TELL ME THIS WAS AN IDEAL VINTAGE

Report from the Climate Council

[The body PM Abbott disbanded]
"The angry Summer: 2013/2014"

graphic and text from the CLIMATE COUNCIL

Continuing hot on the heels of the ‘Angry Summer’ of 2012/2013, Australians again endured record-breaking extreme events this summer. Drought conditions affected inland eastern Australia, while parts of the north and west of the country experienced above average rainfall. There was an early start to the bushfire season in New South Wales, and parts of South Australia, Western Australia and Victoria were ravaged by fires. Prolonged and intense heatwaves were experienced in major population centres, including Adelaide, Canberra and Melbourne.

Over the 2013/2014 summer numerous extreme weather-related records were broken across Australia.

Key findings

1.

Heatwaves and hot days, drought and rainfall extremes (high and low), and bushfires dominated the 2013/2014 summer. For example:

• Sydney had its driest summer in twenty-seven years

• Canberra experienced 20 days of at least 35°C

• Melbourne experienced its hottest ever 24 hour period (average 35.5°C)

• Adelaide had a record of 11 days of 42°C or more during the summer

• Perth had its second hottest summer on record

2.

Climate change is already increasing the intensity and frequency of many extreme weather events in Australia.

3.

Many of our largest population centres stand out as being at increased risk from extreme weather events, including heatwaves, drought and bushfires.

4.

The impacts of extreme weather events on people, property, communities and the environment are serious and costly.

5.

Limiting the increase in extreme weather activity requires urgent and deep reductions in the emissions of greenhouse gases. The decisions we make this decade will largely determine the severity of climate change and its influence on extreme events for our grandchildren. This is the critical decade for action on climate change.

This report provides a summary of extreme weather conditions in the 2013/2014 summer, continuing the trend of hotter summers and more weather extremes in Australia. 

To read the full report click here. 

To watch Professor Tim Flannery explain his sacking and the Abbott government's attempted disbanding of the body, and how public donations have helped reboot the Climate Council as a completely independent scientific organisation, click here.

To read an early vintage report of the Adelaide Plains, and some of the South Mount Lofty Ranges, click here. 

To read a report of the High Barossa bushfires, click here. For more images of what bushfires do to vineyards, click here.

To read a recent general vintage report, click here.

And a flash-back to the comment an anonymous hero posted on DRINKSTER on 13th February: "And I bet you write this vintage off like you did for the 2011 even though there were many fantastic wines produced. Unfortunately you and other idiot wine writers spoilt the sales of 2011 for many small winemakers who DID produce terrific wines. Do us all a favour and say nothing more about 2014 vintage."

Check in tomorrow for my latest summary.

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SEXISM: THE SMART ACCOUNTANT'S VIEW

ALDRIDGE ON HOMO ORGANOLEPTICUS

 




















For Sethefrika, in the spirit of thrashing it at the cricket ... by George Grainger Aldridge

TIMES AIN'T NOTHIN LIKE THEY USE TO BE

photo by Flagstaffotos

Ethyl Methylphenylglycidate and

caffeine and Satan only knows

what: kiddylikker then and now

by PHILIP WHITE

"Oh.  Er, cool.  Yeah.  Listen, can I getta amyl acetate, amyl butyrate, amyl valerate, anethol, anisyl formate, benzyl acetate, benzyl isobutyrate, butyric acid, cinnamyl isobutyrate, cinnamyl valerate, cognac essential oil, diacetyl, dipropyl ketone, ethyl acetate, ethyl amyl ketone, ethyl butyrate, ethyl cinnamate, ethyl heptanoate, ethyl heptylate, ethyl lactate, ethyl methylphenylglycidate, ethyl nitrate, ethyl propionate, ethyl valerate, heliotropin, hydroxyphenyl-2-butanone (10 percent solution in alcohol), a-ionone, isobutyl anthranilate, isobutyl butyrate, lemon essential oil, maltol, 4-methylacetophenone, methyl anthranilate, methyl benzoate, methyl cinnamate, methyl heptine carbonate, methyl naphthyl ketone, methyl salicylate, mint essential oil, neroli essential oil, nerolin, neryl isobutyrate, orris butter, phenethyl alcohol, rose, rum ether, g-undecalactone, vanillin, solvent, caffeine, glucose, sucrose, fructose double vodka on the rocks please?   

