera protocols around like a streetpreacher whacks his Bible.

When venerable grapegrower and community elder John Harvey said “What I reckon you’re telling us to do is practice safe sex,” there was more fluff and bluster.

“It’s about cutting red tape,” Nankivell preached.  He wanted us to believe in him.  Many obviously didn’t.  So he went on and on about “people doing the right thing by themselves because it’s their business.  They won’t take risks with their own business.”

Three stages of Phylloxera, dining on vine hair roots, greatly enlarged.

And yet, when cornered, he said “you can’t legislate for everything,” and kept coming back to a sermon about how people should be diligent at “their own farm gate” and control possible Phylloxera infestations by checking trucks, machinery, and grapes being delivered.

By which time, of course, it’s probably too late.  The preponderance of truckies who remove the speed limiters from their prime movers in order to keep their business, at risk of huge fines and the loss of their licenses, is a good example of how self-regulation beats hard law in extreme times. But were such a pressured trucker to bring the bug in on a dirty truck or on grapes, it would give Nettlebeck’s organization the chance to show off its brilliant science with aerial surveys and whatnot, to measure the spread of the disease.  Within metres.

After which, no doubt, the great expertise of members of his board would come into play as the big nurseries replaced dead vineyards with new grafted rootstock-based vines, to save the Australian wine industry.

In which case the license we’d lose is our priceless old vineyards. Forever.

The Henschke Hill of Grace Vineyard, planted in the 1860s: many of these great old heritage vinegardens would fall quickly to Phylloxera ... photo Milton Wordley

Some figures from a previous blog: At about $5.50 a grafted cutting; 2,000 vines per hectare; 5,427 hectares of vineyard on its own roots and a Phylloxera invasion in Coonawarra, you’re looking at 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.  Many of them are already on rootstock, but South Australia has 75,000 hectares of vines.

Nankivell went on through a grand list of very obvious risks, which he ranked from “very high” to “high”.

At one stage, former chair of the board, Foster’s man Richard Hamilton took to his feet and pointed out the biggest threat was what he called “the afternoon tourists”, who could have stood on Phylloxera-infected ground in Victoria in the morning, flown into South Australia, and nonchalantly wandered into your vineyard in McLaren Vale, Clare, or the Barossa, in the afternoon.

“I’ve got a beard,” he said.  “A footbath is one thing.  You can get them to wash their shoes. But Phylloxera gets everywhere.  If I’d been in a Phylloxera outbreak, it’d be in my beard, in my clothes, on my skin.”

At which point I recalled the official derision shown me in 2009 when I dared mention the Tour Down Under bicycle races through most of South Australia’s cooler vine regions, not to mention McLaren Vale and the Barossa.  In this admirable event, people fly in from Victoria and all over with their picnic tables and portable fridges, set up in the shade beside or in somebody’s vineyard, and celebrate merrily until the bikes have gone past. 

As Nankivell continued, I couldn’t help thinking that even the mere fear of Phylloxera would send the more responsible growers to buy prophylactic rootstocks to secure their vineyards in the face of the threat which the CEO of the Phylloxera board had just then responsibly promoted.

His line grew to a grand crescendo about self-policing being the best measure, and then, right when I thought he’d be asking the sinners to come out the front and repent, Jim Banman, a senior grower, asked Nankivell if he’d like us to show our opinion with a display of hands.

It was all too obvious that most hands would go up if the question was “how many of you are not convinced?” so Nankivell said “what would you vote on?”

Backyard grape sales from a Phylloxera-infested area

He then finished with a neat non sequitur, and told us there was nothing to vote on, that we weren’t there to vote, and that he’d come to make a presentation of the new brochure, Phylloxera Risk Assessment undertaken by the Phylloxera and Grape Industry Board of South Australia.

It was like an Irish Knock Knock joke.  It goes like this:

"Say knock knock."

"Knock knock."

"Who's there?"

And that was it.  Apart from a very strange discussion which Irina Santiago and I both witnessed between Robin Nettlebeck and Dudley Brown.  Obviously startled at the polite vehemence these respected grapegrowers and winemakers had just shone upon his organization, Nettlebeck mysteriously said “McLaren Vale is obviously a bit different to the Barossa, isn’t it.  You don’t get so much fruit coming in here from outside.”

I pointed out that Accolade was planning to move its vast fizz manufactory to Tintara, in the main street of McLaren Vale, which would see thousands of tonnes of grapes being delivered from all over Victoria.  In a disbelieving tone he asked whether I’d asked Accolade for confirmation, and went back to Brown.

Which was good for him.  Initially, workers said Accolade would move its fizz action to Chateau Reynella, but that factory now seems destined to become a humungous Bunnings, the aforementioned garden supply chain which committed the Phylloxera regulations breaches mentioned above.

“Perhaps we could do something different for you?” Nettlebeck said “ ... something special for McLaren Vale?”

We left, mystified at whatever it was he had on offer.

What could it be?  A special wine district which nobody can leave, or enter?

Oldest Shiraz vineyard on Earth, still producing?  Probly.  Langmeil's Freedom, planted 1843 ... gone and forgotten should Phylloxera cross the border

When CEO Nankivell, or indeed chairman Nettlebeck, go back to Minister Gago to wave their brochures and boast about the excellence of their consultation with the regional stakeholders, we can only trust their report has been shortcut by responsible wine folk who cc her into every communication they make with the Phylloxera board.

Written submissions about the proposed relaxing of the regulations close on 16th October, this month.  Oh, hang on: I just read the back page.  They haven’t invited you to comment on the relaxing of the regulations at all.  Instead, they want you to endorse their proposed actions “to address the ten risks of highest concern,” as identified by them.

In which case you might just as well drop the Minister a note about the proposed relaxation of regulations.

In the meantime, if chairman Nettlebeck really wants to do something good for McLaren Vale, indeed the whole of the South Australian vignoble, he should recommend that the Phylloxera board be composed mostly of independent experts, and not major wine company apparatchiks or vine nurserymen.

For an independent chair, I would nominate somebody like the horticulture king of this state, Stephen Forbes, director of the Botanic Gardens.  He appreciates many types of Phylloxera, is an expert in economic botany, and he reckons he’d be happy to fill such a role.

Then, I can think of no digestible reason whatever for the Phylloxera board’s minutes to remain secret.  They should all be on its website, vested interests listed every time.  If the Reserve Bank board can do it, surely this lot can get properly transparent.  

In the meantime, they should be reinforcing and toughening the anti-Phylloxera regulations, if only to avoid that outbreak they believe they’re historically here to manage. 


To read viticulture scientist James Hook on this subject click here.