EXMESS GIFT IDEAS #1: A BEAUTIFUL BOOK

 

If you have a very special friend with an even more special thirst, consider A year in the life of Grange as a gift this festive season.

Self-published by the very brave Milton Wordley, who also took the photographs, and written by yours truly, this 100% Adelaide production has won numerous awards around the world.

A limited, hand-bound, numbered edition, it was designed by John Nowland and edited by Sally Marden.

Milton Wordley, the author and designer John Nowland checking proofs at the excellent Finsbury Green printing house ... photo Peter Fisher

 

Milton's photographs follow a timeline through a year in the life of Australia's greatest wine, from the picking through the fermentation and commitment to barrel, at which point Peter Gago and his team engage in a busy period of international travel, promotion and tastings of the wine made five years previous. Various historic tastings of back vintages are also recorded.

With Penfolds chief winemaker Peter Gago at the launch of A year in the life of Grange in the original Grange cellars at Magill ... photo Darren Clements

 

As Milton photographed Grange creator Max Schubert on numerous occasions since the 'seventies, there are also very rare historical photographs.

My text covers the story of Grange, starting with an introduction to my dear friend and mentor, Max , and carries on through the year of harvesting, making, maturing and promoting and selling the wine. The text explains Max's initial inspiration and design of the wine, its recipe and philosophy, and discusses how, through thick and thin, this remarkable drink has grown in stature since its first commercial release with the 1952 vintage.

Max Schubert (1915-1994) in his blending den ... photo Milton Wordley

We also make special reference to the brilliant wine scientist, Ray Beckwith, who virtually invented modern winemaking with his 1936 discovery of the importance of pH in preventing the bacterial spoilage of wine; before that it was common for winemakers to dump or distill vast volumes of bad wine. Ray gave Max his job as chief winemaker at Penfolds Magill, and lived for over a century. The DVD which comes with the book includes my last interview with Ray, and rare footage of Max taking the visitor around his Grange cellars at Magill.

Ray Beckwith at 100 years of age ... photo Milton Wordley

In his coverage of those who drink Grange, Milton traveled the USA to share a glass and photograph the collector and winemaker Maynard James Keenan, lead singer of TOOL, and Allen Toussaint, the wine-loving master of New Orleans piano at Dr Bob de Bellevue's regular Grange lovers' dinner. He also followed Peter Gago around the States on his exhausting promotional and tasting circuit.

Grange collector, Caduceus winemaker, and lead singer in TOOL, A Perfect Circle and Puscifer, Maynard James Keenan meets Ray Beckwith's famous pH meter at Magill ... photo Philip White (not from the book)

A year in the life of Grange is big - it's tabloid - and it's brilliantly printed on thick archival paper by Finsbury Green and hand-bound and stitched in silk by Adelaide master craftsmen at Chasdor.

Other than granting us access to its properties and use of its trademarks, Treasury Wine Estates, owner of Penfolds, had no involvement in the making and publication of this book. Neither entity had any editorial or financial involvement whatsoever.   

A Lalique lamp shade? Nope. This is Don Oliver's 2012 McLaren Vale Shiraz getting a pump-over in the Grange cellars at Magill ... the Olivers regularly make the coveted Grange cut ... their family has been growing grapes on the same Taranga property for 174 years ... photo Milton Wordley

 

Our first gong came from the American Publishers Awards book fair in New York City, where we were awarded the silver medal in the vast Coffee Table Books category. They gave us a gold medal, too. I won another in the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards for Best Australian Wine History, and then Milton went off to Beijing to collect the Best In The World Wine Book Photography award at the Gourmand Wine and Cook Book Fair. Some enterprising soul pinched the copy on display there.

For more information, and a solid preview of the photographs, text and DVD, check Milton's website. You can even buy a book there.