"Chiz."

I just broke a few rules about opening with a gripping paragraph, but I had to get the dirty water off my chest.

The kid just ordered a raspberry-flavoured alcopop, which many of them are, with vodka.  That's not all the ingredients, mind you - just the fake raspberry fruit flavouring and fragrance.  Everything in that list previous to the word caffeine is in modern raspberry flavouring, even when it's masquerading as cranberry. While this fake raspberry is generally used to add something vaguely like fruitiness to many, many products, its base ingredients are common in fake strawberry, guava, pineapple and whatever -  they're all repetitive.  Add the caffeine and a dozen or two other compounds you're probably never heard of and you'd be homing in on Red Bull.

Meaning there’s a lot more to this country’s addiction to kiddylikker which cranks than the little matter of, ahem, alcohol.

Add the word diet to any of the above and you're really drinking chemo-industrial swill of the most disgusting and deceptive order.

The current delirium malignant around the presumption that raspberry ketones miraculously peel fat from the corpulent are confusing the issue further. Raspberry is suddenly dangerously popular amongst certain adult women. Whatever it is supposed to do, and it very obviously doesn't, raspberry ketone occurs in such miniscule amounts in real raspberries that it's one of the most expensive natural aromatic flavourants of them all: the real shit can pull up to $20,000 per kilogram. Depending on its quality - and you can get equally real bottom class muck - the synthetic version can get as low as $10. This is usually packaged as 'pure' raspberry ketone by your snake oil witchdoctor, whether they're lost somewhere on the internet, in your local supermarket, or standing in a white coat at your pharmacy.

Not like the good old days.  In the sixties and seventies, cough, wheeze, your average school days alcopop was just as likely to be port and Coke.  Bacardi and Coke, scotch and dry – all mixed in the kitchen of somebody who was out.  I was a sarsparilla and vodka enthusiast.  At least the sarsparilla root contained lots of good natural calmative stuff for the dyspeptic teenaged gizzard.

It’s a long time since I saw sarsparilla cordial with any sarsparilla in it.  Or, for that matter, any dry ginger with any ginger, with all its beneficial gingerols and shoagols.  Just a dry-ish dry ginger would be an improvement on the sweet swill the brutes sell us now; even tonic water is too sweet.  And it’s funny: I can’t actually recall anyone drinking spirits with raspberry when I was a kid, even though it was just slightly possible in those grainy days  that raspberry cordial actually contained some fair dinkum raspberry.

Uh-huh.  Raspberry was not a cool drink.  Raspberry was reserved for infants or the Barmaid’s Blush, which was a four-ounce "pony" glass of beer and raspberry.  This drink, while more talked about than consumed, was what the sensitive bloke sent out to his wife, who'd be sitting in the ute staring at the pub wall through the windscreen, while he took his dog into the bar for an hour or two of Coopers Sparkling Ale, half a pack of Escorts, and a bag of chips for the dog, ta. I recall Jack Carroll, in the Great Eastern Hotel in Littlehampton, going out to turn the windscreen wipers on for awhile so his wife could see the pub wall better in the rain. 

Apart from silly confections like the Pineapple Pearl Wolf Blass made at Kaiser Stuhl, the most popular alcopop amongst adults was the old hock, lime, and lemon.  Dry white, or hock, was Crouchen, Semillon, Riesling, Pedro, Doradillo, Sultana, or any of these in a blend.

