TREASURY BEDS CHAMP'S ACCOLADE

"And I will shew wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and the terrible day of the LORD." Joel 2:30-31

Biggest rivals head to bed

Hardcore beefcake action

Scary progeny guaranteed

by PHILIP WHITE

For many, it was a great and/or terrible week.  There’s been plenty of smouldering rage and dark feelings of war in the last days of Chateau Reynella, but that’s only what's happened on the face of the Earth.  Recent big signs in the heavens have included the whole of Constellation itself becoming Accolade, which comes from the French accoler, which came in turn from the from the Vulgar Latin accollare, which means to squeeze the neck. (*1) 

Another is this matter of the choker’s owner, the private equity outfit gaily known as CHAMP, formally getting into bed with its biggest Australian wine rival, Treasury Wine Estates.  This is not just two humungous beefcake models lying back to read to each other, this is hardcore.  In a classic act of Apollonian trajectorialism, they’re gonna squirt into each other’s containers!

“If I made wine from a vineyard I grew and loved, like I do at Marius, and I got it right, and I was proud of it,” my sage mate Pike asked as we wondered at these signs, “if it meant anything to me at all, what would the most critical thing be after growing it and making it?  

“Bottling it myself!”

Small premium producers like Pike dream of affording the luxury of owning their own bottling line.  Contract bottlers can, and do, wreak havoc in batches too small for them to properly notice, but just big enough to provide a meager income for blokes like Pike if the bottler can get it into the bottles unadulterated.  Pike's wines are beautifully bottled, but it’s a fraught scene.  

Woolworths owns Vinpac, by far the biggest contract bottler in the country.  It sees and samples your wine long before you get it on the market. Any bright upper-echelon manager who didn't consider keeping an eye on this to steer Dan Murphy's purchases and the styles of wines Woolworths makes at their giant wineries in the Barossa should be hauled before the shareholders.

On the other hand, surrendering the precious juice of one's toil and soil to one’s foremost rival, or indeed outright enemy, for the final ritual of packaging and sealing seems nuts.

But that’s modern business for you.  CHAMP’s Accolade exports more volume for less money than Treasury; Treasury exports lower volumes for more money than CHAMP’s Accolade.  CHAMP owns the perfectly-named Accolade Park, a huge, fast, bottling and packaging factory in Bristol, UK, which could use some more work; since it now exports so much wine in bulk, Treasury’s bottling line at Wolf Blass in the Barossa could be busier, too.  

So CHAMP shuts Chateau Reynella, as this writer has long maintained it would relentlessly do, and sends that wine to Treasury for bottling in the Barossa, in exchange for Treasury doing its UK bottling in Accolade Park in Bristol. As indeed Tony Keyes prophesied in his essential  Key Report a month before they'd admit to it.

This announcement, along with the news that set the southern Vales smouldering - the bit about 175 people getting the flick - was made in a masterpiece of sophisticated manipulation of media, workmen and women, and message, which they said was necessary to avoid  trouble at the Stock Exchange.  Man, it was crisp!

But it leaves the local wine business reeling with wonderment and terror.  If these two arch rivals can do their swapping of juices business in the name of heightened efficiency and economic rationalism, what other signs and wonders will they provide?

It was perhaps not quite a fluke that this news came the day before Caltex announced it would be closing its oil refinery.  Australian drivers would be henceforth buying their fuel from foreign refiners, whose costs were lower.  Just as oil refineries make raw oil sufficiently explosive and clean to be safely used in motor vehicles, so wine refineries clean and sanitise grape ethanol to make it safe enough for human consumption, with or without explosions.

And that's somebody's oil refinery at the top by the way.  Wineries look like this:

As CHAMP’s Accolade seems intent on leaving Reynella and indeed the historical Tintara winery in the main street of McLaren Vale, both sites ripe for the type of lucrative subdivision we saw fester on the site of John Reynell’s heritage vineyard, why wouldn’t they use up some spare capacity in Treasury’s arsenal of refineries to save a little more money?  If thousands of little guys can get by without the inconvenience of owning your actual  winery, why can't the big guys?  There’s room at Treasury's Rosemount, for example, at McLaren Flat, to make heaps of wine for Accolade.

These huge companies already trade enormous amounts of bulk wine, or buy it from the same grey market traders.  They don't like the cost of running wineries.

Increasing the business of CHAMP’s Accolade Park in Bristol obviously makes it a juicier morsel for sale, just as Treasury’s Wolf Blass bottling hall becomes more alluring.  But showing the world that these two awkward giants can get along so nicely may well be presenting acquisitive companies like China’s scarily-named Bright Food with an even tastier titbit.  This state-owned leviathan is busily buying into the Bordeaux trade; it is often cited as a likely buyer of Treasury.  

Watching James Packer’s Treasury share trading is probably a good barometer.

Now that Treasury has appointed itself some flash new internationalist directors (*2), it will be even more signs and wonders, methinks, and that smoke billowing on the horizon could well be Accolade.  To start with.

There’ll be more human casualties every time a bomb goes off.

