THUS SPRACH THE LORD

Tony Lord photographed in Chesser Cellars by Philip White 1982

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by PHILIP WHITE - Interview in WINESTATE July 1982

Tony Lord is the editor of the prestigious British wine magazine, Decanter. In Australia recently, on his way home from New Zealand, Lord delivered some scathing criticisms on the way Australian wine marketing is conducted abroad, especially in London itself.

Lord believes that since the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation closed the Australian Wine Centre in London, an invaluable twenty years of effort in promoting Australian wines there has been almost entirely wasted.

Pointing out that the number of cases of Australian wine imported into Britain escalated steadily from 11,000 in 1977/78, to 48,000 cases in 79/80, Lord is particularly reproachful of the fact that this figure dropped to 33,000 cases in 80/81, neatly comparing the situation to the number of Californian cases imported: that figure has jumped from 40,000 cases to 400,000 in two years.

Explaining that the established European wine producers are almost operating at their maximum production levels, with very little room for expansion, Lord believes these suppliers have little choice other than to charge higher prices for their shrinking market share, and is adamant that the gap will be filled by wines from the New World countries, like Australia, California, South Africa and New Zealand.

However, Lord explains, Australia, unlike the others, appears now to be disproportionately focusing its attention on the much more difficult markets of the USA and Canada, both areas requiring relatively massive investments for the slightest market share.

A jovial expatriate Australian, Lord displayed a rare and irreverent candour when confronted with the Winestate microphone, and fairly large chunks of his dissertation proved far too spicy for these pages. A pity, but there’s plenty here:

Will we have to send our best wine to Britain to establish a market?

It’s always better to start at the top and work down, but given the quality of the wine selling there now, the wines like the ones Yalumba are shipping are very good flagbearers.

If you look at what’s happening in Australia at the moment, you’ve got a glut of wine and you’ve got price discounting. Everybody’s moaning about there being no profitability in wine, but those companies that are exporting are making money. Any company that’s built up a substantial export base, even on a modest scale, at least they’re getting some reasonable profitability with their wines, which may help the subsidise the furtherance of what they’re doing.

I was talking to Max Lake the other day, and he’s firmly committed to exports, and he said ‘It might be that I do have to cut down the amount of wine that I release in Australia’, but, he said, ‘I just can’t rely on the Australian market for my livelihood if we’re starting to get these price discounting problems with people undercutting and stuff selling for a buck a bottle’.

All the smart people in this industry are the ones who are exporting. In the future, and I’m certain that in the not-too-distant future, there’ll be a huge wine glut in this country again, and in the next minute we’ll see Boeings full of Ockers coming over to London and trying to offload what they’ve got in their warehouses, with little regard for the poor bloody importer who wants continuity of supply, and this time the people in Britain certainly already know what they can expect. They’re not gonna touch these guys with a bargepole. But they will go for the companies like Yalumba and Rothbury and Petaluma, and those companies that have been in Britain for five or six years, and all release a certain quantity of wine to that market each year.

See, that’s very important. The poor bloody importer. I just heard the other day about two companies from Australia that have been exporting to Britain and have decided not to send them any more wine. They’re getting top dollar over here, but when they’re not getting top dollar, they’ll be back over there, and that’s stupid short-sightedness. It really is.

Is there any way around the problem of trying to attack a big market like that with four or five pallets of cabernet?

If the maker finds a good importer and he’s prepared to say ‘Yes, I’ll let you have a thousand cases each year”, and if they’re honest about it ... you see Whitey there’s far more possibility for consistency here because of the climate, if for no other reason.

If the importer gets a duff one, he’s gonna make a decision what he’s gonna do about it. The first and foremost problem is that most of the poor buggers who are in London trying to sell Australian wines – and there are some of them who are putting far more effort into it than their profitability would ever justify – what they want to know is that they are going to get wine. I mean, one of the people who have pulled out rang up the UK importer and said ‘Look I can’t let you have any wine for the next two years’. Well now, what is the importer expected to say? He’d been building this thing up, and he’d had the winemaker over. He’d been holding lunches. He’d been getting press coverage, and then he gets this telephone call. He only wanted two or three hundred cases!

But you need about two or three thousand cases there to start with, to make any sense in terms of profitability, and there are very few wineries here that are even prepared to let an export market have that much wine. And they’re silly. The Californians will let you have as much as you want. They realise what the future is! The South Africans will let you have as much as you want.

The New Zealand industry thinks far better about the future than the bloody Australians!

See what they don’t realise is that London’s a prestige market. The Californians aren’t there to make a noticeable profit within five years. It’s a prestige market. They’ve got to see you represented. Every decent wine merchant in the world goes to London, if only because it’s the stop-off before you go to France. But they see your wine, you’re talked about, and the West Germans feed off it, the Belg feed off it, the Scandinavians feed off it, and the Dutch feed off it. And it’s a very big deal to be there.

The north-west Americans feed off it very heavily, too. But the Australians have got tunnel vision. And this is where I ... well, for a highly-placed person in an Australian wine corporation to say, effectively, that Poms wouldn’t know a good bottle if it hit them over the head, is just the end. If they think it privately, keep it to themselves but you don’t go saying it where it’s going to be quoted back at you in an influential trade publication. If the wombat’s doing these things, you bury him in a very large hole!

There are no marketing skills within the industry that apply to the international market that I’ve ever seen. If you’re dealing with Canada, you must have somebody who understands that market. If you’re dealing with America, you’re dealing with a totally different market, and you need somebody who understands that market. And ditto for Germany and the UK. But what we have here is a Coca-Cola salesman who goes around and thinks he can apply Australian marketing techniques in four totally disparate markets. And what he’s doing is – they open the door and they see this turkey coming from ’way back.

