A FEW QUIET TINCTURES AT THE LION

I missed the fizz and Wendouree in this snap tonight ... it wasna a formal type of thing ... these wines were not on the list ... but the meal at The Lion, as always, was deadly ... if you like true blue steak, like blue, this is the go ... or oysters ... or fancy stuff ... no other pub  does it so good ...  exemplary service ... in spite of many reasons to be frightened by our fierce old lot, our really cool wine waiter handled these specials with respect and alacrity ...  big big recommendation! ... photo Philip White

In Adelaide, getting the fun into

a person is one thing ... letting 

the results leak out is another 

by PHILIP WHITE

"You know that laneway in Melbourne?" The celebrated rockstar Dave Graney tweeted yesterday. "Paris is like that times 1,000,000,000,000. That's the opine of a grade A hick! Me."

I reckon coming from Kanmantoo makes me a triple-A hick compared to one from Mount Gambier, like the Great Graney, but that's a quibble. I mention it only to stress that when a country boy like me hits town, like for a serious night in the gilded palace of sin, the difference between country and city seems more dramatic.

Like, when I hit Paris, I'm likely to add another three zeroes to that very long number. Romance rules.

Adelaide, it seems, has finally decided to put some little bars in its laneways. This is contrary to the idea of Colonel William Light, who designed Adelaide with wide streets so a coach with horses could do a u-turn without the need for reversing, but very few laneways, which he regarded as an easy escape for cutpurses and pickpockets, both types of people he felt his genteel edge-of-desert burgh could live without.

King William Street Adelaide 1889

Nevertheless, there are a few little lanes here and there, and the Weatherill government has shown some flair in following Melbourne's tendency to continue its conversion of said lanes from cobblestone tracks for the night cart to interesting little trails full of hidey-holes for cutpurses, revelling bibulants and the hungry.

A current Adelaide favourite is Publishers, on the corner of Franklin and Cannon Streets. Cannon Street is almost skinny enough to be a lane. While it's no longer the sort of place you'd find a cutpurse - it was previously a backpacker's joint - I leave this establishment feeling like I'm the thief, so thorough and intelligent is the repletion delivered there.

It's good to hear that Minister Gail Gago is working on freeing-up the restrictions on the playing of music in places like the newly-brushed laneways of the West End. I hear the government is even considering the notion of permitting people to drink standing up without being fined or arrested and the landlord too shunted with a ridiculous conviction. It does seem strange that one can pull tricks, gamble, drink freely (whilst seated) and perhaps even cut the odd purse without capture in a precinct where the playing of your actual music will incur a huge fine if the appropriate forms aren't completed, the proper bureaucrats not consulted and you're not a busker.

Music has been far too long constricted to most un-musical places like the Entertainment Centre and Adelaide's many Houses of God. As the horrid epoch of the doof box seems to be in recline, a little music here and there may chill the wilder carousers and assist diminish violence and crime.

Then, it's still worth paying tribute to some of the older temples of discourse and drink. I find it very hard to visit the city without paying my conversational dues at The Exeter, for example, or risk being mistaken for a retired porn star at, say, The Old Col on The Parade.

Lion Brewery and Hotel, date unknown

Saturday I dined at The Lion, which continues to impress for its remarkable standards. The food is as good as pub tucker gets, anywhere, the staff are polite, patient and painstaking, and the bar is pretty much brilliant. Like if a bloke gets a sudden yearning to drink something precisely clean and refined, he can settle down to a pint of Asahi with a Yamazaki 12 year old malt whiskey, just like that.

Where else can you get a front bar with a fourteen-page drinks list? Where else can you fail to notice the security folks until you realise the big bloke holding the door open just called you Sir?

After dinner, which was too good to write about in this limited space, I resiled to said bar, where people were dancing. Dancing. It felt as cheery as the happy clappers up at Paradise, but without a bossy deity or his bossy reps. It felt really bloody good. I fell in with an alluring catering lass and her companion, a guitar-playing bipolar plumber who'd obviously declared his physical interest in her a little too keenly, but without offence.

