AND WE THOUGHT WE HAD IT BAD

So what? It’s cool again. Big deal.

That relieving wave of weather chased our heat across the border and blew little Victoria to bits.

Maybe we should have stuck with the heat. Somehow kept it here. It wasn’t so bad.

It’s the beginning of a new week. Like many Australians, I couldn’t sleep, but tossed about the cot with the wireless chattering about the exploding horror across the border. The heartbreaking floods in northern Queensland. The little kid who chased his dog into the creek and got snapped up by a croc...

Somehow that very Australian death seemed bigger than the Victorian toll that ticked sickeningly upwards all through yesterday, and will, no doubt, do it again so reliably today, as the fireys find the bodies.

The surreal Pompeii bodies, grey with ash, but alive short hours ago. With living mates and relatives wondering where they are.

What do you do about that?

Sick of bed, I rose at five: showered guiltily; and walked around the vineyard while the first dim of the day pushed the filling moon’s honest brightness aside.

Now the heat’s all gone to Victoria, the birds have reappeared, and viticulturers wander back out into the vineyards to see what’s left. The men arrived at six-thirty, and silently went to work taking the big rolls of bird netting from the storage shed, to wrap the shiraz, chardonnay and roussane that somehow survived those thirteen devilish days of heat.

It’s easy to wallow on about survivor’s guilt, but the memories of those blistering days are suddenly hollow as we swallow the horror of what’s happening in Victoria.

Swallow and swallow and swallow.

If you don’t swallow, you’ll puke.

The netting seems pitiful: blokes who’d netted before the heat found it holding the canopy down, still, so the leaves couldn’t move in the odd breeze and burnt more dramatically in the sun. There were no birds then anyway: Bacchus only knows where they went to pant those days away.

So how bad will next weekend’s heat be? How long will that last? Will this net hold those last leaves down so they too burn?

As the work progresses, there are mumbles about mates across the border, whose vineyards were in the paths of the fires. Save a vineyard? Not when people are perishing on their verandas as their melting water buckets fall off their handles and slop pitiful water on the shoes that burn anyway.

My godson came yesterday, and we went to the shop. We felt like smoking cigarettes. There was an impossibly young lad there, with his first tender goatee, buying toothpaste or something in preparation to catch the plane to go and fight fire in Victoria. His face told us that he knew he would come home tainted with horrors none can imagine, and none can prepare for.

“So you’re going over?” the lady asked.

“Yeah”, he said, taking something from the shelf. “We’re going over.”

“Be careful”, she said. “Good luck.”

“Thanks”, he said. “We’ll be back Friday. Sounds like big-time fire danger here again on Saturday. It’s gonna get real hot again.”

“Yes”, she said. “Yes.”

We sat outside in the new cool and drank a bottle of Paul Petagna’s moody black Diavolo: shiraz cabernet from down the Vales, from a vineyard that probably won’t be picked this year: it’s toasted.

It wasn’t enough. So we drank another: Jules Barry’s soberingly beautiful Good Catholic Girl. Shiraz, from Clare.

While we drank, and smoked, my mind wound through the Victorian vineyards I’ve stood in, and drank from, and loved and worshipped, which were right then being whipped by flaming banshees. Blazing coals, falling from towers of soot and hell that reached right up there to heaven. Bendigo, Kyneton, Gippsland, Tallarook, all through the Strathbogies and The Great Dividing Range, through the Yarra Valley to the very edge of Melbourne.

Beautiful vine gardens: the work of good people. Gastronomes. Mates. Lovers.

Then David gave me a box of French oak offcuts for my smoker. He’s made himself a beautiful parquetry floor from discarded barrels.

“Smoke”, I said. “Thanks, bro.”

What is it with smoke?

All through these hills people are clearing trees and scrub and leaves away from their homes. They’d started it half-heartedly before the heatwave, but gave it away when it grew too hot. Now they’re using the cool spell to prepare for more heat. They’re looking at their plastic water tanks, suddenly aware that they would melt in seconds in a conflagration like they’ve just watched on television.

The plastic garden hoses.

Last evening, when David had gone, the news of the Beechworth fire took a nasty turn for the worse, so I rang Julian Castagna, who lives there in his perfect vineyard, in north-eastern Victoria.

“We’re sorry”, the machine said, “but we’re unable to take your call... ”

Of course, I muttered. They’re busy. I hung up without remembering whether I left a message or not, wondering whether they were still alive. Whether that was the last time I’d hear Julian’s voice...

But he rang back within minutes.

"Yes", he said, in the helpless adrenaline-driven illogic of one confronted by abject horror. "I can see the fire. It's really bad. It's terrible. 30,000 hectares! Listen, why don't you come over and stay for a week. We've got a room. You can keep to yourself. Give yourself some time to think... You'd have your own shower. We could do a retrospective..."

