PHYLLOXERA MUSTA HIRED A LOBBYIST

Dark clouds: Dudley Brown, proprietor of Inkwell Wines in McLaren Vale, can't help thinking that the killer vine bug, Phylloxera, must have hired itself a lobbyist.  "Imagine what would happen to the vineyards around here if it arrived," he demands. "The one thing we have which is totally unique in the world -  old vines on their own roots, and the special flavours they offer - would be gone.  Just gone." Dudley is a former President of the McLaren Vale Grape, Wine and Tourism Association.

More Questions Than Answers

Who Wants Old Laws Softened

What Do They Stand To Gain?

by PHILIP WHITE


“I too thought we had nailed this back in 2009 but the attempts to change this stuff are as persistent as the louse itself - who knew Phylloxera had its own lobbying group?” asked McLaren Vale grapegrower and activist, Dudley Brown. 

He referred to Wednesday’s Legislative Council interchange between Robert Brokenshire MLC and Minister Gail Gago, whose portfolios include Agriculture, Food and Fisheries, Forests, Regional Development, Tourism, and the Status of Women.

Brokenshire lives on the edge of McLaren Vale, and knows well, and constantly mixes with  the winemakers there.  He speaks fluent wine.  Minister Gago is married to Peter Gago, the chief winemaker of Penfolds, who has just won the international Winemakers' Winemaker Award from the august international Masters of Wine.  This is the highest award available to winemakers.  These people are not new to wine topics. 

For over a century South Australia has been free of the dreaded micro root louse that killed the vineyards of France and Victoria in the 1800s, and burst out again various times during this last decade in Victoria; perhaps most infamously in a Fosters vineyard in the Yarra Valley.  The sole reason the plague has not crossed into South Australia is the extremely rigid restriction on the movement of machinery, dirt and plant material from places where phylloxera lives to places where it doesn’t. 

“Around Australia phylloxera is clearly being mobilized,” McLaren Vale vine scientist James Hook explained  during the 2009 scare. “Previously confined to North Eastern Victoria Phylloxera is on the march ... Phylloxera was first detected in Australia in 1877, in Geelong, and was responsible for the near destruction of the Victorian wine industry in the 1880s. Until fairly recently it was confined to small areas in central Victoria (Nagambie, Upton, Mooroopna) and northeast Victoria (Rutherglen, King Valley), in southeast New South Wales (Corowa) and in Camden and Cumberland near Sydney. However, there have been several detections in central Victoria in the past 10 years (Buckland Valley 2003, Ovens Valley 2003, Murchison 2006, Yarra Valley 2006, and Mansfield 2010).”

While I'm waiting to take a photograph of James Hook, take a look at this photograph he took.  This is Mitch from Calgary, tenderly poking some goodness into James' Lazy Ballerina red. photo James Hook

There’s the key.  The dreaded louse barely moved for a century, thanks to the rigid restrictions on moving plant material, soil, grapes and machinery.  These were largely imposed by South Australian winemakers through their Phylloxera Board.  Every South Australian grapegrower pays a levy to fund this policing body. 

But in the very years in which the industry made its biggest, most risky and hurried national expansions, Phylloxera suddenly appeared in five very popular interstate vignobles, where it will probably thrive forever.

Nevertheless, somebody away back in a smoke-free room somewhere has managed to have the restrictions eased, so it’s now possible to more easily move stuff from near where Phylloxera lives, if not from precisely smack bang in the middle of the infection.  Pardon my ambiguity in place of rigorous delineation, but it is in this no man's land where the threat is feared to lie.  South Australian grapegrowers with ancient pre-phylloxera clones still growing on their own roots are waiting for their government to prove to them that there is no Phylloxera in the dubious border country, and that the relaxation of the restrictions on the movement of machinery, for example, is no threat to their livelihood.

Having never been consulted about the proposed changes, and certainly not advised of them until Drew and Rae Noon began asking questions and DRINKSTER broke the story a month back, South Australian winemakers and grapegrowers are aghast to discover this, and think the science applied to justify the change is dodgy and highly suspicious, as Phylloxera can be extant in the ground for years without being detected.