The Lion was about to yawn itself off to slumber when I accepted their kind offer of a lift to The Bakery in O'Connell Street. This is where many northern suburb partyers call in for a coffee and some pastry on their way home. It is unlicensed. And it was very busy. It reminded me of the olden days, when no trip to the city was complete without a very late hamburger with the works at the Blue and White Café. It was interesting to learn that cappuccini and croissants have replaced the burgher and Coke for many, and I couldn't help observing how few drunk people there were.

Still, even if you've danced yourself into a slather, like our plumbing mate, a few beers have to find their way out of one eventually, and guess what? Because it's not licensed to sell alcohol, The Bakery has no obligation to provide a toilet.

Which is fair enough. It's a bakery.

Now I'm sure that somewhere in O'Connell Street, there's a public toilet hidden so well away that nobody frequents it for any of the right purposes. But it was strange to be reminded that to take a leak in this day and age, one pretty well has to enter a place where alcohol is sold.   

Alcohol promotes more leaking, you silly duffers. 

In the case of The Lion, its rest rooms are perfectly, frankly palatial, and spotless to match. But that was shut, and it's a fair stretch from The Bakery. Once our plumber was sufficiently busting to wander off down the street to find a discrete culvert, a police wagon pulled across and quietly followed him, waiting for him to commit the crime, at which point they booked him.

I'm no legal eagle, but I thought it was the duty of the police to prevent crime, not watch, waiting for it to be committed. Three grown men, armed and uniformed, spent half an hour interviewing and investigating the poor bugger, who til then had simply overflowed with glee and lust.

 Grenfell Street, 1974 ... photo Philip White

O'Connell Street is certainly wide enough for a coach and horses to do a u-turn, but even those folks were permitted to pee on the rear left hand wheel provided it was parked close against the gutter.

Whilst reconsidering the rights of musicians to play music and contemplating the notion of permitting people to drink whilst standing up, I wonder whether the government might also consider the introduction of the odd unisex pissoir for those caught short when the bars are shut?

The resplendent and witty pissoirs of modern Paris come to mind. They even have music.  

.     

FINO WINE LIST IN HALL OF FAME AGAIN

Congratulations to David Swain and Sharon Romeo for yet another big gong for the ever-changing wine list at Fino ... even more congratulations for serving the perfect springtime lunch yesterday ... the only thing missing was a hammock ... below is a favourite snap of David and Sharon with the Yangarra/Hickinbotham Clarendon Vineyard crew, with Shazza atop the lofty Napa Cabernet king, Chris Carpenter ... l-r: Michael Lane (viticulturer), Shelley Torresan (winemaker) David, Peter Fraser (general manager - winemaker), Chris and Sharon and Charlie Seppelt (Winemaker) ... photos Philip White

NEW KURRAJONG IN AFGHANISTAN

photo: thanks to @bsarwary: 'Freelance Journalist. Worked with the BBC (2002-2014) Thinking about ALL AFGHANS who get up each morning and DONT have the OPTION of just walking away from it ALL'

I'm not popular in McLaren Vale for my dogged belief that the Kurrajong Formation, which follows the Willunga Faultline from Kangarilla to The Victory pub, will eventually prove to be best geology for viticulture. Most of it is used for grazing! People who aren't on it want me to prefer their geology, of course. Since the 2010 publication of the official government Geological Survey map,  Geology of the McLaren Vale Wine Region the geologies that are poor viticulturally are becoming more obvious.

Watch those vineyard prices! Even the banks are waking up.

Here (above) you can see what the Willunga Escarpment must have looked like a few million years back, when the Kurrajong was coming down. I'm talking about those scree slopes. 