Today, there's no answer. But from what I can ascertain, the fire's blowing away from Castagna, towards the north-east.

Wishing and hoping.

BIT LATER ON:

Aha! A call. Carolann says they're okay, but the wind has changed and is now pushing a lot of smoke at them from the north-east, which is not what they want.

.

CHILL DUDES! IT’S ONLY ANECDOTAL HEAT!

MCLAREN VALE SHIRAZ PICKED THIS MORNING. THE LEFT HAND BUNCH IS FINE; THE MIDDLE ONE TYPICAL OF THE FRUIT WHICH IS NOT TOO BADLY AFFECTED. ZOOM ON IT AND YOU'LL SEE THE RAISINING AND BAGGING. THE RIGHT HAND BUNCH IS ABOUT AVERAGE FOR THE SORT OF FRUIT THAT WILL BE PICKED THIS VINTAGE. THERE'S A LOT WORSE STUFF LEFT ON THE VINES IN THE HOTTEST PLACES WITH THE HARDEST SOILS.

Another Day Of Hell

But Cool Respite On The Way!

by PHILIP WHITE

There’s been a little respite from the heatwave since I last wrote here of weather. The daily max actually slumped below 40ºC a few times. Not far below, but mercifully below. Yesterday was back in the forties, and last night was a blisterer.

Winemakers in the Fleurieu Peninsula, McLaren Vale, and up through the Adelaide Hills section of the South Mount Lofty Ranges, through Eden Valley and the Barossa to Clare, have well and truly got into picking.

Or at least selecting which of the least blistered rows to pick.

On the other side of the ranges at Langhorne Creek, nobody wants to talk about it. But closer to the receding Lake Alexandrina, Peter Widdop, world champion battler of Old Mill Estate is candid. “You’ve gotta be realistic”, he says. “This is terrible. But we’ve got some really good fruit. I got up on the roof of the shed this morning and when you look out across the flats you can see where the damage is. It’s highly soil-specific. Our touriga nacional is amazing. And we’ve got really tough shiraz: you can look into the odd vine and say ‘jeez, that fruit’s perfect’. But we’ve lost some of the cabernet that’s on the harder soil.”

On Wednesday, Chester Osborn, of d’Arenberg, McLaren Vale, told DRINKSTER “Nightmare vintage again Whitey. Again. Again.”

“It’s the earliest vintage by a million miles”, he continued. “And it’s very very low. We’ll pick about thirty per cent of what I estimated three weeks back, and that was already reduced dramatically from my previous estimation. Now we’ve got too many pickers. Nothing to pick.

“Anything in shallow hard ground, or reflective sands, with no deep moisture, is over. Bush vines? Poor old buggers! McLaren Vale grenache looked amazing. All gone. The sauvignon blanc’s brown. No flavour. The roussanne died. Viognier? No good, but not bad compared to the rest. Petit verdot? Shrivelled to buggery.”

I live about fifteen kays from Chester as the crow flies – although there’s not much in the way of flying going down in the bird world at the moment: they’re hiding. Here, it’s a bit higher, and a bit cooler, and not nearly so bad.

Most of the priceless old bush vine grenache perished in the first couple of plus forty days: the very sand which reflects light and heat up under the basket-pruned canopies to ensure even veraison and ripening, this year simply roasted them as temperatures in the sun passed 50º C. Unless somebody does a very selective pick of the best sheltered bunches, of which there are some surviving, there'll be no super-premium grenache this year.

But three nights ago the lads picked the first Yangarra chardonnay at 12.5 Beaumé, and near perfect pH and acidity. That went straight into the press, the juice cooled and cold settled, and it’ll soon catch some yeast from the air or from within itself, and begin its blessed tick. For that lot, the torture is over, and it’s now in the cool of the cellar.

The Yangarra shiraz is remarkably well, and the stoic crew are suggesting that in today’s bake it’ll hunker down and close up to retain as much moisture as possible, to then prepare to turn back on and complete veraison in next week’s promised cool, when they think “it could ripen up pretty quickly”. Although it’s patchy, and very dependent on soil types.

The remaining chardonnay is coming on bravely, and the roussane has the punk cockiness of Robert de Niro’s Travis Bickle (pictured) staring himself down in the mirror:

“You lookin at me? ... Who you lookin’ at?”

It’s fit, tight and cheeky.

Around the Vales, I hear good reports about tempranillo, too.

I rose at 0500hrs for a walk before sunrise. Looking across the vignoble, I see growing yellow patches in the canopy above the harder soil types. But there’s still plenty of green here.