It may suddenly seem sensible to have the bottom 80-90 per cent of Australia's wine made in one big factory, and then divvied up.  It would be in the shareholders' interest.

As for moving your refining offshore to save your shareholders a few cents per litre, how long will it be before Jacobs Creek or Bright Foods or somebody starts exporting wine made in China into Australia?  

Forgive me Lord for my impertinence. And praise Bacchus for showing me the light.

*FOOTNOTES: 

1. Pardon my stutter while I repeat my suggestion that big wine companies seem intent on branding themselves with the sorts of names you see on Korean cars.  Which may go part of the way to explaining why they also share the same sort of resale values ... Accolade is a true-blue screamer, and a very good reason why experienced writers should be engaged when boozemongers enter the words business.  I may be overestimating them, but apart from their ignorance of the necking implications, those responsible for Accolade may have been of such sophistry as to imagine their new name had subliminal implications of naughty alcohol and safe lemonade, not to mention the obvious inference of the clap. There already was a Honda called Applause, so I suppose they held back on that. What the hell was wrong with Hardy's Wines?

 2. Non-executive director Paul Rayner will become Treasury chairman, replacing the outgoing Max Ould. As of September 1st., the three new non-executive directors will be Ed Chan, a former president and chief executive of Wal-Mart China, Garry Housell, director of several companies such as Qantas and Orica, and Michael Cheek, a former chairman of Finlandia Vodka Worldwide.

A WEEK OF FEVERISH WOWSERISM

Grenfell Street, Adelaide, 1974.  Adelaide has seen a steady decline in the number of its beautiful old pubs, losing at least 40% of its stock over the last century ... photo Philip White.

Politics and public drinking

Adelaide loses more pubs

Business hard, says Exeter

by PHILIP WHITE

I’d not seen a week of such feverish wowserism for a very long time.  It started with the death by violence of the unfortunate 18 year old, Thomas Kelly, during his first night out without his parents in Kings Cross.

The New South Wales Minister for Hospitality, George Souris, sounded suddenly like that great slave of the big publicans, Premier Sir Robert Askin (right), whose 60s and 70s rule saw him promote himself as a libertarian hero by abandoning the six-o’clock swill and extending liquor licensing hours for all the biggest players.  But little guys getting new licenses?  Not a hope in hell.  Bob Askin’s licensing thugs ruled Sydney with the same rum-riddled brutality that was rife in the days of the Rum Rebellion and the Holey Dollar. 

After Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore’s drive to admit more little independent bars to trade, Sourois made clear his sentiment when he accused small bars of having ''a lower level of surveillance, a lower level of supervision, a lower level of compliance'' … he went on cite the big old venues from Askin’s day as being ''better policed, better supervised than those smaller venues''.  He attacked Moore’s 2008 change of laws to make it easier, cheaper and quicker for small independent operators to get licenses, and made outrageous statements about people drinking Chardonnay.  Put short, he looked really bloody foolish.

This panic was followed by bad Adelaide news.  Chesser Cellars, the genteel timbered gaslit buffet pub for conservatives who couldn’t get entry to the Adelaide Club went down, as did that ancient temple to judicial intemperance, the Crown and Sceptre. Other great pubs are teetering.

Which took me back to the days of the Aurora Action Group, which was formed to save the Aurora Hotel from demolition on the site where Wolf Blass House now sits in Hindmarsh Square. While this became became an outspoken conservationist action group the like of which we have never seen again, it gradually lost steam and fizzled.

 It was the colonial NSW governor Sir John Robinson (1816-1891, left) who best encapsultated South Australia’s early attitude to the booze. 

“None of the men who in this country have left footprints behind them have been cold water men,” he wryly observed. At that point, Adelaide was more a city of pubs than churches.

“Adelaide’s traditional respect of a good beer was always reflected on her street corners,” I wrote in  The Adelaide Pub Guide a decade back, “where beautiful bluestone and sandstone pubs stared at each other through their lacy verandas.”  In 1900, there were 128 pubs within the City square mile.  Paula Stevens of the Adelaide City Council says there are "approximately 79" left, but I think it would be fewer.  And Bacchus only knows how many wine bars we had; they were everywhere.

I asked Kevin Greg, publican of that mighty thirst emporium, The Exeter, why the new slump.

“I don’t know other people’s business,” he said, “but from The Exeter’s point of view there’s no doubt that the cost of business is skyrocketing.  Drinking a beer in a pub is now an expensive luxury.  But it needs to be.  It’s quite alarming, but we must charge enough to pay for the cost of simply doing business.”

Erstwhile landlord of Adelaide's famous Exeter Hotel, Nicholas Binns, with the late Gabriella Bertocci ... Binns  stacked his list with 100 Parker pointers at ridiculously low prices, the cheapest Krug on Earth, house wines by Greenock Creek and Wendouree, Cheong Liew in the kitchen for a while, then Jules Zukelis with her possum pies ... It's always good for hearty food ... if you're looking for lost wine scribes, check The Ex



While it's been a revered rock'n'roll temple to the organoleptic arts and passionate discourse since Binns' day, the Exeter, remember, has no pokies. Few people realize that one of the things that makes the pubs of the East End unique is their absence of gambling machinery – in the ’80s the residents of the precinct lobbied to have this ban imposed on all licenses there.  The Ex has never even had a television.  Which is why it is so special; people love it.  But Kevin rattled off an incredible list of costs and charges and limitations imposed by one interferist bureaucracy or another, and continued with a prophecy of further gloom.

