Soils ain't soils, Sol.

This being the beginning of another growing season here at Bloodwood, I thought it time to get really filthy for a change; thought it time to get our hands well and truly soiled.

When you are selecting the site for your new vineyard, there's a lot to be said for dirt. Not only is it a fairly handy medium in which to stand trellis posts but it can also play a critical role in the quality of your fruit.

You see, vines will grow almost anywhere as "those opposite" continually point out to me during cellar door tastings. This business about one area being able to produce wine while that one won't, is just another red herring. Wine grapes are grown and wine is produced in Alice Springs using similar technology to that found in Hobart or Mudgee.

You'll find the winemakers of Griffith just as unimpressed with vintage rains as we are at Bloodwood.  There's not a lot anybody can do about bush fires or hail, while floods and droughts are facts of this agricultural life. And yet vineyards pop up all over the place, sometimes in the most unlikely places.

Not all of them succeed, not all of them last for generations, but very few of them fail to make wine of some description or another sooner or later.

The wonderful thing about wines is that no two are identical.  Neighbouring wineries can try to level the playing field by growing the same variety on the same trellis, pruned to the same number of buds. They can tend the vines identically and pick their perfectly ripe fruit on the same day; vintage techniques can be identical. And yet, they will make two different wines. These differences may be quite subtle, but they will be there nevertheless. And difference can be all in a wine these days. Just ask the good bergs of Burgundy or Bordeaux if you don't believe me.                   

The French have been long convinced that soil (and aspect and micro-climate and overall provenance) has a lot to do with these differences. While science tells us that climate is more important in the macro scheme of things, soil, in theirs and my opinion, is an underrated link in the quality chain of every fine wine.

Our vineyard is planted on medium to low fertility gravelly soils over a friable, red clay base, the whole profile interspersed with limestone lenses shale and ancient volcanoclastics. Some of our more unkind colleagues refer to Bloodwood as 'the quarry', and as we had to turn to power gel and short fuses to secure our end posts in the Riesling vineyard..they have a point.

Why gravel? To make quality wines, you need quality grapes. And the critical parameter in such a cool, marginal climate as ours is appropriate ripeness of the fruit. Unlike almost any other Australian wine growing area,  acid and pH look after themselves in Orange. However, to make a high quality wine, grapes must ripen enough for flavour to complete the delicate balance in the finished wine.

A deep, high-fertility soil like some of the local, richer red mountain earth orcharding soils allows the mature vine to grow with so much vigour that, through shading and delayed ripening, optimum flavour may  not always be achieved even though alcohol levels can be relatively high.

Conversely, those soils which limit vigour, and, in traditional viticultural wisdom, make the vines work for their living, produce wines of more intense flavour,aroma and overall elegance.

In quality viticulture then, under this Bloodwood sun, all soils ain't soils!

Canopy Splitting (or) Pigs In Space

     Forget all you've learnt from Ensminger's Swine science: History and development of the swine industry; World and U.S. swine and pork - past, present, and future; and read on.
    
Once upon a time there was a swine with strange habits. You see, he really didn't want to be a pig, so all the long day he would peer through the dirty claustrophobic bars of his particular sty, and dream of being a classical ballet dancer, with classical non-cloven hooves and an ever so delicate elegance of gait. And, what's more, he'd practice. Every evening after the last late bucket of swill was splashed into his grubby little trough, he'd surreptitiously tip-toe about his peculiarly smelly sty, perched on his hind trotters imagining, for all the world, that the dung passage sliming dimly in the yellow, incandescent light along the front of his grungy little sty, was a bank of spot lights, and the slats of his ugly, dangerous floor, the firm, strong, clean, safe stage of Madison Square Garden itself.

     However, on Monday evening, he really did have an audience, not of a paying, more of a slaying kind! Vladimir Lemming, a Party man of scientific-non-empathetic background, noticed something of immense practical and ideological interest to the local backfatter industry. He noticed that Boris Porker, which was his, the pigs, stage name, balanced on his hind legs as he was, took up much less horizontal space vis a vis the pen floor, than any other recumbent porcine, which he most definitely was not!
    