There’s an advertising agency in Toronto who are I bet are still laughing at the rip-off they got over Kelvin the Koala. Jesus, they must be bloody in hysterics! “Half a million in your pocket? Great, we can do you a beaut one!’ And, of course, what everybody forgot was by putting this French-speaking koala on the market was that they immediately alienated all the English-speaking Canadians who thought they had a strong bond with Australia through the old Commonwealth. And I mean that’s just a fundamental marketing mistake.

If they can’t see such elementary mistakes, God knows what happens when they get down to the fine print with dealing with these Americans who are so bloody sharp that they’ll eat you before breakfast. In fact, that’s probably when they got this bastard, before breakfast, and tied him up then. You know, while he was still half asleep. They’ve all had a jog and a shower and a jacuzzi and a screw and they’re into the office at seven-thirty in the morning, bouncing and raring to go.

You know me, and any Pom I know, we stagger and say ‘Jeez, I need a glass of good bloody Champagne!’ And you know, these Americans: ‘While you’re signing the documents we’ll open the Deutz, Sir’.

What do people in Britain look for on an Australian wine label?

Well, the varietal name. Area definition, and perhaps a little back label information about the product. It’s getting to the point now with these bloody EEC bureaucrats that by the time you’ve got all the crap that they want on the label, you’re lucky to be able to fit the producer’s name.

Fundamentally, what they want is attractive labelling, and like every other market, there’s just ... well you take a Wolf Blass label. There’s eye-catching shelf appeal, with the varietal name, and the area information, and the vintage. Varietal name and vintage are the key things at the moment because they imply immediately that this wine is quality wine.

It doesn’t necessarily follow-through in the bottle, but, at the moment, anything that hasn’t got a vintage date or a varietal name in Britain is considered real cheapo junk.

But what about an indication of style?

There’s a fine balance in Britain now. You’ll find that, say compared to ten years ago, there’s far more descriptive stuff on labels. “Dry red’, ‘medium white’: very much more indication to tell the consumer what’s inside. People make automatic assumptions in Britain now that if they buy cabernet they expect a certain style of wine. 99.9% of the time they’ll get it. But if it’s a blended wine, like say cabernet-shiraz, you can do that on the back label. But the only thing you don’t want to happen is to go to the California extreme where they literally tell you what socks the winemaker was wearing when he made the wine. I think that’s the sign of a fairly unsophisticated wine-drinking market.

The primary considerations must be shelf-appeal. Eye-catching visual stuff. The South Africans, say, might just call it ‘premium dry red’. We’re not allowed to use the pejorative name in England, but you can in some other markets. You know, in Belfast the soldiers think it’s a good day if they get hit on the head by a bottle that says ‘premium’.

What about the state of Australian wine writing?

I think the wine writers here pussyfoot around a bit too much. There should be much more criticism, because no industry’s going to really top if it’s not criticised, and if it’s not criticised constructively.

There’s this stupid Australian insularity problem. Australians know they’re making good wine. Some of them mistakenly think they’re making brilliant wine. There’s a person I went to university with who’s now a winemaker, and he’s going to charge $14 a bottle for his next release of cabernet sauvignon. Now, this guy’s a doctor. Well, he’s a butcher at medicine, and his winemaking’s even more execrable.

Now it’s awkward. I’m a magazine editor, like you, and we’ve been criticised because we don’t mention bad wines. But a newspaper journalist who has no problem with that sort of thing can come out and say ‘Look, this wine’s been released at $14 but in my humble opinion it’s just not worth the money ... I went down to Chesser Cellars and bought a bottle of Lindeman’s riesling as well as a bottle of so-and-so for under $14 and I think the money was better spent’.

They can’t do anything about that.

What can we, as an industry, do to correct some of these problems?

I’d like to see a lot more of the Wine Board bringing down good journalists and good people from around the world, who know what they’re talking about when they’re talking about wine. More scribes and trade people from different countries. You know, you should be saying ‘OK, the biggest wine buyer from the biggest wine chain in Germany is coming to town, and if anyone in the trade wants to come and meet him for lunch, come along, because he’s going to talk about how to sell wine in Germany’. That’s the sort of thing you should be doing more of, instead of giving your boys first class air tickets to go and whoop it up in the ritziest hotel in New York, wasting growers’ money, when they bloody well need it back here.

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ATLANTA NO ATLANTIS FOR OZWINE ENTHUSIAST

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The Non-existent Presence

Interview by PHILIP WHITE – Winestate June 1983

Frank Stone loves wine. A softly-drawling Georgian, he is headmaster of a body called the Wine Academy of USA, and is also president of the Society of Wine Educators in America.

While he talks, Stone pulls wine marketing and import/export statistics from his memory with an uncanny flair, and he pauses now and then to ensure his last gentle barrage of figures and ideas has properly settled on his listener.

Also a merchant, Frank owns Skinflints, a chain of six supermarket-sized bottle shops in and around Atlanta, Georgia. These shops specialise in quality wines, and they turn over $25 million each year. That’s quite a lot of wine. Frustrated with the difficult task of getting solid and up-to-date information about the Australian wine industry, Stone eventually made time to come and find out for himself.

Philip White intercepted him in the middle of Victoria, and found an interviewee fired with enthusiasm for what he had so far found, and similarly fired with criticism of Australia’s bumbling in the international marketplace.

How do you see the Australian wine presence in the USA?

There’s virtually not a presence. It’s a non-existent presence. Currently, Australian wines are usually put in the “all other wines” section. Perhaps merchandised along with wines from Jugloslavia; less prominently than Hungarian wines; next to Chile and Turkey.

Partially, my criticism is for the really piss-poor PR that your wine marketplace has generated for itself, both within and without the country.

Has anybody ever been to talk to you about it?