You'd half fill a pint glass with hock and add ice with a shot of Bickford’s or Johnston’s lime cordial – made from real lime juice – and fill it to the brim with lemonade which tasted a bit like real lemons.  If one effected a more sophisticated air, one would cut back on the sugar by replacing the lemonade with soda.  It’s still a very good, wholesome drink, instantly satisfying in the summer.  Use good Riesling, real lime juice, fresh rainwater-ice and soda.  A slice of lime and/or lemon, and a mint leaf for garnish, and zing!  Who’s a pretty pussy now?

In ordinary pubs, two things have led to the dearth of the simple cocktail, which all of these drinks are, and their death makes possible - essential, even - our addiction to premixed alcopops.

The first blow came with the invention of the pressurised postmix cordial dispenser.  This began to appear in the late seventies.  You stack a few pressurised cylinders of ultra-sweet flavours (see paragraph # 1) in the cellar, and select your poison upstairs through one of those insidious little nozzles through which all flavours flow.  If you ever get the chance to see the snot that oozes from these things when they’re being serviced, you’ll stick to premixed and prepackaged alcopops for the rest of your life, whatever psychoactive horrors they may contain.

The flavours get mixed, too, of course.  Take that first paragraph, multiply it by the number of flavours in your underground tanks, and imagine them all corrupting each other in the nozzle and the lines.  Bring back the Bickford’s and the Johnston’s, puleeze.

The second deadly blow was the computerised till.  The programs never make accounting space for a person who might like, say, a dash of Campari in a drink, or a teaspoon of Strega.  The staff have no way of ringing it up, as the programs account only for full shots of this or that.

So you have stuff happening like a mob of winemakers pouring into a bar after a wine show and settling down to five or six rounds of Red Bull and double vodka on the rocks.  Or, worse, people who've been drinking beer in the sun all day at the cricket barging in for the same uplifting medicine. They usually seem more, well, ebullient, than the mob from Writers' Week.

Great Eastern Hotel, Littlehampton ... having a few quiet ones on the way to school: Neville Diener, the author and Vicki Russell ... photo Steven Sprigg

But it's time to confess. I grew up on a drink that made Red Bull and vodka look like a sedative. Seppelts Sedna Tonic Wine got me through High School. You'd buy a bottle from the pharmacist on Friday night, and get to sleep sometime a lot closer to Monday. If you were in your school uniform, you'd tell 'em it was for your grandma. It seemed to cost almost nothing, even then. It was a fortified Grenache port from the Para vineyard, chockers with Kola nut, which fulsomely supplied the caffeine side of the Sedna as it did half the name of Coca Cola. When I met him many years later, Benno Seppelt laughingly admitted the name was Andes spelt backwards and asked where I thought he got the Kola nut. Kola nut, of course, comes from Africa. Which left me wondering whether Benno got the Coca bit backwards. That most certainly does come from the Andes.

Either way, it was a lot more healthy than Red Bull, or anything with fake bloody raspberry in it. Bring back the Sedna, Seppeltsfield!

R2D2 STEAMPUNK BASKET PRESS MODEL

DRINKSTER is having difficulty finding the identity of the maker of this beautiful R2D2. Can anybody help? DULY HELPED: Fred McBill, citizen, Adelaide, discovered that this lovely thing was  designed and built by Wesley L. Peck IV of Nocturne Armory. This basket press R2 has a clear dome, "which makes it possible to see his cog and gear-ridden inner workings. He is fully operational, featuring remote-controlled locomotion, a rotating dome, and controllable eye stalk motion. Steampunk R2 also has a programmed sound card with all of the familiar beeps and boops, and a digitized/broken down version of the Cantina song." ... photo by Knightmare6  Makes us wonder how powerful and omnipotent the dreadnaught model could be it it were made, for example, from Corey Vandeleur's press at Bellevue in McLaren Vale. Here's his hand fondling it ... photo by Edwin Niczynski

  

MIRACLE MACHINE TURNS WATER TO WINE

Qana wedding miracle repeats 
Or does it? No grapes required
Magic jug makes eaux de eau 
by PHILIP WHITE

It had to happen.

Napa man Kevin Boyer, who calls himself a "somleeay" (it's a bit like nucular) and confesses to be heavily influenced by his wine marketing Mum, has joined forces with Pom chemist and wine educator Philip James to produce a clever device which turns water into "wine".