And so, it happened that later that evening, Vlad composed a paper entitled The Ideological Importance of Vertical Displacement of Swine-in-Situ which he submitted for publication to the Australian Pork Talk News newsletter. The following Thursday, the 22nd of the month, two days after his actual observation, his practical paper on pig performance and perching possibilities was front page news in Porkda, the official Party magazine, which was to be read by everybody.

In essence, comrade Vlad proposed that a swine supervisor could, by arranging pigs vertically, halve accommodation costs. Or looked at it another way, he could double production per unit area of sty space. A revolution in pork was born! Vlad was commanded to investigate other areas of animal accommodation; such as the application of a similar approach in Party mental hospitals on prime residential land, and the  (by now) obvious advantages in these times of economic restraint, of having the inmates stand with their arms raised in all Party prisons. After all, this arrangement always works well at Party rallies.

Vineyard pruning is a Teutonic exercise at Bloodwood.  And from a reductionists viticultural point of view, Vlads divide and concur approach, applied to pruning, works well. Separation of the canopy of the vine in to an upstairs downstairs configuration allows the beneficial effect of light to enter into the potentially dark bud renewal zone near the cordon and enhances the ripening process through improved UV light exposure.

There are also great advantages for effective spray penetration in disease control. You don't need to saturate the entire canopy if you use, say, systemic bunch rot fungicides as one well directed spray can be applied efficiently to the exposed bunches.

The dormant vines may look a little strange at this time of year, and pruning involves much more care, but this is one revolution in pruning systems which works for us at Bloodwood in bringing home the bacon each vintage.               

RIP Peter Lehmann 18.08.1930 – 28.06.2013

Hook, Line & Sinker

The truth is, we were lucky not to lose PL more than 20 years ago when a surgical slip during a bowel cancer operation cost him a kidney. The complications that followed almost knocked him over. It gave him a sniff of his mortality. If he hadn’t snapped the hobbles on June 28^th, PL would have celebrated his 83^rd birthday on August 18^th, 2013.

There are a lot of family, friends and colleagues around the world who are and will continue to be sad for a very long time because of his death - none more so than wife Margaret and their immediate and wonderful family.

I count myself fortunate to be a member of the wider PL ‘family’. This story isn’t about PL the so-called wine making ‘legend’, a term Margaret dislikes with a passion – along with icon and numerous other overblown descriptions. Outstanding tributes and recognition of his significant and life long contribution to the Australian wine industry and his passion for the Barossa are to be found elsewhere.

Wine, Barossa Music Festivals and Gourmet Weekends, the Birdsville Track mailman Tom Kruse doco and filming Tasting Australia for ABC TV, wonderful long lunches in the Lehmann kitchen and the occasional sleepover may have been how and why my wife Jane and I met Peter and Margaret, but it was around other shared interests that our friendship developed.

PL really enjoyed growing things as well grapes. Who knew mangoes and avocados thrived at Tanunda! He would fish just about anywhere and he loved a punt on useless four legged grass burners. He followed a couple of trainers, with the Hayes family at the top of the list.

Our Saturday afternoons together were usually in the kitchen with Sky Racing on the screen and the TAB page from the local rag on the table, while Jane and Margaret discussed the weighty issues of the world.

PL also owned a number of trotters that occasionally won at better than 15/1. Of course he wouldn’t tell you it was going around until 20 minutes after the race – because he didn’t think it was a chance.

In recent years, as his remaining kidney steadily lost function and needed to be hooked up to a dialysis machine in Adelaide three days a week, he kept his punting cash in his pocket. He knew what we part-time punters finally work out – it’s a mug’s game and he loved it.

PL also enjoyed wetting a line. From the early 90s, we’d work on a plan to go somewhere a bit different every year to catch a fish.