Brokenshire posed a question that many South Australians are very keen to see answered.  He wanted to know whether anybody in government had protested about the wine industry’s relaxation of its own Phylloxera control regulations, and whether the Minister would reverse the decision “as, for instance, her predecessor did in relation to the proposed overnight closures of fruit fly inspection stations in the Riverland?”

If Phylloxera does move, the vast vineyards of the South Australian Riverland will probably be the first to go.  Apart from Coonawarra, they are the closest to Victoria's Phylloxera country.  The state's vast volumes of cheap wine come from the Riverland; its most expensive wine - Penfolds Bin 620 - comes from Coonawarra.

You can read the entire parliamentary interchange on DRINKSTER.  Both pollies have a reasonable grasp of the face of the situation.  While Minister Gago was handed the Agriculture portfolio and several others only recently (upon Jay Weatherill's ascendancy to the Premiership), the President of the chamber called her response “very thorough.”

“My understanding is that the protocol that was put together did a full risk assessment and has put in place the protocols that are necessary to continue to protect the Phylloxera spread,” Minister Gago concluded. “The changes that the honourable member alludes to are those involving equipment between zones that are Phylloxera free.


  
“The Phylloxera board itself, the industry itself, decided that that was a reasonable thing so long as the equipment was certified to have not been in a Phylloxera area. The industry itself has established these standards. The industry itself has looked at these protocols and approved them. South Australia's Phylloxera board, our own South Australian industry, has approved of this and said that these are suitable protocols to continue the protection of our viticulture interests.”
 
Dudley Brown disagrees about the alleged consultation: “There has not been any meaningful consultation with ‘the industry’ as a whole,” he said “but clearly someone in ‘the industry’ has an outsized role in this matter. I would be keen to know who exactly. All [South Australian] growers are levy payers [to the Phylloxera Board] - all deserve a voice in any meaningful change, not just the few who are inconvenienced by regulations that protect us all.”

“I can only reiterate that it was the Phylloxera board that approved these protocols,” Gago told the House. “They are significant leaders within the industry, so it is a protocol that is basically developed by the industry and endorsed by the industry. I think it would be incredibly foolish as a minister (even though my husband is a winemaker, I do not think that gives me the authority) to overturn an industry decision that has been considered as thoroughly as this decision has.” 

But thoroughly considered by whom?  And on what account?  For what reasons?  This writer has spent years attempting to unravel the arcane tangle of committees, bodies, councils, cadres and infernal intrigue that between them moved to relax these vital regulations.

As Brown reminded me, we entered this battle in 2009, when moves to relax the protocols came to notice by sheer chance.  Wayne Farquar, a passionate and highly-respected Barossa vine propagator who owns Elite Nursery, not to mention priceless ancient vineyards of pre-Phylloxera stock – the very sort that Phylloxera will destroy when it crosses the border from Victoria – then wrote a critical letter of concern to the Phylloxera and Grape Industry Board of South Australia (PGIBSA).  This letter, which asked questions about due diligence, and showed deep concern about the relaxation of restrictions, was acknowledged, but never answered, although the acknowledgment note promised an answer would be forthcoming.  Uh-huh.

“For some reason they invited me to a meeting,” Farquar said last week of his 2009 discovery. “That’s when I realised they were trying to relax the regulations.  It was just by chance that I found out ...  

"And now, look Rae Noon’s on the board and she only found out by accident that they were at it again ... It’s all by accident, so you can’t possibly say there’s been real consultation.  

"The Minister has to discover that it’s not really the industry doing this - it’s individuals, and it’s very hard to find out just who they are.”

Phylloxera management in a zone where Phylloxera lives.  The buyer is supposed to ask which parts of the country the grapes can be transported to without breaking the law. South Australia doesn't even rate a mention.

Drew Noon wonders who could possibly profit from a phylloxera outbreak.  This query offers not so clear an answer as his subsequent query.

