Spring rocks in

by PHILIP WHITE

Spring’s here. Well and truly. Just like spring in the ’sixties: gusty and dousing one minute; sunny and warming the next, and lots of wind. But that was spring. You know, September, October, November. This is August.

Until now, it’s been rain, rain, rain. Perfect. The creeks suddenly began to flow on July 10^th; within a week the dams were brimming. And today the wind has quit and we have sunshine so scrubbed and settled it seems to fill all the space of the yard with a dense brick of perfectly transparent matter. The almonds are in full bloom. Arum lilies have suddenly appeared along the water courses. Mick the Pre-Cambrian ram is looking around for all his old girlfriends, all those thousands of ’em, who no doubt went into the mutton pot long before I was born; the foal still within the bursting balloon belly of the mare in the horse paddock next door is kicking so much you can see the lumps moving around in the mother’s stomach. The sedges are alive with baby wood ducks. That’s early. The flats swarm with calm ibis, studiously poking those long black beaks into the sod. Yesterday the blackbird performed his opening cadenza for the sunshine oratorio that feels fit to burst the season wide open any minute now.

As Michael O’Donohoe said the other night in The Exeter: “if you don’t spray poison, your insects won’t get sick. No sick insects, your birds won’t get sick. No sick birds, no slugs or snails”. Since it cut back on the spraying, and sorting out its creeklines with native vegetation in place of the cluttered European species that went malignant, the whole of McLaren Vale is crawling with birdlife that simply wasn’t here five or six years ago. When we were working on the Trott’s View photography in 2000-2001, there was almost no birdlife available to be photographed. Now every time a person tries to get a clean photograph of a cloud, friggin’ wee berrudies fly in the way.

Budburst hit the bellwether vineyard opposite The Salopian Inn on August 1^st.. Last vintage, I reckon it was the 15^th.. And look what happened then. One of the earliest vintages ever, starting out cool in every sense of the word, then suddenly coming over all hellfire and brimstone when the record fortnight of heat hit. And now, although it came excruciatingly late: six weeks of steady soaking rain. The escarpment ground is making water, right down the fault line. If it rains on into the official spring this season, we may well end up with another half a million tonnes of surplus. And a vintage rocking in a fortnight earlier than the last freak.

As Penfolds’ chief winemaker, Peter Gago, said back in April, “In the last fifteen vintages, no two have been alike ...We have to keep modulating our definition of extreme. What’ll come next?”

Bluegrass music, probably. That’s how springy it is. The Dillards. Although I’ve been plastering my ears around The Felice Brothers new’un for a week solid. They’re not bluegrass. They must be sick of being likened to The Band, but it’s probably good for business. And they do come from Woodstock, NY. Raucous, rollicking and brassy like Rock of Ages, sure, and sometimes as if they’re in an empty hall; other times woodsy in that smoky barn sort of way, but they sometimes sound like The Band produced by Lanois, and they get really spooky. Then I sniff hints of Dixie Chicken blue-eyed baptist Billy Payne piano funk. More puce and big crimson than pink, if you get my drift. It will be a delight to follow them. The Band has kept me buzzing for forty years, so a first reserve will be nice.

As there’s nuthin’ new under the Sun, Fleet Foxes drags me back, too. Syrupy pre-Eagles vocals. Like Crosby’s spaced-out solo If I Could Only Remember My Name (with Nash and Young, the Dead, J. Airplane and Joni Mitchell), with splashes of Harry Nilsson and the Beach Boys. Now they’ve learned to sing, I’d love to see them ROCK.

Which there’s absolutely no shortage of in the stunning Large Number 12s, which Mick Wordley just unveiled for me. I can’t believe ’em. He recorded their live opening blast, Every Sunday at The Pint On Punt pub in St Kilda four years ago (it’s on his Mixmaster label – check www.mixmasters.com.au/ ). Mick’s just finished polishing the follow-up, which is studio live and sizzlin’. It’ll be out in a fortnight or so: GO BUY. They sound like Dwight Twilley; 10cc; Rockpile; Thunderclap Newman; The Records; et al, with the Les Paul/Strat interchange of Mick Robbins and the Rev. Charlie Owen always dazzling up the front. Great writing, too. Which is nothing at all to do with wine, other than it makes me very, very thirsty.