“It’s a fact of life.  I think we’re at the start of quite a significant downturn.  People struggle on, but when times are tough they curtail their discretionary spending and one of the first things to go is the beer in the pub.  The publican’s turnover drops.  It was already tight, but suddenly it’s too hard to pay the rent or the power and you come to work and the landlord’s changed the locks.”
 
This deadly combination of wowser interferism, restrictive legislations, meddling bureaucracies and ridiculously complex business regulation is killing the pubs of the United Kingdom, too.  Perhaps simply because there are fewer left to fail, pub closures there have slowed from 25 per week in 2010 to 12 per week in 2012.

And what’s the main excuse for these restrictions and crippling regulations? Tragedies like Thomas Kelly’s death never help.  Precincts devoted to sex, drugs (incuding booze) and rock’n’roll inevitably develop as cities change and morph, simply because a certain percentage of the population needs such precincts.  We are humans. We self-medicate and party.

Because of their bohemian atmosphere, these precincts confound and annoy all sorts of sanctimonious and pious brethren, many of whom savour the chance to say “I told you so” at terrible accidents like Kelly’s death, or the jobbing of the former Treasurer of South Australia during one of his famous midnight carousals.

“And it IS an accident,” Kevin Greg explains.  “A shocking, unfortunate accident.  Nobody goes out to kill anybody by punching them.  It happens.  It’s not the first time and it’s not the last.  We all feel terribly for the poor victim and his grieving family, but what about the perpetrator?  Has he got mental health issues that are not dealt with?

“When these things happen we should take a deep breath and step back and consider.  We should think of the parents and sisters and brothers of the kid that has done this terrible thing and work out how to help them and support them, too.  It’s never simple.  Instead you’ll have a queue of politicians looking for a sound grab!” 

I’m sure things would be very different if some our politicians had been publicans instead of lawyers.  But then, as Bob Askin knew so well, the big publicans, and their union, the Australian Hotels Association, can be very powerful lobbyists indeed.  Maybe they don’t need to become politicians.  I do seem to recall one big pokies publican, Rod Hurley of the Arkaba, as head of the local AHA, even taking a seat on the board of the ABC for a few years.

Obviously an expert at public broadcasting.

Illegal, but hardly a capital offence: the author learning a little pub culture with a refreshment on his way to school ... not a drink of water man ... photo Stephen Sprigg

BIG WINE FESTIVALS HARDLY LEGAL

Far too many folks have a great day out, but they recall only a blur of wine festivals they attend ... photo Philip White, who, through many years of diligent field work, knows.

 Giant wine region plonkfests?

Outside the spirit of the law

Anybody remember any wine?

by PHILIP WHITE a version of this story appeared in InDaily

When Remy Martin, the family-owned French liquor giant, bought the jewel of Clare, Quelltaler, from Nathan & Wyeth in 1982, its Australian manager, the colorful Francois Henri, appointed a brilliant Alsace winemaker to run the show.  He was Michel Dietrich, from a family-owned winery in Kayserberg.  He left Alsace in a winter of blizzards, arrived in Adelaide in 42 degree heat, hired a car and drove to Clare.

Although it took many years for his impact to properly settle, like decades, really, Dietrich revolutionized Clare white wine-making.  First thing he did was get holes dug in the vineyards and check the geology.  To the ridicule of many locals, he then picked the vineyards accordingly. This had never been done before. Once he’d raised the French tricolour above the old Springvale House, the home of the pioneering Sobels family, he got straight down to making stunning Rieslings with yeast he’d brought from home, and the best ever Semillons in good French oak.

Sobels, as in Carl, had been the winemaker for William Jacob at Jacob's Creek in the Barossa. He'd come from Silesia, just as Dietrich came from Alsace, only 135 years later. 

Michel and Isabelle Dietrich getting to know the rocks at Quelltaler, Watervale, Clare, on a freezing morning in 1983 ... photo Philip White

Dietrich also brought a tale of an ancient vintage celebration. Each year, when their ferments were complete, the people of Kayserberg would stroll through their winding hillside village, tasting each other’s wine in the cellars common beneath their story-book houses, with their fachwerk walls and steep, curvy tiled roofs.  Of course every host supplied the best food they could manage.

It’s 28 years since Dietrich, with the assistance and drive of Jane Mitchell, convinced the winemakers of Clare to emulate this cosy gastronomic celebration with the first Clare Gourmet Weekend.  Same as Alsace.  But in Clare, you drove. 

It's a long way from one end of Clare to the other.

But driving big distances didn't matter. It wasn’t long before the Barossa, pushed by Robert O’Callaghan, had one too.  The tourism bureaucrats hopped aboard, seeing these fixtures as a great way of promoting South Australia, and they’ve never gone away.  I mean the weekends still occur, but the bureaucrats are still there, too.