"Who doesn’t?  South Australian growers (especially those with old vines on their own roots) who are rarely or never involved with moving grapes or machinery from interstate and have everything to lose from a Phylloxera outbreak?  What level of risk is acceptable to these SA growers who have everything to lose here?"

 Every time a Phylloxera outbreak occurs, the vines must be removed and destroyed.  Then you engage a nursery to propagate non-grape-bearing American vine rootstocks which are Phylloxera-resistant, and then employ specialists to graft grape-bearing varieties onto those rootstocks.  Then you start your vineyard again, enduring the inconvenience of steam-cleaning machinery, and vegetable material, every time you leave the area.

Like, you gotta disinfect your truck every time you drive to the shop. 

Or you should.

 
Phylloxera would just love the precious Terra Rosa, limestone, and calcrete of Coonawarra ... photo Milton Wordley 


If Phylloxera were to move from the Victorian regions where it thrives, say to Coonawarra, a few hours' drive away, the vignerons would have to re-plant the region, only five per cent of which is already planted on Phylloxera-resistant rootstocks. 

A cutting grafted to Phylloxera-resistant rootstock, ready to plant, costs about $5.50.  

Coonawarra has around 5,427 hectares of vineyard that would require replanting.  

Presuming an average vine intensity of 2,000 per hectare, that’s about a $60 million gross income for the vine nurseries, without considering the cost of vineyard labour or machinery.

Or the loss of production the growers would face during the many years the changeover would require.

And that’s just Coonawarra.  South Australia has 72,000 hectares of vines.

So there’s a lot at stake for the losers, and a lot of money to be made by the winners when the little louse hits the road.  

When Phylloxera crosses our border, a great deal of forensic energy will no doubt go into locating the people who made it all possible.



.

TYPEWRITER SKULL BY JEREMY MAYER

Perfect way for an old word piano to decay ... I found this on the delicious Boing Boing ... Mark Shield woulda loved one ... due for a drink, poor bastard, but it runs everywhere

SWISS ARMY KNIFE - NEW ETHNIC MODELS

Above, the convenient handbag-sized De Luxury Swiss Army Knife; middle, the DS-23 French Army version, and bottom, The Barossa, where I've seen good strong women bite the ends off a Tim Tam, jam it in a glass of muscat, and suck. 

ANYTHING BUT ORDINARY CHARDONNAY

Putting The Spin On Chardonnay

Bigger Than Shiraz Now In Oz 

Keep Shovelling In The Sawdust

by PHILIP WHITE

  
“The ‘Anything But Chardonnay’ days are long gone,” wine marketing consultant Trish Barry tweeted yesterday. “Time to rediscover this fabulous varietal on 24 May.”

She referred to the third annual World Chardonnay Day. Funny how the ethanol peddlers presume special days to assist them market stuff they can’t sell as easily as they’d first hoped, back when they ripped out the native veg and installed the irrigation system.  I mean Chardonnay Day?  How does that look against International Day of Zero Tolerance to Female Genital Mutilation,  or the International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficing, not to mention World Suicide Prevention Day?

“Hang on a bit,” I shot back. “Most of the Chardonnay made in Oz is still execrable industrial piss. You've been hoodwinked!”

Australia now produces around 405,000 tonnes of Chardonnay per year: for some dumb reason it has surpassed Shiraz as our main wine grape.  Imagine 300,000 pallets of it and you’re close.  Most of this is grown in the hot inland, the desert currently drying out after two years of record flooding.  The desert is not the place for Chardonnay, which comes from Continental Europe: Champagne, Chablis and Burgundy – places where it snows. 

You could argue that we should have stuck with the previous biggest Australian wine grape: Sultana. Sully loves the desert when it’s flooded.  When it’s not flooded naturally, you can flood it by emptying the River on it.  You can get over 20 tonnes per acre!

But the punter is not a mug. The Anything But Chardonnay movement sensibly began to form up about a decade back.  So Australia’s excess “Chardy” went to export, until the Anything But sentiment justly followed it. Winemakers panicked.