The author and Milton with our American Independent Publishers Awards medals ... they're bigger and heavier than anything handed out at Australian wine shows! ... photo Gail Gago

A DAY WITH SOME VERY HEAVY GARDENERS

The Council of Heads of Australian Botanic Gardens came to visit Yangarra on Sunday. Here's our bonnie green thumbs cadre in the High Sands Grenache. Left to right: Peter Hardwick, Nimbin (Jock Zonfrillo's Orana restaurant bush food explorer and advisor), Professor Tim Entwisle, Director, Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne, Stephen Forbes, Director, Botanic Gardens of South Australia, Mark Webb, Director, Kings Park &  Botanic Garden, Perth, Dr Judy West, Director, Australian National Botanic Garden, Dr Brett Summerell, Director, Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney, Michael Lane, viticulturer and farm manager, Yangarra and Hickinbotham Clarendon Estates, the author, Yangarra tenant, Carrie Moss, Manager, Public Programs, Botanic Gardens of South Australia, and Tony Kanellos, Manager, Cultural Collections, Botanic Gardens of South Australia.

... and then we ...

Yangarra friends Stephen Forbes (current chair of the Council) and Tony Kanellos brought the group to pick Michael Lane's remarkable mind on matters to do with viticulture in general, but biodynamic and organic management in particular. That High Sands vineyard was planted in 1946, just by the way, in deep æolian sand, which is wind-blown, and not marine. The vineyard has never been watered.

After touring the Yangarra and Clarendon vineyards, we dined and drank, then travelled across the Fleurieu Peninsula to visit the astonishing Currency Creek Arboretum of Dean Nicolle. Overlooking the Murray Estuary and Lake Alexandrina, this specialist eucalypt arboretum is established by Dean to research Australia's most dominant natural group of plants of the genera Angophora, Eucalyptus and Corymbia.

Dean Nicolle in his 'zoo of trees'. Dean started collecting and planting this collection of over 900 species and sub-species when he was sixteen years of age. The arboretum, which is largely self-funded, now has over 7000 individual plants - more than double the number of eucalypt taxa grown on any other site. Major plantings continue.

Dean runs a very busy consulting business, assisting with road plantings, gardens, parks, windbreaks and reforestation. Vignerons with creeklines to fix and keen to replace missing vegetation in an intelligent way should seriously consider engaging him.

I am currently wading through his most recent publication, the excellent Native Eucalypts of South Australia, which you can find through his website.

Below are some photographs I have taken of individual plants which caught my attention. Some of these were taken on a previous visit in midwinter. Pretty trippy, eh?

  

Interestingly, the arboretum is planted in the same sort of æolian sand as the High Sands Grenache, and it's never been watered. The arboretum is not open to the public, except on special visitors' days, which are advertised on the website. Below is a map showing the sites from which Dean has collected his seeds. That's a helluva lot of walking!

 

INKWELL RORSCHACH BLOTS ROCK

Inkwell Blonde on Blonde McLaren Vale Viognier 2014

$25; 12.9% alcohol; screw cap; 91 points

It seems that a few Australian winemakers have reached a new level of appreciation of Viognier, which had fallen from favour and almost entirely disappeared from its home in France by the time the quirky Peter Wall decided it would become Yalumba's top white nearly thirty years ago. Now, with wines like the sublime Castagna Ingénue 2013, we see an enlightened change of gear. Here's another example: heady with a sort of royal oiliness that reminds me of avocado, but with balancing, paler flesh, with aromas and flavours like a salad of carambola, cherimoya and sapodilla. Such wines are moving the variety from a Chardonnay alternative made pretty much to be like an ordinary Chardonnay canned with thicker syrup by a different mob to a true alternative in the sense of radical departure. I know it's the wrong album, but you really "don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." To pause a mo on His Bobness's Blonde on Blonde, sooner or later one of us must know that while this wine is no idiot wind it's clearly blowing from somewhere else. It has that subtle confident oiliness that caresses and soothes the mouth rather than rinsing or bleaching it, but it never begins to paint and coat it to the point of sealing it from the weather. Rather, its fatty acid unction is calming and satisfying, and provokes no urgent hunger, a famishing quality I usually like in wine. So what does it make me wanna do, other than snooze? It makes me put it back in the fridge and begin the careful construction of a red pork curry. Which is a contradiction, but who cares? I'm glad that Dudley Brown came from California to settle on California Road, by our sparkling Gulf, to get on with this here business. He's a welcome blot on our landscape.