No. Not one. Nobody. Not one wine shipper has been to Atlanta Georgia and seen me. Let me tell you even worse than that – much worse than that: as the president of an international wine education association with 1,600 members who teach in universities and colleges, adult education and trade education course – get it: I am the clearing house for all wine information for that group, and have subsequently regurgitated a catalogue of every piece of information available on the subject of Australian wine, and every other wine – do you know how many times I’ve been contacted by anyone from Australia? Never.

Can you make some comparisons between what Australia’s doing and what other countries are doing?

Aw shit. As an example, let’s talk about France and Italy. For the last five years, the French wine imported marketplace has been taking it in the ass in America – at the expense of expanding market share for Italian wines, OK? The French are selling the same amount of wine, with proportionate increases each year, accounting for inflation. However, on the other side of the scale, the Italian wine-producers and importers are accelerating their rate of growth and their market-share percentage by tenfold extrapolated over the French.

Five years ago, 9% of the wine consumed in the United States was imported. The Italians’ share of those imports was less than 11%. Today, imports account for 24% of consumption, and the Italians’ share of that is 67% okay? From 11% of 9% to 67% of 24 – that’s quite a jump in four years! And you know how they’ve done that? First, a media program that’s second-to-none. Advertising, point-of-sale material, maps, charts, books ... they run five trips a year to Italy for wine writers, all expenses paid. All you gotta do is show up at the airport. Five trips a year for forty people apiece! That’s 200 writers a year, every year for the last five years, taken to Italy. OK?

Let’s take Marquis Antinori. You know him? He owns Villa Antinori. Seven years ago, he was shipping 40,000 cases of wine, total. Last year he shipped 2,500,000 cases of wine. Let’s talk about Villa Banfi. Seven years ago they didn’t exist. Last year they shipped 17,000,000 cases of wine. That’s just the States. 17,000,000 cases!

Could they have done that on the quality of the wine alone?

They didn’t do it on the quality at all. They did it by marketing. There’s this body of merchandisers who have been put in New York City. They opened a wine-tasting room, just for the media and the trade. They had an outreach and hand-holding program that went to every village and every city, starting at the population centres and working out like tentacles, making friends, giving tastings, holding seminars and holding classes; correspondence courses.

Last year, imported wine constituted 7% of America’s total balance of trade deficits. Now ponder on that.

The word is that Australia, and Australians, are all fairly popular in the USA at the moment. Is that true?

Absolutely. There’s a very strong kinship with things Australian right now. The phenomenal success of the films is evidence of this. Gallipoli, Breaker Morant, and The man From Snowy River – I’ve seen all three of those, and I think the reason Australia has some fascination for Americans is that’s it’s a resemblance of the old west tough-guy-strikes-out-against-all-evil mentality. It’s been so well-received over the years. But more than that: there’s a philosophical, maybe an emotional endearment to a people who speak the same language, and have the same developmental processes, as the Americans have had.

So in terms of potential adaptability to the marketplace, it couldn’t be better than it is right now.

Are there many similarities between the Australian and American wine marketplaces?

God, there are so many. It’s easier to talk about the differences!

To begin, the marketplace is relatively embryonic in terms of marketing positions and in terms of packaging. It’s fairly sophisticated in the sense of wine technology, and the development of new types and varietal characteristics.

I think the technology’s very high here. The experimental things I’ve seen here have been very interesting, but the really good wines I’ve seen here are really one step beyond experiments, and beyond the hobby – I call them gentlemen – winemakers.

Another thing is that Australian makers have a very introspective perception of the marketplace: they can barely see past their sales room or customer list. From what I’ve seen they don’t have much sensitivity to what’s happening outside their own region. They have very little sensitivity to the world marketplace other than for comparative analysis of their own product.

What are the differences in the customer’s approach to the wine store? Do Australians expect anything that Americans don’t?

Well, they’re telling me that the Australian consumer buys low-price, high-volume goods in great numbers and that you have no market for super-premiums. But see, then when I ask ‘OK, where are the super-premiums?’ they’ve sold completely out, and they’ve got a warehouse full of low quality – I’m sorry – low price, high volume goods left. So maybe it’s the numbers that on paper reflect an avalanche of consumption of high volume and low price, but the synergism in the marketplace is for the unique and the high quality, which supports my allegation that although they say there’s no place for it on the market, it keeps disappearing off the shelves.

What I have noticed with striking similarity is the polarisation of the elements: the consumer element; the retail element; and the wine-producing element. They seem to be at odds with one another about their common interests.

At the producer level, they seem to be hell-bent on distribution at all costs. “We want penetration. We want depletions”. And at the retail level they’re caught in the syndrome that more boxes beget greater market share. They prostitute profits.

At the wine consumer level you seem to have an element who are drinking wine as an alternative to beer, or soft drink, or water. Then you have another element who have developed a cognoscenti of wine snobbery. I don’t like to use the word “snob” though ... let’s say “enthusiasts”. You have these enthusiasts who support the expansion of the super-premium wine market. They do it by wine-tasting clubs, wine-buying schemes, wine-drinking organisations, and then, to a lesser extent, through the restaurant trade.

The most unique character I’ve seen so far is in the restaurants. The restaurants here have a better grip of what’s of what’s happening in the regional marketplace. Much better than the retailers I’ve seen. Now maybe it’s because the marketplace is structured differently here than it is the States, but almost every restaurant I’ve been in has had a pretty active wine-marketing program for that region.

Which Australian wine products would suit the American market?

I don’t think all the products that are made here could suitably be exported and marketed successfully in the United States. I came over here looking for very specific types and kinds and qualities. Specifically, premium reds. Cabernets and shiraz. Some very high quality ports, which is a surprise to everyone that I’ve talked to, and sherries. There is an absolutely insatiable market in the United States for quality port.