In times of such stress, the vines sacrifice the burnt, crisping, yellowing and curling leaves, put their berries on hold, and pump their energy into the remaining canopy instead of the grapes, as they determinedly protect their little babies for another day or two, until the seeds become viable. That’s when veraison

occurs, and the vine ceases production of acid, turns the deterrent green bitter grapes to sweet, juicy, red attractors, and then lies back and hopes the birds will come in, eat them, incubate them in the warm little gizzards, and then kindly disperse them to keep the species going.

Funny thing, nature. Since the vines have trained humans to depend upon them for wine, we coddle the vine gardens, keep the flying incubators off and harvest the crop. We actually kill the seeds in the ferment, but instead of killing the vine as a species we also plant more vines than have existed ever before: there’s decreasing need for the plant to actually bother producing a seed!

Certainly no more need to grow up through the poplars and whatnot.

But back to the weather. By 0600hrs, a full-bore Heat Health Warning had been issued by the State Emergency Service and SA Health, while the three south-eastern mainland states brace for another day of searing, life-threatening hell. Some rural areas have been advised to expect 46+º C, 114ºF in the old money.

The Country Fire Service announced “all resources are on high alert in preparation for today’s extreme weather conditions ... the Bureau of Meteorology is forecasting extreme fire danger across most of South Australia with temperatures above 40 degrees and wind gusts of up to 90kph ahead of a mid-evening change. (!)

“But the fire danger forecast for today may be as extreme as we’ve seen in South Australia for a number of years,” CFS Chief Officer Euan Ferguson said.

“People who live in high fire risk areas will need to activate their Bushfire Action Plans and be prepared to swing into action by either staying and defending their property or leaving early, depending on what’s been decided in the plan.”

Police are on high alert: Chief Superintendent Silvio Amoroso said SAPOL has boosted its number of roving firebug patrols. Pity help any mad bastard that gets caught.

Fireys are fighting forty bushfires across the border in woody Victoria. South Australia is holding its breath.

The Ultra-Violet Index is predicted to reach an extreme 11.

Reports of a blitzed vintage continue to trickle past the spin doctors, who have worked themselves into a frenzy, attempting to convince the world that everything’s cool.

The pinot of the Mornington Peninsula is in deep trouble, with Geraldine McFaul, winemaker at Willow Creek, telling Tyson Stelzer that "any exposed fruit has been completely fried. It looks like someone's taken to it with a flame thrower."

To add insult to its growing phylloxera bloom, the Yarra Valley has been utterly blitzed, with some growers losing everything.

“You have to see it in perspective”, said Tony Brady of the great Wendouree, in Clare. “The end of the world was already nigh.

“The malbec doesn’t like it. It’s very soil specific.”

“But Clare is very very lucky”, David O’Leary at O’Leary Walker told DRINKSTER on Wednesday.

“We had that four inches of rain in twenty four hours in November, which nobody else got. That deep ground moisture delayed vintage, so our riesling was only eight Baume last week. It’ll be above that now, but it was so young and tight and tough it’ll be okay if we get ten days of relief from the heat. If.

“I mean everything’s way down in yield, of course. There’s no weight in it, and we won’t get the flavours we want. But Clare will come out of it quite well if ... ”

Tim Smith of Chateau Tanunda reckoned “Barossa yields could be down forty to fifty per cent”.

While many Barossa white vineyards will not be picked, Tim picked good shiraz on Tuesday at 14.3 Baume, and he said the whites that were coming in had “a shitload of flavour ... But you know what, Whitey?" he continued, “it’s ironic. Those who’d been going for the big yields and pumping the water on big time, so they’ve got much bigger leaf canopies than you’d normally want, will probably come through all right. Like the high-yield chardonnay, which nobody wants, doesn’t have a speck of sunburn!”

So, at a time when there’s barely a drop of irrigation water left in Australia, the bastards who’ve been squirting it on like there’s no tomorrow, going for maximum tonnages to make up for the lowest grape prices in years, are succeeding at the expense of those who were being respectfully frugal with precious water.

This water paradox is also obvious in Coonawarra, and on the Murray. With typical reserve, Jon Angove said “The heat has been very severe. Unfortunately, those who were ekeing their water out, trying not to use too much, have shrivelling crops. Those who’ve kept the water up, and have good foliage, good canopies, are looking alright. We’ve seen this before you know.”

“We’re standing here watching the debilitating effects of earlier heat become apparent”, said Greg Clayfield at Zema, Coonawarra. “There’s a lot of sunburn, yellowing, and shrivelling, and the summer’s just begun. The old bush vines are taking it very badly.”

Some determined district representatives are still struggling to convince the world, and probably themselves, that all is cool in sunstruck Oz. I woke to the five o’clock news to hear a well-meaning hero from Griffith saying leaves were yellow, curled and dropping and yields might be down ten or twenty per cent, “but”, he said, “of course that’s only anecdotal”.