Dudley and Dr Irina Santiago-Brown's wedding day ... the bridal waltz, in fact ... see that ironstone in front of the stage? That used to be Pirramimma sandstone until so much ferruginous water washed through it that it pretty well turned to iron ... I think it gives rusty galvo shed in summer aromas and soft tannins ... photos Philip White

 

Inkwell I & I McLaren Vale Shiraz 2012 

$30; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 93++ points

Maybe it's the vineyard's proximity to the Gulf St Vincent (patron of viticulturers) that has soothed this wine to a more mellow state than the mighty 2012s made in regions further from such calming Mediterranean humidity; perhaps it's Dudley Brown's increasing wisdom as grower and maker who understands his geology. I reckon it's both. Whatever. This is a rich dense syrup of prune and pickled morello cherries with a drying topnote that's as much soft-and-pithy Ditters dried apple as the chalky clay and ferruginous sandstone of the site. In the Vales, sandstone often seems to impart more morello and rusty shed, while the rare bits of chalky calcrete give tighter, less humourous, Coonawarra-like tannins. But that's the bouquet. In the mouth the wine is more typical twelve. It's long and intense and bone dry with the sort of fine tannin that will carry it for the year or two it will take for its lovely fruit juice to properly swell and cushion those perfectly natural grapeskin and pip preservative phenolics. Right now, I'd love the opportunity to have it with numerous spoonsful of ripe Stilton. Which is how my mate Max Schubert preferred to take a younger Grange. 

Inkwell Perfect Day McLaren Vale Shiraz 2012

$40; 14.6% alcohol; screw cap; 94+++ points

A touch more new French oak in the barrel selection and a dab of the Calabrian Primitivo has given this wine more smug carbon darkness right from the start. It has everything the I & I projects, but in a more authoritative and monumental form. Like the stony faces of Easter Island or the Sphynx, it's gonna take a long time for its countenance to weather and fall. There's intensely compressed and ultra-smooth fruit in the bouquet, but that's only the beginning. Think of melting iron in a limeburner's kiln and you're beginning to get close. Take a schlück and the gums and cheeks wince hungrily, reaching for the dribbling pink steak and a stack of field mushrooms in butter and lemon, with a reduction of this wine, barely-ground black peppercorns and cream, all over the top. This is not for vegan diets. But it is a ravishing thing. While it's dedicated to Lou Reed and named after one of his most childishly hopeful songs, I reckon that at this baby stage it's a lot more Metal Machine Music on vinyl. It's the sort of wine I'd prefer to drink in quadrophonic headphones. Clunk. Hiss. Schlurp. Chew. Choof. Chill with a grin. 

Inkwell Road to Joy McLaren Vale Shiraz Primitivo 2012 

$25; 14.6% alcohol; screw cap; 85++ points 

Instead of just the dribble of Primitivo that's in the Perfect Day, this mutha's on fifteen per cent. It seems to give the Shiraz a neat set of black fingernails and its twenty-hole Docs a layer of Parade Gloss. The wine is silky smooth with an illusion of sweetness, and as it comes from the sandstone bit of the patch it's all black gean cherries with barely a hint of the tight Coonawarra-like tannin the calcrete in the Ngaltinga clays impart. Which you pronounce like gnat, with an L. So we have here a swift, slick, highly-polished punk who's so clean and sophisticated (in the original sense of the word) that you wonder why it's not perched at the bar in a little black cocktail dress and matching patent Manolo Bila double-strap copies with the kneefucker heels. Polish them nails.