You can tell from the auction prices in London that there’s a world demand. Look at the Decanter index! The port index is up higher than the Bordeaux prices! The numbers speak for themselves.

Best of the things that I’ve seen, there are least a half-dozen that I’d be proud to sell, not as an Australian wine, not as a wine from another wine-producing region, but a god-damn good seven dollar bottle of red wine! That’s the crux of the thing: I’m dealing in goods that are international in scope. And I’m looking to supply our market with the best quality, within the price range, from anywhere in the world. I don’t give a shit where it comes from. And my customers don’t either. I used to think they were hung-up, but they’re not. They’re buying what I tell them is the best value for money. That’s how I built my business.

Here’s an example: a year ago I went to South Africa, and became enamoured with the Zeonnebloem cabernet. One particular vintage out of the eight I tried was outstanding. Stylistically, it’s a non-typical cabernet style for America. It’s got a good presence of colour, a good complexity of flavour, long in the mouth, with no astringency and no tannin – it’s as if somebody clipped off the bottom half of the glass.

Slippery, wonderful taste. And I also tasted the same wine-style that they’d been making over the last thirty years. They were that old, and they still had fruit in the glass! I couldn’t believe it! If I hadn’t tasted them myself, I would have thought that that wine would have been over the hill and in the salad dressing within five years. It has a structure unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. It’s because of the climatic growing conditions. You can read about it, but until you see it, it’s an absolute anomaly.

I took a shipment of some of these wines back, along with some Edelkeur, which is a botrytised dessert style white. I took 200 cases back to the States, and I sold it faster than a cat could lick its ass. You know why? Because it’s light, it’s got good colour, good fruit. People can drink it like a Beaujolais. Drink it chilled – not cold – as a complement to food: a wonderful food wine. We don’t have a wine made in America that’s like the wine I’ve just described.

Anyway, 200 cases was my first shipment last March. Before the end of December this year we’ll probably do 80,000 cases.

Have you seen any wine in Australia which excites you so much?

I don’t want to be patronising or partial, but so far the most unique thing is Hickinbotham’s Anakie Cab Mac. It’s exactly the type of wine I’m talking about. Forward, and fruit-like, with not a lot of complexity to it, and easy ... a fun wine to drink!

But that’s coming from one of the smallest wineries in the country!

Well, what can I tell you?

Well, what else can you tell me?

I don’t think the chardonnays I’ve seen have sorted themselves out in a way comparable or similar to the Californians.

But I’ve seen some cabernets and some reds from Coonawarra that are very nice. They’re wines that I have an interest in. I did see a couple of things in the Barossa that were interesting. The Hill Smith outfit has a couple of wines that I’m really partial to. In the McLaren Vale I found a couple that caught my attention. The most interesting thing I found there was Hardy’s Show Port.

We were hoping you’d never discover that! What about riesling? Are we ever going to sell it in the States?

No. We’ve got plenty of that now. The botrytised wines are a definite, although there are a lot of attempts at botrytised wines here – they don’t have the depth or the apricot flavours that I’m looking for yet, but they’re certainly getting there. You’ve certainly got the areas for it.

Can you make just a short comment on what Australia should be doing?

Australian wine products are not recognised in America. By and large, Americans don’t even know that Australia is a wine-producing nation, and that the wines that are being made here are serious efforts towards making universally-accepted wine products.

The way I propose to expediate the development of that awareness is through education.

Last year, the Society of Wine Educators provided wine education for over 600,000 people in America. OK? That body is currently in the process of developing a core educational program for every wine-producing country. This will be disseminated to the Society’s members on, say Italy, or it could be France, or Germany, South Africa, Australia, or Chile. Slides, transparencies, maps, production data, crop information and statistics, contact points, where you get tasting samples ... OK?

You take all that and you get it to 1,600 wine teachers and you start communication.

Another obvious thing would be for your wine-producing areas to collectively develop what I call educational tasting tours through the States. Hit the eight or nine major markets. Put on educational tastings. Invite the trade and the press. Get twenty wine producers to go through the United States on a ten-city tour. A goodwill media blitz. Tastings. A coupla lunches and some breakfasts, handing out maps and charts and photographs. God-damn, you’d get $500,000 worth of publicity out of a trip like that, and they don’t cost that much. Those are the things that are proven ingredients. They’ve worked very successfully for other producers. I’ve talked to dozens of people from here who say “we need a good export scheme”.

You don’t need a good export scheme. Shit, you don’t even export yet. Well?

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LONG DRY ROUTE TO THE KING OF THE RIVER

The author waits for Tony Bilson's magnificent repast at Trevor Knaggs' La Dolce Vita lunch at King River Estate

by PHILIP WHITE - A version of this story appeared in The Independent Weekly on 28 NOV 08

Horsham, drought, late afternoon. The sky is spectacular with thunderclouds: thousands of tonnes of water, stubbornly refusing to fall. Well-dressed farmers sit at footpath tables, glimpsing up, drinking coffee. There’s not much else to do. For hundreds of kilometres, every farm gate has a tractor or two for sale; a harvester; a favourite ute. There is no stock other than the odd scrawny sheep gnawing at what was supposed to be wheat, and a few bony cattle.

The roads have run down. Every village building needs paint. All those Wimmera streams that run north into the Murray are bone dry. I ask for more chilli on my chook burrito. The disbelieving lass produces a bowl of slightly mustard-coloured powder which rips the nose apart. Monosodium glutamate sprayed with Mace. It takes two beers to erase. Where’s the butcher? I ask, dreaming of edible food. Where’s the fruitaveg? “Coles”, she says.

Shops which once housed the butchers and greengrocers now brim with bric-a-brac: home-made artworks, trinkets, and useless caucasian artefacts that householders have chosen to live without.

On the hilltop west of St Arnaud, a quick thunderstorm has left one puddle. I report this to the nearest publican. “Fair dinkum”, she says. “You shoulda took a photograph of it. We coulda used it on a postcard!”