Yep. It’s only anecdotal.

None other than the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation, which is led by a former Minister for Defence, The Hon. John Moore AO (pictured, right), yesterday issued a press release saying:

“Recent reports of high temperatures across parts of South Eastern Australia are likely to impact the predicted yields of the 2009 harvest, however it is too early in the season to make quality assessments and it is clear that Australian wine supply is not threatened.

"Most reports from affected wine regions rate the downgrading at between 10% and 20%. The most likely impact of the sustained period of high temperatures will be to bring the season forward and to shorten it – thereby presenting Australian winemakers with some logistical challenges during harvest.”

Some logistical challenges, indeed. Probably merely anecdotal logistical challenges.

The first recorded use of the term “spin”, or its like, which I have encountered, is in dear old Cicero, reviewing the freshly-published historical writings of Julius Caesar sometime around 50BC.

“They are like nude figures, upright and beautiful, stripped of all ornament of style as if they had removed a garment” Marcus Tullio Cicero (left) wrote.

“His [Caesar’s] aim was to provide source material for others who might wish to write history, and perhaps he has gratified the insensitive, who may wish to use their curling-tongs on his work; but men of good sense he has deterred from writing.” from Brutus (262)

It's 0922 now, 41ºC, and the foreboding calm of the dawn has been invaded by a savage northerly, coming in off Australia's vast baking centre. It dries the eyes to a sand-blasted painfulness within minutes, and in it you can smell an acrid, fearsome reek, like the hot metal and brick of a blast furnace.

POST SCRIPT:

2020HRS: I have just turned the exhausted air-conditioning off and opened my windows and doors for the first time since January 28th. There's a beautiful sou-easterly breeze coming in from the Gulf St Vincent (appropriately patron of viticulturers, lost things, schoolgirls and vinegar-makers), and the crickets are singing with glee!

I can almost smell the whales' breath.

In the last couple of hours, as the northerly wore itself out and swung about to the south, the temperature has taken a merciful plunge. It's now 18.6ºC, and the relative humidy has risen to a comfy 71%. At 0930 it was 12%! The Bureau of Meteorology says temperatures will stay below 30ºC until Friday, and ease up to 37ºC next Saturday.

My asthma has gone, the prickly hay-fevered skin is beginning once more to feel liveable, and my eyes suddenly require no lubricating drops. The wee berrudies are chattering delightedly in the gloaming, and from my desk, through the French doors, I believe I can hear the vines sucking in their first big gulp of cool air in a dozen days.

It will take the survivors a day or two to return to normal functions, and then winemakers hope they'll begin smoothly to stack on some sugar without shedding all the precious acidity that remains.

Baz White, from Gomersal Wines in the Barossa called to say that once it was cool enough, he'd taken a walk in his normally schmick vineyard, and discovered that his vines had been auto-aborting bunches all day: each vine has shed two or three bunches. And he keeps them running fairly minimally at the best of times, so that's a big crop loss before he gets down to individual row or even individual bunch selection at harvest.

"We'll just have to see how we go", he said sagely.

Peter Gago called this afternoon from Penfolds, where he makes the legendary Grange, the Magill Estate red, St Henri, and all the Penfolds numbered bin premiums. He'd just done a lap of his wide-spread minions.

"The Magill Estate crush is over", he said of the vineyard surrounding the grand old suburban winery and the tiny Grange cottage of the original winemaker, Mary Penfold. "We beat the previous earlist crush record by two days, and it's not looking too bad at that!

"We've got five open fermenters initially hovering around Baumes of 14.1-14.3, thankfully without any greenness."

Peter had been in the south-east and Coonawarra earlier in the week, and says it was "quite encouraging" since the best Fosters vineyards in the district have in recent years been returned to more modest viticulture with single-wire trellis systems.

"Yesterday in the Barossa it was, not surprisingly, more variable", he added politely.

Now the radio says that as the cool change moves east into Victoria, the cooling wind which brought it will actually inflame the many bushfires raging there. Many vignobles are now surrounded by savage conflagrations, and the poor old Yarra Valley, on the edge of suburban Melbourne, which has been strugging with phylloxera, then a record heatwave that scorched its crop, now looks like getting more than its share of smoke taint, if indeed it doesn't burn down.

Vineyards near Bendigo and Keyneton face the same threat.

Hundreds of thousands of Victorian householders have been warned to prepare for evacuation, or rigidly enforce their emergency bushfire plans if they choose to remain. Melbourne's major power supply lines are threatened at several points, and the open pit coalfields of the La Trobe Valley are being licked by uncontrolled bushfire.

The head of the Victorian fire services has just warned that the cool change has made the State even more treacherously dangerous.