This is why, a couple of years back, somebody obviously wearing a tie obviously called a meeting in their smoke-free room and decided that it was time people in the wine industry began talking Chardonnay back up.  Whoever barked the order got what they wanted: it went first through the Chairmen of Judges on the national wine show circuit.  One after another, they briefed their teams to be kinder to Chardonnay, and one after another, the teams responded with bling which the Chairmen could then boast of in the round-up speeches and droll propaganda that oozes out through the presses and the screens and phones.

Then the wine hacks who grovel to get judging berths at these huge wine races obediently went back to their editors with obsequious nonsense about Chardonnay coming of age or however it comes.

“Maybe I've been drinking the good stuff over $10 (can't comment below that),” rattled Trish, “but in my opinion lots of great options.”  Rather than waste good guitar-pickin fingernails typing the sordid details of the swill below $20 that I swim through each week, I suggested “Judges, Wine Australia, Wine Communicators, all decided eighteen months ago they'd begin saying ABC is dead. Musta worked!”

She quickly shot back “Surely that's a better message for industry to be sending than all doom and gloom.”

“I don't work for the wine industry,” I responded. “I work for my readers. The Oz wine industry as we knew it has failed. It IS doom and gloom.”

New old-style French oak fermenters at Kooyong, Mornington Peninsula

There is no doubt that Australia is producing better Chardonnay than it did.  It's not saying much.  But so it bloody well should make better wine from it, having dedicated so much precious farmland to it, most of it inappropriately irrigated with water we don’t have. 

A few - just a handful of Australian winemakers of rare gastronomic intelligence – and I mean RARE: these are the MENSA dudes of wine smarts – are making stunning Chardonnays, many of which would stand their own in Burgundy, from whence we pinched the variety in the first place.  

Unfortunately for everybody else, and most of all my beloved readers, most who entered this racket never bothered to work a vintage or two there in Burgundy to learn about what they were trying to copy, so they made a terrible hash of it from the start.

Adam Wynn was first in with a serious purpose-planted high, cool-country Chardonnay vineyard at Mountadam, which his father David began in 1969.  By 1983 he was home from duxing the Bordeaux University winemaking course, bolstered with serious experience in Burgundy.  He was the first Australian winemaker with the intelligence, money and terroir to really understand the relationship between the best French barrels and cool climate Australian Chardonnay. 

Stephen Hickinbotham was another who’d studied and worked hard in Burgundy in those early student years, and was just beginning to get the fledgeling Mornington Peninsula and Bellarine Chardonnay vineyards together with his brother Andrew, who was planting them for people like Bails Myer, when he (StepHen) was killed in a plane crash.    

Australian wine would be a very different thing if Wynn and Hickie were still in the business: they provided a serious intellectual and spiritual counterbalance to the arrogant Evans-Croser axis, and from the start made wines of much more adventure, finesse and feeling.

Wynn went on developing a solid Burgundy style until a burst of ill-health forced his retirement, which was another terrible pity; at least he survives.  

I shall never forget the lunch Tony Bilson gave Paul Bocuse and his senior staff and about six of us antipodean yokels at Bilson’s on Circular Quay in the late ’eighties: I worked Australian wines in with Tony’s astonishing menu. When we poured the Mountadam, Bocuse could not grasp that the Chardonnay in his glass was not from Burgundy.

Bilson and White, 25 years later at O'Leary-Walker in Clare ... enjoying a glass of Nick Walker's racy Hurtle sparkling Chardonnay/Pinot from Oakbank, near Hahndorf in the Adelaide Hills ... photo Matt Walker

You normally see livelier eyes in a fishmonger’s window, but at that Mountadam High Eden Chardonnay 1984, the old Lion of Lyon positively sparkled. 

He left wearing an almighty, if slightly bothered, smile.