It's annoying that some McLaren Vale winemakers are keen to draw lines over the top of the geology map, attempting to delineate sub-regions which mean something. Led by Chester Osborn, that master of nomenclature, they've spent buckets of growers' money on lawyers, registering names for these confusing appellations. 

The idea behind the geology map was that people would learn the names and science of their geology, not impose another skein of confusion over it. Like Scarce Earths? You can see from these photographs that these 'earths' are not scarce at all.  They're all over the world. Scarce Earths is a marketing device set up to sell Shiraz, which McLaren Vale has too much of, planted in the wrong places for all the wrong reasons by precisely the wrong people.

I still keep the initial e-mail from the chairman of the McLaren Vale Grape Wine and Tourism Association, suggesting all the local winemakers should have a $100 Shiraz. They've used the geology map, a scientific document, as their excuse to move in this direction. Which, as far as marketing exercises go, is blurry in all senses other than money.

If sub-regions are discernible, surely they will be dependent on micro-climate, background humidity, altitude and aspect as much as rock types. 

The idea of paying wine writers from afar to come here and suggest that these wines are good reflections of their geology is silly.

Burgundy has two basic geologies and three basic grape varieties. It took them two thousand years to work it out. It took 1500 years until Philippe The Good came along and suggested Gamay was not the best red thing for his hood. Which left him, and us, happy with Pinot noir, Chardonnay and Aligote, and Beaujolais much the stronger.  

McLaren Vale has the most complex mess of geology that I know of in the viticulture world, and it seems they're trying to organise it to suit them, not learn it and understand it, which will take a lot longer than four or five years with a map on the lap and the bank manager on the phone.

The picture below is young Kurrajong, yet to fall down the fault, but you can see it's already come down from somewhere above which is no longer there. That's on top of Toop's Hill, east of the faultline. 

Below that is old, well-weathered Kurrajong at Roger Pike's Marius Vineyard at Willunga at the bottom of the fault's western side ... both photos Philip White

 

... the same sort of thing in its early stages, from Kurdistan ... I suspect the Willunga Fault once looked a bit like this perfect example ... but in the epochs before the Mount Lofty Ranges wore away, they were more like the Himalaya: ten kilometres tall. 

Here's something along the same lines from the Bay of Shoals on Kangaroo Island

... and an itty bitty sort of a one on the Harbison property east of Spalding in the South Flinders Ranges ... just an old riverbed, but of similar age ... there's a mountain on top of it ... those near-vertical striations in the bedrock below were once horizontal and sea floor ... you get my drift ... we're talking real old shit... every rock has a different flavour

PENFOLDS PREMIUMS 2ND 14 RELEASE

Penfolds Yattarna Chardonnay 2012 

$150; 13.2% alcohol; screw cap; 95+ points 

Suddenly the Abrams tank model Yattarna which I really liked, 2011, driven by Gertrude Stein, looks even heavier. In contrast, this is the '62 Ferrari 250 GTO: the most sought-after, elegant Ferrari of all. The one that went for US$38 million at auction in August. Ultra lightweight/heavy-horsepower business, near the edge yacht designer Ben Lexcen sharpened when he said, "If it won't break it's too heavy."

Through precise vineyard selection in Tasmania's Derwent and Coal Valleys, Henty in Victoria and the Adelaide Hills, this wine's many bits have been fitted and amalgamated in a way that purrs such taut power and finesse. And Audrey Hepburn's driving.

Change gears. Racing chassis apart, car 2012 smells like a frothy zabaglione on lightly poached clingstone peach, sliced real thin, and served with amaretti. There's nothing thick or gloopy about it. Which is a relief; also: I'm not going to swallow a Ferrari. But I could sit here for a week, dreaming up all the nuts, berries and fruits it brings to mind, and miss the fact that all those many individual components are working altruistically for the good of the mob, not the individual. Only together do they have strength.

Precisely how those myriad shards of this and that come together to form Audrey Hepburn driving a  250 GTO beats me.