Further east, the Goulburn looks almost hearty. And so it should, if Melbourne’s new pipeline is to deliver. Across the Hume Highway the countryside turns lush green. We wind up the King Valley to Edi, where the tobacco farmers were, but now spread shooting vineyards, ash trees, oaks; creeklines thick with willow and hawthorn. Out of the car at King River Estate. “Jeez mate, this country’s looking good”, I say to winemaker Trevor Knaggs. “We get forty inches”, he says.

Perversely, the purpose of this journey is the annual La Dolce Vita Lunch. Trevor’s beautiful King River Estate wines, and a repast cooked by the great Tony Bilson, who makes the annual pilgrimage from Bilson’s at the Radisson in Sydney to King River, where he cooks for 120 in an old cowshed.

“Talk to Tony”, Trevor says. “Choose the wines. We’re proud of them. We’re going biodynamic.” A sexy tenor sax tootles away as the first diners arrive; waiters don shirts that say “Conserve water. Drink wine”. The first dish is from ancient Rome: almond gazpacho beneath a thin layer of oil. It comes with a croüton smothered in foie gras. Trevor’s 06 verdelho does it perfectly, with its faint hints of kernel supporting rather than contrasting. The duet’s ravishing.

“Now” says Tony. “This lobster tail will come out with fresh shelled oysters and seawater jelly”. The fumé, fennel and cream cheese of the 08 sauvignon blanc does the oysters and salty jelly perfectly, once again supportive rather than contrasting, just as the carambola and drying tannins of the 08 vermentino wrap that hearty lobster.

Somebody had promised to shoot some deer. No deer volunteer, and the 40 kilos of fillet Tony rattled up at the last minute in Sydney gets lost, so local venison turns up anyway. Tony roasts it and serves it in a sauce poivrade with chocolate, foie gras and juniper berries, with asparagus and a purée of potato and celeriac. The mighty King River Reserves, an 06 cabernet sauvignon and 05 merlot nail that dainty: in their different ways, both wines are chocolaty to some extent, and while the maturing chicory greens of the cabernet suit the celeriac side of the dish and the asparagus, the mossy, earthy, merlot nearly brings that Bambi back to life.

The Milawa Cheese Company presents a cheeseboard that just a decade back could be found only in Burgundy or Champagne. So we serve two unusual reds: a sweet 06 merlot, the result of a stuck ferment and some inspired tidying up, and the dry, unfortified - but tawny - 99 Nancy’s Shiraz, named after Trevor’s deceased Mum. “We gotta have this” Trevor says. “Mum’d love this”.

Tony’s mousse of chocolate with walnut cream, red berry salad and balsamic vinegar is a dryish, very adult affair, so we throw the dry 05 barbera at it. You oughta hear ’em slurp. This is one of the most utterly beautiful meals.

Coming home along the River, we first traverse hundreds of open channels gushing with water. They’re about the same width as the roads, and they’re using the new government grants to rubber-line them, but not enclose them. The chandlers are doing well in the drought: every fifty metres, there’s a neat little steel cable mariner’s ladder so critters can climb out if they slip on the rubber. But there’s only a glum puddle of a River at Echuca. From there to Swan Hill the anabranches are all dry, and there are millions of dead trees. There are no birds left on the road to Ouyen, and at Pinnaroo they’re irrigating potatoes with overhead sprinklers.

SHOWS: BIG CO.s KILL HILLS; JUDGES KILL VALES

by PHILIP WHITE

It’s official: out of 58 Adelaide Hills sauvignons blanc exhibited at the Adelaide Hills Wine Show, the best is from Constellation Wines and the generally-discounted Oomoo range.

The big chains are ordering their Constellation Oomoo Adelaide Hills Sauvignon Blanc 2008 as I write, but both are coy about the price they’ll charge. I expect it to eventually sit between $15 and $19, but who knows?

“The top sauvignon blanc awards showed fresh bright fruit characters but with an extra dimension” reported chair of judges Louisa Rose, from Yalumba. “Clear but well integrated acid was rewarded.”

The judges seemed once again to steer away from wines deliberately built with some complexity, like the O’Leary Walker Fully Worked Adelaide Hills Sauvignon Blanc 2007, which is a personal favourite.

Fully-worked chardonnay won the day, however, with Penfold’s Bin 06A Adelaide Hills Chardonnay 2006 taking top gold in the commercial chardonnay class, as well as winning best wine of the show. Luckily for the drinker, the much cheaper Penfolds Thomas Hyland Chardonnay 2007 came in only half a point behind, equal scoring with Shaw & Smith’s premium M3 2007. The Starvedog Lane 2005 also won gold.

None of this writer’s preferred pinots got anywhere. Ashton Hills Reserve 2007 scraped bronze; Honey Moon and Romney Park didn’t score. Boo hoo.

The cabernet and merlot classes scored rock-bottom across the board, but there was a glimmer of hope in the shiraz sector, with Honey Moon winning gold, as did Brackenwood, Argyle Cawdor, Shaw & Smith, and Starvedog with its shiraz/viognier.

These results were similar to those of the recent McLaren Vale Show, where the stunning wines which didn’t score - Coriole Nebbiolo Rose 2008; d’Arenberg The Coppermine Road Cabernet 2006; d’Arenberg the Dead Arm Shiraz 2006; et cetera, were as noticeable for their omission as the trophy winners were for their victory.

Not one white wine was rewarded gold at McLaren Vale.

COMMENTS:

GINGER MEGGS said:

"Of course Oomoo's the best sauvignon in the Adelaide Hills! Have you tasted the rest of them?"

