VINTAGE SUNSET WAY DOWN SOUTH

The gloaming sky was trippy last night at Casa Blanca. Three weather patterns collide over Yangarra. This photo faces due south: the Blewett Springs gullies are over that ridge. In the sky you see the sou-westerly bring in rows of clouds from the Great Australian Bight from the lower right; underlying that come similar waves from across the Fleurieu Peninsula in the lower left.

Both these prevailers come from the Great Southern Ocean. On the right days, I can smell whale's breath: I'm 15 kays from the Gulf St Vincent on the RHS of this shot, further to the Great Southern Ocean; five times that distance to the LHS you're in the Murray Estuary and then that same vast Ocean.

When the other pattern comes in, from NE to NW, it pumps angry high-ion dusty desert breath toward the photographer's shoulders from behind. All I smell then is the acrid tang of waste and rage.

Twenty minutes after that shot, I swung 45 degrees to my right and snapped this.

QUERCUS ALBA: PENFOLDS 707

... from my tasting notes ...

GROSSET & HILL SMITH IN THE MESH PIT

Mesh Eden Valley Riesling 2017 ($30; 12.5% alcohol; screw cap) is the latest joint venture in which the Clare Riesling maker Jeffrey Grosset is purported to pick grapes he likes while Yalumba's Rob Hill Smith selects his own personal favourites, both from the same vineyard in the high Barossa. The wine is then made at Yalumba and sold at a premium. 

I recall a vintage where the press release claimed the gentlemen picked into differently-coloured buckets before your actual meshing, which is an enduring organoleptic image. 

I wonder what they wore? 

This wine has been released alongside the Mesh Classic Release Eden Valley Riesling  2012 ($38; 12% alcohol; screw cap), which could be another variety, given the gap the five years puts between them. The 2017 wine is crisply citric, with those sharply-edged lemon blossom aromatic angles that seem pristine and fresh and mountain brookish. Below that sharp cleansing intro lies a bowl of healthy fresh juice that reminds me of biting into a nashi pear. 

Bright, clean and fresh to sniff, and similarly refreshing to drink, the wine seems perfect for today's humidity: it triggers dreams of spicy Thai tucker at a hawker's stall somewhere in the jungle. It's cool. And cooling. 

As you can see, the Classic Release wine gives you five more years and comes half-an-alcohol short. Providing a much greater contrast than those statistical details, the aroma of this Rizza is all soused in the waft I've heard British masters of wine call "that lovely Aussie petrol" which is a character many of them seem to expect of good Australian Riesling. It is indeed a petroleum-like aroma that pretty well covers the citrus characters that must have been in there once. 

Stylistically, it's a bit like the difference between a new Lamborghini and a cosy old Wolseley with dribbles and leaks. 

In my experience, this unusual petrol station aroma is related to sunburnt grape skins: if the bunches are on, say, the north-western sunshine side of the vine, they can take on a bronzy beachcomber hue and develop, from the start, this style of bouquet. 

As I say, many Brits seem to love it. 

Take it or leave it, this gives the contemporary tippler a glimpse into the styles of Riesling that were common a lifetime ago, before we got a proper grasp of  plant physiology and the ways leaf canopy manipulation and vine row orientation - relative to the sun - can change fruit and wine flavours dramatically. The flavour is shorter and less brightly refreshing. It's a more solemn, contemplative sort of a drink, offering you the chance to appreciate the difference a bit of sunshine can make, and that those five extra years cost you $1.60 each.

HARVEST BREKKY DIGNITY AT LUNCH

I woke to happy chatter on the dim dawn air to find this view from my kitchen window: they're picking the baby Grenache bush vines on the ironstone slope beside Ironheart ... tasted, wrote, took photographs, filed copy. raised the Ground Crew from Last Night, drank two pots of cawfy, waved 'em orf with the PA and went to a stinkingly dignified lunch with Kelly Vincent, the Dignity Party’s representative in our Legislative Assembly. 

Kelly's the youngest woman ever elected to an Australian parliament, and the first person elected on the platform of the rights of disabled people. 

Here I hope she's going to win her first re-election after some long years in the Upper House. She's exemplary in her crisp, determined curiosity and can blaze an honesty around that's hot enough to peel paint. 

You know Bitcoin? How people trade and mine Bitcoin? Steal it? Like grease their own greed?