Then there was the irony of the poor responsible but infectiously jovial mob who'd hired a bus in the Barossa, and their driver blew way over.

Just where the customers came from, and then went back to, was deeply interesting to me.  The promoters, especially those in government, seemed to believe they came from interstate and overseas. In the late ’eighties, Kay Hannaford & Associates conducted a poll, and interviewed a percentage of the visitors at many Barossa cellars.  As I suspected, the vast majority of them were graziers and graingrowers from nearby farmlands: they were almost locals, and simply needed a good excuse to get out and spend a day in the wineries.  Many brought friends from a bit further out, and used it as a get-together. 

And then, many were very local, and didn’t have far to go at all.  Doug Lehmann, for example, then winemaker at Basedow's in Tanunda, voiced delight that it had given him an excuse to visit Bethany Wines for the first time in his life.  It's all of five kays away.

McLaren Vale fills up with many folks from the seaside suburbs which remove its vineyards  from their gulf: I wonder how many times these return, to buy wine, before the next annual gooze.

The ideal size for a small regional wine tasting: the Vale Cru mob offer their wares at The Victory Hotel, Sellicks Hill, McLaren Vale.  No food outside, but if you'd booked, you could enter the pub, sit down, and dine ... photo James Hook

Last week, InDaily reported the kerfuffle amongst the Barossa winemakers, who are disunited about the viability of their event.  Many are disinterested.  It’s the same in McLaren Vale, relative to their Sea and Vines festival.

There's constant rumbling, too, in the smallest mobs, like McLaren Vale's Grand Cru, who do a great presentation of lovely rare wines from deadly producers, but struggle about promotion budgets and never manage to please all their constituents.

Same on the grand scale.  While the huge extravaganzas certainly employ many locals, from security dudes to musicians, chefs, waiters and drivers, they rarely make their participants much profit. Perhaps because of this, they’re regarded purely as promotional events, but other than that poll in the Barossa, all those years ago, I know of no proper investigation made into just who attends, for what reasons, and what their attendance does to consequent wine purchasing.

Casual carousing tourists drive serious wine buyers away.

The old notion of carnivale – the death of meat, and its gluttonous consumption before Lent – and the feasting of feastival always involved wild revelry and over-indulgence; invariably, the modern “gourmet” weekends teeter on the verge of affording a little too much respect to this history.  Ask the security guards, or the poor old traffic police who have the unseemly task of ensuring the roads are free of drunks without making enemies in tourism or amongst the winemakers themselves. 

The riotous Barossa Vintage Festival of old always occurred at the end of Lent. After all that abstinence, and the hard work of vintage, Easter sometimes arrived in time for everybody to overdo it at an officially-sanctioned local bacchanale. If the timing was wrong, you did it anyway. 

Vintage lunch amongst the brimming  fermenters at Petagna Wines, Sellicks Hill, McLaren Vale. The soulful  chef Nigel Rich, centre, blue, cooked meaty perfections with Paul Petagna, head of table.  (Nigel's opening a new joint in the main street of McLaren Vale this Friday.  It will rock.) True wine lovers seek memorable, intimate experiences like this when they attend wine festivals, but they often get mass idiocy with folks they don't particularly like  ... photo Philip White

In that Barossa poll, the average number of people in each car was around three.  Nobody was happy at my suggestion that this meant that one in three of the visitors attracted could not partake of the product being promoted without breaking the spirit of the law, if not the law itself.  Not a popular score.  But the superintendant of Traffic Police of the day agreed wholeheartedly.

South Australia’s determination to be the Festival State has always puzzled me. Everyone gets their turn, and then seems to be expected to fade until the next big festival.  It seems that after our annual or biennial celebration of one lot or another, they should then retreat, to let every other mob have their go.   Writers get a week or two out in the light, for example, and then politely disappear for twelve months.

The Yearlings laughing through a perfect afternoon at Yangarra, at Sea and Vines.  The music's easy: you hire good musicians and give them support at the gig.  But feeding the throngs, and keeping everybody tidy, and off the roads, is a lot more difficult on a big scale ... photo Milton Wordley
 
Michel Dietrich returned to France to make wine in Bordeaux in 1987, which he does to this day at his Château Haut Rian. If we paused long enough to consider his original idea, and its source in that fairytale village on the mountain away off in Alsace, we might begin to consider festivals which people can attend on foot if the organisers can't arrange responsible transport.  Go smaller; go sub-regional; have more of them ... and make it really hard for anybody to drive themselves.

An obvious possibility exists at my back door, here at Yangarra Estate, smack on the faultline at Kangarilla. Spread along this escarpment are a string of delicious little wineries that many have never heard of.  These could get together, work out how many people they could comfortably accommodate at any given time, and sell tickets in advance.  According to the schedule so derived, people could catch a charter bus from the city, gather on Eyers Flat common near Kangarilla, and in small groups proceed from cellar to cellar by feeder buses as the day goes by.

And you know what?  It'd be better if not everyone was in it.  Break it up. Make it smaller.



