GRENACHE: HIGH SANDS TOP PICKED

"It's a Grenache year," winemaker Charlie Seppelt said once I'd followed this morning's harvest of the top of the High Sands Grenache vineyard to the Yangarra winery. The vineyard's just up the hill outside my back door. I love watching what they do. I'm a sucker for the feeling of it all.

Charlie said it with great finality.

These 1946 model G-Spots are in deep wind-blown sand. Their roots go way down to the ironstone and clay, sometimes metres deep. This vineyard has not been watered since Bernard Smart, my neighbour, planted it.

Random bin, straight off the vine. Neat bunches like these from such old bushies have complex, juicy stem systems hidden within them. While some winemakers like to leave some stalks with whole bunches in the ferment, I tend to see them as being full of water and vegetal flavours that don't seem to sit real pretty in Grenache. We're all whoreses for causes. I like to see all the stalks and stems sitting in a stack like this:

Another random bin, straight off the grape sorter: note the wide range of ripeness and berry size, a welcome variation to me, typical of bush vine fruit, indicating a wider range of potential complexities ... gimme dem flavour fractals! ... all photos©Philip White

PARACOMBE: A BRACE OF BLONDE BEWDIES

Paracombe Holland Creek Adelaide Hills Riesling 2016 

($20; 13% alcohol; screw cap) 

Lobbing right in time for lazy autumn afternoons watching the leaves fall from the patio, this fine Riesling is a sultry, moody sort of thing, offering just a little more creamy flesh than the Rieslings of the harder country of Eden and Clare. 

It reminds me of the new Ashton Hills release from just a ridge or two to the south. It smells as much like white ham fat as the usual lemons and limes. In keeping with that comfy bouquet, the palate's cosy too. 

It does have that trademark deep gully acidity, but the nature of that plush magnolia petal flesh growing there wraps it up so it has none of the smashed windscreen jangle of some of those more austere wines from drier climes and older rocks. Of course I love those too, but I prefer them when it's hot as shit and you need to be reminded of the sound of ice. 

It's not desultory wine, but it's one that I reckon would fill a fair few of the cracks in desultory people. Like it'd stop 'em clicking their nails on the laminex. Smooth as. Chill, Blossom. 

Paracombe Adelaide Hills Sauvignon Blanc 2016 

($21; 13% alcohol; screw cap) 

This Drogemuller family classic has always given a proud pointy bit to the white Sauvignon of the Hills. It was one of the very first and has just confidently stood its ground for decades in that treacherous market full of grassy, pecky-peck Kiwis. It's always been a beauty. 

Once she'd pegged her claim with it in the hearts and fridges of Adelaide, Cath Drogemuller, that dimpled fire-haired Dragon Lady with the smile, was never about to let it go. Watching her burn shoe leather to establish, secure and service that market was a lesson to all. Man she steamed it! 

They grew it, Paul made it, she sold it. 

And here we go again: a fresh upland breeze of a thing, with a mix of drier seaside dunal herbage as much as juicy, ripe gooseberry. But then the flavour fills with that magnolia petal flesh like we loved in the Riesling and right down in there that yellow pollen puts a dainty dot of honey smack dab in the middle. 

It is a lucky town that has gastronomic glories like these grown and made in its environs, and offered at such modest prices. 

And now we see the next gen of Droggies rockin' in to run the show it looks like there's even less chance of these deliveries wavering in quality, honesty or determination to please. Not that there ever was such possibility. Brilliant.

IRONHEART BRIDES UNVEILED AND PICKED

It was the dance of the Seven Veils outside Casa Blanca yesterday morning, as the Ironheart Vineyard Shiraz brides were unveiled for harvest.

That's one end of the vineyard from my front veranda. The ground here is scanty sand and bits of clay on big slab ironstone. The geology changes at that treeline: beyond on the flat is a Chapel Hill vineyard which produces very different flavours in recent alluvium. 

There's something about the flavour of these Ironheart grapes this year that reminds me of the panforte complexity Michael Waugh and a few others get in low-yielding Shiraz around Greenock and Marananga in the real old outcrops of the north-west Barossa.

But here, without losing complexity or fresh berry acidity those spicy baked nuts and berries flavours are more frothed up and moussey. It's as if they've had the corners knocked off them. 

I'm not talking quality, I'm talking difference. 

There's also a tantalising whisper of nougat, like I saw the other day, redolent in Drew Noon's fermenting Grenache rosé.