It was Len Evans, the pugnacious Welshman, who pushed this whole C-word thing along.  He up and offed from his job as storeman in the Mt Isa mine, then waddled around Australia like a bumptious missionary, preaching that Chardonnay would be “the vanilla of the Australian wine industry.”  He eventually began boasting that his early Rothbury Estate versions were exemplary.  They didn’t ring any bells for me, however, and when I found myself in his lab in the early ’eighties, innocently signing the delivery chit for a shipment of plastic drums I later discovered were labelled “Essence of Oak Chips”, I began to realise the root of the Evans faith: he was obviously an artificial vanilla essence man, not a fair dinkum vanilla pod worshipper. 

Essence of oak chips was illegal in wine.  “Oh no,” whimpered the lab rat, when he realized what had happened.  “I only use that to work out how many barrels to order.”

I suggested he’d bought enough to turn Sydney Harbour into Chardonnay, and asked if he would pour me a snifter of the dark stuff, so I could see which forest they’d distilled. 

Seemed like Missouri to me.

As he went on to take control of the Australian wine show circuit, Evans ensured that his dogma was adhered to: everybody planted the stuff, and the peachiest ones with the most overt oak won all the bling.  Some blokes, it seemed, even went as far as to use barrels.

Evans mouthing off

We should sigh a heave of relief that those scarce serious gastronomes I mention above are making stunning wines.  Vanya Cullen’s got it nailed in Margaret River; some think Leeuwin Estate does it too.  Vasse Felix is a sure triumph.  Then we see marvelous works of epicurean art like the Chardonnays in the new Penfolds premium release: drinks which really do raise the national bar. And do yourself a favour and buy a full set of the single vineyard Oakridge Yarra Valley Chardonnays: David Bicknell is gradually unleashing a suite of brilliantly distinctive wines from individual sites: they all rock.

To go from one Oakridge bottle to the next is like taking a stroll down a back lane in the Côte-d'Or, cellar-to-cellar; vineyard to vineyard.  If David can keep this up, these wines will be the first set of Australian Chardonnays to sell out each year.

Closer to AddleAde, get into the new Romney Park Hahndorf Blanc de Blancs fizz: a pristine, elegant, totally disarming Chardonnay which must surely be the most stylish suds made this side of Tasmania. It takes me immediately to Mesnil, the heart of Champagne’s best Chardonnay patch.  
 
There are others, of course, and so there should be.  We have over 2,530 wine producers now; 1,707 of them have at least one Chardonnay.

But let’s just pause a minute.  Apart from Tasmania, and a few isolated bits of Australian upland, we have no climate which gets close to Champagne, Chablis or Burgundy, the places where the Chardonnay templates, like it or not, were set.

Apart from wines like that Romney Park and the exquisite sparklers that Ed Carr somehow continues to make for Heavens Above or Universe or the Milky Way or whatever Constellation’s now called – think Arras and Bay of Fires – we have little in the way of really good Champagne-style Chardonnay, and little chance of making much more.

We could follow the Chablisiennes, and make high acid Chardonnays without oak, if only we had enough cool climate vineyard to guarantee the high natural acid that makes Chablis special.  But we don’t, and generally, we can’t.

Which leads us to Burgundy, which is highly reliant upon the skill of its unique coopers, the tonnelleries.  It’s not uncommon to be tasting there in a cellar there with the winemaker when somebody else lets themselves in with a key, and starts tasting barrels on their ownsome.  That’ll be the local consulting cooper, making sure the wines fit the wood flavours he’s chosen, and vice versa.  "I think I'll put one more stave of Vosges forest in next year's barrels." You don’t get too much of that sort of service or trust in Australia.

New egg-shaped French oak fermenters from Taransaud

Which leads me in turn to the matter of oak.  We can’t make Chablis.  We’d be better off sticking to Riesling if we want unoaked, steely whites.  Fizz needs no new oak, so we can approximate Champagne in Tassie and Hahndorf and the odd spot here and there, but not much of it.  So we attempt, to varying degrees, to make our Chardonnay after the style set in the slightly warmer Burgundy, where some new oak seems essential.