Jay Hoad plays for the ladies at Settlement Wines, McLaren Vale photo Philip White

I’m sure to miss some, but Yangarra, Hugo, Pertaringa, Noon, Marius, Whitefeather, Halifax, Battle of Bosworth, Danshie’s Rise, Lot Thirteen, Cradle of Hills, Cascabel, and Petagna could be in this, with everybody finishing at The Victory to savour Douggie’s Rudderless reds, grown right beside the pub.  Bus back to Eyer’s Flat or the city.  Done. All included in the cost of the ticket.

Such an event - call it The Faultliners - would have a consistent terroir theme, as all the wines would be from that peculiar piedmont, just as the Kayserberg wines come from vineyards snaking along their stony hillside. It would invariably attract wine buyers more than revelers. And it would open the gate for other small manageable festivals with similar themes.  So, as far as the district went, it wouldn’t all happen at once.  Properly marketed, such focused nuts-and-berries events would also attract more serious interstaters.

By Jingo winemaker John Gilbert tweeted this week that the best food and wine festival he’d attended was in the small Victorian Alps appellation of Heathcote, where they simply set the oval up with a circle of marquees, and people wandered about, grazing and tasting.  This reminded me of the old days of the maypole on Tanunda Oval, where things had a true village ring about them.

Sure, there would be misdemeanors.  But if you did it like that, both security and public transport would be much easier to manage, and remove many of these disputes which are inevitable as long as we insist that the huge piss-ups of yore are socially responsible or sustainable.

And, like, do they draw many serious long-term customers?

Big Bob McLean hosting a fair dinkum winery lunch at McLean's Farm in the High Barossa ... small is more fun, people never forget, they buy more wine, word-of-mouth applause goes on and on, and everybody can do it by bus ... photo Milton Wordley

THE CITY WENT SOFT ON COFFEE: A LAMENT

The author visits Adelaide's East End to do heavy Mines Department drilling business in the pre-latte Bat Chain Puller days ... obviously something rather heavy in the back of the ute ... I seem to recall a Terex diff crownwheel ... photo Chris Langman; artwork: Maire Mannik (left)  ...   The following is a 1996 letter to that inveterate writer of letters to the editor, Edgar Woods Castle of Tungkillo, in response to the alarm he wisely showed at the conversion of a classically-cluttered inner-city electrical repair works to a sanitary chrome and glass coffee joint.

Losing our mysto-letric 'hood: 

Letter to Edgar Woods Castle

Coffee corrupts wires and chains 

Dear Edgar,

Whatever did happen to that temple in Pulteney Street? I mean, the guy could've died - which seems unlikely, given the weight of wireless activity he conducted over the years - but even then the sheer mass of the valves and wire and housings - which would have been dangerously left to vibrate without his management - wouldn't have tolerated the sideways motion essential for transport. 

Meltdown.
    
The other one was the Central Saw Works opposite the divers' chandlery just there off Gouger Street. That guy did die physically, leaving something like seventy six thousand giant teeth unfiled. Apparently these surrendered the remnants of their bite and gradually dulled away and resumed enough for the Officials to interrupt and come in and move them, although a couple of the huge sawmillers' band saws - I witnessed him wrestling a twenty four footer across his leather apron once - came over quite snakey when the bailer twine gave way and the damned things unwound and lashed about like giant serpents from Hell. 

They reckon the Officials went into the corners fairly quickly. 

Levitate or shred?
    
I also recorded a fairly serious draw whilst attempting to pass Adelaide Chain Pullers in Hindley Street. My calculations suggested it had something to do with the amount of  pointillismic energy which builds up around unused tackle blocks and heavy duty chain tensioners, but Mum said it was just dirt. She shoulda known: her Dad made coil springs for trains when he wasn't preachin the gospel.  Nowadays I can't even work out where that place was: no matter how slowly I move, I can't recieve anything and you'd think there'd be some sort of trace of it remaining there amongst all the shish kebab joints and whores. One Grote Street premises brings it to mind, along a bit from the Opera. Mainly Sidchrome stuff there though: big workshop kits, and nowhere near the force. Not enough chain.
    
But if it's just Pulteney Street you're talking, the old Poultry Association Hall was always fairly powerful, even though the marriage of poultry and Pulteney had a slightly dodgy sort of poofy fluffiness about it. I liked the big wall plaques which listed the Grand Champion chooks of generations of full-time fowl wranglers. Empty, she was as good as a Buffs' Lodge. The only times I ever saw her full was when the Old Man would bring us all down from Kanmantoo and rent her for a Revival, and he'd be out the front screaming Hellfire and Jesus' Blood, calling on the fire of perdition to drive the stray souls a-crawling down that sawdust trail past the lists of the great roosters of Australia. I couldn't get the cupboard open but I reckon they kept quite a few stuffed chooks in there for special rituals.
    
