ELVISH ELDRIDGE PINOT NOIR AND GAMAY

Philip the Bold slumbers in a Pinot haze in the Palace of the Dukes of Burgundy at Dijon 

The divorce of Gamay and Pinot noir: fixed by Philips, queried by David; reported by more Philips
by PHILIP WHITE

In the summer of 1395, Philip the Bold finally forbad the growing of Gamay in Burgundy.

In spite of the peasants' love of it - it was easy to grow and yielded well - Philip didn't like it. He preferred Pinot noir.

Which was much more tricky to make.

Philip (above) was a warrior, earning his Bold appellation at the age of 14 at the battle of Poitiers, when he fought like a tiger against the Black Prince until he was captured with his father, King Jean II of France. They were lucky to surrender to Dennis of Morbeke, an honorable knight errant who turned out to be a Frenchman fighting for the Black Prince's Englishmen after being thrown out of France by some prick who stole his estate.

It was all hand-to-hand, very close and rather bitchy and familial, Jean being cousin to Edward III, the Black Prince's dad, but Dennis did the right thing and Jean and young Philip survived after handing their gauntlets to him for passage to Edward. 

Some years later, for his gallantry, Jean gave Philip the Duchy of Burgundy.

When the Bold's grandson, Philip the Good, took over the Duchy he backed his grandad's banishment of Gamay with the reinforcement "The Dukes of Burgundy are known as the lords of the best wines in Christendom. We will maintain our reputation".

Philip the Good. Good? Good palate, maybe; he was certainly good at grovelling to the English to secure his power. He did a good thorough job of capturing the savage nationalist Joan of Arc and handing her to the English to be burned. 

While it's cool to maintain the modern Burgundian mantra about the region growing only Pinot noir and Chardonnay, its worth realising that today, there's plenty of Gamay back in there, and the white Aligote is common as well.

They're just not allowed into the famous appellations. They're limited to the vin ordinaire, some of which is brilliant. Put simply, Burgundy still preaches the marketing dogma of the Philips.

It's when you head south to Beaujolais that you really land in Gamay country. There, it's everywhere.

There's not much Gamay in Australia - it doesn't like our tired alkaline soils, through which its roots won't penetrate, leaving it gasping for water. But it loves the slighty acid volcanic loam of Mornington Peninsula.

David Lloyd beheading Pinot at Eldridge Estate ... photo from his website

How do I know? I'm drinking David Lloyd's Eldridge Estate Mornington Peninsula Gamay 2014 ($40; 13% alcohol; screw cap) which is out of stock at the winery. I'm not taking any blame for that: it's easy to see why. It's bloody brilliant. It's easily the best one I've guzzled outside of Beaujolais.

And better than about 90% of the ones I've guzzled inside it. Beaujolais, I mean. Like, drink, say, Joseph Drouin's  Cru Beaujolais Fleurie, which is appearing on a few Mennonite wine lists about our shores, and that's like Coke. The Eldridge shits all over it.

And guzzled is the word. While it's tempting to sniff its alluring, cheeky, peppery cherries-and-red currants bouquet, with its dark black tea and cloves base, it's so keen to get into your mouth that its momentum just steers it straight down the little red lane. Whooshka! 

Once it's gone, if you can bung the brakes on long enough to think about it, you will relish its unctuous and rosy crème de groseille red currant liqueur nature, all wrapped with that tea tin tannin round an acid spine that's halfway between stainless steel whiprod rapier and crunchy shattered windscreen brittle.

In spite of having been headfirst through a windscreen and on another occasion endured a whipping by a skinhead with a car ærial, I love the whole adventure of this wine. It creams my PTSD. I reckon if those old Burgundian Philips could be passed a glass they'd have second thoughts immediately. It would have helped Philip the Good, just for example, to add to his official recorded fold of 24 mistresses and eighteen illegitimate kids. 

It's in that carnal realm.

Get in early for the 2015!

