OLD FASHIONED VINTAGE WITH A DEATH

The vintage John Clarke died
by PHILIP WHITE

Once a person accumulates a serious collection of vintages, and I mean years, not bottles, the lazy brain tends to use identifiers other than the actual number of the year. 

You know, like '83 was bushfire and flood, '11 was the wettest ever, '71 was bloody perfect. 

Many other vintages, like people, just seem to march away in the line to obscurity: forgettable, featureless.  

The flak wasn't too bad when I listed the official weather and climate records broken in the lead-up to the harvest of '17: although there were far too many, it seemed, for some winemakers to digest. No, no, no, they said, conditions are ideal. Yes, it was wet but now it's not. Yes, it was hot but now it's cold. Yes the yields are very high but so is the quality. No the winds are not really any different this year but they do seem to blow around a lot sometimes. Yes there were a lot of yellow leaves earlier on but they all fell off in that gale. No it wasn't it was a zephyr. Did it rain too much in Coonawarra? Oh there was a fair bit of it over that fence there but if never actually rained here. Like not right here. Nah, that wasn't rain.  

I can assert that there's a lot of Shiraz around that seems a little hollow in the middle. Like it's not as bad as the Stephen King cover with the house with all its doors and windows open, the lights on and the curtains all blowing out, but you know that whatever's in the middle is not quite the one that was there that other year when everything was just a lot more peace-in-the-valley.  

Time will tell. 

I can say there's some exquisite Cabernet reclining in oak and tank along these South Mount Lofty Ranges, and it's not just the overt amount of unplucked leaf present to jack up the variety's normal herbaceous index: it's real serious pretties in the best ground. Cabernet franc, too.

Same, dare I say, with Grenache. Great perfumes in great sites. 

I can report some utterly forgettable Chardonnay. And some of scary finesse. Many curious odds and sods of new varieties. Who leaked in the Savvy-B? Nobody. Of course. Many fine sites, many fine varieties still hanging, in hope, all over the state. 

I daren't mention Clare Riesling: I've already had such a contradictory variety of Rizza reports that I'm not picking any of them until the wine's in a bottle in front of me. 

One curious thing. It is a thing.  It's a whole generation of winemakers who haven't experienced what we used to call a normal year. Like it went on for week after week in the Olden Days, more gentle like this. This was normal. So after that really scary aggro lead-up we suddenly have this slow one like past beauties so everyone’s having to recalibrate. It wasn't always a panic. Back to retro. 

But no, I'm not gonna attempt to round that all up into a neat digestive curve ball that just hangs there in the air waiting to be slapped. 

Bigger things than that going down.  

I'm already referring to 2017 as the Year John Clarke died whilst walking round the Grampians  photographing wild birds with his wife and friends. 

By Bacchus he was such a lovely bright spark. What a telling hole he leaves in our national discourse! I can never forget finding him in the rabble of the old Universal Wine Bar in its heyday at Festival time, sitting at a front table with the simple glee of a delighted schoolboy. He had such bright curious eyes that seemed to suck at every radiation you exuded so thoroughly and forensically yet somehow at the same time comfort you with such casual reassurance you forgot about what those eyes were seeing whilst also you just happened to forget to talk. If you dropped your line of vision from his eyes you hit that charming, disbelieving, cheeky grin. My goodness. 

Just coincidentally, but maybe it's not, there was a big slice of demeanour Clarke shared with Dr Ray Beckwith (1912-2012), the great Penfolds wine scientist. This was an unswerving faith in their own curiosity. To my eye, they were both dazzled by what their curiosity handed them. They followed it around.  

It's cheap and easy to whinge about the wine industry, the ethanol biz, not having a Clarke to mimic it publicly. Or a Beckwith hidden within, plastering its walls and corporate mentality with bright science. History now shows that even in its ridicule of politics colonial Australia has afforded only one John Clarke. I trust that his very saddening death reminds us all of the importance of that sort of humble greatness that is so rarely recognised or given room to move.

If there are such brains out there in the wine community how would we know? Would they get a voice? Where?  

Which leads me to the matter of how you say "pairing" drinks and grief. I'm almost convinced wine is no good as an assuager of grief. Wine is life, not grief. When the skinny old bloke with the scythe comes scratchin up the lane I reach for the distilled peated oak-cured spirit of John Barleycorn. It has a more direct gravity and cooler geometry than the romantic drinks. Within that scaffolding I'll be following my nose til it lights me up.  

Oh? What's that? Follow it into the vintage outside? Sure! That'll be the year John Clarke died photographing birds in the Grampians.