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Driving dogs to drink

by PHILIP WHITE - This was published in The Independent Weekly in 2007

Having weathered the Tet Offensive cowering beneath a wire bed with a case of rum while the ordnance rained down in Vietnam, it seemed likely that the great Richard Beckett would approach wine and food criticism in a new manner if he indeed survived. This he did, writing the still unmatched Sam Orr column in the pages of Gordon Barton’s Nation Review in the early seventies. Those pages swelled with the larrikin work of McCullam, Adams, Ellis, Lurie, Leunig and Hepworth, but Beckett’s cranky Orr ruled supreme. His collected works, Roll On Brave New Bloody World were published by A&R in 1980. He died seven years later.

Beckett once summarized the wines of McLaren Vale by ranking them according to the affect each would have on dogs. One particular red was enough to drive a brown dog to drink; a neighbour’s would drive two brown dogs to drink; another would kill a black dog, and so on.

By the end of the eighties, winemakers had all become rock stars, their fat Labradors were pampered wowsers, and their wines tasted like carpentries. Gone was the winemaker who’d greet you on the dirt floor of his galvo castle in thongs, and hand you a glass of sump oil that would turn a Rottweiler vegetarian. Blokes who’d been animal husbandry specialists, tractor drivers, broke down dirt farmers and the like were suddenly making wine and carrying on like Keith Richards. Or Liberace. And there was more than one precocious Germaine Greer amongst the winemakers without penises.

Since then, there’s been a sickening turn to the worse. Now there are two main schools of winemaker. The best ones wear beanies. Apart from a few idiots who effect the women’s Akubra preferred by Prime Minister Howard, all the rest wear hard hats, steel-capped boots and safety glasses. It’s dead easy to pick their wines on the blind.

This hard hat wine is distinguished by grapeyards which strobe when you drive past them: great Nuremberg rallies of vines in laser-perfect grids.

Since nature is chaotic and fractal, and gastronomy is even more arcane and confounding, I ache for the return of non-strobing vineyards, in which the vines look like natural plants capable of producing something you would confidently insert in your body.

Now that the vignerons of the Old World have officially decided to copy our industrialised wine business, the incidence of strobing grapeyards there will increase exponentially. While many winemakers may die from autobahn prangs brought on by the grand mals triggered by driving the Bimmer too quickly past strobing grapeyards, we should smite the survivors by stealing their old non-strobing viticultural techniques, and reach back beyond the rock stars and the safety helmets and rekindle the old dirt floor and thongs epoch.

The Europeans are delighted that new laws will finally permit them to emulate Australian wines by adding oak chips, sawdust and splinters. I suggest we offer them a new product which will ensure their wines are even closer in style to our hard hat wines. This is the steel chip.

We should be manufacturing millions of tonnes of these. We have plenty of iron in the West, and a beautiful blast furnace at Whyalla. They could be in the form of little pellets, curly swarf, splinters or planks. We should flog these to Europe on the grounds that, when inserted into an oak barrel, they will add characters to the wine which will much more closely emulate the flavours we have perfected since Beckett turned up his Vegemite jar and carked.

Dr. White’s new patented steel chips can be re-used after washing them with a nice bath of caustic. They will never wear out, or lose their shiny, sanitary freshness. They can be handed down from generation to generation, outlasting even the centuries-old oak tanks of the Rhineland. They could even sport, in laser-etched bas relief, the winemaker’s trademark, which would add value to them in the secondary market. Like, dude, this wine’s made with ex-Margaux chips!

The weight of this new product will of course make the steel-capped boot essential for the Old World wine technologist. Their helmets and safety glasses will make them feel safer driving past their vines, and we could get on with forging beanie wines that would turn a black dog’s gizzards to gold and give the next Richard Beckett more reason to stay alive.