 

Inkwell Infidels McLaren Vale Primitivo 2013 
$30; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 80 points

This wine looks like it just stepped out of a Tom Waits song. You know the skinny white street preacher with the string tie and dirty collar who hits the goonbag port, turns black from gutter grime and puts on about twenty stone. On the first sniff - "scuse me while I, well ... I'm gonna sniff you ... you know, like for the diabetes" - it's hard to tell whether he's gonna shrink back to a beanpole when he swaps over to the meths and his liver disappears and he up and dies in a jangly shiver, or whether he's gonna see the light of God's grace, get back on the water and repossess his former angular countenance on the better side of the apex so he can splatter the pedestrians with a little more hot gospel. That might seem confusing to the unreached zinners, zinfidels and primitivos in the Star Wars Blah down the lane at the Land of Promise Hotel, but they're all cut from the same grape, which for want of a grasp of the Aramaic we'll call Zinfandel. Lost souls might not be aware that Zin, which is a lot more appropriate a name than Prim, coz it's just not, is an ornery Calabrian grape which a bloke never knows when to pick on account of it having big ripe red berries like balloons full of sugar and sweet arterial blood sitting in the same bunch as little bitter green bastards like lentils and some lost at various illogical milestones along the way. Butchew know what? I sniff it again and it's come over all polite and contrite and while it remains on the dark side it seems to wind back to the days when the poor soul's addiction to the Devil's Brew was only beginning and you could still see his bones and he could go about forty minutes on the Beasts of Revelations without raising a sweat. And now dammit he's stolen a cornflower blue 59 Caddy and turned into a door-to-door perfume salesman with slick-back hair. Time to lock up your wife. Honey, take the kids inside.

Whitey the preacher by Stacey Pothoven-Vice     

THE COMING OF THE YELLOW DRAGON

How long can our citrus last?
The dreaded huánglóngbìng 
bacterium could finish it off 
by PHILIP WHITE

Love your vodka and orange? A slice of lemon in your G&T? Campari with a slice of sweet orange? Cointreau? Curaçao? Like a hot lemon juice when you're feverish and gurgling? Straight-up OJ?

Think some well-grown oranges might save your livelihood if you live up the River and can't make a living from wine grapes?

Get ready. Huánglóngbìng is coming - The Yellow Dragon.

Yellow things according to Mandelbrot: a touch of the old fractal chaos of nature in agriculture and horticulture might help us avoid Yellow Dragons like huánglóngbìng

Let's go back a touch. In Yu Kung, a 500BC pæan to Chinese life under the emperor Yu in 2200BC, we find the first reference to citrus, which is tropical and comes from China.

We have no idea what the first fruit looked like, but by the time Han Yen-Chih took up his calligraphy brush in 1178AD, he could describe twenty-seven different varieties of citrus, all developed from that one original fruit.

Now we enjoy limes both Mexican and Tahitian, mandarins, grapefruit, lemons, kumquats, citrons, pummelos, tangelos and the oranges, from Navel to Curaçao. Bacchus only knows how many hybrids there are, but all came from that single plant in old China. They've mutated and been cross bred and older strains have been bred back in to various generations of hybrids via a confounding web of intrigue, a little like the thoroughbred race horse.

Yu the Great of Xia

Which brings me to Professor David Mabberley, pre-eminent international botanist, who came to town as a guest of the Botanic Gardens of South Australia, to run the most astounding intensive lecture series and workshops called 'Economic Botany Today - A study of practical ecological biochemistry for humans.'

A graduate of both Cambridge and Oxford, Mabberley has a string of credentials like no other plant fiend. His most revered work is Mabberley's Plant-Book, a one kilogram, 1020 page 'pocket' book listing  and describing over 24,000 plants and explaining their uses and quirks. You can usually find a copy of this in the Digger's Bookshop, behind the equally especial Museum of Economic Botany in the Adelaide Botanic Gardens. 