It'll easily handle ten years of cellar. But with Audrey at the tiller - on Ferrari or Vespa, I don't care - I'll plan on getting through the next year or so. Go for lots of laughter. Put wheels on footpath and share that zabaglione with the peach and amaretti and argue happily about all these mad theories. 

Penfolds Bin 707 Cabernet Sauvignon 2012 

$350; 14.5% alcohol; cork; no score awarded 

It's a perverse freak of history, the notion of putting your best Cabernet in 100% new American Quercus alba hogsheads for fourteen months. I'd be reluctant to put whiskey in American oak, just between you and me. When this was first poured, it seemed mainly sap, like a carpentry. After three days, it's settled down to smell like Wild Turkey Rare Bourbon and Cola. Which is at least a premium RTD: the kind of thing preferred by only the best lumberjacks. I've drunk centre cut on tour with Jimmy Russell, and was trained in this stuff by great Bourbon bibbers like Christos Juhansen, but I still find it tricky to regard this sort of Quercus alba as a food. 

Max Schubert toasts Rada Penfold Russell in the early 70s ...  from Huon Hooke's book, Max Schubert Winemaker (Kerr 1994)

After three days, this smells even more like a classic 707. Think of the history. Max Schubert had wanted to make Grange from Cabernet from the start. It was too scarce and expensive, as was the good French oak he'd have preferred to use. It was just after the war. The French forests had not been loved. So Grange became Shiraz and French barrels became American ones. 707 was first released in older, more subtle American oak in 1964, and was named after the Boeing 707, the coolest thing in the sky. 

 
These were Chet Baker days. Even Raoul Merton shoes released a 707 V-jet brand of flash pointy-toed shoes for blokes in them 'sixties. 

But Cabernet was still too scarce and unreliable, and by the re-launch of 707 in 1976, the 747 Jumbo ruled the sky, men's shoes had grown clunky platform heels, and prominent American oak had become as vital to the Penfolds style as the 707 had long before been to Boeing.

Wrong way up: Tex Johnson's famous 1955 barrel-roll over Seattle ... test pilot Tex was showing off the new aircraft to the VIPs assembled below at the boat races ... anything 707 was a really rockin' thing ... barrel rolls help

 

So, forgiving it for the type of oak beloved by such gourmands as John Spalvins, what's it really like? Like in your face. Like hurling everything at you. Across the table. Like licorice, blackcurrant, blackberry, deadly nightshade and aniseed. Uh-oh, here come the patent Manolos. Drink it? Narrow, strapping, ungiving Cabernet of the highest order, in wood I can't abide. And because, as Peter Gago says, that oak is "totally absorbed ... certainly at one with the wine," I find it very tricky to fairly appraise other than to say that if you're a 707 traditionalist, you'll love this.

Let's call it the most 707ly of 707s and hope my comments don't deter the Chinese, who seem to  love it like rich Australian people loved it as they learned about premium table wine in the '70s and 80s.

Now. Would you like your stilettos back? I've given them a bit of a polish. 

Penfold's Bin 95 Grange 2010 

$785; 14.5% alcohol; cork; 97+++ points 

For the technicians: this is the best new Grange in decades. Gago's brilliant team has nailed the oak. This lot's harmonious. Always will be. Similarly, they've nailed the volatiles: the traditional trademark balsamic is here, but in harmony. The tannin? Persistent and intense, but gentle. Harmony. The rest of it's been done by brilliant viticulturers and rustic grape farmers in forensically-selected vineyards in Barossa, Clare, Adelaide Hills, McLaren Vale and Magill. This fruit is as good as it gets in these parts. Harmony, see! This is a thirty year Grange that would go fifty and more under screwcap.