Drunks outlive their brains

By PHILIP WHITE – This was published in The Independent Weekly in September 2007

I’m confused. While many of us seem determined to drink ourselves to death, too many are nevertheless living longer than our brains were designed to last. So awful things like Alzeimer’s disease are increasingly common.

Confusingly, one scientific report last week found that quite a few regular drinks actually prevents erectile dysfunction. Coming on top of the years of cant insisting that red wine is a cornucopia of anti-oxidant lovelies, rotely repeated by mongers of tea, chocolate, coffee, and whatnot, it’s obvious that far too many bibulous buggers will outlive our brains. And possibly procreate our way past the realms of intelligent consciousness if we keep giving the booze a nudge.

The gene pool will be increasingly dominated by drunks who outlive their brains.

The first sign of the brain tumour which killed George Gershwin was his constant complaint that he could smell rubber, which he thenceforth avoided. Think frangers. Drunk men with worn out brains and George Gershwin’s tumour could well procreate their way to total dominance of the gene pool. Rhapsody in Blue!

Last week’s Archives of General Psychiatry reports that the earliest indicator of the onset of Alzeimer’s is the decay of one’s sense of smell. Onion, black pepper, lemon, banana, cinnamon, chocolate, pineapple, rose, smoke, soap – the minute you find yourself missing these whiffs is the first signal that you’re destined to end up walking around with your underpants on your head while you try to phone your kids on the TV remote.

This horrifies the wine critic who’s constantly ridiculed for reporting such aromas in wine. Few boofheads understand that there are only a certain number of aromatic compounds, which repeat, in myriad combinations, through all foodstuffs.

Now, when sniggering buffoons buttonhole me about how wine could never possibly smell of pineapple or bananas – “It smells like bloody woyne to me” – I know they’ll be well on the way to the zombie twilight zone and the room with combination locks, nappies, and the Big Nurse.

But that’s not the end of it. I reckon one’s aroma vocabulary, and the library in the brain that records it and stores it, is well and truly established and finalised by the time you’re about eight years of age, maybe earlier.

So an old brute like me, who grew up in an enyclopaedia of wondrous smells in the mountains of eastern Victoria in the ’fifties, is threatened most of all by the cruel reality that there’s hardly a bastard alive who knows what those things that set my imagination afire smell like.

Take malo-lactic fermentation, often called secondary fermentation. This is where bacteria, not yeast, ferment the harsh malic acid of grapes, and convert it to the softer malic acid of milk. This is the first flavour we ever savour, from the most beloved and trusted source: Mum’s teat.

In wine, lactic acid often smells of transformed dairy products, like custard and junket. Once the breast was cruelly withdrawn, I grew up on custard and junket. Who the hell alive today has ever smelt such stuff? How many of today’s lot even got a suck of that lovely teat?

Put white wine, like a pear-smelling cool climate semillon, in oak for a wild yeast ferment, and you get the aromas of superphosphate sacks (from the yeast and soil), and the indelibly imprinted whoof of my grand-dad’s old wooden grange, in which were stored hessian sacks of pears. As the unsold ones gradually ripened and slid to decay, they gave a wondrously evocative perfume; one which I’ve smelled many times in beautiful ageing oaked semillons.

But how many of today’s humans have ever been in a wooden grange in the mountain pines, stacked with over-ripe fruits in old superphosphate sacks? Who can understand me suggesting a wine smells like a cowshed when the only cowshed left smells like a hospital? I mean, c’mon, milk doesn’t even smell like milk anymore.

So while I remain terrified that losing my sense of smell heralds the onset of Alzeimer’s, and find myself constantly checking for the faintest whiff of rubber, I’m stuck with an aroma vocab that for all intents and purposes would be best forgotten anyway.

Stick with me. We’ll drink our way through this.

Seep is the word

By PHILIP WHITE - This was first published in The Independent Weekly in 2006

Your scribe was chattering on about which port he’d been enjoying, comparing the ’06 to the ’05 and remembering with a certain fondness the ’93, when a colleague interrupted with a fair query: “Whitey, aren’t they a bit young for ports?”