In the meantime you might tide yourself under with a bottle or two of the Eldridge Estate Mornington Peninsula PTG 2015 ($30; 13% alcohol; screw cap), which, tellingly, is still readily available. The acronym - Bacchus only knows my visceral disdain for acronyms - is a truncated version of Passe-Tout-Grains, which is the Burgundian term for its blend of Pinot noir and Gamay, the only rosé in the region.

While it's easy to see your fingers through this wine, it's much darker than the classic pheasant-eye/onion skin colour of the best south-of-France rosés, and even my colourblind eyes were delighted to spot a threatening glint of gunblue when I poured myself a bucket in the sun.

A 50-50 blend of the varieties, it's a delicious, bone dry, gently tannic red, but no introduction to either the brilliant Gamay above or the accomplished Pinots below. Rather, it's a frivolous, over-priced, slightly meaty peccadillo of a drink, not quite in the realm of peckerheads and dills, but not far above, either. It smells and tastes of bitter cherries, like a shot of Cherry Heering diluted 5:1 with soda. It has that dry Heering sort of tannin. In fact, it's a bit like that Fleurie mentioned above.

Don't tell the experts, but it's exactly the sort of thing I could mindlessly guzzle for hours on end while jammin' on the veranda in this perfect Indian Summer post-vintage weather. 

If someone else was paying.

It's when we venture into the eight clones of Pinot noir grown there that Eldridge begins to dance. Elvishly. The name, after all, comes from elf, and has connotations that range from a place rich in mischievous elvish activity to ruler of elves. Lookyousure: There be elves in these Pinots. 

Pan, by Syd Long, the sensualist who rebelled against Melbourne's Heidelburg 'Australian Impressionism' School and dared to see art nouveau patterns in our eucalypts ... this beauty's in the Art Gallery of New South Wales

Eldridge Estate Mornington Peninsula Pinot Noir 2014 ($60; 14% alcohol; screw cap) has that tea tin aroma - and I think what Lloyd calls cloves - that confounds and confuses those who think that this variety should be strawberries all the way to the bank, and they are still many. The best Pinots are tannic, serious, confounding wines, where that aromatic signal that I call black tea or tea tin reappears in these tannins and the infinitely complex array of terpenes in the finish. Where there should also be quite a spine of acidity.

Which this wine has. 

It also has flesh, in a scant, elusive, elvish form. I nearly said a wriggle of flesh, but it's not moving. It's a solid, almost sinister lozenge of morello, maraschino, chocolate cream and pomegranate hammered by some elvish blacksmith into a token that will take only the years to break. Then, that hammering will unfold to let blood run. 

This is not a wine for Shiraz fetishists.

Which leads me to a pair of wines that best illustrate the felicitous, tantalising, majestic wierdness of Pinot and makes me wonder in awe at the table conversations of those mysterious Philips who preceded me, who will never be King of Burgundy.

Bugger.

Lloyd calls them Clonal North and South Pairs and sold prevous vintages for $150 the brace but now offers the 2014s individually at a bigger spend.

From top to bottom of its aroma, Eldridge Estate Mornington Peninsula Pinot Noir N 2014 ($68; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap) has dark cherries, kalamata, bay leaf, taragon, cooking chocolate, sawn cedar, freshly-tanned and painted leather and yep, black tea tin dregs. That's in the aroma. According only to me. I can't see a goddam strawberry or raspberry for the life of me. 

[But then I can't see anything on these friggin' labels: all the text is smaller than the finest stuff on the Aussie tenner, even the cute but infinitismal N (for North) stamp. This work desk of mine is very well lit. I can't abide restaurant lighting. Maybe that tinyness is deliberate, to confuse us so we drink more to solve our confusion. Bad thoughts, Philip the Shit. But, seriously, at this spend, I expect to leave the table without asking garçon for a magnifying glass. That's why we have labels, non?] 

I can smell really good forestry in the stave selection of the barriques, but to the newcomer, that won't even smell like oak.