Nineteen ninety I actually moved from Mount Crawford to Hurtle Square - everything came along without much resistance - and during the ensuing years wandered quite a lot of Pulteney en route to Binnsy's Thirst Emporium, and over and over I remembered those moments of enlightenment in the Chook Hall and compared them to the constant hum all those wires and valves built up in your man's place. The simmering power of that barely contained electricity won hands down, which to me seemed to be a good indicator of how religion falters when you take too much of the mystery out of her. She needs quite a deal of arcane mumbo jumbo, and not all that black and white hot and cold Talk Straight To Jesus bullshit the Old Man shouts. Which is why the Greek Orthodox, just as an example, usually get a pretty good mob. The Roman church suicided, admitting the English mass. Although Rome had been uncertain really since stoicism degraded to dogma and Marcus Aurelius said: "Blessed be the partial, for they shall inherit the earth". My Old Man would probly get along okay with Marcus Aurelius. 

Not a bad bloke, really, Marcus Aurelius, but no great shakes with the religion. Stoicism worked best as a rumour. Another thing he said - and it's fair dinkum this time - was "All things are the same: familiar in experience, transient in time, sordid in their material; all now such as in the days of those whom we have buried". And he said: "Accept without pride, relinquish without struggle." And furthermore: "To acquaint yourself with these things for a hundred years, or for three, is the same". I can see him there on a quiet night on the Germanic front, casting aside his cloak to take up the clay and carve out another pristine meditation by the fire. I'm sure he was a resumptionist, too, but somehow the purple job of Emperor led him to literacy, and his faith degraded to dogma as if to prove itself, resuming to its own gravitas. 
    
Top half of Nicholas Binns' Exeter by Milly the Kid 1987

Nossir Edgar, I reckon that if he did die they never could've got the stuff to move laterally to the truck, because it was all connected up and the force would've kept it tangled and glowering, right where she was. Pretty frightening: considering the danger the Officials were in, and the fools never realised. Probly in white coats and everything. So I'm buggered if I know how they converted it to a joint where all these mugs sit, eating cake: bastards must be hard as nails. Or maybe just so stupid they never realise that their motions don't set properly and float. Nor that their girlfriend hates their breath. Probly blame the coffee. And go back for more, day after day. Jesus. Hell.
    
One of the reasons is I've got this domestic Kingsley shelf wireless - the one about eighteen inches long, with the tuning dial about the same size as the speaker - is that it was Pat Dadonna's down at the Royal Oak. He'd sit there with his hand on it, stroking the race results out, the other one working his smoke. It'd get so bloody cold there the topless barmaid would don a guernsey once everybody'd got their drink and she'd take it off just to serve you and then put it back on again and sit there on a stool down one end while Pat sat up the other in the dark, long brown hand on the Kingsley. Listening. If his equus got up he'd pat that wireless like a good little boy, and we made jokes he never understood about Pat being an abbreviation of Pasquale, which was his real name. That Kingsley's got his beautiful Italian hand grease all over it and it's number five seven one zero four one. Talk about patina. I took a sheilah down there who was a Professer of language from Italy and she couldn't understand a word old Pat said. Dialect, she said. She was pretty weird anyway: rough trader. There's a scrap of a sticker on the back of it that says BUY BETTER AT BAILETTI'S 192-4 Hindley Street CYCLES FIREARMS ELECTRICAL. Anyway, the bloody thing keeps fading in and out and I can't part with it because when Pat eventually sold the pub and took his wife to New York for the first holiday of their lives he dropped dead of a heart attack in Times Square and that was that. Monica reckons I should clean it up if I want to listen to it but she doesn't understand all those years of goosebumped barmaids shivering in the dark and Pat just sitting there smoking, talking a lingo that nobody else in the world could understand. Just before he went away he cleared out the cellar a bit and put a bottle of Sedna on the shelf, as if it was brand new. He eventually found a catalogue old enough to list a price and I bought it. The stuff hadn't been manufactured for twenty years, but when I asked if he had any more he said something about getting more in, as if you could do it just like that. Karl Seppelt named it Sedna because that's Andes backwards and the cola nuts came from the Andes. I could never work out why he put cows on the label, but I enjoyed being able to purchase it in chemists when I was just a kid. They knew I had a serious respect for Pat so they gave me his wireless and some other bits and pieces when they cleared the whole joint out. Anyway, Edgar, in the absence of BAILETTI'S CYCLES FIREARMS ELECTRICAL I could use that bloke in Pulteney Street, because I know he'd fix that little Kingsley in a zip, and he'd never clean any of Pat's grease off it.     

Another great wireless was the one the proprietor of the Ceylon Hut kept on during the cricket season. He set it up on one of the dining tables in the middle of the restaurant, with stacks of dockets and newspapers and stuff all around it. It was a beaut white bakelite job, and he lit her up with one of those old fashioned gooseneck desklamps with a globe no stronger than about fifteen watts. Hairoil bloke, he was, glasses, proper part on the left. He managed to make cricket become part of the flavour of his curries and I'll bet you not a soul knows whatever happened to that wireless when he left and it resumed.
    
Some of this is really hard to come to grips with but I trust you, because I have faith in your theory of resumption. Just never let it decay too far into doctrine -- we don't require such vivid proof. Very few can really come to grips with it, but I'm right in there with you. 