Oh hell. I’d meant the 1906, 1905 and 1893 Para Liqueurs. The 1906 is seeping out now. These incredible Paras are released annually at one hundred years of age, and, seriously seep is the word. Or maybe ooze is better: the wine is incredibly thick and sticky after a full century of evaporation through the old oak of its barrel.

Upon the completion of his magnificent port cellar in 1878, the great Benno Seppelt selected his favourite puncheon (500 litres) of tawny, put it on a special stand, and declared that it was not to be opened for one hundred years. In spite of the incredulity that the hose draggers of the day must have felt, the ritual was repeated in 1879, and again every year since.

James Godfrey, who, as fortified maker at Seppeltsfield, is surely one of the world’s most patient men, explains the ever so gradual ageing process thus: “We lose two-thirds of every puncheon to evaporation. The Angels’ Share. That slow evaporation concentrates every component of the wine, but it all remains proportionate, in balance.”

“The sugars rise as the wine concentrates”, he continues, “peaking somewhere between the fifty and seventy-five year mark. They’ll increase from six-point five baumé at manufacture to as much as nineteen baumé.

“During those first fifty years, the acidity also rises from four grams per litre to around twelve. But the alcohol’s fastest: it’ll go from seventeen per cent by volume to peak at around twenty four percent by the twenty-five year mark.”

So James, at this point you simply sit back and wait for another seventy-five years? Of course. And what do these treasures taste like? A Buggatti Royale? The Brooklyn Bridge? The Crown Jewels? Maybe. Maybe not.

They certainly don’t taste much like wine. Think more of treacle pestled with balsamic, pickled walnuts, and ancient soy. Think of after dinner sweets made from strong, black, bitter cooking chocolate, filled with this syrup. Think of eating them with a shot of Cognac on the deep leather back seat of the aforementioned Buggatti. The lass there wears Guerlain’s Jicky and smokes a Cohiba cheroot. The sticky Para is smudged with the lipstick and flakes of cigar. Husky laughter is in order; smoky whispers through the hair.

In more winy terms, I reckon the ’06 is close in style to the ’05, in that it has less obvious volatile acidity and less oak flavour than in other years. They’re the smoother, more feminine styles. You want something butch on the back seat of your Bug, try a macho year, like the ’93. I know it well, having smuggled some through the dry zone to my dear grandmother Sarah on the occasion of her hundredth birthday. It was her birth year; more tannic, spiritous, and woody, after the mould of an old Shetland crofter, reeking of peat. More smuggler’s boat than billionaire’s Bug.

One thing all these incredible wines have in common is their persistence, and I mean hanging around the drinker’s palate for hours after tasting. You can have your Para, and a smoke, and a few beers, and dinner, for Bacchus’s sake, and still have that wicked sticky alive and prominent in your taste receptors. It won’t go away. It’ll still be there battling your toothpaste in the morning. Get down to bang for your suck, there’s no wine on earth that lasts this long.

Just as there are no other drinks like these centenarian Paras, there is no winery on earth quite like Seppeltsfield, which is, once again, on the market. While Fosters rather blithely announced its proposed sale before the end of last financial year, winning reams of free press, prospective buyers have since muttered frustrations about the vendor being a little disorganised about precisely what’s for sale.

But Fosters PR flack, Matt Schmidt, is non-stick. “We have healthy interest from international quarters”, he insists, “and feel our responsibility is to ensure it goes to a sympathetic buyer who will look after it with respect”.

Seen many Benno Seppelts around lately?

FOOTNOTE:

Seppeltsfield Para 1906 is $525 for 375ml., and $1050 for a full bottle at the cellar.

PINOT IS LIKE RIESLING

Pinot is like Riesling

by PHILIP WHITE - This was first published in The Independent Weekly in 2006

“I’ve learned about three things about pinot in the last twenty-five years” muttered Stephen George, who often makes my favourite Australian versions of it at Ashton Hills. He didn’t expand. Already halfway into the car, I left without asking. We’ve been discussing pinot noir for decades.