Have a drink of it, and it's the bottomless black swamp Pan will eventually sit beside when he gets his flute out and the sylphs and fawns, sprites and nymphs will dance deadly and wicked all about and over you.

In its middle is an innocent puddle of strawberry conserve, maraschino cherries, redcurrant pectin and jelly.

If you swim in there far enough you'll never emerge. Specially once its chocolate cream begins to emerge.

Ten metres away, uphill to the south, where the loam is deeper and has less clay, roughly the same blend of clones gives us the Eldridge Estate Mornington Peninsula Pinot Noir S 2014 ($68; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap). This was fermented and matured in the same selection of oaks with the same local airborne yeasts.

This wine smells of dried ground ginger. Of fresh mace peel. Of dried Curaçao orange peel and bergamot. Of hot summer dust. Of the best granulated cacao. Of Arabica coffee beans grown way up a mountain somewhere, eaten, not by monkeys or whatever they famously are in baristaworld, but by ballet dancers and then removed from their pretty stools by elves, who had to come in here somewhere, and whom then went on to wash said jewels in that Cherry Heering I recall from about twenty glasses back before poaching them in new vintage Château d'Yquem and dissolving them in quangdong juice just for the glaze.

Near the bottom of the bottle, It's time I admitted I smell really cleverly chosen wood.

It tastes, pure and simple, of carnal sin in a carpentry. Joseph is teaching Jesus how to make a solid table and what can then happen upon it. All the fleshiest, most sinuous, impossibly pink meat fruits are hidden here in the tannins. The smoky woods.  Smoked salmon; barely-cooked spatchcock. Take, eat, this is my body I break for you. My blood. Ka-chink!

By which point, I'm with the other Philips. If we let this danger outa the house, it'll cause more shit than that savage petit pucelle Joan from up Domrémy way.

But them Philips are sleepin' safe and sound in the vaults of the palais des ducs et des États de Bourgogne and I'm sittin' here very much alive on the veranda near  Kangarilla, awaiting carriage.

Beware the cloven hoof.

While you're persevering with Philips and the way we view sensuality, and the way its illusion and elusive wannabees and what ifs and if onlies are sometimes reflected best in Pinot noir, check one of my favourite Pinot accompanisements by one of my favourite living Philips. Hint: I think this is more about the impish felicity of Pinot than about its flesh.

TWO MORE FROM THE MARS EXPERDITION

Gaywetnesslessness Tweed Hat Thoroughbred Wine Company Pty Ltd Singo Ocko Blingo Thingo Very Dry Sweet Red 2007 [or one of those years around then or now] Limited Shareholders Barrel 2014 Release

Whether it had botrytis or not, which is contentious, this must have been a great horse.  People spent millions on it.  Before it hits the glue factory you should drink this toast to the vast gap of emotion and understanding yawning between anybody with a big crooked horse book and those with an ordinary yearning for an honest punt in the hope that maybe just one of them nags eventually tells the truth, flutters them impossibly long eyelashes, bares them giant piano key teeth and goes out there on the track and fucking wins something fair and square.  It doesn’t quite smell or taste of horse, but you get the defunct post-modern Adelaide University Wine Marketing Degree reek of this academic study in the wee tulip: Twitterculture more than viticulture. When I see the cargo pant wine drongoes paste on Facebook, I actually sometimes feel like that I would accept a wine like this and funnel it in til no bubbles rise.    

