McMURTRIE: NOT MEGA-SPENDY GLOOP

Distinctive wildcat quartet from a McLaren Vale shedster with heritage
by PHILIP WHITE


No rock star, Ross McMurtrie is a reclusive bloke who grows and makes some cool shed reds in McLaren Vale. They've been a local secret too long. From the road named McMurtrie after Ross's forebears: the one that runs from the Salopian Inn, where they were born to grow beside this vineyard as it grew ... the road that runs right along the foot of the ridge from Richard Hamilton's famous Hut Block Cabernet, his best, on through Frank Mitolo's, past Wirra Wirra, over the faultline, and straight up the range. 

That McMurtrie McLaren Vale Sangiovese 2015 
(14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 80 dozen made) 

What? That? That's no superEtruscan! Not a hope in hell aiming your pretense in that direction if you're in this southern country ... this here's real abrasive briary bitter cherry: somewhere between what they'd call a narrow conceptual model and a Chianti punk with its collar-and-cuffs turned up ... 

Make that a hillbilly Elba punk ... the dude in the Amarni herringbone waistcoat but oh no it's just his grandfather's old one like the FIAT 500 ... kid put a filthy Suzy Busa donk where the back seat used to be ... 

"82? Shit Filippo that's cubic inches, not my IQ ... so you're not game to get in my car?" 

Okay just chug it as you would at a long barnyard table in the middle of that irony isle and if there are savage hare frightening the kiddies on the football ground you could sneak one into a jug for nearly too long and use its juices with strip noodles pappardella alla lepre ... with a real wormy casu marzu cheese ... oh yes, if the hare didn't have ticked fur it was probably a goat. 

Otherwise, you could let it mellow to really syrupy marello of simple elegance with a good airing in the same jug but that'd be silly. I shared it with a Napa winemaking mate with a terrible Barolo fetish who didn't like it but then he reflected fondly on his time at the wheel of a Veyron, which should preclude him from access to this rustic purity. 

The McMurtrie McLaren Vale Shiraz 2014 
(14.8% alcohol; screw cap; 89 dozen made) 

When first snapped, this seemed pretty much the grown-up, embarrassed older sister of the zitty Fix It Again Tony (FIAT) fanger: tight with twisty angst, she just can't wait to get away from him and right off the island. On the boat. After a good airing it went through a more satisfied phase when it brought me to where McLaren Vale's Blewett Springs and McLaren Flat Shiraz hits the sparser black cracking clays of the Wok around the Aldinga airport. 

It's a sort of mixture of the cherry florals of the Blewett Springs sand and ironstone, the soulful mud of the Flat, and the tortured hard harsh yields of the southern clays, which pull the vines' hair roots apart every time the summer dries them out til they crack. 

So it's a bigger deal structurally than your Elba adventure, and its tasty geology is not much like any of the above anyway. In spite of those slightly burny alcohols, it's a fairly lean, appetising Shiraz for the Vales. Which I like. More of that hare, please ... and send another jug to the accordion player. Grazie. 

This McMurtrie McLaren Vale Cabernet Sauvignon Shiraz 2014 
(14.8% alcohol; screw cap; 80 dozen made) 

Now we change gears. Or cars, really. Whole mediums. Just rethink everything. Try haute couture. This isn't the The or the That, this is the This. This is Cabernet country; this is the purpose of the McMurtrie Road dune/ridge thing. 

Ross Hannaford on his penultimate tour of Adelaide ... photo Milton Wordley

This viny, winy Cabernet just grabs the errant and listless Shiraz by the arm, obviously jerking it out of its porky food dreaming, and suddenly you have a seriously distinctive fashion house for the slender. It has all the willowy sensuality that only this blend seems to achieve: you don't get this with a Cabernet Merlot mixture whether it's from Medoc or Madagascar. The lantana and crême de cassis extremes of the McMurtrie Cabernet wrap around that Shiraz and damn well carry it to school on their shoulders. 