When you ferment wine in a good barrel, and leave it there on its yeast lees, an electro-static reaction not only attracts the dead yeast lees to the inside of the staves, but makes them cling there.  Stir the wine – a nine iron is perfect – in the act called battonage, and the skeletal remains of the dead yeast form a thin calcarious film which lines the entire barrel. It moves up the sides, covers the heads, and stays there.  So when your Chardonnay soaks into the oak, to derive those lemon, spice, ginger and caramel flavours that make the great wines of Burgundy what they are – even soot, if the barrel’s been toasted – it must first pass through that natural chalky filter.  When it oozes back out of the wood, it must pass through the same layer again.

This is an absolutely vital key to good wooded Chardonnay.

A little well-placed wood can get you a long way

So here comes that doom and gloom: Australia has 405,000 tonnes of Chardonnay.  Say we extract 700 litres of wine per tonne on the average, and ferment that Chardonnay in 230 litre French oak barrels.  My figures err to the conservative side.  The average French oak tree harvested for cooperage is 170 years old and produces nearly enough staves to make two barrels.  We’d need well over 600,000 170 year old oak trees per annum to properly make our Chardonnay in the manner we’d like everyone to imagine we do: over  1,200,000 barrels.  But regardless of the French being the best forestry managers on Earth – silviculture, it’s prettily called - France can’t even get its total barrel production up to 300,000 units per year – 250,000 is more like it. 

Which means that if Australia’s Chardonnay makers got every French oak barrel produced in France, and there were none allocated for any other winemakers on Earth, including the French themselves, Australia’s Chardonnay would still be a million barrels short.  Every year.

So where do all those new French oak barrels come from that we read of on the back labels?   It’s simple: sawdust, shavings, splinters, chips, cubes, planks, inner staves, “wood derivatives”, “tea bags” … these are very much cheaper, but they do not work like a barrel.  There is no electro-static reaction. There is no calcarious filter between the raw sap and the Chardonnay.  Especially if you use essence of oak chips.

STEINGARTEN: SAVED; THEN DILUTED

Who's this dude in the Louisiana State prison garb, and what's he doing flapping paper around on the Barossa Ranges?  It's me, offering a white balance (!) for cinematographer Gus Howard while we made the first serious promotional movie to advise the Brits about Australian wine, 1984-ish ... the client was the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation, now called Wine Australia ... that thin green line right behind my head is the once famous Orlando Steingarten Vineyard ... a few years later, I took Victorian winemakers Ron Laughton (Jasper Hill) and Graeme Leith (Passing Clouds) to show them this remarkable and crazy vineyard, planted by Colin Gramp in 1962. Determined to achieve a more Germanic style of Riesling, he'd used gelignite to blow holes in the stone so he could plant this tiny vinegarden which he literally named Garden of Stone. It was revolutionary for Australia.  Its wines were indeed exquisite, varying from year-to-year from flinty, Ernie Loosen Pfalz-like styles to slightly sweet versions more like Mosel spaetlese. But as we arrived through the back gate, from over that range, we discovered a crew of workers in there with a hydraulic pruner, cutting the vines off flush at the ground. Half the vineyard was gone: pathetic little trunks weeping sap into the stone which had somehow nurtured them for 25 years. The workers told us they realised they were wreaking a terrible blow to the heritage of the Barossa, but were under orders to remove the entire vineyard.  To their disbelief, I suggested they should cease the destruction while I drove down to the Orlando head office at Rowland Flat to have a bit of a word with MD Gunther Prass. Which I did, thrashing that ol hemi V8 Valiant police car down the hill like Jehu, my guests cowering and whimpering in the back. I burst into the boss's office in a most unseemly haste; Gunther squirmed, shuffled some papers, showed what I think was genuine shock, and immediately ordered the operation to cease. Since Pernod-Ricard bought Orlando-Wyndham, these imperious Frenchmen have completely buggered the Steingarten brand by using it on an amorphous blend of Riesling from other, more industrial grapeyards, and rebadging it Jacob's Creek Steingarten. Now they wonder why they've lost their market distinction!  If they looked after this tiny vineyard properly, and put a stone wall around it to keep the wind out, like the French would do in their own country, they could be selling this Riesling  for $500 a bottle. I'd love to see that movie again, by the way.  Anybody got a print?  