Pinot is a felicitous, difficult, but sometimes heady, sensual, hypnotic and salacious red grape. Stephen’s success in it comes from his curious sensory intelligence and stoic patience, as much as from the high altitude, cool, and peculiar soil of the vineyard. He and his partner, Peta van Rood, acquired this from her pioneering parents, Peter and Sophie, both deceased. Commenced in 1982, it’s away up in the crown of the Piccadilly Valley, near Mount Bonython, and they’ve spent the years trialling many ways of growing many clones of the same variety.

You will usually find pinot addicts where the best duck or pig is served. They guts in exclusive bunches, bellies nudging the table like the rubbing strakes of so many tugboats, perversely muttering and mooing over very big glasses. The hard core will never be seen drinking pinot from anywhere other than Burgundy. If more of them could be as relaxed about their fetish as Stephen and Peta, good pinot would be a much bigger hit.

At Ashton Hills, a bottle might cost you thousands of dollars less than the preposterous legends from Burgundy.

Proper pinot is more like riesling in structure than any red grape. Pinot is about acidity, and grown in the right places, riesling is the king of acidity.

Riesling has fruit aromas of lemon, lime, pear, nashi pear, and to a lesser degree of acidity and spine, banana, pineapple, and sometimes white stone fruits. The best pinots have the same rapier of acidity as great rieslings, and share the same lithe texture, weight and structure, but their fruit aromas are cranberry, raspberry, various sorts of cherry, baby beetroot, pink meats, and whatnot. Pink and light red, not white and yellow.

As great rieslings age, their fruits decay to marmalades of lime, lemon, ginger, and maybe even orange. Pinots, too, become more like conserves of the fruits they began with. Not full-bore, boiled jams, but lighter conserves, where there are still whole berries in the mix. The fruit remains alive. Oak provides cinnamon and nutmeg spicing.

Acids have individual flavours. Tartaric tastes metallic. Ascorbic - vitamin C – is like aluminium. Citric’s all lemons and limes. Oxalic acid’s soursobs and rhubarb. Aspalgic has mild flavour, but smells like the water closet at an asparagus dinner. Malic acid’s slightly less metallic than tartaric or ascorbic. Lactic acid is fatty, creamy, and custardy, like the first drink you get after the Big Nurse smacks you on the bum and hands you back to your new Mother. Comforting, and milky. These occur in wine; mystifying combinations occur in Pinot.

I’m overwhelmed by the power and acidity of the Ashton Hills Riesling 2005 ($19, 13 per cent alcohol, and 93 points). Like the Swedish fencing instructor I never had, she’s lithe, wiry, sensual and lean. I want her to thrash me long after she’s grey.

The entry level Ashton Hills Piccadilly Pinot Noir 2005 ($24; 13.5; 88 points) has coarser tannin than its more expensive kin. That makes it more macho: the furry tannin covers its acid spine. It lacks sensuality, but it’s your best opener.

Move up to the $45, 2005 Estate model (all from the estate vineyard – 14%; 93 points) and you see more cherry and lemon, and a great deal more sensuality with that finer tannin, greater viscosity, and more prominent acidity. Like the riesling, this wine will earn more points as it matures.

And so will the ravishing 2004 Reserve ($56; 14%; 94). It’s gorgeous. Maraschino, raspberry, wild cherry, spicy oak, slender but sensual viscosity, and heaps of natural acid, from newly ripening cherries to lime and lemon, are its hallmarks.

Half way through what I thought was my own radical posturising, Stephen produced a book that also suggested pinot was like riesling. Miffed,I refuse to remember it. “Most of the places that grow good pinot will grow good riesling”, he said, avoiding mention of Burgundy, where the arcane appellation laws forbid riesling plantations. “But it doesn’t always work in reverse.”

More mystification. More thirst.

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The wowsers are not ready

by PHILIP WHITE - This was published in The Independent Weekly in 2006

Saturday’s reading started with Friday’s Financial Review colour mag. The first reference to the drug, alcohol, came quickly with the head “Drinks missionary bar none”, a piece about London’s new bar czar, Jonathon Downey. He’s coming to Sydney to open more bars. “What the hell are we going to do when we can’t smoke, dance, drink and fight in bars anymore?” he asked.