Ch. Trevoir Girls Kisscurls Interaction Őhl Űber de Placé 1816 

Looking really spritely for a Trev this rooted, the ’16 CTGKIOUDP is something we could have quite easily forgotten.  Having spent decades in the laboratory, the writer can now exclusively reveal that the drinker’s reaction to this wine depends upon the composition of the drinker’s spit and the company the drinker is exposed to at the time of consumption. Just as that great consumptive warrior and scout, Col. Wllm. Light, could spit blood at will, feign major wounding and then limply ride, disshevelled but respectfully unshot, with an officer’s honour, back through the ranks of the Spanish his company had just ravaged, these dribbly lasses discard their damp cheesecloth and flat-dance the Duke of Wellington’s Full Booted Jig in aid of the Better Purchase Shoe Company.  This, the acute observer may aside, is nothing to do with Germany. But, dear reader, what better charity could one endure? Go to Sir John Wren’s St Paul’s cathedral, look the reclining Wellington in the face, and tell me: is he happy?  Give it another century.

ps: That's my photo of Elsie at the top. Never told a lie in her life. Great sense of humour.

PUTTING CHOOKS BACK INTO VINEYARDS

Yangarra Chook Shed Mk I: this prototype was built on a four-wheel trailer chassis so it can be towed around the vineyard. The little solar panel on the right powers a light-weight mesh electric fence supported by simple tread-in posts. On this very hot day, it was an easy procedure to herd the birds into the coop and set them in the shade ... photo©Philip White

Forget Monsanto: round-up is a thing you do to sheep and chooks once they've eaten the weeds

by PHILIP WHITE

Greg Trott, founder of the modern Wirra Wirra, often chortled whilst recalling McLaren Vale's days as a domestic fowl and egg producing centre.

After World War II, when all the shell-shocked lads came home to remember what farming was like, the wine business was in disarray, and even those with established family vineyards found it necessary to run several businesses on the one property. Orchards, nuts, stock, grain, dairy ... anything that could be squeezed onto a block was attempted alongside the growing of currants and wine grapes.

This often involved a reach back into past farming practices; a certain rekindling of old-fashioned habits that might have required harder work, but returned a more wholesome, ecologically-sound profit.

For some years, chooks were the go. There were many meat birds raised around the Vales when I began paying attention in the 'seventies, but in the 'fifties and 'sixties, great populations of laying hens were common all the way from Stump Hill along Pedler Creek through McLaren Flat and right up the Blewett Springs gullies to the brink of the Onkaparinga Gorge. Some are still there.

Their manure was a very handy vineyard fertiliser in the days before mindless petrochem monoculture.

There was a tax, an annual fee due on each laying fowl. Other than the marauding foxes, the region's most hated intruder was the gubmnt chook inspector.

While the old hand-plugged party-line telephone system was the most modern form of communication, its lack of privacy, although usually hated, made possible simultæneous communication between all the chook farmers. Whenever the dreaded whitecoat approached with his ledger, it'd be all phone lines open with the message "The Enemy is amongst us."

To make the counting of the birds nigh impossible, they'd all be released from their sheds and cages and chased onto the wild open range. When the inspector arrived to demand an accurate count, the farmer would retort "Well I dunno how many there are. I can't get 'em in the shed. You round 'em up and count 'em."

One of Trotty's most humourous recollections was the co-operative matter of getting the birds  down from the trees and back into their coops once The Enemy had retreated to the city. Maxwell, Dennis, Osborn, Genders, Kay, Trott ... some very famous wine names would form hilarious chook posses.

All this came to mind at the beginning of vintage, when a handsome new five-star fowl hotel appeared in the vineyard outside my kitchen. A well-ventilated galvo structure, it was custom-built on a big four-wheel trailer chassis.

Peter Fraser, my landlord, had raised many local eyebrows with his replacement of Monsanto's dreaded Roundup with lambing ewes in the Yangarra vineyards five and six years back; now we see sheep everywhere through the winter, right across the district. Once the vines are dormant weeds generally proliferate. Sheep now turn this vegetation into neat little balls of biodynamic fertiliser.

Ewes with lambs in the Ironheart Vineyard ...photo©Philip White

Monsanto loses out on the Roundup sale. It loses again on its petrochem fertiliser account. And the vigneron makes money selling the lambs: When the vines begin to shoot in spring the sheep are removed. Noted chefs queue for the dressed lambs and the ewes are returned to their standard pasture elsewhere on the range.