BLEAT ABOUT BRITISH WINE IMPERIALISM

The British Still Don't Get It:

The Empire Thing Didn't Work

So Why Do Ockers Grovel So?

by PHILIP WHITE

Somebody should tell the wine hacks and merchants of Great Britain that the Empire thing didn’t work out.

I’m sick of ’em.  They pomp on and off our shores as if Port Arthur is only temporarily mothballed. 

Take Jamie Goode. 

Who’s Jamie Goode? Wikipedia says he’s “a British author with a PhD in plant biology, and a wine columnist of The Sunday Express ... Goode also contributes to wine publications such as Harpers, The World of Fine Wine, Decanter, GrapesTALK and Sommelier Journal.” 

And on it goes: “Goode published the book Wine science: the application of science in winemaking in 2005, to wide acclaim and winning the Glenfiddich Drink Book of the Year award, and Wine Bottle Closures in 2006. His website The Wine Anorak and the related blog launched in 2001, are among the internet's most highly regarded wine sites, containing in-depth articles on subjects such as wine chemistry issues.”

Why are we not surprised that a fellow with credentials like that should utter triumphant codswallop like this:

“So there are now 1400 hectares of vines in the UK. That makes it around one-tenth the size of Australia's vineyard area!”

The exclamation mark, which is his, says it all, really.  This was Twitter last week.

“Australian Bureau of Statistics says 156,632 ha are under vine here JimLad,” I explained. “You'll need another imperial zero on your pom plot.”

“You are indeed correct,” he deigned to respond. “One-hundreth the size, not one-tenth.”

After a bit of a think, he came back in with something approaching contrition: “Hmmm, bad maths, make that 1/100th the size of Australia's vineyard area! (Blushes) you are indeed correct, one-hundreth the size, not one-tenth.”

A peanut as innumerate and slydexic as this writer is not your ideal statistician, but the mushy old brain still works sufficiently to justly beg how, in the names of Bacchus and Pan, how a fellow of Goode’s influence and experience could imagine for a second that Australia’s vineyard totals only 14,000 ha.

It’s a mindset more than a mistake.

Repeating that I’m no statistician, it seems to me that if Australia sells roughly 250 million litres of wine to the parsimonious British each year, from 14,000 ha, we’d be picking something like 17 tonnes per hectare.  While that sounds reasonably profitable, one can’t help wondering where Goode imagines we get the wine we drink, let alone the extra skrillion litres we export to other little-known countries like the USA, Canada and China.

More sickening is the way my fellow countrymen grovel to these imperious tykes.

Never does a Royal Australian Wine Show (that’s what they’re actually called, Royal!)  never does one dribble to halt without the guest Pom taking the lecturn to officially advise us what we should be doing; how we should be making our wine; how we must keep those prices down and whatnot.

Now we have another about to tour:

“Leading wine commentator Andrew Jefford will travel to Australia’s major capital cities later this month to present at this year’s Wine Communicators of Australia annual lecture,” trumps today’s Daily Wine News.

Church of England Bishop chatting up a few Adelaide shielas in 1923 photo from the State Library of South Australia ... thanks Premier Weatherill for the tip!

 Dangerously presuming numeracy, again, I estimate that Jefford’s won eight times as many Glenfiddich Awards as Goode.  “He is also very familiar with Australia,” DWN continues, “having spent 2009 as a senior research fellow at the University of Adelaide and Wine Writer in Residence to the Wine 2030 Research Network.

“His address, titled Wine and Astonishment, will also cover the role of alcohol in wine as well as wine from a science and poetry viewpoint ...