Then came a woman in suspenders with a bottle of Dom Perignon pink, giving Karl Lagerfeld a plug. The old restaurateur, Beppi Polese, was next: full page, in his cellar, white wine in hand. Over the page he’s sniffing a red. Another full page praised vintage port.

The Life and Leisure section devoted half a page to Seppeltsfield, our most hallowed port house. Then a double page to “the historic riesling region”, Clare.

There were pieces about pubs losing money via the smoke bans, and the MD of Adelaide Bank being awarded an expensive burgundy for achieving a twenty five per cent increase in profit.

Move to the Weekend Oz. “Clare may offend again” turned out to be about a serial pedophile, with no mention of historic riesling. Similarly, the bit about Bob Francis made no mention of alcohol, but Lion Nathan confirmed a $25 million profit in Business. The Tour de France winner made the front page of Sport saying his testosterone was high because he’d had a pint of beer.

Travel included a half page on the Italian winemakers of the King Valley, another praising the Pinots noir of Curly Flat, and an encouraging piece about the glories you can drink with your food at Brasserie Moustache, which everyone should attend. It’s near Henschke’s. Magazine ran another piece about Seppeltsfield.

Then there was yours truly recommending the wines of Tim Smith in The Independent Weekly, and I imagine The Advertiser must have had alcohol in it somewhere.

Considering all this, it’s amusing to find the Fin Review’s Health page listing Australia’s “top six drugs” as being aspirin, insulin, diuretics, antibiotics, Paracetamol, and the opiates.

Who are they kidding? Most of the dudes I know on that stuff take it to alleviate the effects of alcohol.

I dined recently with Dr. David Caldicott, the emergency and trauma research fellow at the Royal Adelaide Hospital, and Sandra Kanck, the Democrat. While we drank an exquisite red from Ben Jeanneret – Clare offending again – we talked about the hypocrisy of this society when it comes to drug use and abuse.

Now that the fizz of sanctimonious outrage is settling, it’s worth re-examining the pasting all media gave Kanck for her attempt at injecting some logic into the drug debate. Having read her contentious Legislative Council speech of May 10, complete with the contrary hissings of Anne Bressington – thanks for that, Nick – one can only marvel that none of these detractors can see that there are votes in more sensible, realistic, holistic drug policy. Or maybe they can. Maybe that’s why they’re all so hissy.

Maybe Bressington suspects that the party-drug users who voted for Xenophon may have cast their ballot in another direction if they’d known about her.

The infuriating spaghetti of theories and ideas that rise from any contemplation of drug use share one point of eureka clarity, and this is where they most revealingly intersect: the point where drug policy is actually formed. Who forms it? Drug companies? The liquor barons? The religious right? The Laura Norder brigade? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. And the politicians and press who can control the ebb and flow of public fear and derision by ridiculing the likes of the well-intentioned Kanck. They’re scared and angry. They think the debate is evil in itself.

The wowsers certainly aren’t ready for Caldicott. As a scientist and an intellectual, he’s razor sharp and determined. As a hot-blooded Irish catholic who dated Dr Ian Paisley’s daughter, he understands the holy roller, the Bible-poker, the interferist and the self-interested powermonger as well as he knows the reality of life and death at the front line in his wards. Where does his budget go? Repairing the victims of alcohol, of course.

“Until I came to Australia I’d never met a dim Australian”, he said. “You have a genetic ingenuity which you betray by adopting an American drug policy which is used as a political agenda. It’s morally bankrupt. It should be the doctors and scientists making this agenda, not politicians, unelected priests, or press.”

I’ll drink to that.

The best recipes

by PHILIP WHITE – This was published in the Independent Weekly in December 2006

“I cut my teeth at Yalumba. I dragged hoses for Charlie Melton. I worked at St Hallett and Tatachilla. I do vintage every year in Portugal, making dry reds from Touriga and Grenache for Azamor in Alentejo. This year I’ve worked as a grunt for Ralph Fowler at Chateau Tanunda. And I make my own wines at various sheds throughout the Barossa.”