"The wind is what we don't need ... and fire at night is a lot more scary than fire in the daytime", he added flatly.

Somehow, miraculously, South Australia stayed free of big fires today.

Now, with intense pleasure and relief, I'm going to put some clothes on and taste a few reds. It's that cool.

I may even risk turning the stove on to cook something.

Anecdotally, of course.

AND FURTHERMORE:

The radio has just reported fourteen people confirmed burnt to death in Victoria, with another thirty unconfirmed.

And the floods which have just subsided in northern Queensland are rising again, as some districts report two and three hundred millimetres of new rain.

.

.

ORGANIC FIREBRAND HAS BIG BIO-D SPRAY

RUDOLPH STEINER






Hilliard Rains On Rudolph's Parade
Walks Straight In; Turns Music Down

by PHILIP WHITE – A VERSION OF THIS WAS PUBLISHED IN THE INDEPENDENT WEEKLY ON 30 JAN 2009

I don’t know John Hilliard. Never met him. I’d never heard of his pretty vineyard in Lompoc, California. Never had his wine. Yet there he is, splattered all over the internet with a bitter philippic on biodynamics.

I don’t know what his star sign is, but I’ll bet John is a perfect example of it. He sounds like the sort of person who walks uninvited into your home, goes straight to the stereo, and turns your music down.

He puts the boot into silly old Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), the hero of the biodynamicists, by suggesting he believed in “Lemuria and Atlantis, nine classes of supernatural beings, seven epochs of history, 12 constellations that correspond to 12 parts of the body, and four elements of human temperaments.

“He believed that the heart does not pump blood”, Hilliard continues, “and had a very un-Newtonian concept of the planets moving through the sky, not to mention that he pays attention to only seven planets ... but includes the moon ... my own mass affects the vine somewhere in the order of 60,000 times greater than the moon’s effects on the vine”.

“I ask what scientific truth has been credited to Steiner?” he rants. “It seems that Steiner’s foolishness has to wait to be exposed after the thrill and trendiness of biodynamics wears down, and the marketing edge that biodynamics offers is replaced with some new way to excite buyers.”

You get his drift.

I’ve attended a few intensive Steinerite gatherings. To do with vineyards, mainly. I’ve read his lectures, essays and books. I leave sniggering, but respectful.

I have shovelled the cement mixer full of properly fermented cowshit, and made a mulch heap that completely digested a whole sheep, including bones, horns and wool, in a couple of months. You shoulda seen what that mulch did to the bony buggered field to which it was applied.

I have buried horns full of bacteria from cows’ gizzards, and made a spray from burnt starlings.

And you know what?

The starlings stayed away. The vineyards improved.

Steinerites are like the Exclusive Brethren: even to the point of being a bunch of pious and sanctimonious shits.

But, just as I've never heard of a Bretho going broke, the Steiner lunies generally make better wine than anybody else, from Burgundy to Lysergic-Blissbombcentral.

Have you read the back of the tin of shitcan poison you last sprayed on your garden?

Since the vineyard in which I live began to replace the general petrochem regime with a few bio-D preps, by my modest birdism, I reckon the amount of local native birdlife - particularly the essential stuff at the end of the foodchain: the raptors, has constantly improved.

The insects have certainly come back in the skrillion. If you have no sick insects, you have no sick birds, see? And raptors scare the birds that eat grapes.

The vineyards are just schmick.

When we did the photography for McLaren Vale - Trott’s View, in 2000, with four top snappers working for a year, the only photo we got of local indigenous feathered fauna was a top knot sitting on a post.

Apart from far too many corellas, native birds were scarce.

Since so many of the McLaren Vale growers have cut back their rote petrochem, many going bio-D, the birds have returned.

I never taste wine on root days, because my palate's dodgy.

I always feel shitty on nodes.

I learned these patterns through the biodynamic calendar, which magically predicts the cycles of cattle chewing cud, or grazing, to within a day, years in advance.

And I am not alone.

For four years, in an annual three week blind tasting of three or four thousand wines, the winner and/or runner-up in my Top 100 were made by biodynamicists.

Hilliard’s impassioned bleat may be worth a giggle at the Sceptics’ Club, but it’s not what the vine gardens need.

I’d much prefer a molecule of Shakespeare.

Steiner was indeed a nut. But he didn't dream all this stuff up. He was a reluctant evangelist who condensed whole epochs of old wives’ gardening tales and had the guts to promote them.

A bit like another famous nut, Jesus Christ, he tried to get his converts to get on with whichever degree of his philosophy they could manage without ranting too much about it. He felt the results would do the talking.

Which, on my experience, they do indeed.

By their works ye shall know them.

I like the music of many great musicians I’ve worked with or know, and the poems of Coleridge. I could go on. But I don't have to go as far into the addictions of those poor buggers to savour their work.