Contrast: Kelly deals in dignity. She works really hard to get dignity for people. Gets on the news. Fights for it. Talks over and over and long and persistent on the radio. Gets dignifying legislation through. Then she gives it away for free. Dignity. 

Not a bad sort of a currency, dignity.

The wine business should be supporting Kelly and using her sage advice about how we must think on new angles to accommodate people with tricky bits like her cerebral palsy. She's a grammar/syntax nut too, more cognoscent than the rest of the importance of logical language patterns.

Vote 1 Dignity Party. Vote for Kelly.

THE OLD VATAR VINO TRICK DOWN UNDER

It's forever been cool to put gentle crusher tootsies in wine, but in Australia, it's always been illegal to add water ... photo Maynard James Keenan

New heat sees Down Under wine cops permit black snake dilution to 13.5% 
by PHILIP WHITE


It says a lot about human love of intoxication, the arcane layers of law, lure and lore that we wrap around very basic drugs like alcohol. 

Like in winemaking, we've long made it illegal to add water. This law was regularly, perhaps habitually, broken by cheats attempting to increase the volume of their product cheaply and by those more responsible makers who wanted their wine to be a more elegant, less gloopy, more drinkable affair

In Australia, the sunshine's often a touch too loud: it's generally very easy to get grapes ripe. Very ripe: until this recent Global Warming, our grapes easily guaranteed wines much stronger than the cold Old World vignobles. Now, they're having the same problems. 

Wines have become so strong, in fact, that they're often so loaded with obvious, overwhelming alcohol - in the form of ethanol - they're of little gastronomic advantage. Which is dumb when you consider the great sales line of the vendors has always revolved around their powerful intoxicant being a compulsory magnifier of the delights of the gourmand table. 

While the vendors avoided acknowledging that their product was indeed dangerous, the dry wowser interferists insisted it was, while governments pretended to agree with both sides so they could gluttonise themselves to a kind of intoxication on the taxes they could raise from our love of the glug. 

The alcohol levels of most of the bottled wine I drank in the 'seventies and well into the 'eighties were, in today's standards, modest: 13.5 per cent was commonplace; 12.5 never to be snorted at. These were the types of alcohol levels Australian wines shared with the grand, impossibly expensive wonders of Bordeaux and Burgundy, where sunshine was often a bit thin on the ground. 

How did we achieve such levels? Either you picked early or you added water. The old "Black Snake" - the water hose - was an essential winemaking tool for more than wash-down. As modern, mindless over-irrigation became the norm, some alcohols stayed down because the little berries were so prolific and tight with water they could never properly ripen. There grew a certain downward spiral as we learned to move great amounts of water out of its natural channels and into vines: the location of most of those arid inland vineyards meant the wine would not be of the  quality required to charge a proper price of the cognoscenti. 

The next route to viability lay in tipping more water on the vineyard in pursuit of higher yields, and more wine, whatever the quality, which further lowered the product's value. 

Many things influence alcoholic strength. Like rain: the Hunter Valley, for example, often can't pick at ideal ripeness because sub-tropical rains turn the ground to mud, limiting human pickers' access to the crop and ensuring big harvesting machines sink to their axles. If it rains too much the sugars - and alcohols - plunge; if it rains more modestly, ripening continues, often too quickly, but nobody can get in the vineyards. 

In regions where the vineyards are more garden-like, and less industrial, the dependence on human pickers is greater, so the timing of harvest is often determined by the availability of labour. Get a heatwave without a corresponding influx of workers and you have to wait til they arrive, by which time your wine could have gone from 13.5 alcohols to 17 or more. 

Same with harvesting machines: these are very, very expensive and in limited numbers. If things go through the roof, you have to put your vintage in the harvester queue. Stuff gets too ripe. If you have water, you can add it to your harvest via the vine roots, but it's illegal to add in the winery. 

All this went nuts with the advent of a single US critic, Robert Parker Jr. His personal taste favoured huge alcoholic jam bombs. His astonishingly influential newsletter made such gloop popular, first amongst the emergent sommelier class, then aspirant north American foodies, and then even further afield: it was almost as if the USA, a country more known for Coke and fat than cuisine nouvelle, knew more about wine than Paris. 

Australia follows Amurkha: up went our alcohols with the perfect Parker points and our fast food, fat, sugar and starch intake. Up went the national obesity. We trained an entire generation of winemakers to regard wines of 15 or more per cent as the norm. 