December 3, 2008 10:48 AM

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DISASTROUS VINTAGE FIGURES RELEASED

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The following dread news has just arrived in my e. Apart from the wise few who picked modest yields before the heatwave, most of Australia endured the worst vintage in memory in 2008. The worst drought, a dead Murray-Darling Basin; yet yields per hectare are up by a quarter; the total crop’s up one third; export volumes are down 9%; and domestic sales are down 5%. Australia's unsold wine lake is now 2 billion litres. That’s cactus. Absolutely CACTUS. The sand dunes are coming over the mountain.

PRESS RELEASE FROM THE AUSTRALIAN BUREAU OF STATISTICS

“Wine production up a third, but sales slow: ABS

“Wine production has gone up, but lower domestic sales and a drop in exports has led to increased wine stocks according to figures released today by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).

“The total grape crush for 2007-08 came in at 1.8 million tonnes, up by nearly a third (31%) on last year; this produced 1.2 billion litres of wine, up just over a quarter (27%).

“The total area of grape vines (166,000 hectares) was slightly higher than last year, and with production up, yield rose to 11.8 tonnes per hectare (from 9.3 last year).

“Red/rosé wine production grew by 40% to 673 million litres; white wine production was 553 million litres (up 15%).

“While production was up, exports of Australian wine fell 9% (to 715 million litres) and domestic sales dropped by 5% (to 426 million litres); the United Kingdom remained the largest importer of Australian wine, taking 268 million litres valued at $895 million.

“The combination of higher production and lower sales saw winemaker's inventories rise 5% to 1.9 billion litres, with red/rosé wines representing nearly two thirds of the stock on hand.

“Australia's largest winemakers crushed a total of 1.3 million tonnes of grapes (71% of the total crush), averaging 92,000 tonnes each, while the smallest winemakers averaged 97 tonnes each.

“A third of all winemaking locations were in South Australia, representing 45% of the national crush.

“Nearly all (88%) vineyards in Australia used irrigation this season; average water consumption was 3.2 megalitres per hectare, with drip or micro spray irrigation the most common form of watering.

“Further information is in Australian Wine and Grape Industry (cat. no. 1329.0), available for free download from the ABS website .”

COMMENTS:

FIRSTY wrote:

Where's all this water come from? Politicians set this up so it's possible, so naturally people are gonna do it!

BRIAN wrote:

The ABS should be forced to have these figures out in JUNE before everyone's finished their pruning; not the same week they release the grape prices!!!

ENRAGED GROWER wrote:

How come it takes so long for them to tell us this? Why does it always come out the week before they tell us their grape prices?

HYPER-CYNIC wrote:

So where did all the water to grow this come from?

Bore users are capped here at 1.1ML p/ Ha. Mains average use below that on average. Moreover yields here were below 8-9 tonnes p/ Ha. Someone is growing lots of 15-20 tonnes per acre fruit still somewhere.

It seems government attempts to throw temporary lifelines to growers are only prolonging / worsening the situation. First they gave out permits and tax credits, now they are providing financial assistance to buy temporary water in areas that are no longer financially viable in the “market”. Worse, the South Americans are eating our lunch in the under $10 p/b segment overseas. Regions that supply this segment are where the dough is getting spread around. Makes no sense. The worst part is listening to people (inc. gov’t officials) calling it “market failure.” The merciless “market” would have sorted this one years ago.

WATERMAN said:

It doesn't matter how much bullshit we hear from Rudd, Wong, Maywald, Rann and their nefarious ilk - nobody is managing the river. How come this story was buried here by the South Australian media? I never heard it reported!!! December 3, 2008 11:33 AM

CHE said...

It's the same as the Senate Libs letting the Victorian pipeline proceed: never have this nation's politicians looked more inept, amatuerish, self-satisfied and priggish. Who do they think WE are? December 3, 2008 12:32 PM

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GOVAN'S GREATEST VICTORY

Victory Hotel publican Douglas Govan fondles his pot of gold at his Rudderless Vineyard behind his Victory Hotel on Sellicks Hill, McLaren Vale, South Australia. That's another view of the vineyard, above, with the Gulf St. Vincent in the background.

SPEECH for the OPENING of the NEW BAR AND CELLAR at the VICTORY HOTEL, Sunday 30th November 2008

by PHILIP WHITE

Thanks Douglas.

I’m going to talk awhile about the nature of names as much as those very special qualities which mark the nature of a successful public house.

Public houses are places people attend to enjoy indulgent luxuries and wickedness they cannot otherwise procure because they’re travelling – it’s too long; or luxuries and behaviours which would simply not be tolerated at home – it’s too hard.

Such naughtiness ranges from extreme gushings of bullshit to spilling stuff on the carpet, through, until recently, to burning holes in the carpet, to the more traditional outrage of using the carpet through friction to burn holes in elbows and knees while scorching the gluteus maximus muscles of somebody else.

Metaphorically, of course.

Given the economies of the day, the publican varyingly tolerates, facilitates, and even encourages such behaviours, and the cleverest among publicans are those which can routinely manage all three, whilst keeping a clean nose, and ensuring those customers, and sometimes also those regular customers’ partners in life, reoffend with impunity.

While beer has been popular for some 8000 years, we don’t know who first made its drinking something that should be supervised by publicans in public houses, but I’m sure it didn’t take long.

There are references to such establishments in Chinese literature several thousands of years back, but one of the earliest writings to make pubs sound rather fascinating to the young Philip White came from the Gospel According To Matthew. It was read to the congregation of the Presbyterians at Childers, in the mountains of east Victoria, by Philip’s Father, the president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, in about 1958.

And it referred to wine, not beer.

As if to prepare me for Shakespeare, who plied his thirty thousand word vocabulary at Stratford while the royal scribes across in London and Oxbridge were limited to five thousand as they worked on the King James Version of the Bible, my Father the preacher of course used that translation.