Neither do I have to wonder too hard about what sort of agriculture Hilliard would be practising if he’d born in 1861; or what sort of philosophy Steiner would be pursuing if he was born in 1961.

A little passion and idiosyncracy, a little more attention to detail, a little deeper the disrespect of the rote norm, a little sharper the rejection of the flock dogma, the better off we'll all be, I reckon.

When an earthquake threatens, the animals disperse.

.

DAMIEN HIRST LIFTS PENNY'S HILL RED DOT

DAMO'S SKRILLION DOLLAR SCONE AFTER VICIOUS NIGHT ON SLASH. THOSE WHO CALL HIM MOZZIE SYMPO NOTE: SHOES ARE IN MOSQUE, BY HITCHING POST AND NITRO; HEAD'S OUTSIDE IN GARBAGE; LIFT HAS GONE. UP.

Dottie Pom Rips Spots Off McLaren Vale Winery

You Can Put A Red Dot On That

by PHILIP WHITE

Damien Hirst, the ingenious London artghoul famous for putting whole cows in glass tanks of formaldehyde, and infamous in hard art circles for copping out and apologising for calling the destruction of the Twin Towers as being “like a work of art”, has ripped off the Penny’s Hill label of Tony and Susie Parkinson, from McLaren Vale, South Australia.

Penny’s Hill has used the distinctive red dot logo for thirteen years, on domestic and export release. London drinks heaps.

Publicists say Hirst designed the "exclusive" label to raise money for the U.K. charity, Comic Relief.

For every bottle of this Sethefriken plonk sold, £1 goes to Comic Relief. Even St Jancis is promoting the stuff - she should be aware of the Penny's Hill dot.

A million hangovers and a huge stack of bullshit could have been prevented if Damien had simply given Comic Relief a great big stack of his money.

He recently hired artisans to make a diamond-encrusted skull which he sold for $US122 million, a record price for work sold by a living artist.

The piece, "For the Love of God," is a life-size platinum skull encrusted with 8601 diamonds. He used the skull of somebody already dead for the cast.

Last time DRINKSTER had a night on the slash with Damo, we got so maggoted on Penny's Hill the head was left out the front of the studio.

When DRINKSTER took it back in the morning, he said "Phew, thanks mate. I'd better put a red dot on that!"

SORRY FOR THE SOFT FOCUS, GUS. IT WAS A BIG NIGHT!

Hirst’s "Lullaby Spring," a three metre wide steel cabinet containing 6136 hand-crafted and individually-painted pills, sold for $US23.4 million in June.

Comic Relief believes the wines will become collectors’ items because of Hirst's "exclusive" red dot.

If the Mr. Bigs at Penny’s Hill get their way, Damien's little red pills may well become collectors’ items, too.

DRINKSTER imagines them suspended in formaldehyde in the hyper-cool Red Dot Gallery at the Penny’s Hill winery.

Or Parky could keep 'em in a jar on his telly. Warmer, see?

Comic relief, see.

COMMENT:

Re skull:

A little foreground softness is OK these days. They call it the indie look. Comes from people shooting no-budget feature films with auto-focus cameras or even phones, and recognising their own deficiencies in the work of others. The future will be just like the present only worse.

RUS BEAR (HIC!) LIES WITH LION KING (SIC!)

REMEMBER BURGE AND WILSON, “THE YOUNGEST WINEMAKERS EVER TO WIN THE JIMMY WATSON TROPHY”? FORGET ‘EM. IN AN INTERNATIONAL EXCLUSIVE, DRINKSTER REPORTS THIS NEW DYNAMIC WINEMAKING DUO WILL LEAVE THE WEST BEHIND. LIKE B&W, THEY PLAN TO BUY THE WINNING WINE FROM JIM INGOLDBY, JUST TO GET STARTED, THEN HIRE SOMEBODY LIKE BRUCE KEMP...

Afro-Rus Plonk Bloc Can Blow Us All Away

Big Aussie Wine Consultant Required

by PHILIP WHITE

Moamar Gaddafi Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi, Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution, King of Kings, is the new chairman of the African Union, which he plans to transform into the United States Of Africa.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was the second President of Russia, and is now the Prime Minister of Russia, and chairman of United Russia. He became Acting President of Russia in December 1999, just as Bruce Kemp was leaving the managing directorship of Southcorp, owner of Penfolds, the world’s biggest boutique winery.

“In recent months almost all speeches about the crisis have begun with comprehensive criticism of what happened in the United States. I do not intend to get into that”, Mr Putin advised the recent Davos summit.

“The time for enlightenment has come. We must analyse the deep causes of what happened, calmly, with no trace of gloating; objectively.”