For the romantics: it stuns and dumbfounds from the first pour. People walk around, mumbling and groaning. Shaking their heads. Over the days it has simply, calmly overwhelmed me with its perfect harmony, complexity and authority. Yet maybe it's unfair to drink it at this compressed stage: it may amaze and delight to the point of gastronomic hallucination, but I think it impresses only by the myriad facets it reveals at unexpected moments. It doesn't ever seem to unravel or unfold, but rather glints and glimmers, sometimes releasing a fairytale firework against its own darkness; sometimes just oozing smooth harmonious calm. I keep thinking of a kaleidoscope made from a well-blued gun barrel, lit from within, and turned real slow, so the patterns hesitate before they tumble against the deep night sky. 

I'll gradually unload reviews of the entire Penfolds release over the next week.

FARMYARD LIFE: THE BIG EYE-OFF

Not long ago, vineyards round here were blitzed with Monsanto Roundup herbicide: a mindless ritual. Now sheep turn the weeds into little pellets of organic fertiliser and roundup means something completely different ... Peter Fraser's dogs. These good dogs don't bark, but they want to work, and they're perfect at roundup ... photo Philip White

COLORINO COLOURS IN SOME RIESLING

J. Petrucci & Son: Joe and Michael in their barrel house near Wirra Wirra ... all photos Philip White

J. Petrucci & Son puts on weight

Chianti's Colorino moves to Vale

and settles on old Riesling roots

by PHILIP WHITE

 

"I put on fourteen kilos in a few weeks in my village," Joe Petruccio says of his recent trip to Castellino, in Molise, near Abbruzzi.

"The food is always there. In Ireland, I lost twelve kilos. They only bring one plate."

Greg Trott introduced me to his neighbour Joe in about 1980. "In the Barossa," Trott sagely explained, "they have Germans. McLaren Vale has Italians."

One got the feeling Trott preferred Italians. He loved the influences they had on his beloved McLaren Vale, and particularly admired their attitude to tucker. He refused to put a fence between his Wirra Wirra Winery and the Petrucci vineyards next door.

Twenty-two years later, when Trott was dying of cancer, and I was editing his book, McLaren Vale - Trott's View, he insisted I included as many photographs as possible of his Italian neighbours. He would scour the rejects box for any image I may have discarded.

"You can't leave this one out," he'd say. "That's Joe Petrucci."

Petrooch had his own waltz with Jimmy Dancer last year, but the treatments, backed up by a touch of familial feeding in the old home town, have put the zizz back in his demeanour. 

Once again, Joe has both fusto and gusto a-plenty.

"I wasn't ready," he murmured of his visit to the departure lounge.

Now, with his winemaking son Michael, he's making some brilliant new wines. J. Petrucci & Son is the bargain brand to seek. These dudes overdeliver.

Colorino is certainly new to McLaren Vale, but it's hardly new in Chianti, where it seems to have run its race. For centuries it was used to add colour and weight to the red blends of that ancient vignoble. In recent years, with modern science and new trellises and whatnot, the Chianti makers have learned to get the colour and character they need from their beloved Sangiovese, so Colorino is not top of the pops.

Many are uprooting it.

So Joe grafted some onto some mature Riesling roots in his sandy slope at McLaren Vale and Michael made a stunning wine.

I first drank it a few weeks back at the Willunga Farmers' Market, where Joe always has a little tasting stall. For a while I thought it would suck all the water out of my eyes; it certainly sucked quite a lot of light outa the sky. It's like a big damp perfumed velvet stage curtain has descended on you.

J. Petrucci & Son McLaren Vale Colorino 2013 reminds me a little of Petit verdot, the very late-ripening grape of Bordeaux, used for tannin and colour in those great French blends. I hear that global warming has seen many French replacing Merlot with Petit verdot, as the early-ripening Merlot gets too ripe and gloopy far too quickly in this new heat. The Colorino also reminds me too of Carmenere, which served a similar role in Bordeaux but survives mainly in Chile, although underground goss says some radical Bordeaux growers are playing with it again.

