AI WEIWEI ON CHINA'S NEW RICH

Grape, by Ai Weiwei: Artist not in residence is The Economist's headline: because the great Chinese artist is not permitted to leave China on account of his bad attitude, he has designed this major retrospective exhibition in Blenheim Palace, Churchill's birthplace, digitally, from afar. The show is loaded with wry comments on the China's new hyper-wealthy ruling class. Looks like another handy cultural backgrounder for those aiming to sell wine in China. If you're in the UK, go check it out!

OLD STYLE SHIRAZ FOR THE BLOOD MOON

Blue Pyrenees Shiraz 2012 

$24; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 89+ points 

They were grand old days when the wicked Francois Henri was redesigning the Blue Pyrenees vineyard north-east of Ararat, which his employer, Remy Martin, had originally planted in the 'sixties to make premium brandy. The brandy business was taxed into oblivion in the early seventies. Out came the brandy grapes in the ensuing decade; in went the standard red varieties of the day. 

Colin Lanceley was called in to paint the vineyard beneath the full moon and Francois had a handsome label designed which copied the packaging of Rothmans International cigarettes, a deluxe brand of extra-long smokes for duty-free airport stores. That label was ultra radical in its day, not because it was influenced by the tobacco business, but  because it was blue, then a definite no-no for wine. 

We were tasting the components for his red blend, which was a Bordeaux-style mix with a little Shiraz, when I convinced him the peppery, feisty, young vine Shiraz was so good it should have its own label. A game and adventurous soul, Francois called it Australis, as he hoped it would be exported to France, to show the Rhone blokes a thing or two. Here, it was considered one of the better early cool-climate Shiraz offerings of its day.

Remy hit the international financial shellgrit eventually, and retired hurt. After one thing and another, a group of investors bought the business in 2002. They're still there.

Keeping in mind my sentimental connection, permit me to suggest this is a warmer, softer red than its zappy ancestor. Now those vines are hitting some proper age, it's rich without being strong, and more mellow and soulful. It's not at all gloopy or jammy. It has a dark damp earth and tomato bush aroma, in with its old leather upholstery and polished walnut wood: it smells like an old Jaguar with a warm engine, an oil leak and potted tomato plants on the back seat. Maybe some mushrooms, too. It calmly settles in on the mouth without any challenge. Settle into it, and it's a nostalgic sort of a ride. The tannins are fine and dry and drawn out, and seem well suited to tea-smoked duck or roast quail with pine nuts, reduced spinach on the side. It's no grand cru, but a good drink for the money, and stylistically, a bit of a rarity.

While Francois' original blue-and-gilt Rothmans label is gone, it's good to see Colin's full moon survives, especially beneath a Blood Moon eclipse like tonight's. 

Longhop Mount Lofty Ranges Shiraz 2013 

$18; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 89++ points 

This baby's a year younger, so it has a touch more bright berry fruit, but it's pretty much after the 'Blueper' in style. Made from low-yielding older vines in the high Barossa and the hills to the south and west, it has similar hints of tomato garden and mushroom with a little white pepper piquancy in place of the old Jag which has yet to arrive. Give it a couple of years. Maybe it's a tad yeasty, as in doughy bread. That's a fault in the nostrils of the show ring technocrats, but it's fine by me. The palate is sinuous rather than plush, still comforting, and a little cheeky. Instead of Colin Lanceley, it has a fine George Grainger Aldridge portrait of an old vine on the front, setting the tone just right. As it slowly draws out to its dry tannin taper, it makes me dribble for the sort of delicious blue steak the kitchen at the Lion Hotel does just perfectly: no bucking, no moo, no horns, a little crusty and caramelised on the outside, and warm all the way through. To push the blue mood, both these wines are perfect accompaniments to the Miles Davis masterpiece, Kinda Blue. They also make me dangerously nostalgic for a slow draw on one of those long-gone Rothmans. Mmmmm.

Blood Moon eclipse 09.10.14 from International Space Station

   

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