Mabberly so loves and reveres that Museum, one of only three left in the world, that he remains a close friend of Tony Kanellos, the keeper and curator, and his boss Stephen Forbes, director of the Gardens. Thus the busy Professor's presence here.

As Mabberly took us through all the major plant food sources, explaining how they developed and how we spread them around our lonely little blue ball hanging magically in our tiny stretch of the Milky Way, he wove a tapestry of intrigue and bedazzlement, always leaving us wondering about how vulnerable humans have become through our obsession with training and developing food plants to suit us: homogenising and homologating them so they are easier to grow, transport and sell. The keystone of this little-considered extravagance is its, and our, weakest point: in our genetic purging and hybridising in search of convenience and profit, we make ourselves and our essential crops peculiarly susceptible to old and newer hybrid diseases.

Yu the Great's mausoleum stele at Shaoxing, Zhejiang, China

Eventually, at the end of two dumbfounding days, he brought us to the last lecture: Tropical fruits. This included all the citrus, their common roots and their incessant travels. And then to the Yellow Dragon Disease, huánglóngbìng, also called  citrus greening disease or HLB.

When it hits, this disease is so deadly to the citrus tree that it dies before there's much chance to investigate it or attempt to fix it. The blight was first spotted in China in 1943; Mabberley believes it came from a gene that jumped into a bacterium, Candidatus liberibacter, which is spread by a bug, the Asian citrus psyllid, Diaphorina citri (below), and by grafting.

The Yellow Dragon kills the plant quickly and efficiently by interfering with its phloem, its blood. Leaves mottle and yellow then fall off while the twigs look like they have die-back and the fruit greens and turns bitter and next thing you know your tree is one dead parrot. Deceased.

This scourge is now in every major citrus-growing region on Earth, except Australia. It is in New Guinea, waiting for the right wind. It is destroying the orchards of Florida and California to the extent that the OJ-addicted USA is beginning to be dependent on South America for its fruit. But the Dragon's there too. It's all through south-east Asia, India, the Middle East, Europe and the Americas.

Put very simply, it's everywhere but here.

Great scientists like Mabberley are scrambling to discover a remedy, but to no avail. They rue the fact that there is no example of the source cultivar of citrus extant in China, preventing the opportunity to start the complex web of citrus afresh. We dudded.

Remorse ... Jimmy Swaggart orange crate art by Ben Sakoguchi 

Of course this is a delicious public relations temptation for gene manipulators like the omnipresent Monsanto. Whether such interferist plant fabricators have a solution is arguable; if they do, they're waiting til the world realises how close it is to witnessing the death of all citrus, at which point the public relations infidels will have a a redemptive field day, saving the vodka and orange from the vicious Yellow Dragon. In the interests of the shareholders, naturally.

Love that citrus while you've got it. Riverland, get ready ... and you thought wine grapes were tricky.

click here for more Mabberly ... orange crate art by Ben Sakoguchi

AMAZING DAYS WITH DAVID MABBERLEY

DRINKSTER has just spent two days with the great Professor David Mabberley. The Botanic Gardens of South Australia invited Mabberley to present  'Economic Botany Today - A study of practical ecological biochemistry for humans,' an  intensive series of lectures on the "biological basis of human society ... teaching a far deeper understanding of plants, how they have shaped our past and how they can impact our future." 

It was mind-blowing. And very, very scary.

Topics included Plant-animal interactions; The first roots; A balanced diet - starch, mainly grasses; A balanced diet - protein, mainly legumes; Temperate fruits, and finally, Tropical fruits. Curator Tony Kanellos took us on a tour of the Museum of Economic Botany, which is amongst the last few of its type on Earth. Once, every capital city in the British Empire had one. While this remarkable Adelaide institution is singularly impressive and always educational to those of us who visit regularly, it is especially confronting to those visiting for the first time, regardless of their walk of life. Or their age. Kids love it.