Garfish – on a moonless night with Department of Ag agronomist Bob Haggerstrom in his four metre tinny, catching net and underwater light in hand at American River on Kangaroo Island. There could only be two at a time onboard. This meant Margaret and I would be on the jetty with a warming glass or two of some Lehmann deliciousness. We’d swap over every 20 minutes. We quickly learnt that you’ve got to get the small catching net on the end of the hand held pole in front of a garfish. They are impossible to scoop up from behind. They’re too fast!

Snapper – off the bottom of Yorke Peninsula with Dave Burge from Coober Pedy and his motley crew in vessels of questionable seaworthiness. From time to time we slept in swags. When PL rolled out of bed on day two of the snapper expedition, after a particularly rough night, he swore that his swag days were over – indeed he never swagged it again.

King George Whiting - at Coffin Bay, off Farm Beach and around the Sir Joseph Banks Group of Islands off Tumby Bay on Eastern Eyre Peninsula with Ken Scott. I now have in my boat a GPS mark off Farm Beach named Lehmann. PL cleaned up with a bag of 40 + cm KG whiting. It’s the spot where he showed me how to skin a leather jacket (a much underrated fish in his view) with the back of a hacksaw blade. He liked the flavor of the fish and skin, lightly fried in butter with a squeeze of lemon and a bit of cracked pepper.

Mulloway & Coorong Mullet – in the Coorong (caught with square hooks – read net) after a failed attempt to land a Coorong mullet with a line. Lakes and Coorong fishers Gary Hera-Singh and Henry Jones were wonderful hosts and enjoyed the PLW Port and being walloped by Margaret at crib.

There are numerous trophies and remarkable photographs in the wondrous Lehmann home in the Barossa. They recognize the PL and Margaret story and his outstanding wine making successes and contribution to the industry nationally and internationally.

Among a pile of lists, photos and stuff stuck with magnets to the fridge in the kitchen is a pic that brings a smile to my face every time I see it. It was taken in 1995 of a couple of daggy blokes with a couple of mulloway. The location is Gary Hera-Singh’s fishing shack on the Coorong. Peter in a crappy jumper remarkably without a fag and me in a bucket hat - with a fag. Margaret reckons I look like Andy Capp and loves the shot. The above shot is of the four of us in the Lehmann kitchen a month or so before he died.

PL wasn’t the greatest fisherman but he was a really good bloke – Jane and I miss him.

Ian Doyle

August 2013

Smoked oysters and Sweaty Saddles

This tasting of wine at the cellar door is a bloody funny business. I find that there is a general reluctance to actually examine, let alone identify, flavours and impressions during a tasting. It's as if the messages being relayed from the taste buds, palate and olfactory epithelium are lost on their way to the brain..as if there is such social intimidation tied up in the use of descriptive terms during wine tastings that, unless you are perceived as an "expert", it's simply not done to comment.                          

"I don't know much about wine, I just drink it...don't ask me, I wouldn't have a clue, just as long as it doesn't burn my throat on the way down"..

I don't like excessive alcohol either, but after all the human and natural endeavour needed to coax wine into bottle, I find that nonchalance a real pity. If you were served a plate of fish and chips that smelt of violets and blackberries, which finished with a clean, fine-grained tannin and left you relaxed, convivial and at peace with your fellows, there's a fair chance that you would have something to say to your local fish monger.( If you let me know the address of such an establishment, there's an even greater chance that I, and most of my friend, would take up permanent residence in the cafe responsible.)

However, discover those same flavours and impressions in a fine glass of cool climate Cabernet Sauvignon and general silence reigns. The conspiratorial muteness barrier falls. Why is it so.?

I was conducting a tasting recently when one of the "I don't know much about wine" brigade was tormented by me into making a comment on the tired old Shiraz before him.

