Here’s the problem. Australia does not have terroir.

Or so I was told in France. If I had $100 for every vigneron who told me while I rode my Solex from Chablis to Sablet in Provence last May and June: “My only role is to get the terroir to express itself, not like you Australians with your brand-driven syrupy wines made for the likes of Robert Parker”, I’d be lying on a beach for the rest of my life.

The French claim makes many an Aussie winemaker’s blood boil. Charles Melton, for example, in the Barossa valley does not take kindly to ze French assumption.

Charles Melton, Barossa terroir man

We sat in the shade of his verandah last week chatting it all over. He’d opened a bottle, of course, a Richelieu, not at all in the “gobs of fruit” style so beloved by Parker. I have kept in touch with him ever since a bottle of his Nine Popes that I’d slipped into a blind Rhone tasting in Paris (it was “against” several Chateauneuf-de-Papes and Gigondas) came out favourite.

His vines are dry farmed (ie without irrigation), he uses oak sparingly, and some of his grapes are whole bunch vinified (the grapes are left on the stems). “We need to convince people about acidity in wine. People want too much instant appeal and accessibility.”

When he says: “The brand name Barossa is as important to us as the brand name Charles Melton”, it sounds more like the French appellation-driven approach than the Australian one.

Rather casusally, he mentions a 10-year project to which he contributes. “We are inspired by the approach in Burgundy. We love those wines, we love Pinot and admire the detail of their knowledge. We need to get to that point of detail… Each year, we ask for samples of single block wines from different parts of the Barossa and taste them blind. We have mapped the soils and take from fifty to a hundred wines from the same blocks. We note down all the “descriptors” that the tasters keep using. We keep the panel stable; about 20 tasters are winemakers, not all from the area. Others come from the Australian Wine Research Institute.”

By tracing the relationship between the descriptors and the blocks, they are starting to map the “expression”, yes, of the terroir.

To a resident of the Patrie with its designer trains that flash through the country, the train from Newcastle to Sydney is rather retro-quaint. I took photos of the vinyl chairs, the view of the waterways from the windows and the fine-threatinging signs. I love those signs,which pervade this compulsively law abiding country (or are the middle classes still subliminarily scared of the descendents of the convicts?). These signs are on every train, at every beach and town park, the crossed circles surrounding an image of what you are not allowed to do: a fellow with his feet on a seat, for example, if you are not allowed to do that.

 Rob McBride, a paramedic, was on his way to Hobart for a conference. He knows the line, and warned me when the good views were coming up. He also likes wine.

“Up in the Hunter,” he said, ”there’s a group of about eight wineries who want to have their own identity. They want to be called Lovedale, which is part of Pokolbin, but they don’t want to be just Pokolbin. They want their own identity.”

“What do you think?” I asked, enthralled that the topic was obviously so prevalent now. “ It’s a bit of elitism that’s gone over the top,” he answered simply. 

“A big part of the problem with a lack of terroir,” he continued, ”is the WET.” This invidious 29% Wine Equalisation Tax is applied before the 10% GST so the compounding takes it toover 40%. “The tax is applied as soon as the cork goes into the bottle, not on sale. Australians don’t have cellars, so the wineries have to make wines that are ready for drinking. Since the wineries can’t afford to cellar the bottles themselves, it’s forced a whole shift in wine quality.”

Who could have imagined a decade ago that you could have a conversation about wine quality in the train like that? This country has come a long way!

   

Readers might recall that I was fooled by a Tyrrell’s Shiraz last week, one served blind. I thought it was a Bordeaux blend.

While my sister Karen and I were wandering around Hunter Valley vineyards yesterday, we saw the sign and drove in. I wanted to see where that enigmatic bottle came from.

Murray Flannigan, who has been with Tyrrell’s since 1968 and who was pouring at their popular tasting room, shook his head. “We didn’t do the Vat 9 in 2008, so we have none here. It comes from that little plot over there.” He was pointing out the door past the carpark at a few lines of vines. “Hey, come and look at this.” He led us outside and into a large shed with several open, metre-high, two-metre square wax-lined cement fermentation tanks in the middle and a smattering of stainless steel vats around the walls. “We push down on the cap with this,” he said, grabbing a broomstick with a silicon plate-sized disc on the end.