Pretty wise stuff, really.

Gaddafi is a DRINKSTER hero for his sage confession “I cannot recognise either the Palestinian state or the Israeli state. The Palestinians are idiots and the Israelis are idiots”.

While the whole wine world has been feverishly obsessed with discovering the favoured wines of the Obamas, DRINKSTER can’t avoid noticing the absence of concern for the drinking plans of the two heroes pictured above.

While Pete Gago ensured Putin left Australia with his birth vintage Grange in his hand, few marketers have paid much attention to Gaddafi.

But given Gadaffi’s modesty about western luxuries, like money, women, and sunglasses, imagine the wine these dudes will produce when they consolidate their shit.

“Gaddaffi’s Moslem”, I hear you say. “Moslem’s don’t drink!”

But who’ll stop him? It won’t be the arab world.

“The times of Arab nationalism and unity are gone forever”, he said.

Putin can do anything from icewine through Champagne to Shiraz, whereupon, entering the sandier parts, Gadaffi can step forward, reinstitute the vast irrigated vineyards the Romans ran in coastal Libya some time before he took over, hire Bruce Kemp as advisor, and blow every other wine producing country into kingdom come.

.

SAME OLD SAME OLD DOWN THE WOOFER?

WITH BUNCHES LIKE THESE BUGGERED EDEN VALLEY SHIRAZ EXAMPLES TYPICAL OF WHAT'S GROWING - OR DYING - IN OUR BEST VINEYARDS RIGHT NOW, SURELY THE NEW WFA PRESIDENT COULD CONSIDER MATTERS OTHER THAN OVERSUPPLY?

Old Southcorpse Takes Over Winemakers' Federation

Somebody Please Tell Him About The Vintage

by PHILIP WHITE

This morning the Winemakers Federation of Australia announced the appointment of Bruce Kemp to its presidency.

Since his role as chief executive of Southcorp Wines from 1992 to 1999, Kemp has been busy in his Global Wine Advice consultancy, and has been chairman of Pipers Brook Vineyards and Anthony Smith & Associates, a manufacturer of synthetic wine stoppers.

"I am honoured to be invited by the WFA to take on this critical leadership role at a time of great challenge for the Australian wine industry," Kemp said.

"The industry's oversupply, policy risks associated with growing community and government concerns about binge drinking and better integration of our key industry bodies will be priorities during my term."

Oversupply?

Will somebody please tell him what’s just happened to the 2009 vintage?

One of his notable statements came in 2001, when Fosters Berringer were about to move on Southcorp, which he’d just left.

“I think what we're seeing is some consolidation within the industry as major companies try and increase their size and scale to ensure that they are going to be able to move what is going to be significantly increasing volumes of wine into the international market”, he said.

The BMW motorcycle addict (that's a tick!) has had eight years to learn that you can’t continue to move significantly increasing volumes of wine into the international market.

As Fosters are beginning to discover.

But one would have thought that the blitz of heat destroying much of Australia’s premium crop, right now, might have earned a mention in the new president’s first major statement. No?

Or the little matter of the death of the River? Or the phylloxera?

Or the consideration of the sudden disappearance of all the money in the world?

The Winemakers Federation grew out of the Small Winemakers Federation, a group initiated in the mid-eighties by the late Greg Trott of Wirra Wirra, which formed because the big industry councils consistently failed to protect the interests of the small winemakers and growers.

At its seminal meeting in McLaren Vale, guest chairman Brian Croser suggested the proposed members size limit of 400 tonnes crush was far too small for such a group to have any punch, and immediately insisted that wineries the size of Yalumba should be included.

There went the Small Winemakers Federation.

It will be interesting to see precisely what "better integration of our key industry bodies" involves.

NEW HEAT BLITZ FIRES UP DOWN TALK

WE KNEW THE MURRAY WAS CACTUS. NOW EVERYTHING'S CACTUS. OR IS IT?

Are We Really In Hell Daddy,
Or Is This Simply Limbo?
by PHILIP WHITE

Its disastrous business and economic implications aside, the unprecedented heatwave currently blasting south-eastern Australia’s vintage to hell is giving rise to two fascinating problems.

The first is a communication and marketing conundrum; the second is an illness.

Put simply, (1) how much honesty can the wine industry afford to use in its descriptions of what’s going down, and (2), how in the hell, because this is hell, with all due deference to (1), how in the hell is the wine business and the wider society going to handle the clinical depression which is sweeping through whole winegrowing communities?

The industry bodies usually left with the job of making public statements have long been in denial.

This is because all of them are burdened with intricate conflicts of interest.

This was best manifest with the seepage of waves of terrible news about the industry’s parlous state over the Christmas break, when no reporters are at work, nobody reads newspapers, and nobody gives a shit about news.