"Well", lips pursed and limbs flailing about like a someone hand sowing oats in a thunderstorm, "well, if you really want to know, it smells like Bondi sewer".

 This may have been meant to embarrass his persecutor in particular and the group in general. It was certainly intended to end his torment. Undeterred,(sic) my response charged back.

 "Correct. Sewers from Buckingham Palace to Bondi smell of hydrogen-sulphide, or at least sulphur derivatives. I would assume that the good bergs of Bondi, and the not so good ones of London SW1A 1AA, United Kingdom are no less fond of good food than we all are and that their sulfide is just as hard to hide as that of we lesser mortals'

 And the wine, well it had a case of bad-handling in its youth; or, at least a brush with a winemaker not anal enough to protect it against oxidation and the many bacterial afflictions wine is heir to through the correct use of hygiene and sulphur-dioxide during maturation. And it did have a touch too much of that weee-ha, good-'ol-sweaty-saddle so common in certain traditional styles from equally traditional areas both local and Continental.  I'm reliably informed that that same wine taster now associates Bondi with hydrogen-sulphide problems in wine, and impresses, ad-nauseam, at local dinner parties with his technical expertise in that particular wine fault. I must introduce him to the fresh bright, clean Katoomba's of wine so he'll have something else to talk about.

(As an aside, I wonder what Australian winemakers will have left to say about Bordeaux when the Bordelaise finally get on top of brettanomyces bruxellensis. Now that will be an interesting tasting! )

So you see, there's nothing extraordinary in becoming a good wine taster. All you need is an ability to associate the flavours found in wine with tastes or aroma sensations you've experienced in your lifetime.

 It becomes a little more tricky when developing the ability to translate these impressions into word pictures common to your audience. Try telling a winemaker that his or her newest creation in the grand tradition of Bordeaux earthiness reminds you of Bondi sewer, and see how inadequate your medical insurance is. But slide into the "observation" with a "can you detect a slight hint of H2S on the nose,"  and you've made your point with a better than average chance of making it home alive.

To get the ball rolling, the next time you open a bottle of Domaine de la Romanee-Conti La Tache 2006, at $2,500 per bottle, see if you can detect a rich smoked oyster and saline savoury character on the nose. On the other hand, smoked oysters are only $2.50 at your local Walmart this week.

It all looked a bit staged really.

It all looked a bit staged really.

Certainly, the chainsaw, the front end loader and his father had every right (reason had long since deserted activities agricultural) to be flailing about in the dam. After all, it had been a warm day, all the sheep had been drenched and there was just cause for a quick splash before dinner.

But the skid marks down the collapsed bank and the steam drifting  from the partly submerged diesel engine, quite apart from the smoke hissing from the partly submerged Dad, all suggested another reality.

You see, his father, (well let's just call him Dad,) Dad had had (as Dad's do from time to time), an idea. Those willows overhanging the pump-house had been dropping their leaves in such profusion of late, that the foot-valve feeding the Lister had developed a leak.

 Now, as most Dads realise, a leaky foot-valve causes all sorts of problems if it is ignored. While dissertations on such annoyances enliven the occasional dinner party conversation and cause a great deal of analogous mirth in rugby shower blocks, they really are no laughing matter when it is you who has the wet boots. That's what Dad reasoned anyway.

Problem? Overhanging branches. Solution! Stand in bucket of front end loader, chainsaw at hip, directing vertical and lateral movement of bucket via biological switching package (son's brain) to hydraulics of machine. Result?.., well pretty much as described above.

You see, Son (well lets just call him Mark) Mark, unbeknown to Dad, had recently secretly developed encephalic illuminati of the accelerator foot. Even though the 'biological switching package' had been perfectly functional up until that awful mechanical avalanche, on that day, Mark's brain was numb to the knees on account of intensely libidinous thoughts involving a certain Lulu la Lingere from Longreach.

Moral?..farm machinery and lingere don't mix.