It reminds me of sweet Ross Hannaford singing Fats Dominoe's Josephine: 

"You used to live over yonder 
By the railroad track 
When it rained you couldn't walk
I used to tote ya on my back "

Amongst the French trees, the touch of American oak helps sharpen the pencil. Suddenly you have a Carson McCullers in with the Rosses, Hannaford and McMurtrie, telling you about everything, including yourself and your hunger. Lithe, strapping, intelligent, bright red wine. 

Valiant McMurtrie McLaren Vale Cabernet Sauvignon 2014 
(14.8% alcohol; screw cap; 50 dozen made) 

It could be said the Barossa and McLaren Vale have always had too much of their money on Shiraz. Both regions grow far too much of it from their laziness as much as our propensity to mindlessy funnel it down or flog it to China. 

I'm not talking of great Shiraz, which is scarce and quite rightfully highly-valued, but just dead lazy nose-pickers' Shiraz. Because when you really pick the overload of the shittier Shiraz away both Barossa and the Vales can pour stonking Cabernet which too often goes unsung. 

Of course the best of the original Barossa vines of Penfolds Kalimna are revered without question, like Greenock Creek's Roennfeldt Road, but it seems to me that the old king McLaren Vale Cabs of Tintara, Reynella, Kays and Jim Indgoldby are in danger of fading from the page. 

Made in Adelaide: nice clean Val at The Ex ... photo Philip White

Maybe it'll take something like this to get us back on track. The McMurtrie's CL Valiant. Made in Adelaide. Indestructible. MoPar. Hemi. Holy hell. Having bled out through head wounds, I was once, only once, delivered with no radial pulse to the Royal Adelaide Hospital after a battle defending Shiva, my old Police pursuit CL, from a barbarian who sat on its roof. Some sensible soul had dropped a worked 360 hemi w Holley into SHV-123 and I'd dropped it on its chin, with likky straps up front and baggies out back.  Change gears once after breakfast, again after lunch, sit on about 2,500 revs all day and have a quiet dinner in the Hydro Majestic. 

Big Vals are like that. You die for 'em. Not in 'em. 

But while this delightful wine has that formidable body and soul, its form and spriteliness are more along lighter, less tractorly Valiant Pacer lines. 

Rather than share it with a Bugatti and Barolo bloke, I drank some of this with another winemaker I deeply respect, who arrived in a Mitsi farmer's ute. 

"Jeez that's good Cabernet," he said, " ... Jeez. What's that?" 

"McMurtrie's Val." 

"Wow. That's good. Who's McMurtrie?" 

See? 

Getting off the road, this is lovely: intense, elegant, strapping and lithe wine. You don't get this without decades of fanatical, sensitive vineyard management in the right place for the right purpose by the right people. It'd sing with saltimbocca or simple lamb cutlets. Even Andy Clappis's baccalà. Chanterelle mushrooms. Yellow caps. Porcini - I reckon if you found an old CL you could fill it with coffee grounds and grow fungi like these in it to go with delightful wines like this. 

Imagine that back label. "Recommended with Boletus edulis mushrooms grown in Black Ivory coffee grounds in the body of a CL Valiant Station Wagon facing south with no wheels and the tailgate window wound right down so its silica eventually subsides as sand into the original ferruginous ground." 

Yeah, I know: we're in the Anthropocene Epoch now. But while there's no dead CL resuming into rusty geology there is pre-Valiant ironstone in the sand, loam and clay of the bonnie McMurtrie vineyard. 

 You can have a mixed dozen of these wines (delivered free) through the McMurtrie website for about $20 a bottle, which is one tasty buy if you like your red with plenty of local character, but more appetising finesse than mega-spendy gloop. 

TOXIC AMERICAN TOAD BY GEORGE

The natural range of Cane Toads extends from the southern United States to tropical South America. They were deliberately introduced from Hawaii to Australia in 1935, to control scarab beetles that were pests of sugar cane.  Cane Toads occur throughout the eastern and northern half of Queensland and have extended their range to the river catchments surrounding Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory. In New South Wales they occur on the coast as far south as Yamba, and there is an isolated colony near Port Macquarie. In South America, the Embera Wounan milk the Toads for arrow poison.