“But whereunto shall I liken this generation?” Jesus asks.

“It is like unto children sitting in the markets, and calling unto their fellows. And saying, ‘We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned unto you, and ye have not lamented’.

“For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He hath a devil!’.

“The son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Behold a man gluttonous, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners’.”

1,950 years later there was an essay competition.

“I won it with an entry under my own name”, Douglas Govan told me earlier this year.

“And I also came third with another entry under another name.

“With the winnings I bought a Sony amplifier. I had no speakers or anything. Just the amp. I’d turn it on and marvel at the little green light. There was a Japanese kid at school with big stereo headphones. He let me try them on and once I was in there – like wow! Stereo! Suddenly I understood. I got right into music. I got into some serious platter-spinning. The wheels of steel. Within a few years I was running nightclubs, and eventually made enough money to buy a pub.”

So Douglas has been here since 1989, doing renovations and rebuilds in brave, tasteful waves, which are directly relative, of course, to the numbers of sinners, apostles, and sons of gods he entertains here.

Before the mighty rebuild we celebrate today, Douglas’s last big spend was on three bed and breakfast establishments just up the hill. While these are highly convenient and polite, I think somewhere in there, back with the gamblers, Douglas should build a copy of the Great Bed Of Ware (see picture at bottom of this page), which at three metres by four in acreage, was famous for holding around twenty passengers at a time. In Billy the Shakespaw’s day this mighty cot resided in another great pub, the White Hart Inn in Hertfordshire, and the Bard referred to it in Twelfth Night, where Sir Andrew Aguecheek is urged to write down enough lies to fill a sheet 'big enough for the bed of Ware'.

Speaking of the gluteus maximus muscles, the surname Aguecheek reflects not on the bearer’s capacity to score carpetburns upon his arse, but is a slightly more polite version of quakebuttock, a popular term for the sweaty, quivering cowards of that day.

Built by Hertfordshire carpenter Jonas Fosbrooke in about 1590, the bed’s four grand posts are carved with the names of some of those lucky enough to have sailed in her. She went to The Saracen’s Head, another Ware inn, until 1870, and now lies restored but tragically unused in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Which brings us to another great pub, the Boar’s Head. As Christian beliefs overtook pagan customs in Europe, the presentation of a boar's head at Christmas came to symbolize the triumph of Christ over sin. So young Will Shakepaws appropriately named the favourite watering hole of that corpulent and profane reprobate Sir John Falstaff The Boar’s Head.

This pub was at Southwark, where, coincidentally, lived the German woodworkers who'd helped build the Great Bed Of Ware. The real Boar's Head had been owned by the warrior John Fastolf, who in hearty simile to the playwrite’s name Shake Spear, (which he often signed Shakes Paw – a walloper of one’s cods) became John Fall Staff, a character quite the opposite of John the Baptist, who neither ate nor drank but did carry a staff til Salome secured the falling of his head.

The Boar's Head Inn, outside the City of London's medieval walls on the northeast, had long been a venue for play-acting in previous decades, and Shakespeare easily modified it for use as the vehicle in which Head Bore, Fall Staff famously fell asleep, drunk.

In Richard IV, Falstaff’s there drinking at two oclock in the morning with prince Henry.

enter BARDOLPH, running

"O, my lord, my lord! the sheriff with a most monstrous watch is at the door."

HOSTESS

"The sheriff and all the watch are at the door: they are come to search the house. Shall I let them in?"

It appears that the Sheriff’s looking for Falstaff over the little matter of a big stack of stolen money.

Prince Henry sends Falstaff to hide behind the arras, which, like denim, the characteristic cloth of Nimes - de Nimes - was an abbreviation for the rich tapestries and brocades made in the French town of Arras. The word came to refer to such tapestries, which usually bore heroic images of hunts or great battles, and which were hung in pubs to hide drafty unused doorways, annexes or snugs.

“Go, hide thee behind the arras”, the Prince tells Sir John.

As I’m talking about names, their meanings, and the way these change, Hardy’s or BRL or Galaxy or Heavens Above - or whoever they're currently called - that supplied this beautiful Tassie fizz we're gurgling should shout Douglas an arras as he now has the perfect location for one in his sumptuous new cellars.

Prince Henry assures the Sheriff that his quarry – as fat as butter – is not in the pub, so the sheriff leaves.

“This oily rascal is known as well as St Paul's” says the future king. “Go, call him forth”.

But Falstaff’s fast asleep behind the arras, snorting like a horse. They go through his pockets, looking for the money, but find only the day’s account from the pub.

Item, A capon (a chook),. . 2s. 2d.
Item, Sauce,. . . 4d.
Item, Sack (that’s sherry), two gallons, 5s. 8d.
Item, Anchovies and sack after supper, 2s. 6d.
Item, Bread, a halfpenny.

“O monstrous!” yells the Prince. “but one half-penny-worth of bread to this intolerable deal of sack!"

Sir John drinks in many public houses, and handily repairs to one called The Garter Inn after having been thrown into the Thames.

“Have I lived to be carried in a basket, like a barrow of butcher's offal, and to be thrown in the Thames?” he roars in the MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR. “Go fetch me a quart of sack; put a toast in't”.

In those days they served steaming hot sherry in large mugs, with a crouton or two floating on top. The sherry, which was yellow and sweet, and made before the invention of flor fino, was often so stinky and cloudy they also stirred in an egg or two to clarify it, much as we clarify consomme or indeed wines in barrel.

“Let me pour in some sack to the Thames water; for my belly's as cold as if I’d swallowed snowballs for pills to cool the reins. Call her in” Falstaff orders of the barmaid. But when Mistress Quickly arrives, he roars again “Take away these chalices. Go brew me a pottle of sack finely”.

“With eggs, sir?” she asks.