Every farm is a dangerous place. Every day in the vineyard there is ample opportunity to feel glad I have comprehensive life and health insurance. As pruning gets into full swing for another year, and the band-aid bill mounts, I can't help but wonder why we bother with it at all.

Having had the doubtful pleasure of being garrotted by trellis wires on a cold and bitter winter afternoon, I have concluded that this activity is not my idea of a fulfilling natural experience. However, it probably does explain why I'm not enamoured of hydraulic pruning shears. Besides the noise of the compressor, or the weight if the battery pack, or the inconvenience of dragging all those air hoses through the paddock, I hold the view that if anybody is going to have the pleasure of lopping off one of my  digits, that somebody, without mechanical assistance, will be me.

But again, why do I bother?. I like order. Vines endure years of untrained life in natural disarray. Ask any lateral what agony your secateurs bring, every laborious incision, every vicarious excision means emasculation of the plant. No wonder there's a price to pay in kind.

Pruning, after all, is all about balance, maintaining the correct number of fruiting buds according to the vigour of the vine. Lop too much off, and you will grow lots of leaves and not much fruit; too little, and there may be more fruit than the vine can ripen. There's no denying it, as you nail each vine to it's particular cross of trellis, there's nothing natural about pruning.

It's all a bit staged really.

Be Proud Of Your Poultry

Standing in the blend block the other day, pruning my way along a row of ancient Cabernet Franc vines, I had a very strong feeling of pride in our Bloodwood livestock. An investigatory vehicle had rolled up to the cellar door and, as is usual in these cases, Mum and Dad struggled out of the front seats, while a phalanx of kids, freshly blooded greyhounds that they were, bolted from the back of the vehicle, and raced towards the dam. A stylised stretch of the "ol' back" from Dad and a casual hopeful glance from Mum in the general direction of their rapidly disappearing offspring, prompted the usual introduction to this quite normal domestic  passion play. Says Dad,  "and don't go near the bloody dam youse bloody kids. Simon, Lizzy, Mark, Ed, Phil, Trina- did ya hear me,-- bloody keep outa the water"

Their familial duty done, Mum and Dad repaired to the cellar door for a quiet tipple in the magical afternoon sunshine just as their first greyhound slipped up onto the dam wall. Now, long suffering readers of these pages will have learnt, from time to time, of the extraordinary exploits of Bill and Ben, our psychotic Embden geese. You will have some memory of the mighty "Brian The Bull" verses "Bill and Ben" belly-flop championships conducted on the dam over the course of last summer. This was where Brian the bellicose Angus , (nose flaring as he busts through farm gates sideways in the stifling dust and emitting so much smoke from his ears that a casual observer could be forgiven if they came to the conclusion that he had just elected himself Pope), would hurl his terrible black bulk into the dam in tormented pursuit of these feathered avengers, only to find them behind him on the bank, honking their honks off and deriding his indignity.

You may also remember the case of the terrorised cyclist, the manure heap, and the complete indifference of both Bill and Ben to the whole smelly affair. It wasn't the poor cyclist's fault that they, at the very beginning of a glorious spring breeding season, had just come to the terrible realisation that neither of them was a goose and, ergo, both of them must be ganders. What they did to the pneumatic interloper is best not revisited here. Suffice it to say,  in short, without any more ado, these particular geese are completely nasty bastards.

And so to the scene at hand. Picture if you will, both Ben and Bill, awakened from their early afternoon slumber by the pitter patter of little feet approaching at speed from a south-easterly direction. And this, after a boring winter of hassling wood ducks and persecuting pathetic plovers. What joy! It was almost too good to be true!. They looked smirkingly at each other for an instant before going into what could only be described as a vicious kind of goose Haka. Without the war paint but with all the tongue flushes and mega-phonic hissing, they set sail for glory; two feathered robotic psychotics in pursuit of, well, kiddies.