Like the host of others, I send big pumping heart to Bryan, and to those we don't know in John's sanctum: Helen, Lorin and Lucia and their families and circle of friends  ... thankyou for giving us so much of him ... might sound stupid and I dunno why but I felt like this when Lloyd Rees died

PHOTO SHOW AT MAGPIE SPRINGS

I enjoyed the pleasure of opening a fine exhibition of photographic works by seven photographic artists at Magpie Springs winery up on the Range.

That's photographer Lucy Partington above, presenting a thankyou gift as OPUS exhibition co-ordinator Gavin Blake looks on. They're her cloud photographs behind me. I shoulda been giving her the present.  

Gavin is Director of the Centre for Creative Photography, where these seven graduating photographers have studied together for 26 weeks. 

There be trowies and sylphs at Magpie Springs ... this is what I found outside ... but get yourself a sparkling Pinot pink,  head into the gallery and take a good look at the work of these seven clever people.

There be scary formal portraits of young humans by Sarah Batistella, Megan Ferguson's wild animals, Chris Holmes series of mates in the shower, Shiana Mules' female nudes with reflections, Janet Simpson's flower portraits, Natalia Rowland's studies of peoples' fetishes or Lucy's black and white portraits of clouds ... it's a very cool show hanging there til June 4 ... make a double day of it and also visit Lazy Ballerina a bit further north into Kuitpo.

 

MY TABLE TONIGHT: STRANGE BUSINESS

On hearing first thing this morning of the death of John Clarke, our foremost yet most humble satyrist, observer, writer, performer, producer and philosopher, I found myself drinking large whisky and tidying my kitchen for a lot of messy tears whilst recalling The Grampians. Pretty weird. Like Ruby Hunter has gone plus Lloyd Rees and  cranky Donald Horne all at once. I don't mean to pick anybody but you know what I intend. Like a really great one. Like I dunno, you dunno, but it's a great big mess of em gone through one astonishing mind. This is what ended up on the corner of the table. Don't ask.

THE YEARLINGS AT PIKE'S 70TH

With the help of good friends with their own private vehicular transport, I got to Pike's 70th at Sellick's Hills Wines on Saturday, and home again praise Bacchus and Lino Ramble. Empty vehicles going everywhere all the time but they're tricky to intercept, so thankyou comrades. Anyway through my own mismanagement I lobbed late and The Yearlings were coming up to the top of their set in the gloaming chill and they sounded very different to what I'm used to..

Rob Chalklen had let go the steeltrap precision of the old Martin dreadnought to return to the softer wood and honeyed sweetness of a big old Gibson, whilst in the US tour Parks found a vintage Gibson archtop with voodoo wiring that replaces the old honey fuzz of the Danelectro with pure golden syrup. Parks is wallowing! Shit it's sweeeet. They're so sweet. The Yearlings just changed gear. I wonder who their new songs will be? Can't wait.

And I must reiterate: I reckon Rob's as good as rhythm guitarists get anywhere on Earth. She plays like a geological epoch. Masterly. Not even going near that haunting voice. Which only haunts when we need haunting. Love youse.

Like Pike, I found my camera devoid of other images of the following revelry. So forgive my simply posting the lad in his teens:

all photos©Philip White ... but I didn't write this

Pike

Pike, three inches long, perfect
Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold.
Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin.
They dance on the surface among the flies.

Or move, stunned by their own grandeur,
Over a bed of emerald, silhouette
Of submarine delicacy and horror.
A hundred feet long in their world.

In ponds, under the heat-struck lily pads-
Gloom of their stillness:
Logged on last year’s black leaves, watching upwards.
Or hung in an amber cavern of weeds

The jaws’ hooked clamp and fangs
Not to be changed at this date:
A life subdued to its instrument;
The gills kneading quietly, and the pectorals.

Three we kept behind glass,
Jungled in weed: three inches, four,
And four and a half: fed fry to them-
Suddenly there were two. Finally one

With a sag belly and the grin it was born with.
And indeed they spare nobody.
Two, six pounds each, over two feet long
High and dry and dead in the willow-herb-

One jammed past its gills down the other’s gullet:
The outside eye stared: as a vice locks-
The same iron in this eye
Though its film shrank in death.

A pond I fished, fifty yards across,
Whose lilies and muscular tench
Had outlasted every visible stone
Of the monastery that planted them-

Stilled legendary depth:
It was as deep as England. It held
Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old
That past nightfall I dared not cast

But silently cast and fished
With the hair frozen on my head
For what might move, for what eye might move.
The still splashes on the dark pond,

Owls hushing the floating woods
Frail on my ear against the dream
Darkness beneath night’s darkness had freed,
That rose slowly toward me, watching.

Ted Hughes
1930-1998

Pike with Irish John by me ... to hear Ted read Pike hit this

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