Internationally, Parker's influence, fortunately for the modest epicure, has waned dramatically. But in Australia, the habit lingers, partly because many people love intoxication and have become accustomed to high alcohol wine. This, however, is assisted by the simple fact: it's a lot easier to grow and make highly alcoholic gloop than wines of balance and finesse.    

One of the smartest ways toward reversing this trend is to first acknowledge its existence. This has taken twenty years. Next, we should work together to change it, which will be tricky in this new heat. How do we do that? In an unusually bright move, the authorities have changed the Food Standards Code to permit the addition of water: 

"Water may only be added to wine, sparkling wine and fortified wine to facilitate fermentation if the water is added to dilute the high sugar grape must prior to fermentation and does not dilute the must below 13.5 degrees Baumé."  

University of Adelaide PhD candidate Olaf Schelezki reports that in his search to discover whether such addition might detrimentally effect the colour, tannins, volatiles or sensory aspects of wine, he had an immediate stroke of good luck: the trial vineyard he'd selected to test, in McLaren Vale, was hit by the heatwave of 2015. This blast of concentrated summer "saw the potential alcohol in the Cabernet sauvignon vineyard increase by nearly three per cent in barely three days," Olaf said, producing "a control wine coming it at 18 per cent alcohol and badly needing some attention.

"It was a classic example of the compressed vintages that winemakers are facing around the world: Unwanted heat at a sensitive time of the year," he explained upon the publication of his paper.

Olaf (above) tried two common treatments. He tried adding up to 30 per cent water to the over-sweet juice, and then another batch with 40 per cent of early-harvest green wine of less than 5 per cent alcohol. In both cases, he was surprised at how minor, if any, were the resultant detriments to the finished wine's character and flavour. 

Not that it started out with much glamour: "It was a very overripe crop," he said, "very shrivelled fruit with almost port wine aromas and dried fruit, and these characters prevailed despite lowering the alcohol content ... It was not a great wine and the process did not change that. In this case it would have been better to avoid the problem and harvest earlier." 

In the more comfortable 2016 vintage his crop came in at a potential 15.5 per cent alcohol: "one that might be open to stylistic tweaking but didn’t need drastic attention." 

The wine with the added water was better. His preliminary 2017 results show that adding sufficient water to the ferment to drop one per cent alcohol had little detrimental influence, leading to the conclusion that "adding water is really not the big deal that some people have been perceiving it as, and is particularly benign in comparison to some other approaches to lowering wine alcohol content." 

Halliebloodylooyah!

McLAREN VALE'S EXEMPLARY NEW SUBURB

In June, 2011, concerned residents of McLaren Vale set up a community garden on the site of the government's contentious Seaford Heights suburban development. This was to involve kids in learning the value of prime agriculture ground and to bring broader attention to the battle between housing and agriculture. Even Nick Xenophon brought his wellies and had a bit of a dig ... never saw his again, mind you ...

As the development proceeded, the first things to go beneath the dozer were the garden and the remnant strands of native vegetation.

I wandered in to the same site yesterday to check the progress. That bountiful hill now looks like this:

The housing is modestly coloured, with nice little features reflecting the siltstones that made the site famous for its outstanding barley production. I even spotted one little retaining wall made from the local Blanche Point limestone!

Guinness sought this premium brewing grain for many years:

The developers have made plenty of room for big box shops, but there's hardly space among the houses to plant a single blade of grass. The prices seem very low, but some of the hyper-intensive rental apartments look even smaller and closer than many in the city.

To read the discussion paper for the government's proposed review of the McLaren Vale Character Preservation Act 2012, click here. You have only one more week to contribute. To read William Skinner's remarkable thesis, Fermenting Place - Wine Production and and Terroir in McLaren Vale, South Australia, click here. 

In the meantime, if you're in the region, make sure you get along to our public meeting this Wednesday night, where the three major party election candidates and the Mayor will discuss these issues and others in a public forum at the Bocce Club. Click here to download flyer. 

This is an essential gathering for all concerned citizens. If you're stuck in vintage, send a proxy!

Like: is the Seaford Heights development indicative of the sorts of housing we can expect to see being cramped into the surveyed township spaces of McLaren Vale, McLaren Flat and Willunga? Ribbon development between villages?

VALE ISSUES: OLD TEXT NEW PHOTOGRAPHS

text Oliver Moriarty from issue A journal of Comment edited Derek Whitelock October 1975 photos Philip White except aerial by Stacey Vice and cliffs by Kate Elmes