Mark Richardson and a fermentation vat

It seemed delightfully traditional to me, and I said so. “That’s the word for it,” he answered. “Traditional.” He took us to some “more modern” ones, the same only lined with epoxy. Someone was fiddling with a pump by the door. “Hey, Mark,” he called, ”are you free?” A fellow, perhaps in his early forties came over. Mark Richardson is responsible for their red wines. I mentioned the 2004 Vat 9. “I made that”, he said. “You shouldn’t have picked it as Bordeaux, but it is a lot more feminine that most Aussie shiraz.”

The next shed, with rows of large oak barrels the French call foudres, was made of unlined corrugated iron, and was a lot warmer. A chap was spraying the earth floor with a hose to keep it cool.

That was yesterday. Today I bought James Halliday’s Australian Wine Companion 2010. The Winery of the Year? Tyrrell’s, of which Halliday says “the credo is let the wines speak without interference or embroidery.”

Hang on! Where are we? That’s the sort of stuff we hear in France, the “I just let the terroir express itself” paradigm. I’m starting to get confused down here, and delightfully so.

“It’s quite a challenge making wines in a sub-tropical climate.” We were talking with Mark Davidson, MD and Chief Winemaker at Tamburlaine winery in the Hunter Valley. I was with my sister Karen, who lives in the once-industrial town of Newcastle, where the valley meets the sea almost 200 kilometers north of Sydney . Although we had just dropped in without an appointment, he took us into his office and was more than happy to yarn about the meaning of wine.

Tamburlaine is one of about 30 farms in Australia certified organic. Davidson is a keen advocate. Although the 2008 vintage here was wet and terribly difficult, just as it was in the Rhone, he suffered a lot less from mildew than the traditional farmers.

Mark Davidson, Organic wine maker

Mark is genial and smart without being corporate. When I ask him for a photo later, he apologises for being too dressed up.

I mention my interest in terroir. “It’s the reason you do it,” he responds. He is responsible for 170 hectares. “If you are a farmer, ultimately you have to ask yourself how are you building sustainability into the terroir,” he says. He bought the place in 1985. He also has vines in Orange in the drier county to the west. Over there the soils are basalt based, “beautifully rich and quite deep.”

Rich soils? I murmer.

“Yes, that’s what you need.”

This is a shock to my French experience. Over there, we avoid the alluvial plains as they are too rich and seek out the less fertile slopes. In Australia, with its ancient poor soils, winemakers struggle to make the soil rich enough. The vines are usually on the flats.

Mark Davidson with a lunar gardening guide

Another shock. As an organic farmer he avoids ploughing the soil. It exposes the humus and destroys it. In France, the “bios” plough to control weeds without chemicals.

I ask about the weather. “It’s like living in Singapore. I’ve never seen a year like it.” Even in normal years he considers the climate sub-tropical. This is not the traditional climate for wines, and the hardest to farm organically. Down in the Rhone we love those dry hot days and brisk winds that rip down the valley. Indeed, there’s a sense here that it’s an “also-ran” terroir for wine growing. He is prospering, though. The crowds come up from Sydney and he has 10,000 members to whom he sells directly.

He is an articulate and convincing speaker, someone the communicators would call “talent”, someone their industry should roll out the next time they have to convince foreigners that Australians are interested in their terroir.

What’s this got to do with wine? Nothing!

We were sipping our coffees on Sunday morning when my mother said: “There goes Allan.  He must be on his way to the gliding club.”

We called Allan’s wife, Heather. “Would that have been Allan going over?” I asked. “It looked like his plane.”

“Yep”, she answered. “Hey, that reminds me. We’ve met an old mate of yours, a glider pilot called Norm.”

Norm Sanders: Californian, journalist, activist and Australian Senator for a few years. With Sue, his friend of many years, an animal rights activist, he lives just above Byron Bay in a spot widely known as Godzone or God’s Own. Norm and I had worked together in the early 80s on the campaign to save the Franklin river in south-west Tasmania from a dam project, he haranging the politicians while I worked the courts.

Mum, Norm and Sue in Godzone

We caught up for lunch yesterday at the Happy Dolphin cafe in Brunswick Heads.

“Yeah,” he said. I fly a motorised glider.”

“A what? Norm, that sounds like an airplane,” I suggested.

“Nah. Once I’m up there I turn off the motor.”