It really was no match. In an impressive display of battle tactics which would have bought joy to Napoleon's heart, they out manoeuvred and regrouped the junior infidels with such glorious precision, that it wasn't long before they had herded them all the way back to the family Commodore, just so many cowboys, wagon-circled into submission. It was a wonderful sight; as if the mechanical ducks in a shooting gallery suddenly developed the ability to turn front-on and fire back.

And what did our ever vigilant father say as he emerged staggering from the tasting? "I thought I told you kids to stay away from the bloody dam, and Simon, how many times have I told you to stop foolin' with them bloody ducks".

Ah yes, in a world where the small framed joys of this life are too often overlooked for the bigger, bitter picture, it does one's heart good to be proud of one's bloody poultry.

Tales of Christmas Past

"I'll make it snow for you. I'll make it snow tomorrow morning!."

There's not a lot you can do to impress city kids these days, and it's even more difficult when those same small people have experienced more of the real world via TV and the Interweb at age 6 than you are ever likely to explore before your final vintage. Still, all you can do is try.

"By the time you come home from town tomorrow morning, the whole vineyard will be covered in snow!"

There was a Christmas past when a need arose for a similar demonstration of control over the mystical elements, a Christmas in which there deserved to be a bit of a spiritual lift. The great days' eve was filled with the sort of conversational game which amounts to somebody putting up a cultural paradigm , and everyone else knocking it clean off its sacrosanct pedestal. You know the sort of thing. " Santa does not exist because I happen to know he is Uncle Roger in disguise, and the nearest he's been to reindeer is Dubbo Zoo." or " If the sleigh really does land on the roof of  the winery, how come we don't all wake up with the noise?"and "What was Rudolph really on when she developed her red nose and what's with the stupid fur-lined suit and second-hand motorcycle boots.?" Nah ne nah ne nah nah!! 

In effect, by the end of the second bottle of Rosewood Rare Topaque, (proving for me at least,there is a god), there seemed no doubt that poor old Nic'd had the flick. Now everybody knows M/S Claus is a part of all of us from time to time and, chimneys and flying pigs aside, she has been a power of strength to desperate small and large children alike, down the depressing ages. Therefore there was, even on nostalgic grounds, a need for balance to be re-established in the debate. Indeed, a sullied reputation needed to be righted, and a righteous use yearned to be made of a redundant bean bag. What do we want?... "to save Santa!' When do we want it?..."Now!",.. more or less. It was time for Santa's little helpers to strike back!

Early next morning, before the aforementioned very fine Rutherglen tokay had allowed those vocal souls of the previous night so recently uncorked to re-enter the fantasy and privilege of another glorious day at Bloodwood, a terrible plot was hatched. An impressive trail of pristine deer poo, courtesy of the carefully spilled contents of a slashed bean bag, cometed away beyond the Cabernet vineyard and disappeared down stage right into the breaking dawn. As the dreary, bleary slum of over-hung Christmas eve cynics one-eyed the break of this special day, both barrels of the 12 gauge shotgun, in uncomfortable proximity to the tin walls of the shed,  mortared the cowering dawn.

"Get back in your own backyard, you discredited cross-dressing old hippie bastard, and take those poncy bloody velvet-eared sheep with you, they're stripping the Yellow Box trees."

Well, you could have heard a cork float.

Children of all ages, (mostly post-war), hushed in disbelief. "He's shot Santa. He's bloody shot Sandra Claus !!". That bearded kindly person, so lately a figure of conjecture and cynicism, of mock and ridicule: neigh doubt and disdain,  had suddenly re assumed his substantial corporeal proportions, and there was the trail of synthetic reindeer poo stretching to the horizon to prove it.

And was the whole vineyard covered in snow when the city cousins returned from the Boxing Day sales the next day? You bet your best bean bag it was. Rhonda and I are becoming a dab hands at liming vineyards these days, and as these particular city folk know what's going on in the real world by watching all the weather on T.V., they'll never know the difference.

Nothing ever changes in the worlds we invent..without a little bit of help!