“Simple of itself” he gurgles; “I'll have no pullet-sperm in my brewage”.

“A good sherris sack hath a two-fold operation in it” Sir John trumpeted. “It ascends me into the brain; dries me there all the foolish and dull and curdy vapours which environ it; makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble fiery and delectable shapes, which, delivered o'er to the voice, the tongue, which is the birth, becomes excellent wit. The second property of your excellent sherris is, the warming of the blood; which, before cold and settled, left the liver white and pale, which is the badge of pusillanimity and cowardice; but the sherris warms it and makes it course from the inwards to the parts extreme: it illumineth the face, which as a beacon gives warning to all the rest of this little kingdom, man, to arm; and then the vital commoners and inland petty spirits muster me all to their captain, the heart, who, great and puffed up with this retinue, doth any deed of courage; and this valour comes of sherris. So that skill in the weapon is nothing without sack, for that sets it a-work; and learning a mere hoard of gold kept by a devil, till sack commences it and sets it in act and use. Hereof comes it that Prince Harry is valiant; for the cold blood he did naturally inherit of his father, he hath, like lean, sterile and bare land, manured, husbanded and tilled with excellent endeavour of drinking good and good store of fertile sherris, that he is become very hot and valiant. If I had a thousand sons, the first humane principle I would teach them should be, to forswear thin potations and to addict themselves to sack.”

A few hundred years later The South Australian in 1845 praised “the extensive and rich valley of McLaren … where almost the whole of the country inns visited on this trip are neatly and cleanly kept … everywhere the traveller meets with civility and attention … and there was no lack of good viands”. Going by the amount of sherry grape varieties then planted hereabouts, these abundant good viands must have included a fair potage of Sir John’s peculier petrol.

But this Victory was then not yet built.

I’d always thought, like hundreds of other pubs throughout the British Empire, that this establishment was named after the mighty vessel upon which Lord Nelson asked his mate Hardy for “a bit more tongue” then up and died.

I liked this possibility, because the Victory had been more successfully employed off the Portuguese coast in the battle of Cabo de São Vincente – Cape St Vincent - on 18 January, 1797, under Admiral Sir John Jervis, who thence took the title Lord St Vincent and became First Lord of The Admiralty, in which position he awarded passports to the French ships which sailed from his Channel to this coast, captained by Nicholas Baudin, under the sponsorship of Charles Pierre Claret, the Comte de Fleurieu, Senator, member of the Institute of France, former Minister of Marine, governor of the palate of Versailles, and intendant-general of Napoleon's household.

Baudin, of course, named this water Golfe Josephine, after Bonaparte’s mistress, unaware that by the time his charts got back to Paris Boney’d swapped Josephine for Marie Louise.

But before the French cartographers changed Baudin’s maps, Flinders named this glittering stretch of water St Vincent after his sponsor. It’s perchance that Baudin's maps reside in the Bibliotech, opposite Willy’s Wine Bar in the Rue Petit Champs in Paris. Henri Paul, the ex SAS man who drove Princess Diana to her death, drank, sometimes heavily, in Willy’s as he lived directly upstairs and always left his Mini Cooper S parked crooked on the footpath outside. Diana of course was a Spencer, and it was her ancestor, George John, the Second Earl Spencer and first Lord of the Admiralty, after whom Flinders named the other Gulf, which Baudin called Bonaparte.

It’s simply opportune that Vincent was not just the patron of viticulturers, but also of vinegar makers, lost stuff, and schoolgirls.

When Douglas named his wine brand Rudderless, he reinforced my naive belief that this Victory was named for Nelson’s vessel after its great Victory at the Cabo St Vincente, around which smart caravels for centuries carried sherris sack from Spain to the likes of Falstaff and the lads in The Boar’s Head, just as this gulf (St Vincent) and this cape (Cape Jervis - at the toe of The Fleurieu) see today’s enormous wine exports sail off for the public houses of London.

The names of Australian public houses often referred to things royal. If the King sought to go to war, he’d have to build a navy, so he planted Royal Oak, or Kingswood. The Great Eastern and Great Western hotels, of which Australia has many, were named after the biggest vessels of their day, both built by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who was the consultant engineer on the Goolwa – Victor Harbour railway, here on our beautiful Fleurieu Peninsula. The Exeter was named after that temple of enlightenment, Exeter Hall in London, where Wilberforce held his world-changing rallies against slavery, the first emancipationists met, and the meetings for the establishment of the South Australia Company were held. Rising Sun Hotels, which are everywhere, either face east or sit on eastern pavements. This pub, indeed, would make a perfect Rising Sun.

It took Chris Davies, of Willunga, to set me right about this Victory, and point out that the old coach road that passes outside here from Sellicks Hill to Pages Flat Road was originally named The Victory Road, not after any vessel, but after the victory of Aldinga Council Chairman John Norman who was instrumental in pushing this road through to Myponga and Yankalilla.

The ceremony to open the road was held on Tuesday, March 15th 1859 at this new inn, and at the celebratory dinner which ensued, this great public house was named Norman’s Victory in the hope that it would be a perpetual commemoration of the councillor’s achievement.

So, in the spirit of Sir John Falstaff, and his foremost Australian equivalent, the NSW Premier Sir John Robertson, who upon visiting these shores in 1860 drily observed

"None of the men who in this country have left footprints behind them have been cold water men",

I urge you to pack your pottles with sack, put a toast on it, and drink one to the gulf the Kaurna called Wongayerlo - the place where the sun disappears – and to all publicans and sinners, to Douglas Govan and his mighty Victory, where each day the sun arises, to all who sail in her, and in honest expectation that if Jesus came back today, the first thing he’d do would gather the lads up from their clambake down there on Galilee, and wander up the dusty Victory track for a few long loud ones in this beautiful new cellar and bar.

To the Victory!

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