Top day well had: Eddie Bilson finishing a Yangarra lamb on the homestead veranda.

Now Peter's having another go at the vineyard chook, the doubters' eyebrows have raised a touch higher.

Trott's chortles and the great fowl round-ups came to mind last week when the Feds anounced that free-range eggs could now be officially laid by chooks farmed at an intensity of one bird per square metre. 

Ki-yi-yippee ki yay!

Peter's prototype chookhouse was built to sleep only about 250 birds. Using a solar-powered electric fence of lightweight roll-up mesh, the birds were given about one square metre of roaming range per head, but the whole thing was moved every few days, so they always had fresh ground to forage, and their shit never became thick enough to kill everything.

On very hot days, the whole business was moved out of the vines and into the shade.

Bacchus only knows how the modern gubmnt chook monitor would police such errant non-conformism.

"Yeah mate they only get one metre each but every few days it's a fresh metre."

Karena Armstrong's Yangarra chicken liver salad at the Salopian Inn in McLaren Vale

This first trial flock were baby meat birds not bred to forage, but forage they did, tentatively. With supplementary feed, they were fat enough for table within a couple of months and were dressed the old-fashioned way by Kapowie Poultry near Kapunda. Kapowie is the only professional chicken processor in the state to do the slaughtering and packaging without the bleach and stuff that blights all other commercially-processed fowl.

These fine chooks were also spared the injection of water, a neat guarantee of extra weight in your mass-produced deep-frozen bird.

Peter sold all his 240 chooks in a few hours of Twitter and Facebook action. Cheong Liew, that genius  master chef from Kuala Lumpur's biggest chook farming family, was first in the queue. We shared a few reds on my veranda while he waited for the dressed birds to come back south from Kapowie, a great grin on his face.

First happy customer for the 2016 Yangarra Estate vintage chooks: Cheong Liew, creator of what became known internationally as fusion cuisine back in the '70s heyday of his famous Adelaide restaurant, Neddy's, with Yangarra GM/chief winemaker Peter Fraser

 

At the other end of the impending winter, at bud burst, the 2016 vintage sheep will come out of the vineyards, their fat biodynamic lambs will be processed and sold, and Peter will mount a much more serious attempt at his chook enterprise.

He has plans for a lighter, more mobile coop, and perhaps a different strain of bird. He'll try laying fowl, and think about the breeds that might forage harder, eat more pests and even assist in the management of tricky stuff like Kikuyu grass, Pennisetum clandestinum, the tropical East African Gĩkũyũ native introduced to grow lawns in Australia.

Cease using the standard glyphosate and you'll find Kikuyu rampant in previously hard-farmed, weathered soils, especially in freak summer rains like the record falls of last January. Kikuyu loves drought-breaking rains, and predominates very quickly when there is no rival vegetation already established.

Add some proper foraging fowl to the sheep effort, and fingers crossed, the lawn might be held back sufficiently to let a richer texture of native grasses take hold before vintage 2017.

Cheong, who understands the advantages of jungle chooks, suggests the introduction of a bantam rooster to the flock. Reading Professor Barbara Santich's great book, McLaren Vale - Sea and Vines, I notice that at the annual shows of the McLaren Vale Poultry and Kennel Club early last century, breeds as diverse as Plymouth Rock, Silver-spangled Hamburg, Andalusian, Indian Game and Black-red Malay fowl were grown.

Santich also reports the showing of Toulouse geese, and Aylesbury, Rouen and Indian Runner ducks.

Chicken by Carly Feaver-Wilson

Who knows how long it'll be before we can buy a biodynamic Indian Game fowl raised in bush-vine Grenache and fattened on spent Roussanne skins before the sheep take their turn in the vineyard?

In McLaren Vale, for starters at least, Monsanto will eventually regret the name it gave its deadly glyphosate weedicide. Round up is once again something you do to sheep. And chooks. After they've eaten the weeds.

I can hearTrotty chortling.