This softening I suspect is about relative humidity. 

I reckon you could match the clones, geology and altitude of Shiraz sites in the Clare, Barossa and McLaren Vale vignobles and the one with the highest relative humidity will have the softest tannin. That'd most likely be the one closest to the ocean. Yangarra Ironheart is fifteen kays from the drink. 

I'd love to see somebody science the hell outa that theory.

As a sundial my solid drop-forged chrome moly worm squirming up from the terrazo slab ironstone in my front yard says this was 0730 hrs but I dunno if the sun's been advised to adjust for Daylight Saving. 

First thing this morning: in go the pickers. Give this image a click to look into it. I didn't want to adjust it. Everything felt kinda mediævally sacred in that early light.

2017 Ironheart Shiraz, ready to go to the winery, 8AM - like less than an hour ago. The grape sorting machine will remove all stalks and leaves and wee beasties hiding within the bunches - raisins too, if required - and give the winemakers caviar like this (2012 photo):

... and here they were hitting veraison on 6th February: seems like yesterday ... I'm dyin to see what happens as they ferment ... overall, my favourite growers and most reliable sources, many of whose fruit I've tasted as I start to get around after being crook, say this looks like a stonking Grenache year, and I agree so far, but straight off the vine this Shiraz made me dribble ... I hear they're picking the heart of High Sands tomorrow ... I'll get some snaps if they do ... this is a really trippy/sparky time of year ... I love watching what goes down ... all cool in this neck of the woods ... all photos©Philip White

GRENACHE AND THE ITALIAN CONNECTION

Giovanni and Geoff Patritti: Grenache kings

Gippsland and the Patritti connection

by PHILIP WHITE - 170403 

It came as a certain relief to confirm today that Grenache was the first wine I tasted. 

I'd long been suspicious that those dregs of vino famiglia I'd pinched as a toddler were Grenache but it was too far back to track. 

Which led to living content that my first confirmed glug of the G-drop was from a Hardy's flagon in the bushes of the carpark out the back of the Crafers pub when I was a high school kid. 

But this very morning I discovered it had indeed occured at those previous tastings ten years earlier, at our Italian neighbours' place in Victoria. We lived in the Strezlecki Ranges in Gippsland. The Bagnara family, sharefarmers from the mountains north of Venice, lived through the pines, just across the sandy Old Leongatha road. 

Giacomo"Jack" Moscato, patron of many immigrant Veneti families, and Attilio "Artie" Bagnara had built a boccé court beneath Artie's backyard cypress trees, right beside the neat and lovely Bagnara cottage. 

When I was a little kid I'd lie in my bed 400 yards away, with the window open, listening to the clack of balls and ka-chink of beer glasses well into nights decorated with all the excited exotica of a romantic language I never knew, applied by laughing, tiddly people to a game of bowls anyone could play. 


That joy was much more alluring than the Exclusive Brethren who'd gather for worship in our big room, with their 

" ... hymns exhaled through trembling wattles; 
pious old throats filled with the Holy spit 
and sanctimonious halitosis." *

It was a great relief to discover Federico Fellini twenty years later. His movies  confirmed to me how exotic and romantic and foreign all that Italian stuff really was to a little blue-eyed Brethren kid in the hills at the bottom of Australia. It wasn't a dream after all. I had good cause for my infant jealousy and wonderment. I lived like the boy in Amarcord. 

While the men were in the cowsheds and the women busy in the kitchens making breakfasts I'd saunter across the track in the mornings after big boccé nights, just to try the odd cigarette butt, leftover beer, or homemade red wine. I was a connoisseur by the age of seven. 

Us Whites lived in a very white house where we ate even whiter food: porridge and vienna slice; lettuce and radishes; boiled cauliflower and cabbage; corned beef. White tea. No alcohol, prawns,or pork. 

Instead of holding an uncle still twitchy from the war, the Bagnaras' veranda sleepout was hung with home-cured meats; their shelves stacked with pickled jardinière and olives. They always had cheese with a lot more character than the stuff at our joint, but then  Artie had grown up making cheese in Italy. 

Fiorina taught me to hold the little wooden grinder between my legs to grind the morning coffee: I had never inhaled anything so good. Until Artie would add a few drops of his plum grappa to the tiny cups she'd serve him. That smelled even better. 