DYLAN: WATCHIN' THEM JUGS A-FILLIN'

Self Portrait by Bob Dylan 1970

Gatemaking Nobel Literature Laureate opens new whiskey doors 
by PHILIP WHITE


A real big whoosh of ethanol envy washed round the traps last week, when the 2017 Nobel Literature Laureate dared to release a trinity of American whiskies. 

This came as the Nobel literature people, those who actually make the awards,  resigned into an unholy Scando shatter of scandal about women being made to pay the professional price of their male partners' ignoble sexual behaviour. As the academy went meltdown, their 2017 recipient, Bob Dylan, triggered his own wee frisson round whiskey. Yet even this seemed more about his reclusive, mystical rock star status than his literary or liquorous notoriety. 

Unusual in the entertainment world for his absence from the #MeToo lists, and his lack of alcohol, love and drug scandals, Dylan drives the pulp fiction gossip writers nuts. 

It seemed for a day or two that his professional entry into the world of ethanol marketing might bring a scandal as big as his sudden 1965 electrification. The pious and sanctimonious proto-hippies in that Newport audience thought it was all their special folk music, but nah. It was his to play with. Dylan's. They stayed mad at him for a generation. 

Dylan plays. 

In contrast, the current hipster generation's twitter-tattle at Dylan and his new distillate, pro or con, went quiet quicker than the Nobel literature committee outrage. That particular one will simmer on. Fierce Viking women. Tired of the sagas. 

Anyway, the avuncular fireside style of old Bob's recent recordings croons out for a good mellow spirit and a smoke. Which I hear his three shots offer. 

Under deep cover: despite Trump politics, failed Texan gubernatorial candidate Kinky Friedman has his name on a Mexican tequila line and some handy Cuban cigars
  
Only Satan knows all the torrid devils' brews I've seen under rock star labels. More than I dare risk. Iron Maiden, Rolling Stones, AC/DC, Pogues, Queen, Motorhead, Drake, Kinky Friedman, Marilyn Manson, The Police, Billy Gibbons, Megadeth, Pig Destroyer, Whitesnake and Anthrax are just a few old rock crocks that come to mind. Appetising, eh? 

Such aged dainties must love licking up their labels and sticking them on tins, bottles and bags of stuff that other people make.  

After having paid, as he says, "so much to the weed industry over the years," even the ancient Willie Nelson's "taking a little back" since joining everyone from Snoop Dogg to Cheech and Chong in wrapping his name round a brand of legal cannabis. He easily lured US$30 million to get Willy's Reserve off the ground. Dylan raised US$35 million for his whiskey outfit. 

Sam Neill's First Paddock, Central Otago, South Island, New Zealand

Of course there are entertainers who'd never consider simply repackaging, reblending or refinishing intoxicants that anybody could buy in bulk. Some folks' intense gastronomic curiosity and intelligence drive them, at incredible expense, to grow and make their own. New Zealand actor and Pinot perve Sam Neill and his beloved Two Paddocks winery in Central Otago are foremost in my southern mind. 

Maynard James Keenan and staff, Caduceus Cellars, Jerome, Arizona


Similarly, in the northern hardrock mountain business, Maynard James Keenan's probably the ultimate: a truly talented multi Grammy-winning rockstar winemaker with his own Caduceus Cellars and Merkin Vineyards up the stony mountain at Jerome, Arizona. He even has his own wine stores and restaurants. Oh yes, and a young family. And he's the singer in three bands. While Tool and Puscifer take a rest, Keenan's currently tasting and touring the USA with A Perfect Circle, pumping their blistering new album, Eat the Elephant.  