SONIC MOVES AT CASA BLANCO

There are recuperative days when an old cobber or two will rock up armed with wine, wood and wire and heads full of music unplayed which urgently needs replacing with fume. On this bonnie day, Mick Wordley of Mixmasters lurched in with his dog and Joe Manning came down off his riverboat through The Adders, where he collected GiGi (who took these phone snaps) and Syko who took this phone vid of us remembering the whole three chords of All Along The Watchtower - PLAY IT LOUD. I always swore I'd never attempt to play this, having grown up in awe of John Wesley Harding, then the Hendrix version, then Bobby and The Band blistering it again live on Before The Flood. It's like Leonard begging people to back off their habitual destruction of his beautiful Hallelujah. Anyway, this Watchtower was no rehearsing, one take, nice and short.

... here's me much later on another  night, gettin blues outa the old Gibbo through my Pigpen hat ... photo by Noah Vice, who helped get that Youtube thing up ... thanks Noah!

... then I had a delightful surprise visit from the first two drummers I ever met: Stephen "Stewart" Sprigg (left, below) and Paul Thredgold ... Stewart slapped skins in a wild little trio we had with Chris Mitchell in Mount Barker around 1970-71 ... Stew and Chris were publicans' sons; I was the son of a preacher man ... and we all had strong patient queenly mothers, lucky us, standing back, watching, waiting to save ... Stewart helped me get work in his Dad's pub when I fled from home ... Threddie, a mechanic's son, always had the coolest, hottest cars ... he taught me a lot about '50s and '60s rock'n'roll, gave me his copy of Oscar Peterson's Night Train and went off  driving trains all over Australia for nearly fifty years ... It was a very sweet thing to have these old cobbers surprise me ... that's a split  of the historic Tommie Wattie Stomp Claret on the table ... photo by Raylene Thredgold


 

NEW CASA FLAGRANTE ZOOMICO

Casa Flagrante Zoomico 2019

When you get to the corner of this wine it’s all bananas and bricks.  There’s some salt damp in the eastern crater, and when you look at the tracks the damn thing leaves it’s obvious there’s a nail or something in the fifteenth tyre on the left.  They probably wrangled the canes for maximum exposure to Saturn and forgot the forthcoming supernova in NGC 387, which has fried the epidermis and left all the titanium looking crackly.  That thing sticking out the side is troubling, but it’ll probably go down when the twin moons come across next week.  I’d recommend you have it with all your husbands and spermicide on toast. A touch overpriced at fifteen grocks, but it’ll keep.

Grorbly Wood Part-oaked Disgustablo Franc 2098

Always one for lasses, the Disgustablo seems keen to take more wood than this label suggests.  But then, well, the fashion is to leave ’em panting in the yearnment division until Probert Darker discovers it and gives it the full numbers in the Wine Speculum, which can’t be too far off, give or take a few Baumé.  As if that was bad, I always felt the fissile nature of this variety would lead to unseemly revelry in the lumberjack camp, so it’s a relief to see Grorbly Wood sticking to partly, even if it is only shavings from the warped meat safe door.  The other thing is the gap left by the maker’s insistence on partly is very neatly plugged by a cigar or a carrot.  Assinine as much as artisanal, it’s a credit to its terror.   You’ll love that little tweak of butylated hydroxyanisole complementing the piquant trichloranisole in the finish! Such resolution is a rare thing these days. Cake.
.

from Evidence of Vineyards on Mars [2013 George Grainger Aldridge and Philip White]

BOOK FAST FOR BIGGEST BULLDUST FEST

Winemakers and marketers in dire need of a polishing of their Speculative Histories should do well to consider spending an afternoon with the experts at Terowie. Please book, so the Institute of Backyard Studies and the good citizens of Terowie have a bit of an idea of how many tonnes of bulldust per hectare they'll need to water.

THE AUSTRALIAN HOBBY or LITTLE FALCON

photo Ausphotography