From the way I watched others regard it, Jack Moscato usually seemed to have the best vino. He drove a Simca Vedette, with the steering wheel rubbing a stain into the shirt that stretched over his fat belly. He'd nevertheless manage to tuck a half-gallon flagon there in the vicinity of the thighs in case of being interrupted by sudden thirst.

The Vedette had the 2351 cc flathead Aquillon V8 with the double-barrel Zenith, and when he opened the bonnet more men gathered to perve and share his flagon than I recall showing up to watch the Sputnik sail silently across one speckled night. 

The Panozzos drove a Citroen DS, which was much more Sputnik as far as aliens went. I'll never forget first seeing that spaceship float up the village street. Mum was as shocked as me. I instantly loved it more than my previous beau, the faux Americano Vedette, which used all its wings and chrome to look bigger than it was. 

At the same time, in the northern suburbs of Adelaide, Giovanni "John" Amadio (left) still grew bush vine Grenache and Mataro on Montacute Road. He owned the brand name Dry Table Wine and through and after World War II sold most of his product in barrel to the Australian government, which served it to the Italian prisoners of war we'd locked up in the gulags along the Murray. 

They were our enemies at war, yet Australia gave them wine with their meals: a far cry from the way we ignore international law to punish honest refugees fleeing from the undeclared wars we've waged ever since. 

Just as John Amadio went to the Riverland for the Shiraz he'd add to his suburban Grenache and Mataro, I'd always romantically imagined the Strezlecki Veneti crossed the Australian Alps to find Grenache on their northern side, in Rutherglen, and the King and Ovens Valleys, where other Italians grew grapes and tobacco. 

Rae and Drew Noon in their old Grenache vines on the Willunga Escarpment piedmont in McLaren Vale ... photo©Phiip White

Then Drew Noon told how the old blokes at Langhorne Creek recall sending Grenache bunches in boxes to the Melbourne market where Italians would buy them for backyard winemaking, so I thought maybe some of that may have found its way east to the mountains ... 

My dear Kangarilla neighbour Bernard Smart, who I regard as a senior Godfather/Protector of upland McLaren Vale Grenache, recalls sending his grapes in banana boxes to the markets of Sydney for the same purpose. 

Premier Don Dunstan loved living amongst the Italians in Norwood. He'd joke about his suburb being easy to find in the summer: all one had to do was look for the cloud of gourmand vinegar flies. Best palates on Earth, he reckoned. 

Only when I moved south did I learn where many of those grapes had grown. 

Wayne Smart and his dad Bernard in their 1921 Grenache vineyard on the last high sand sand between Bakers Gully and the Onkaparinga Gorge, at the north-eastern extremity of the McLaren Vale vignoble ... photo©Phiip White

Bernard's two upland Grenache vineyards survived due to his appreciation of the Italian community's love of dry Grenache family wine. 

Once port was out of fashion, those of English or German backgrounds were disdainful of the variety they had planted everywhere to make that embarrassing sweet plonk. That business had been their invention. Now they didn't want to know. 

Apart from bits and pieces of dry Grenache finding its way anonymously into blends with Mataro and Shiraz in things like that Hardy's flagon, or back before cubism deconstructed, even d'Arry's Red Stripe, Grenache was rarely seen to be a particularly good grape for premium table wine. 

So prices fell and vast spreads of old pre-phylloxera bush vines  were bulldozed and burnt, all the way along the Ranges from the Cape north to Clare. It was horrible. 

Fortunately, Bernard Smart hung on: having grown up working his forebears' old bush vine Grenache on the ridge between Baker's Gully and the Onkaparinga Gorge, Bernard was not about to rip out the results of two or three generations of very hard toil. His kin began planting those vines in 1921. He had also to protect the big High Sands bush vine patch he planted on the next sandy ridge a few kays away in 1946. Remembering the Italian demand for bulk Grenache grapes in Sydney, he'd simply sell his fruit to Adelaide Italians who'd come and pick it themselves into boxes, car boots and trailers. Back to the 'burbs into the scrubbed laundry trough; through the home-made basket press and into that barrel on the back veranda she'd-a-go. 

It wasn't much money, but it kept those vines alive for another 25 years: just until the Grenache revival saw prices back up where they belonged. While I'll tell Bernard's story a bit further into this Grenache series, it was him relating his Italian tale yesterday that led me to recollect that vino famiglia beneath the sighing cypress a lifetime ago. 