Right now, like tonight, Maynard's at home, "Prepping to bottle the 2017 whites 'n' rosés," he says, "and the 2016 reds. Then I’m back out the door to Eat more Elephant. Hopefully this meal brings me round under in early 2019." 

New wineries cost lots of monery.

Truth be known, the Nobel world is as thoroughly laced with liquor as the popular music morass. While the literature committee's taking a year off to regroup its shit before announcing two literature laureates next year, take the time to peruse Professor Dr Donald Goodwin's 1992 article Alcohol as Muse in the American Journal of Psychotherapy. In that, he infamously reports that over 70 per cent of American Nobel literature laureates were alcoholics. 

If you think that'd be enough to drive the 2018 and '19 aspirants to drink you're likely spot on. Which his Bobness, it seems is not. Not a wicked alcoholic driven to drink, anyway. While many believe Dylan is teetotal, Marc Bushala, the founding  Heaven's Door creative, maintains that during the long process of sourcing, selecting and buying the whiskies for the blends, Dylan was in the end quite specific about the oak treatments he wanted. 

Dylan the hipster gate builder at 29  ... photo John Cohen Sony 

There was a lot of to-and-froing from the source distilleries to Dylan's LA gate and steel fabrication business, where he spends a lot of time making stuff. Like gates made from old recycled implements as in the Heaven's Gate bottle art.

He sent one blend back complaining that "it should feel like being in a wood structure," sending them off to match the smell of an old wood barn: the opposite of his acrid steelworks whiff. Which they eventually did. Shouldna bin too hard. 

From early reviews of the trio - a Straight Tennessee Bourbon, the Double Barrel Whiskey and a Straight Rye Whiskey - it appears that the smokin' and solderin' Dylan hooter enjoys its toasty oak. Considering the love that chain smoking Barossa winemakers Max Schubert, John Glaetzer and Peter Lehmann showed the best smoky American Quercus alba A. P. John Cooperage could make for them, there's not much novelty there, Bob. Not here. Big smokers seem to like smoke.

On the other hand, the Heaven's Door Rye was finished in barrels from the Vosges forest of Alsace ... The flavours and prices of this uniquely spicy, tight-grained wood vary according to its source altitude. Any lover of Australian Chardonnay or Pinot would have tasted it a thousand times. Vosges is a favourite in Burgundy. In fact fans of the Maipenrai and Amungula Creek wines of Brian Schmidt at Canberra may have savoured the odd Vosges stave, Burgundy barrels sometimes being blends of favourite forests. 

A board member of the Australian Wine Research Institute, vice-chancellor of the Australian National University and co-winner of the 2011 Nobel prize in physics, astrophysicist Schmidt is a self-confessing slave to Pinot, just to balance the musical rock star side of the equation. 

Schmidt grows and makes his own wine, suggesting  it's a bit easier to sell with a Nobel prize. Not to mention a Nobel for helping to discover that the  universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, meaning it'll end up on ice. 

He's not alone, of course, in being a scientific non-literary laureate with a penchant for a tipple. When the beer-loving Dane, Niels Bohr, quantum and theoretical physicist, won the Nobel physics prize in 1922, the Carlsberg Brewery rewarded him with a beautiful new home beside its distillery, free, with a direct pipeline supplying his home bar taps with fresh draft suds for life. 

It is said he argued much with Einstein, who suspected that a cosmological constant, an abundant cosmic repulsive force existed. Schmidt and his colleagues and rivals eventually proved that indeed it did exist with their discovery of the dark energy that makes up about 70 per cent of the universe. Like the rockstar booze so many of them never make themselves, this repulsive stuff is as dark, forboding and ubiquitous as Coke. 

"Heard the new Dark Energy yet?" 

"Nah but I love their kiddylikker and Coke." 

Praise Bacchus for folks like Brian Schmidt, Sam Neill and Maynard James Keenan who understand the special illuminating darkness that lets enough delight shine through to draw good things together. Original things. Original people. The unCoke. Lucid. So you can just see your fingers through the glass. 