He told Mum about the landing we did in his Cesna 180 back in the summer of 1983 on the west coast of Tasmania. The wind had changed 90 degrees while we had been flying around collecting aerial photo evidence against the Hydro Electric Commission. “Counsellor,” he’d said, “this plane is called a widow maker as it rolls itself into a little ball if it catches the side wind when landing. We could go down safely in Queenstown [the local hotbed of Hydro supporters] or take a 20% risk of dying in Strahan.”

“Strahan,” I answered.

As we circled the airstrip, other pilots waiting in the shed for the wind to abate came outside to watch us die. But Norm, entirely illegally, came in at right angles to the strip and landed across it.

“Good thing the wind was strong enough to stop us,” he said, to applause from the other pilots.

The Happy Dolphin doesn’t sell wine. We were drinking water. It all goes to show that - sometimes - you can have a good time without wine. I will be remedying that today as my sister Karen is taking me up to the Hunter Valley.

"Now, that's what I call French"

After Lindsay and Joan snagged me on Saturday night with the Tyrrell’s Hunter Valley Shiraz, I tried to get my own back yesterday.

Don’t get me wrong. There is nothing as tedious as wineupmanship, a vulgar form of competitiveness usually practised by ageing men with size issues.

But it was fun to pull out a bottle of my own.

“It’s not French,” says Joan, sipping intently. Lindsay was not so sure. “Knowing where you come from, Linc, I think this could be a Rhone.”

“It’s young, yet ready to drink,” Joan insisted.

“Hmmm. Fabulous fruit, yet lingering, fine tanins, ” Linsay mused. “Ahhhh. French!”

What do you do when you are peckish in the morning in Australia?

You have brekkie. Lots of it.

And brekkie, even if it consists of three pancakes, is impossible without bubbly.

Sounds good already? Sipping a Taltarni with the waves in the background, as a baby butcher bird learns to sing and water dragon lizards sun themselves nearby.

A Taltarni and pancakes breakfast

I wouldn’t be doing it if it weren’t in the great Antipodean cultural tradition.

Now that I am Down Under, I will use the vernacular.

I got it arsed-about. I ballsed up.

OK. I made a mistake.

My mother invited her friends Lindsay and Joan around for a barbie last night. Lindsay bought a bottle, which he kept hidden.

“This one expresses a particular Australian terroir. Let’s see if you can get it.”

Swirl, sniff, sip and gulp. To me, it was a Bordeaux, and I’d tasted quite a few just before leaving Paris. There was plenty of well integrated but not overpoweringly plummy fruit, lots of tobacco and woody spiciness, little pepper and no discernable trace of alcohol on the nose.

“Well, it’s not a shiraz, anyway,” I said. Lindsay raised an eyebrow.

“So, it’s probably from the Coonawarra,” I blundered on, as that cool area near the sea in South Australia is where many of the Bordeaux-style wines come from.

He showed me the bottle. A shiraz from the Hunter valley. Ooops!

Lindsay and Joan enjoying the joke

What a pleasure to balls it up with this wine. And what fun it is going to be trying to learn about what is really happening in Aussie wines.

At lunch today at Shelly’s Beach in Northern NSW, the couple at the next table thought I was a wowser, a puritan killjoy in the local lingo. For purely professional reasons, of course, I was just trying to see what they were drinking. As my mother and I were drinking water their entirely reasonable assumption was that I was sneering down my nose at their imbibing.

A kiwi tipple on the beach

As one does in Australia, we got chatting. “What’s it like?” I asked.

“The bloody kiwis,” he answered. “They’ve got such a glut of wine, they are blending from all over the country. But at least it’s cheap now. It’s orrite, though.”

I explained my interesting in terroir. It turned out they were wild francophiles who had been to Beaune. They knew the creed.

“Ain’t much terroir in this stuff,” she said. “Pity we finished it, or you coulda tasted some.”

The bottle on the left is the famous Oyster Bay. The second is a Giesen.

A lovely couple. They were off home “to relax a bit” and then open a bottle of Champers: the real stuff, a Piper Heidsieck.

I saw people at another table eating a huge pancake and mentioned that it looked like a good breakfast.

“No worries,” our fellow said. “We’ll see ya tomorrow morning then.”

I’ll keep you posted.

I am heading down to Australia. To thaw out.

While I am there visiting family and friends, I will do as much wine “research” as possible and will post posts when I can. So, if you want to see through the “parallel mirror” what an Aussie living in France thinks of the Australian wine situation, keep logging on!