The huge weight of public relations inertia was again evident during December’s Yarra Valley phylloxera outbreak, when Decanter magazine, in London, was the first journal to follow DRINKSTER in reporting the implications of this epidemic.

The responsible bodies, with the tacit involvement of politicians like South Australian Premier, Media Mike Rann, were deeply intent on keeping any sense of bad news well out of the general Australian media, at the risk of the dreaded bug spreading to phylloxera-free regions.

They succeeded!

DRINKSTER teased this issue out as it proceeded otherwise unreported. While tens of thousands of Victorian vehicles came from phylloxera-infected regions to sit in phylloxera-free vignobles in South Australia to picnic in the vines and watch the famous bicyclist, Lance Armstrong, return from retirement and whizz past in the Tour Down Under peloton, industry bodies and policitians failed completely to effectively advise these travellers to clean their cars and boots before they entered South Australia. In their fey anxiety over avoiding any rain on this glamourous PR parade, all bodies and governments missed an unequalled opportunity to advise an ignorant public about the dread realities of the vine-killing insect.

So, has the bug come to South Australia? If it has, we won’t know for years.

Type phylloxera in the search box at the top left, and read about it.

Now we have a heatwave utterly unprecedented.

But was it unpredicted?

“Budburst hit the bellwether vineyard opposite The Salopian Inn on August 1^st.”, DRINKSTER reported on 27^th August last year.

“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.”

There is no satisfaction in “I told you so”, but this seems to keep happening.

Now we see the many industry bodies struggling to admit there’s a terrible problem with the heatwave, but they don’t want anybody to imagine there’s anything sick in the vineyards. Their blithering underestimation of the Australian public fails to appreciate that we can actually absorb news of a bad crop without thinking all the wines will poison us.

We understand fruit fly, for Bacchus’s sake!

Perhaps this is an innate component of this very complex business which in essence masquerades as a provider of healthy gastronomic delights made by fresh-faced artisans and crusty environmentalist heroes, when in reality it sells one of the most dangerous addictive recreational intoxicants and depressants known to man, which is manufactured by technicians in hard hats and safety boots in glittering refineries. You might see them admit that half of Australia’s crop still goes into goonbags, but they’ll never give a skerrick of credo to the thought that one can also have alcoholism troubles with premium bottled wine.

And they act as if everything in bottles is premium.

So, presented with the dread reality of this literal hell on Earth which has just blitzed their whole business, they struggle to actually say things are as crook as they most obviously are.

It’d be funny if it wasn’t so frigging tragic.

DRINKSTER has been hard onto the heatwave and its implications since January 28^th . Today, five days later, we had press statements ooze out from Executive officer of the Riverland Winegrape Growers' Association, Chris Byrne, and Mark McKenzie, executive director of Wine Grape Growers Australia.

Dudley Brown, the impressive new Chairman of the McLaren Vale Wine Grape and Tourism Association, has shown skill in being honest without sensationalist. He sent a message this afternoon which was pure zen in its simple understatement and monumental implication.

“The Phylloxera meeting scheduled for 13 Feb is cancelled as it was a pre-vintage meeting”, it stated.

(Vintage could well be over by the 13^th.)

But from the top, the wine industry seems keen to impart the impression that there will still be great wines made from 2009. This was possible in 2008, when smart cookies picked before the fifteen day heatwave, which seemed terrible then, but looks piffling now.

I’d like to see a list of vineyards which have somehow missed out on this dusie first grade triple-A with a bullet king hell bitch of a heatwave which looks like going for at least another week if not forever.

As DRINKSTER reported yesterday, such fey blatherings will of course backfire when the same people who are insisting that there will be great wines in 2009 later attempt to get financial assistance from government, as grain farmers do with drought relief.

“Mallee wheatboys never pull any punches when they know their season's cactus”, the DRINKSTER said. “Winemakers could learn something from the disarming honesty of the graziers, pastoralists and grain cockies, but I doubt it'll happen this year. Just depends on how bad things really get.”

That aside, we then address the matter of depression, diagnosed, denied or whatever.

The Australian countryside was already littered with broken households where broken farmers struggled with the black dog.

Now the beast has jumped into the wine basket, and great care must be exercised to limit its destruction.

Any business afflicted with the sort of abject rote denial the wine industry tends to display, seems, on the face of it, unlikely to capably handle such a seeping terror.

Once again, McLaren Vale’s Dudley Brown seems best to have his brain around this threat, calling meetings of growers and makers to instil a feeling of togetherness as much as anything else.

Other regions should follow his example.

The councils at the top don’t seem to acknowledge depression.

Maybe it’s something to do with industrial liability.

COMMENT:

"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy." - Martin Luther King Jr.

February 3, 2009 1:03 AM

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