Precisely how much enlightenment the literature laureate's liquor will unleash remains to be seen. One thing is sure to me: Mr D has obviously appreciated the keenest value of moonshine since his recording of A.F. Beddoe's Copper Kettle: 

"My daddy he made whiskey, my granddaddy he did too 
We ain't paid no whiskey tax since 1792 
You just lay there by the juniper while the moon is bright 
Watch them jugs a-filling in the pale moonlight." 

That song, and Self Portrait, the double album including it, was the bard's biggest indicator that one day he'd be hitting us with whiskey-and-honey crooning like the cosy Sinatra stuff he records today. Moody shots to match. Yeah, yeah, moody photos, sure. But I meant shots of moody sippin' liquor. 

We're rolling Bob ... look at the bottle, Bob

Typically, the damn critics were more savage in their derision when Dylan released Self Portrait in 1970, which us teenaged Kanmantoo hillsbillies slurped right up with our Jack and Jim and seedy outdoor dope. We were a long way from Pinot noir. 

I wonder whether our LA gatemaking Nobel literature laureate will ever grow and make  a really sexy, fleshy, visceral Pinot. I reckon not. 

So maybe he will. To promote his gates. Lookout, Vosges.

Hey dudes: dja wanna launch a whiskey with this Nobel physics bloke I heard of?  I know a bloke ... Only joking. And here bullshitting the unconvinced at Penfolds' Grange: real winemakers Jason Barrette and Maynard James Keenan with the author and the great wine scientist, Dr. Ray Beckwith's pH meter ... photo Milton Wordley

OFF HIS FACE BY GEORGE

A LOVELY INTERVIEW WITH DREW NOON

Rae and Drew Noon with their 2017 Grenache rosé ... my photos ... a reclusive but locally-involved couple with a deep social conscience, the Noons are people I respect with a depth bordering on spiritual. And I adore their honest, pristine wine.

Perhaps because of that reverence, I have never intruded much to write about them, while I rarely see them well profiled. I think my friend Milton Wordley has captured them as only a questioning photographer could in this lovely warm interview with Drew. 

I envy Milton's documentary ability to question without the politics which invariably infect my interviews. Jealous.

An indulgence: a favourite photograph of dear Milton ... it's trepidatious, photographing a great photographer. This was the night we got our medals from the New York IPA Book Fair. I grabbed a snap with a finger over the flash; the little Sony gave me this:
.

 

VOLCANIC WINE: THE NEXT BIG POP?

The Blue Lake in the caldera of the volcano complex at Mount Gambier, in South Australia's Limestone Coast vignoble ... this exploded only 4,500 years ago ... ABC photo

The Earth is like stew but new guru says volcanic ground is like cheese
by PHILIP WHITE


Maybe I was wrong again. Jeez. Too much wishful thinking ... 

People increasingly ask which fad might follow the current unmade, unfinished, "natural" wine affection, which also remains stubbornly unplugged. I usually suggest that some hi-tech might be nice. 

If the hipster yearning for vinous antiquity stays firm, and it can't be Bob Dylan clicking a Strat into a Twin Reverb and rockin' into I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more before Pete Seeger or some luny firm zealot chops the cables with an axe, the new wine wave could even be retro hi-tech, like Kraftwerk, no? At least that has some rhythm, and South Australia has a German culture. Ask the tourism commissioners.  Ask Nick Cave. 

But nah. The next sommelier-driven lunge of wine fashion is a lot damn hotter than that. And older. It's volcanic. 

Influential McLaren Valer, Rebecca Hopkins (left) reminded me of this lurch with a link to her buddy Peter Weltman's wine-searcher.com piece, The lava lover's dream. 

Working out of San Francisco for well over a decade now, Rebecca is the Communications Strategist at Michael Mondavi's Folio Fine Wine Partners, formidable shippers of many premium Italian wines from volcano country. Amongst others. 