I lived out of a fine Saratoga trunk from nineteen eighty five through to nineteen ninety, when a mate demanded it back because he reckoned he'd never ever given it to me in the first place. I reckon that if a bloke can't live comfortably out of a Saratoga there's something wrong with him. And if another bloke gives you one because he found it at an auction and he reckons you could use it and appreciate it better than he could and then he turns around and says he never gave it to you in the first place then he probly believes in resumption, too, even if he dies without ever understanding any of it.

Keep that stylus honed, Edgar. I like it.
 
Philip White,
Adelaide.
Wednesday 19th of December 1996.

SOMETHING TO CHEER YOU UP

"Testing Limits"  portion of installation by Jamie Willis with Greg Johns sculpture on horizon photo Philip White ... I don't know what the res is like for you - probly no good on bigger screens - but I hear it makes a great screensaver ... it's from a day on Greg Johns' Palmer Sculpture Biennial, which was a great day and a long march ... out on the eastern side of the South Mount Lofty Range ... click image to enlarge ... there's cropping room

CHATEAU REYNELLA 175 JOBS GONE

Chateau Reynella photo Kate Elmes

THIS MORNING'S PRESS RELEASES
FROM ACCOLADE AND TREASURY

10:00am July 24, 2012 (Adelaide, Australia)

ACCOLADE WINES MAKES GROUND-BREAKING CHANGE

Accolade Wines and Treasury Wine Estates (TWE) today announced a major transformation of the wine industry entering into reciprocal bottling and packaging contracts that will see Accolade Wines bottle for TWE in the UK and TWE bottle for Accolade Wines in Australia.

Accolade Wines Chief Executive Troy Christensen (left) said the agreements would strengthen the Australian wine industry by improving the efficiencies of both Accolade Wines and TWE.

"This ground-breaking agreement will enable each of us to secure economies of scale in each region," Mr Christensen said.

"Our decision to enter a reciprocal bottling agreement with TWE underpins Accolade Wines continued success in Australia and globally.

"This agreement is important for the thousands of people in Australia and globally who rely on our business, including employees, customers, grapegrowers and other suppliers. It will allow us to put more effort into growing the sales of Australian wine in Asia and North America.

"We are delighted to partner with TWE in the UK where we will undertake all of TWE's UK bottling. This will move to Accolade Park in Bristol which will increase production there by 30pc."

Mr Christensen said changing market dynamics had created surplus Australian bottling capacity which was holding back the Australian wine industry.

"For a number of years we have researched alternatives to avoid outsourcing our Reynella bottling and distribution facility, including relocating assets within the business. No other option delivered such long term benefits.

"We were faced with the difficult realisation that the best option for our business, and for the Australian industry was to ensure that the most efficient facilities were fully utilised even if they were not our own.

"This is a very significant decision for the Australian wine industry as it creates a new paradigm for the industry. It recognises that we are in the business of producing wine and getting it to consumers. Just as we do not own all our own vineyards, or all our own trucks, we don't have to own every piece of equipment that helps us get wine to the consumers' glass."

Mr Christensen said the decision was not taken lightly because it means that 175 employees at Reynella will be made redundant.

"All employees made redundant will receive their full redundancy entitlements and further support in the form of outplacement services to help find new jobs," Mr Christensen said.

Approximately 20 of the redundancies relate to a separate arrangement where Accolade Wines will outsource its Reynella warehousing and distribution to MacKenzie Hillebrand's facilities at Outer Harbor, South Australia.

"We are working with Treasury and separately with MacKenzie Hillebrand on plans that we anticipate will see us fully transitioned by January 2013," Mr Christensen said.

Accolade Wines and Treasury Wine Estates Agreement

There is compelling business logic behind the agreement between Accolade Wines and Treasury Wine Estates.

The agreement recognises that optimum business efficiency is achieved when capacity at the most efficient operations is fully utilised.

The market conditions described above have had negative impacts on Accolade Wines bottling facilities which have not been operating at full capacity for some time. Accolade Wines has made significant efforts to win contract bottling work to keep its plant operational however due to the prevailing industry conditions cited previously there is significant spare bottling capacity within the Australian industry.

Outsourcing Accolade Wines' bottling operation to Treasury Wine Estates in Australia builds on a partnership developed in the UK where Accolade Wines has been producing all European Cask volume for Treasury Wine Estates. Under the terms of this agreement Accolade Wines will now takeover all the bottling for Treasury Wines Estates in the UK.

The business case for the agreement is compelling. The agreement underpins Accolade Wines continued success in Australia and globally. This arrangement enables Accolade Wines to increase investment towards distributing Australian wine in Asia and North America.

All Accolade Wines' brands will still be made from grapes sourced from the same regions, the same vineyards and processed under the supervision of Accolade Wines' winemakers. The only change in the production of our wine will be that the wines will be sent to a different plant for bottling and packaging.

The business relationship between Accolade Wines and Treasury Wine Estates will remain that of principal and contractor. In Australia Treasury Wine Estates will pack for Accolade Wines and in the UK Accolade will pack for Treasury Wine Estates.

It is expected the transition will be completed by January 2013.