I use parentheses because no grapes are required.

Claiming this to be in the spirit of the miracle at Qana, they call their electric amphora device M│M - the Miracle Machine.

Their promotion blurb says "It came about after one too many glasses of wine over dinner, and a casual remark by Philip (left) that 'Jesus made water into wine; with all the technology we have available today why can’t we do the same?'"

They're calling the machine "the world's first accelerated winemaking device for the home".

Reminds me of a lunch this Philip had nearly thirty years ago with genius (a word I rarely use) winemaker StepHen Hickinbotham. We were joking about the Lord's amarone being marketed as a miracle, agreeing that it was more of an H2O on the dried grapes trick than your actual turning pure H2O into grape ethanol of a fine vintage.

Stephen revealed he'd been designing a home winemaking device which would do pretty much the same trick as the M│M. Before he got close to perfecting this, he died in a plane crash in 1986.

"Winemaking is still considered by most an art. Secrets are closely guarded," the M│M chaps claim.  Their machine obviously still keeps most of the alchemy under the hat. Its basis is the secret additives - a powder and a finishing syrup - devised by their team.

The sophisticated M│M propaganda on their website claims that the partners "also looked at the precise chemical breakdown of some of the finest wines in the world and realized that just as the scent industry is able to simulate smells, it is possible to replicate the delicate flavors of highly sought-after vintages."

'45 Romanée-Conti, anybody? Comin' right up!

It appears that the M│M depends on a sealed containment vessel which incorporates a sugar-measuring device, an oxygenating bubbler, a bit like you see in a fish tank, and a soundwave generator which pumps vibes into the container to hasten the polymerisation of the tannins, softening them. The whole process is managed remotely by an app in your phone.

One can vaguely imagine what's in the additives.  Sugar, acid, enzymes, some sorbitol (to supply viscosity and an illusion of sweetness), colourant, yeast, tannin, flavours, wood essence and fragrances. The impressive-looking machine seems likely to be a combination of devices and techniques already extant.

Even the "ultrasonic transducer, positioned directly underneath the chamber [which] resonates, effectively speeding up the flavor development of the wine" sounds a lot like a machine I played with six years ago. It seemed extremely expensive for what it did. It was supposed to "age" real bottled wine between decanting and service. As far as I could see, it merely flattened the aromatic, flavour and tannin profiles of anything put in it; I recall the procedure taking about forty minutes.  I felt it may have industrial uses on a large scale to sort out specific tanks of poor wine, making them perhaps more useful if blended with fresher wine, but couldn't see any serious wine lover exposing a good Bordeaux or a Grange to its destructive alchemy.

After a few weeks, I sent it back.

Kevin Boyer

And that wild M│M claim about the synthetic perfume business ? I've just gotta assert that as a total fragrance slut I'll guarantee that the most beautiful scents are painstakingly composed by top noses from concentrates of real fruits, flowers, barks and spices; real musk from the arse of the musk deer or ambergris from sperm whale chunder make the synthetics smell like Coke.

Hickinbotham's machine looked like a stainless steel pressure cooker. It had a removable lid which sealed tight. Between the lid and the vessel was a removable inflexible steel filter screen on top of food-grade polymer membrane. The vessel had an inlet and outlet. You'd attach a hose from your kitchen tap to the inlet, which admitted water to circulate between the membrane and the vessel, to adjust the temperature of the whole berry ferment. Warmer, faster ferment? Turn the hot tap up. Cool it? Slow it down? Use cold. The water simply circulated between the membrane and the vessel, and exited through the release valve. It never entered the wine.

Stephen Hickinbotham

Stephen's device was designed to teach people how simple winemaking really is. He planned to sell you good varietal wine grapes frozen with some yeast in a Cryovac bag. You could buy Cabernet, Pinot, Chardonnay, a blend: whatever flavour you wanted.