Weltman writes of the Toronto-based Master Sommelier and evangeliser John Szabo, author of last year's Volcanic Wines: Salt, Grit and Power, who says things like "Think of volcanic soils like cheese." 

While I'm sure Bec wouldn't be the type to put all her vinous eggs in one such explosive/runny basket, I can't help thinking that if it's volcanoes that make the difference, she shoulda stayed in Australia. 

Australia has volcanoes and volcanic geology from arsehole to breakfast. Take the eastern coast and its ranges. Some of those rocks erupted as molten sizzling goo onto the bottom of an ocean about 520 million years ago. Australia wasn't even here then. 

Queensland's Granite Belt is built of crystallised magma that cooled and solidified about 240 million years ago, but never kissed the sky until erosion exposed it about 50 million years later. Good wines there. 

Cheese served by Julian Castagna on volcanic ground at Beechworth, on the north side of the Victorian Alps ... photo Philip White

Forget cheese for a moment: Imagine the Earth as a huge pot of stew. You know those big globby bits that form on the top if you don't stir it? How they'll move around and crash into one another, build up, or just plain sink, or boil away? That's the Earth's crust. We ride on that. Its bouyancy and movement is all about its composition, surface tension, and the great swirling currents in the molten magma and its temperatures beneath. 

Since Australia bounced off Gondwanaland about 132 million years ago, to bullishly head back north at about 75 kilometres per million years, a great swathe of its east coast cruised over a very hot spot in that molten liquor below. This pushed a string of zits up through the skin. Speaking generally, these cool, set and age as their piece of crust travels north past the hot bit. So the northern ones are older and colder than those down south: Very far south, in the case of Australia's only erupting volcano, its tallest mountain, Mawson Peak. That beauty's on Heard Island, just 1,500 kilometres short of Antarctica in the Southern Ocean. 

Which is not to say the mainland volcanoes are, as they say, "extinct". At best, those in the vineyard country in South Australia's south-eastern corner are barely dormant. Mount Gambier popped only 4,500 years back, while European humans were learning to mine and meld copper and bronze and Mesopotamia was inventing the plough ... 45,000 years after people were conducting ceremonial burials at Lake Mungo. 

There are about 400 small volcanoes of a similar youthfulness between the Mount Gambier/Mount Schank complex and the City of Melbourne, whose old buildings are almost singularly made from cold grey volcanic basalt. Of course such hard-set lava is not much use for grape growing. But soils made from its gradual deterioration through weathering of it or other volcanics, like those of Beechworth, Yarra Valley, the Bellarine Peninsula at Geelong or the Mornington Peninsula, are usually ferruginous - rich in iron - and very fast-draining. 

As are the vast fields of dust and ash some volcanoes blast across the countryside through incredible explosions that occur when the lava coming up hits a water acquifer, which happened at Mount Gambier. Ka-friggin-boom! Volcanic wines everywhere! 

My first volcano with grapes was at the other end of that same "Newer Volcanic Province", at Mount Anakie, sticking out of the flats near Geelong. Ian and Judy Hickinbotham had bought it from the Maltby family; their eldest son Stephen Hickinbotham was the winemaker in the early 'eighties. 

To me, Anakie was like the classic cone-shaped volcanoes you'd see rising out of the desert in a Donald Duck comic. If you're old enough, you'll remember: Donald and the nephews getting their feathers singed while the American natives rode past, feathers intact, saying "Ugh." 

The Anakie vine rows went straight up the hill. Each night, the heart of that cone-shaped mount would hold its warmth, so a cartoonish corona of mist, a perfect halo, would form around the peak, ensuring an even botrytis cinerea strike at the top of each row, across all the varieties. Even the Cabernet would have a 10 or 15 per cent botrytis strike. Stephen, a Bordeaux and Burgundy-trained genius, said you couldn't make a good red without botrytis. His were bone dry, contentious and stunning. 