So after 55 or so vintages I tracked down Attilio and Fiorina's surviving son, Aldo, and phoned him in Gippsland. 

Man, can we talk! 

After scanning half-a-century's gossip, I enquired where his community would have found the grapes for that home-made 'fifties vino famiglia? 

"It wasn't home-made," he said. "Every now and then we'd write to Guiseppe Patritti in Adelaide and he'd send a barrel by train from Adelaide through Melbourne and on to our local railway station at Yarragon. The station master would write to us and brother Flavio and I would pick it up with the tractor and trailer and haul it back up the hill. We'd have a big community get-together - like we did when somebody would buy a pig for smallgoods -  and bottle it in rinsed beer bottles. Somebody even found little corks for them. There were no wine bottles. 

"Nobody else in the district knew anything about wine or wine culture. We had the devil of a job convincing our non-Italian neighbours we never drank the whole forty gallons in the one sitting!" 

So. My first red ever had been a Patritti Grenache, grown on that beautiful alluvium of Adelaide's southern suburbs where only villa rash and Tupperware Tuscany now spreads. 

Apart, of course, from the tiny vineyard surviving on Oaklands Road, where the trouble this year was birds, not bugs. 

And of course the Patritti winery's still there in the houses, making fabulous old vine Grenache. Go taste. Go buy. 

Bit of a knees-up at Patritti, back in the good old days, and below, the delivery truck

That's chief Patritti winemaker James Mongell, his mum, Ines Patritti and winemaker Ben Heide in the ancient Grenache and Shiraz in the Marion Vines Vineyard on Oaklands Road, which we saved twice from genius developing councillors ... once from a Colonel Sadness/Golden Arches horror; second time they wanted a carpark ... it's the last precious remnant of what was a great swathe of southern vines.  ... I twitch with wonder that some of these grapes may have been in the first wine to pass my lips ... it's not unlikely ... photo©Philip White 

*FOOTNOTE:this is from an earlier lament, republished here at the horror of Newtown: I had a soul.

ON HEARING BIG BOB WAS DYING - ARCHIVE

some of the earliest of the last thoughts

for bob and wilma mclean sarah and family and adam

 

those who collect funerals

ravens dribbling roadkill

remittance men

butcherbird hanging mouseguts in a tree

matriarchs maven lovelies

shelf-shaking panhandlers

blazers and suits and fizzhags

bright girls in long silk

sunday school teachers rope petticoats

the slavic dancer's bitten toenails

the blokes with the zip-up chests

shadow-boxers warty benchmen

whores with mouthsful of lipstick

lord twining giggling toothless on a flagon

backsliders backbiters syndicators

the horse I used to kiss

tough-fingered neighbours in tears

bringers of soup and firewood and stew

peacocks on the woodbox

the giant pitch hounds

man we pranced for you

in the spiral waft of your spirit

man we danced

the open-throated laughter of rejoice

balancing on talons

the wedge-tailed eagle skrawked a warning

shotgun discharges on the fence

as I spun 

your big hand at the small of my back

sweet brandy whisper of grandmother's breath

reassurance of ironed linen to come

bits went up in the air

we cast dirt skyward

lumps of gravel and clay

hats and butts and worn out notions

the bones of old ideas 

heaven was our chimney 

I hurled bottles 

shiraz made mud for our boots 

this is the works

  

these are our roots 

philip white

top photo©Milton Wordley ... on the occasion of her 60th birthday, without spilling a drop of Riesling, Wilma exits a very low limbo below a real long Mt Pleasant metwurst, which we then devoured ... bottom snaps by me: Big Bob as Yeti ... and here he is at our last lunch ... the tomato one on his left was his favourite. I think he thought I would deftly devour the other. Sheesh. Wee Rab.

That shotgun reference is a recollection of the day Bob's 12 gauge discharged as he climbed over a fence. About 1984. Silly fellow was hardly a hunter. I was so freaked to realise how close he'd come to blowing his head off I could barely speak but typical of the man, he ended up attempting to comfort and reassure me! No more shotgun after that.

On just re-discovering this poem in the ether I was tempted to clarify this incident by adding to its text, but I don't want to change what must have been an utterly spontaneous splurge of images from the eyelid cinema library ... I can't remember the Philip who wrote that poem but he seems close.
 