It worked vaguely like this: You'd remove the lid and the strainer and put the sealed bag of grapes, freshly defrosted, in above the impermeable polymer membrane. You'd push it down til the grape bag filled the vessel, and the membrane formed a second lining between the bag and the vessel. Then you'd put the lid back on, and reseal the unit.

When the ferment was complete, you'd take the lid off and cut open the top of the bag of   fermented grapes, leaving the bag in place, then replace the filter screen and tighten the lid.  You'd close the exit valve, and, using mains pressure through the inlet, fill the gap between the membrane and the container with water, and leave the tap on. This pressure would gradually push the fermented must up through the filter screen and out through a valve in the lid, leaving the skins behind. You could control how hard you pressed with your tap. You'd then finish your ferment and do your cold-settling and clarification in a glass container, using the fridge, learning every step of the real winemaking procedure as you went - any week of the year.

Forgive me Bacchus, but you could even add oak chips if you had lumberjack tendencies. 

Barely a day goes by that I don't wish I could consult Stephen for gossip or advice. He had an astonishing winemaking pedigree. His grandfather Alan "Hick" Robb Hickinbotham founded the Roseworthy wine science course; his father Ian had a historical career winemaking with great companies like Wynns, Kaiser Stuhl and Penfolds. His uncle Alan, the housing developer, planted the famous Hickinbotham Clarendon Vineyard. 

To help perfect the inexpensive and radical sparkling "pearl" wines of the day, Ian brought the smart young German fizzmaster, Wolf Blass (left) to Australia in 1961 to first make Pineapple Pearl, a clean wine-based kiddylikker which opened the door for the "wine coolers" which boomed in the late 'eighties and through the 'nineties. Many of these confections of essences, leftovers and cheap spirits contained little or no wine at all.

Ian, who still lives with his wife, Jude, in Melbourne, worked with David Wynn perfecting the bladder pack which was based on the old goat, sheep or pig skin idea. In its plastic form it had been used for years as a vinegar and oil container in Italy. Although he worked hard introducing the idea into Australia, it was not the invention of Tom Angove, as is popularly presumed. 

Ian was also the first person known to deliberately induce, maintain and monitor malolactic fermentations in Coonawarra in 1951 and 52.

Stephen's brother Andrew and his partner Terryn run the Hickinbotham of Dromana winery and vineyard on Mornington Peninsula. This is fitting, as most of the early vineyards on that bonnie Peninsula were planted under contract by the Hickinbotham family, after they had been largely responsible for re-kindling and encouraging the now-thriving wine world around Geelong.

Just as there's contention about whoever it is that claims to do things first, there's argument about whether Solomon or Koheleth or somebody else wrote the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes. But there can never be doubt of the truth and wisdom of verse nine of its first chapter. 

^"The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun." 

I'll raise a toast to Bacchus on that account. If he insists on the '45 Romanée-Conti, make it a real one.

To read of Stephen Hickinbotham's theory of deliberately making red wines with a little botrytis, and how Max Schubert regarded his heretical stance, click here. This is pertinent in tricky botrytis years like 2011 and, in some places, even 2014.

To read of Hickinbotham's Cab Mac invention, using very big plastic bags to ferment an Australian-style Beaujolais,  click here.

To read the latest of my long string of rewrites about Jesus making the wine at the wedding, click here.

 

PRUNING IN RENNAISSANCE FRANCE

March is pruning time in the northern hemisphere, as best portrayed here in Les Grandes Heures d'Anne de Bretagne, a book of hours commissioned by Anne of Britanny, Queen of France, and illuminated by Jean Bourdichon between 1503 and 1508. Anne (25 January 1477 – 9 January 1514) married two kings consecutively, Maximilien I of Austria and Charles III of France. She was the richest woman in Europe. This remarkable book is held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France as Ms lat. 9474. If you manage to lift it, sneak it through the back door and I'll meet you just across Rue des Petits Champs, in Willi's. As long as you let me fondle your prize for an hour or two, the Cognac's on me. In the meantime, happy pruning, and good luck with 2014, Old Yurp!