Stephen Hickinbotham at Anakie, 1984 ... photo Paul Lloyd

Stephen and his beloved partner Jenny O'Regan and five other mates were killed in a 1986 plane crash. His brother Andrew and sister Jenny were as highly respectful of the values of volcanic loam as he'd been. Together, they'd assisted the likes of Bails Meyer establish pioneering vineyards in the same sort of loose red volcanic stuff on Mornington Peninsula, where Andrew and Terryn have their Hickinbotham Dromana winery and brewery. 

Maybe their move across the Bay was even smarter than it first seemed: Emeritus Professor in the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Melbourne, Bernie Joyce, regularly warns that volcanoes as young as Anakie could quite suddenly become active zits once more. 

"These are scoria cones, they are young volcanoes," he says, "the most common and smallest volcanoes ... about one and a half million years old ... there might be a new volcano. It could be a scoria with lava flows or a deeper crater like Mount Gambier and Tower Hill which produces ash. We don't need to hold our breath but there could be a volcano eruption in the next century." 

The "Organ Pipes" - crystalline volcanic magma in the Gawler Ranges ... this was all runny and red hot when it oozed out about 1,500,000,000 years back ... photo SA Government

Which there won't be soon in South Australia's other vast volcanic region, the Gawler Ranges, south of that great outback salt pan, Lake Gairdner. It's the country of a mixture of Barngala, Kokatha and Wirangu people. Neither will there be any vineyards there soon. There wasn't any single explosive eruption there that we can tell, but about 1.5 billion years back a great release of red-hot molten goo just oozed up and covered enough ground to make a spectacular national park on the country of those good people. She's pretty much solid volcanic rock up that way. 

Younger volcanics emerge 1,700 kilometres west, at the other end of the Bight in the ranges north of Albany. There are some deliciously fruitful vineyards there in the loam surrounding the mighty Porongorup, granitic exudations that skwoze out from below, all along the line where Australia first crashed into Antarctica. Granite Island. Remarkable Rocks. 

Granite - crystallised magma -  Remarkable Rocks on Kangaroo Island ... photo SA Government

Volcanic wine? Bring it on. Bung in a big Pinot and Chardonnay fizz joint on Heard Island. Straight up the side, like the old Anakie. The snow will all melt soon. But it'll still be so damn chilly there that all the wine will cold-settle very quickly and efficiently, so it'll look like something clean and bright outa the fridge. Professional. That'll be closer to Kraftwerk than your cloudy unmade murk. And volcanic. Rock and roll.

Australia's tallest peak: the active volcano Mount Mawson, with Elephant Spit, Heard Island ... away off on the Indian Ocean side of the Southern Ocean, 1,500 kays short of Antarctica ...  photo Gary Miller, Australian Antarctic Division

CLARE RIESLING: A SIX-PACK

Post Kilikanoon, Kevin Mitchell and Kathleen Bourne open their sideline
by PHILIP WHITE 

It rattles you? This weather rattles me. Sure, it's warm enough, but why should I suddenly find it strange to be relishing Riesling half-way into what should be winter? We know it's like record heat for autumn, and by this time of the year I'm usually disappearing into the indigo and vermilion or the duvet ... so shouldn't a dude be delighted that these bright sunny days provide ideal conditions for sinking Rizza? No? 

Relativity. If you were schlücking it with Ernie Loosen at the top of a treacherous slate scree above his freezing Erdener Prälat in the Mosel you'd think our freak "Indian" summer was too hot for Riesling. I'm a sook. 

Of course you can enjoy Riesling in any weather. At any time of day, for that matter. Like it's 4:27AM now, and I'm steamin through Woodvale. 

This is the offshoot business of Kathleen Bourne and Kevin Mitchell, based in the west Clare hills in Skillogalee Valley, near the original Mitchell's winery of his cousin Andrew and his wife Jane and their tribe. 

I reviewed those Mitchells' delicious whites some weeks back. It's range wars with Riesling out them ways. 

Woodvale has emerged as the Changyu Pioneer Wine Company purchased an 80 percent stake in Kevin Mitchell's Kilikanoon. Lots of that sort of thing going on round the traps. 