Back at school ... the class included a bright lot of environmental scientists, horticulturers, plant physiologists, other expert plant nerds and people with very big gardens to manage. Foremost apple and pear expert, and therefore cider nut, Greg Cramond attended, but, tellingly, other than the DRINKSTER, there was not a soul from the wine industry. Which was a pity, because Mabberly loved making humourous references to the myriad plants which humans use for intoxication. Not to mention the amounts of poisonous spray the industrial wine biz uses to protect its increasingly vulnerable Vitis vinifera.

Mabberley took us on a breathless tour through the major food groups, continuously referencing the manner in which we  have homogenised and homologated food plants to the point of extreme monoculture, where vital foodstuffs become scarily vulnerable to disease. This is made very much worse with the many plants whose source stocks no longer exist, like citrus, meaning there is no chance of beginning again when our conveniently sanitised and easily-farmed modern forms suddenly succumb to infection, be it old or new. 

As is the case with all the world's citrus. All western supermarket citrus - oranges, lemons, limes, mandarins, grapefuit etc - comes from a single source plant in China which no longer exists. And now, starting in China, we have the formidable Huanglongbing (HLB) disease, which Mabberly believes to be the result of a gene jumping from an unknown source into an insect-transmitted bacterium. This fast killer is now rife in every citrus-growing country except Australia. It has reached New Guinea, so it will be in Australia when the winds are right. There is no cure. So enjoy your vodka and orange: there's a good chance there will be no more citrus anywhere very soon. Our Riverland included.

I couldn't help thinking of phylloxera, a deadly old vine disease we have slowed just a little, and whatever new ones might suddenly occur to send all grape vines chasing the poor old oranges and lemons down the gurgler.

If you ever get a chance to listen to Professor Mabberley, take it. In the meantime, his essential book, Mabberley's Plant-Book remains my constant bible to the world of over 24,000 plants and their uses. This is available in the Digger's Seed Store behind the Museum of Economic Botany. The other must-read is Where our food comes from - retracing Nikolay Vavilov's quest to end famine (Gary Paul Nabhan, Island Press, 2009).

Our merry, but well-sobered throng: we all left a whole lot wiser, wondering what we can do to fix the mess we've made.  Luckily, I was wearing my 1987 vintage Vavilov badge in the session where Mabberley got round to him. Good boy, little Whitey.

this photo by Philip White ... all others courtesy of Botanic Gardens of South Australia

GEORGE GRAINGER ALDRIDGE EXHIBITION

DRINKSTER co-conspirator George Grainger Aldridge, recently pictured here at his home in the Flinders Rangers, will stage an exhibition of new work at The Garage Bar, 163 Waymouth Street, Adelaide at 6:30 on Friday November 21st. Maria Cmielewski and Jodie Willman will also show recent work. Bring your plastic, and join us for a glass or six! Below are a few hints at where George's new creations are headed ... as you can see, some of these works were unfinished when I last visited his studio ... photos Philip White

 

NEW W. C. AT A. P. BIRKS WENDOUREE

That's winemaker and co-proprietor Tony Brady standing proud beside the door he's made from recycled winery timber for the guest retreat room in the new toilet block he's built at the mighty Wendouree at Clare. There was a whiff of goss about Tony and his winemaking partner Lita selling the priceless temple earlier this year, so to stomp on such fickle nonsense he built a new toilet block and replaced the old railway tracks that roll the press into the fermenting cellar with a replacement that will last at least one century, just as the previous one did. Wendouree is not open to the public. Neither is it for sale. The new W. C. has verandas on north and south sides, is perfectly proportioned and very easy on the feng shui-sensitive eye, has ultra-cool modern Italian electric lighting and sports a beautiful outdoor shower, where one can wash whilst watching the kangaroos ... photo Philip White  

photo Doug Govan