GRENACHE - DREW NOON'S LOVE STORY

Drew and Rae Noon in their Grenache vines, planted in 1934 on the piedmont of the Willunga Escarpment in McLaren Vale ... photo©Philip White

Grenache: growing up in it 

by DREW NOON MW 

When I was young we used to pick our grapes into old kerosene tins painted with special white paint before the harvest each year. 

I loved to eat the fruit while we were picking, taking a bite from almost every bunch! 

Our vines were Grenache. They were planted in 1934. It seemed to me as though they’d always been there, like the gum trees surrounding our block. 

We pruned them back each winter and from the stumpy, gnarled trunks somehow lovely soft green shoots emerged each spring. They survived our hot summers well, producing smaller crops when the season was really dry. 

But as I grew up I became aware that in our region Grenache was becoming regarded as a second rate variety. Everybody wanted Shiraz. The price the wineries were prepared to pay for Grenache was consequently lower. This was in the 1970s, at the beginning of a new era in McLaren Vale. Demand had shifted from fortified wines to table wines and Grenache made wine which was less dark in colour and tended to oxidise with barrel ageing. These characteristics were strengths for tawny port production but were considered weaknesses for producing red table wines. 

And so the grapes produced by our beloved old vines suffered falling demand from winery buyers. Our neighbour BJ who purchased the vineyard at the back of our property in 1972 still keeps a hand painted sign in his shed with ‘Grenache grapes $200 per ton’ from those days. 

Then things took a turn for the better. Dad was still selling our crop to local wineries (including at different times Genders, Wirra Wirra, d’Arenberg and the Southern Vales Co-op) but due to a combination of the falling demand and his experience in the south of France teaching English for a year, he decided to have a go at making his own wine.

Life was much simpler then. 

It was 1975 when he produced his first few hogsheads of wine. I am fairly sure of the date because the previous year - a wet summer - we lost the crop to downy mildew, which we had never seen before. I was only a teenager and I remember the wine being pretty dry to my palate but with a sort of recognisable connection to the taste of the grapes. I was strangely quite impressed! 

Over the following years, I at first accepted the wisdom of the time that Grenache was a second-rate variety. But dad was selling our Grenache wine through the cellar door with no problem. And the public who visited and tasted the wine didn’t seem to hold any such prejudices. 

I spent 15 years away making wine interstate, with no Grenache and not a bush vine in sight. By the time Raegan and I returned home to take over the winery from mum and dad I looked at our old vines with a new perspective. 

For the first time I saw them as unique and special rather than old fashioned and out-of-date. 

I wanted to protect them and to show people what they could do. I felt sure that we could make something special from them. It was our obligation.

The Grenache crush fell from 57% of the total red nationally in 1964 to make up only 7% of McLaren Vale’s red harvest by 2015. However although these figures don’t show it, there’s been something of a revival in the last couple of years. Grenache has suddenly become fashionable - perhaps McLaren Vale Grenache in particular. 

Whilst this is a welcome development, it’s also a bit of a worry for those who have worked with Grenache for a long time. I’ve learnt over the years that people are opportunists (motivated principally by the desire to make money) and therefore I expect that this renewed interest in Grenache will lead to more plantings but unfortunately not necessarily focused on quality, just on the variety. 

Grenache does not lend itself to greed, hurry or the time-poor modern lifestyle. It makes its best wine in fairly hard conditions which limit its growth and yield potential. This is true of most red wine grapes but you notice this more with Grenache than say Shiraz, which is over-endowed with colour and produces wines of quite acceptable soft fruitiness even when yields are higher. 

It is the fragile nature of Grenache wine which means that it reflects its terroir more transparently too, making it an excellent vehicle for transferring site-derived characters to the glass. 

Old vines growing on their own roots help here. 

Grenache can produce the most engaging wine that you have ever tasted. It can be profound in its depth and complexity. I love Grenache like this. But to produce such wine takes a dedication to quality in the vineyard and winery. There are no shortcuts. 

I think the likening of Grenache to warm climate Pinot is a fair analogy. Both can produce wine that is as good as it gets but there is a steep cliff off which quality drops unless yields are kept limited and sites well chosen. 

The fact that it isn't easy making good Grenache makes it all the more exciting. 

The fact that I grew up with these vines and loved them unconditionally at first, only to discover they weren’t valued by others and then finally to uncover their potential for myself makes the connection personal. 

Grenache is very close to my heart.

Rae and Drew this very morning with their 2017 Grenache rosé fizzing happily away with its own indigenous yeast ... it smells like fresh nougat! ... photo©Philip White