Woodvale has six Rieslings on the market. Not too much of that. 

The idea is to sell some small batches of Riesling a touch more mature, or at least more mellow or more approachable than the rivals. To begin, if they're not too eucalypty, vineyards in those woody hills and vales to the west of the Main North Road can produce Rieslings which, aromatically, at least, are a tad softer than the more austere marvels grown in the chalky calcrete of Watervale in the crown of these North Mount Lofty Ranges. 

Clare is a web of upland valleys, like Skillogalee, Penwortham, Aberfeldy, Sevenhill, Armargh, Watervale, Auburn and the Polish River. In fact, these are more the Clare Hills than a singular valley: like a repeat of the Adelaide Hills bits of the South Mount Lofty Ranges.

We're starting in the west. For openers, the bouquet of the Woodvale Skilly Clare Valley Riesling 2014 ($25; 12.5% alcohol; screw cap) has buttery hints of honeycomb, or cinder toffee melding neatly with its toast-and-marmalade base. But the flavours are more austere and more typically youthful than that aroma signals, as long and dusty as the summer wind. Pass me a cool peach. 

The 2016 Skilly ($25; 12%) seems even more toasty, in a sort of Semillon direction, with the gentlest beginnings of that petrol-like aroma many regard to be the hallmark of great Clare Riesling. 

Here the flavours seem better streamlined; the acids and phenolics not so locked up and tight: perhaps more agile; less brittle. Unbuttoned. Little beads of perspiration in the cleavage. 

Woodvale Watervale Clare Valley Riesling 2015 ($25; 12.5%) is more prim and deliberate in mood. One daren't ask any cheeky questions here. Nothing squishy about this high-strung beauty. Right from that fine, linear, lemon-lime aroma this is your more elegant, more finely-engineered, long-distance, low-weight sportser. 

Find a baguette, butter, a handful of fresh cress and drive straight to the nearest King George whiting beach. Don't get your scarf caught in the spokes. 

Where I reckon the more granular and chalky Watervale 2016 ($25; 12.5%) needs oysters so fresh they wince when you hit 'em with the lemon. Meaning the beach will have to be Farm Beach at Coffin Bay. Just get the Fabulous Fordies' permission to go past Boston Bay Wines. You better take one of their rockin' Rieslings, too. 

Boston Bay wines at Port Lincoln, en route to the oysters and whiting at Coffin Bay ... post-revolutionary French explorere Nicolas Baudin named this Côte d'Champagny

This is really fine, long, taut Riesling. It's like somebody's put old Ezekiel's Valley of Dry Bones in the blender so they could never dream of the fleshing-up and reconnecting business. This wine will eventually get round to that, of course, but Lord only knows when. 

Woodvale The Khileyre Clare Valley Riesling 2015 ($35; 12.5%) is Watervale wound round closer to eleven. It's so compact and compressed it even seems peppery, which leads me to that cress. (Some of the most peppery cress I know is in Moondah Brook, but that's in the sandhills of Gin Gin, way north of Perth, dammit.) 

The chalky slope of Watervale ... this is the Côte d'Blancs on my charts 

In the savouring/mouthly/swallowing sector, however, it seems to relax enough to make me feel like I could call this a day and head straight to the royal cot, fully sated, with the biggest buffoon lear ...   

But there's still The Khileyre 2016 ($35; 12.5%) winking at me. 

Again, this super-refined baby prickles the nostrils with a coastal/dunal array of whiffs as much as the regular citrus-and-chalk of Riesling from these freak Clare uplands. Again, the wine comfortably serves a refined, bone china sort of Riesling, but it's sufficiently kindly and generous to pat one's brow and say "Good Boy". 

Spread both sides of a kippered herring with Paris Creek butter. Sizzle gently in the pan, flesh down, skin up. Serve with slivers of lemon, a soft toast, and this. 

Then get off the bed, dress and proceed.

Franco Maticho