“When I was last in Australia,” Jefford is quoted, “I lectured quite a lot on questions of terroir, so I thought it might be interesting and useful to tackle wine from another perspective on this occasion … That perspective is, broadly speaking, philosophical – but the aim is a practical one; namely, to refresh some of our thinking about wine, and to try to make wine new for us all again or at least help us all to look at wine in a new and unusual way.”

“Jefford joins a long list of previous esteemed Wine Communicators Australia guests to Australia, including Robert Joseph and Jancis Robinson MW,” the story gloats.

Aunty Jancis probably enjoys coming to Australia more now that the pugnacious Len Evans is not around to bully her to tears, but he was another Brit.  It seems like only weeks back that she came all the way to Tasmania to make a bit of a speech about what they should be doing down there, but I have yet to see any great difference she has made to Australian winemaking, other than to offer reasonable encouragement.  At least Bobby-Jo consults to McGuigan.  I can’t wait to taste the results of that affair.

Jefford’s a really good writer, of poetry as much as boozelit, and I can’t wait to read his book about the terroir of Australia, which one presumes he mastered during his year here.  You might read an eager anticipation and discussion of these matters in Australian terroir – a gift from Blighty. 

This parade of Poms began its modern fervour in the late ’eighties, when Senator Amanda Vanstone brought Auberon Waugh here.  This was not for him to tell us what to do.  He wouldn’t.  He was far too polite to presume, but that was another age.  We expected to tell him what to do, as in go home and promote our good wine to his readers in The Spectator Wine Club.

Which he did, of course, but only after marveling, in his first classically sarcastic piece, at the idyllic lives of our aboriginal people, lolling about the beautiful public parks of Adelaide as they enjoyed endless blind tastings of our incredibly low-priced and aged fortified wines.

Original Australians picking up some British habits in George Street Sydney ca 1830

Bron’s efforts certainly triggered a renewed wave of British interest in our wine, but his biggest achievement seemed to be putting an end to the epidemic of Repetitive Strain Disorder we then mysteriously suffered.  People were wearing plasters and various ornate devices on their arms and hands to correct the agony they incurred performing ordurous tasks like typing or playing tennis.  The disbelieving Bron called this Kangaroo Paw, and his incredulous writing on it seemed to trigger a such wave of embarrassing disbelief internationally that we now rarely see anybody with the ailment.

But back to wine.  One of the most sickening grovels occurred  when some of the winemakers of Clare put their Rieslings under screw caps for the first time in 2000, and gave the credit to Charles Metcalfe or somebody from England.  As a writer who respected and jealously protected his readers from the obnoxious rip-off of cork for some twenty years before that, tirelessly promoting the sanitary screw over the spongiform hive of Iberian germs that was cork, I was fascinated, but hardly surprised, to discover that they’d grovel to England before they listened to the local hack.

So there’s some shit off my bursting liver. Just don’t get me started on the Pommie merchants, the buyers, who expect ever-descending prices married to permanently-increasing quality, not to mention the red carpet.

If we DID give Port Arthur a bit of a scrub, and locked a few more thieving Brits in there, this writer doubts that once they’d done their time, they’d be of the quality required to build a nation like Australia.

But I suppose if we bought Aunty Jancis a riding crop, some jodhpurs and a bullwhip, she’d be the ideal Nurse Ratchid, keeping the cuckoo’s nest in order, while dear Jefford taught them about the stone in the walls and read his lovely poetry to them at night.

Details of Andrew Jefford’s lecture schedule are available on the Wine Communicators website ... and check out his   Decanter piece on corrupt winewriters ... for a recent example of why the influence of alcohol on original Australians is no joke, click here ... and just to show that the British Left can be as imperialistic as the Right? Check this.

MARSHALL AMP FRIDGE - I WANT ONE!

... but Budweiser? Uh-huh ... when I was a kid I used to drink a can of Bud in the shower on real hot days, but I've never found another use for it ... I'll have mine stacked with Goodiesons McLaren Vale Pale Ale, please Mr Stage Manager ...  you'll find their cute little brewery on Sand Road, just east of Paxton's gate ... and wind her up to eleven!