The 2ha John Reynell vineyard Constellation had removed from the Heritage List to make way for the intensive housing which now covers the site.

 24 July 2012

TREASURY WINE ESTATES DRIVES SUPPLY CHAIN EFFICIENCY IN PACKAGING

Treasury Wine Estates (ASX: TWE) is pleased to announce it has signed contractual terms with Accolade Wines for new packaging arrangements between the two companies. Under the contract announced today, TWE will pack wine for Accolade in  Australia with Accolade packing wine for TWE in the United Kingdom.

Stuart McNab, Chief Supply Officer for TWE said the new arrangements will utilise the best and most efficient assets of both companies.

"We have put a big focus on increasing efficiencies in our supply network and this new arrangement with Accolade will leverage these efficiencies by utilising spare capacity in our Australian facilities."

Historically, TWE has used several service providers for wine packaging in England, but under the new arrangements, the company will consolidate all United Kingdom packaging into Accolade Park, in Bristol.

David Dearie, Chief Executive Officer for TWE says these packaging arrangements strengthen our global supply chain and position Treasury Wine Estates for future sales growth.

"Both businesses compete in the global wine market and these new arrangements will enable us to better capitalise on our resources and state of the art facilities in the regions where we can best leverage the benefits."

The new arrangements will commence over the coming weeks with both companies increasing their volumes over a six month period to meet full planned packaging volumes by January 2013.

These new arrangements are part of a longer-term supply optimisation strategy aimed at better utilisation of TWE's packaging and distribution assets around the globe.

For background, type REYNELLA into the search box at the top left.

LA TÂCHE 2009 - THE UNSPOKEN WORD

The Odd Tasting Note emerges: 
why does one think like this?

Domaine de la Romanée-Conti La Tâche 2009
AU$2500(USA)-AU$4000(UK and Fr.); 13.5% alcohol; cork; 96+++ points
 
I know I'm gonna get a backful of silver forks for this, but I honestly wonder how many Australian winemakers would recognise this as Pinot noir. All the stuff most were taught to find in good Pinot is barely here.  Unless indicating abject derision, I rarely use capitals in my tasting notes, but on this wine they're huge:  "NO STRAWBERRIES NO RASPBERRIES NO CHERRIES" they shout.  The secret is the La Tâche vineyard, which has been there by the Burgundian village of Vosne-Romanée for over 800 years.  Think six hectares of 50± year old vines on the world's most expensive irony limestone, pruned so hard it takes three vines to fill a bottle.  The vineyard is managed using very old organic and biodynamic methods; like Moon, horses, no tractors, only vine-derived compost. Along with the wine from its neighbouring 1.8 ha Romanée-Conti vineyard, it's as good and expensive as Pinot gets, and is simply revered in the arcane world of the Burgundiac and Pinotphile.  This 2009 is being compared to the majestic 1990.  But if there's no primary fruit, what makes it great?  Structure.  Tannin.  Acidity?  The most ethereal and fleeting wafts of perfume?  But really, the damn thing seemed chockers with the nightshade aromas: the dark green aromas of those leaves, as if in thick black tea.  Pepper, juniper, leather, valerian, coaldust, iron all sat there. Surly, glowering.  Daring me. "Maybe the closest we get to fruit is a faint whiff of coconut butter", I concluded, mystified.  But then, wakey-wakey: the initial glimmers of something between tart juniper berry, sweet beetroot and very bitter cherry began to stir, and long after pouring the thing had awoken sufficiently to give just a glimpse of the overt sensuality which will dominate if the juice of those very special grapes eventually matures to swell and fill the wine's dusty, tannic whalebone corset. A good whipping would be in order before we do any mouth work.

Hurley Vineyard Balnarring Mornington Peninsula Pinot Noir 2010 $45; 13.5% alcohol; Diam cork; 89+ points
 
The Pinots Kevin Bell and Trycia Byrnes grow and make at Balnarring are amongst the best in Australia each year; increasingly so as their suite of vineyards matures. This is the most junior of their four delicious wines, and the cheapest.  It's a blend of the barrels that just miss the cut, and fail to earn their place in the Lodestone ($65); the Hommage ($65) or the Garamond ($75). Each of these comes from its own specific vineyard on irony volcanic loams.  This blend is brimming with maraschino cherries.  It has hints of that dust and leaf, but minor.  All the overt fruitiness missing from the La Tâche is here in such carnal fleshiness that it's impossible to imagine they're made from the same grape.  This is silky, supple, healthy-tasting juice. You could stick a cocktail brolly in it.   The Lodestone has more iron and dust, and while it's still cherries, these are the darker marello.  Again, it is a plush, silky drink, but has that little extra tannin, and the riper fruit leaves the faintest alcohol heat in the aftertaste (91++ points; 14.2% alcohol).  Hommage is a step back toward tightness and structure rather than tender Rubens flesh, but it still abounds with wickedness (93+++; 12.8%).  And the Garamond?  In style, this is between La Tâche and the entry point Balnarring, but where the French wine has true might and grandeur, this is still immediately simply, overtly sensual. No whipping. Straight to the cot (93+++; 13.7%).