Mainly, the Petrucci Colorino reminds me of Saperavi, the Caucasian red grape which is distinguished by its red sap and red juice. While nearly all the other red grapes have white juice, leaving the winemaker to extract the colour and flavour from the skins and pips, Saperavi actually has black juice and sap the colour of beetroot juice, so intense levels of flavour and colour can be achieved without pressing too hard, leaving the tannins softer and more welcoming.

Also, surprise, surprise, full character can be gotten without too much alcohol. This wine's a dainty 13.8%.

"I put 14.5% on the label because that seems to be what people still expect," Michael laughs. He's well within the strange law about alcohol labelling: the permitted margin is 1.5% either side of the claimed figure in Australian wine. Most makers bend their label number the other way, so the wine appears lower in alcohol. 

This drink sure feels and tastes like it's stronger than 13.8%! Customer reassurance, see?

It's a deep dark thing, I tell you. It smells of black coffee and tea tin and aniseed. It glowers. It's sinister. But as a young wine, it smells harmonious and tidy. It's slightly syrupy, but the velvet tannins remove any illusion of sweetness and the acid creeps up and draws the whole thing out real long and slow and dry.

That finish is as dry and fine as ground-up bone china.

I've had it straight from the freshly-opened bottle. I've tried it over days. I've had it roughly decanted and smooth; nothing seems to make much difference to it. It's as confident and stoic as the giant stone faces on Easter Island.

 

Yet it's the damned thing's straightout intensity of character that gets you, not alcohol. I don't want to mention the gooey black Pedro ximénes sauces they cook and fortify in Jerez, but in truth it's almost one of them, lite.

The idea of your actual fruits doesn't seem to arise until well into the aftertaste when the drinker suddenly wonders why. If anything, it leaves flavours of soft-dried figs, dates, quince paste and fresh juniper pulp.

It doesn't quite smell like panforte, but it's so much in that direction that I reckon it'd accompany one perfectly. With thick fresh cream. Otherwise, I keep dreaming of big dark wild mushrooms. Morels. 94++ points.

Before I scare you off, there's an antidote to luxury so intense. In counterpoint, it's luxurious in a wicked cheeky way. Under their bargain-bargain Sabella label, Michael's made a slightly frizzante moscato from Joe's Muscat of Alexandria.

Just as the mystery of the Colorino is its modest alcohol, the mystery here lies in the wine's sweetness number: it's drier than the lollypop fairy-floss ones. And it's only 7% alcohol.

"It makes me laugh," I said, showing unseemly thirst.

"That's why we called it Allegria," Joe shot back, bringing my attention to the bottle in hand.

This baby doesn't have the rubbery aroma that spoils moscatos made from the wrong muscats in places too hot. It's rather just grapy, with the gentlest cordite edge. Slurp the bugger, and you're laughing.

And what do you drink it with? Joe suggests another bottle. "But Philip," he clarified, "I take another from the fridge, and I try to do things ... " At which point he finished with a perfectly Latinate shrug.

If you're safe at home and not driving, pop your skateboard armour on and try it with Absolut vodka on the rocks with a bruised mint leaf.

The Petruccis showed me a Shiraz which is serious Bushing King quality, and exciting wanderings through Mourvèdre, Nero d'Avola and Aglianico which are still on the cooker.

Wait for those, but don't wait for the two I'm pumping: the Sabella of McLaren Vale Allegria Moscato is $18 (85 points); the J. Petrucci & Son reds are a meek $25. Unless you bump into Joe at the Prospect market or the Willunga one, where they are several dollars cheaper.

They are indeed delightful things to be on the end of. Especially considering there's more to come.

It's a long time since Joe's father Michael brought his kids from Melbourne and bought 120 acres of the best vineyard land in the south. Right beside Greg Trott. Then Michael Snr. died falling from the roof when he tried to fix the tv antenna, leaving Joe, John and Vicky 40 acres each. That was 1976.

Michael Snr. and Trott would be delighted to see what hard work, persistence, and acute gastronomic intelligence has done.

And being Italian.

Take note, Jamie Oliver.