So explained the intensely quiet Tim Smith over a duck at T-Chow. It tasted so good it must have anticipated what it would finally swim in: his supple and elegant Tim Smith Wines Mataro Grenache Shiraz 2005 ($27; 14.6 per cent alcohol; 93 points).

“I’m finding I like Mataro more and more”, he said, “like the Bandols of southern France, where it’s called Mourvedre. I’ll be using more of it in this blend in the future. Bugger this obsession with GSM. Grenache Shiraz Mataro? Why should it always be those three in that order? Whose idea was that? I’ll probably end up dropping the Shiraz from the blend altogether.”

Tim’s exquisite wines are a lot about texture. I mean this blend shows amazing fruit intensity, freshness, and depth of flavour, but its texture, its silky smooth viscosity, gives it elegance and form, and what Max Schubert used to call warmth. At the risk of being gender specific, it’s feminine.

“If you want big firm extracted red, drink Stonewell”, he says, respectfully, of one of Peter Lehmann’s macho flagships.

Hot ferments and plenty of stirring of the yeast lees in barrel is the trick to the Tim Smith Wines fleshy, silky style. “That leesy slime is essential”, he continued. “A lot of people can’t sell their wine because they don’t have a point of difference. Their tanks are full of ordinary wine. Attention to detail must be absolutely mercenary when it comes to quality decisions. It’s those one per cent decisions that give you a point of difference.”

So to his Tim Smith Wines Barossa Shiraz 2004 ($33; 14.5; 93), which seemed even softer, sweeter, and more opulent and silky, in spite of its velvety tannin. This wine was fermented with complete bunches suspended in the must, and had daily lees stirring for a month.

“And pigeage”, he says, referring to the old French method of gently agitating the ferment without bruising the uncrushed bunches suspended in it. “Great form of relaxation. Buy yourself a six-pack of beer, wash your feet, and walk up and down in your ferment for a while.”

We chewed over a barrel sample of his 2005 Shiraz (94 points; for Christmas release). This had a tiny proportion of the white, firmly tannic Viognier in it, which seemed in a sense to reverse some of the silkiness which is his trademark, but this will soften with time. “It’s okay. Just a trial”, he shrugged, when I suggested the French put the tannic white Viognier in their Shiraz to make it bigger and drier, especially in the simple, raspberry and cherry Shiraz of the cooler north Rhone.

In sunny Australia, where the Shiraz is already tannic, the questionable tendency is to let the Viognier get too ripe before the addition, and you end up losing its tannin and replacing it with a most unwinelike canned peach syrup.

“Yeah”, he continued. “In a way, Shiraz Viognier is a waste
of time in the warmer Australian districts.”

Thence to the majestic reserve Shiraz 2005 (95 points; release next year), which includes a touch of McLaren Vale Shiraz to further soften its structure. “I won’t live long enough to see this in its full glory” he murmured into his glass. His recommended food match? “Bloody rare haunch of Bison.”

So why the Barossa? There was no pause.

“Location, location, location” he said, finally approaching animation. “It’s fifty minutes from T-Chow. It’s a five minute blast on a Triumph Bonneville to the top of Mengler’s for the world’s best sunsets. It’s ninety minutes to the southern beaches. And it has all this amazing loamy soil with plenty of ironstone.

“Then, of course, there’s a really good vibe of camaraderie amongst the young winemakers now”, he continued, almost raising his voice. “Winewriters call me a young winemaker, but I’m forty-four years old. There’s a whole new generation rising. They’re on fire. Look at their surnames: Henschke, Glaetzer, Teusner, Lehmann, O’Callaghan.”

He went back to his original hush for the last line. “But Whitey, you know, the real Barossa heroes are the unknown hosedraggers and steel fitters who make it all happen and are happy to tell us pompous winemaking pricks where to get off. They’re always the ones with the best humour.” And then in a whisper: “And the best recipes.”