by Graeme Leith
The weekend was chosen and away we went. It was Easter so there was no shortage of pickers and food preparers. It soon became apparent that some people loved picking, mostly females, for they are more nimble-fingered and generally don’t find it monotonous; after all, women have a long history of working, relating, chatting and gossiping at the same time. Others, usually males, could not stand picking so they were put on duty to collect the bins and load them onto the trailer or, later, to work in the winery, crushing, loading stalks onto the other trailer, and cleaning up.
The shiraz ripened first, so it was picked that weekend; the following weekend was to be the cabernet. My job was to drive the tractor; that way I could communicate with everybody—pickers, bucket picker-uppers, winery workers and lunch-preparers. It also gave me the responsibility of avoiding children and dogs, a potentially perilous mix with a tractor.
It all went well. We had vats of beautifully crushed grapes and I was free to make up the yeast culture, a procedure I had learnt from Professor Andrew Markides in the laboratories of Riverina College. Hydrogen sulphide, H2S, was at that time the greatest potential hazard for winemakers—it occurs naturally in fermentations but its production is exaggerated in must (crushed grapes) when there is a deficiency of nitrogen. In later years in most wine areas it became almost mandatory to add diammonium phosphate to the ferment to provide nitrogen and, later again, specific nutrients to feed the exponentially expanding millions and billions of yeast cells.
I sometimes wondered how it was discovered that the addition of nitrogen to the must would prevent the production of H2S. Perhaps some little boys were caught and chastised for piddling into a vat of fermenting wine that was later found to be clean and free of H2S—the nitrogen in the urine had done its job! However it happened, little seems to have been known about it then, and H2S was accepted as a necessary component of wine. Perhaps it was a component of the ‘sweaty saddle’ character of some Hunter Valley wines, particularly shiraz, and it was certainly present, often to an alarming extent, in French pinot noir, in Burgundies. If the ferment has been allowed to reach completion without the addition of nutrients, including nitrogen, and some H2S is present, then the solution is to add tiny amounts of copper, as cupric sulphate, or to expose the wine to some elemental copper. Suspending a copper plate or some copper wire in the container would often rectify the problem.
In France, bronze fittings containing copper were widely used. Copper funnels were also used to top up the wine in the barrels, so the H2S was inadvertently removed from the wine. As the traditional hoses and other winery fittings were slowly replaced with plastic and stainless steel, copper and bronze were phased out. There was nothing to remove the H2S and more and more was retained over the years—so gradually that the winemakers never noticed it. But others did.
I once ordered a bottle of muscadet in a Melbourne restaurant and was told by the owner, a noted Francophile, that he had something better for me, a French pinot that he insisted on opening. I had done some work at Riverina College by then, and we had all become well aware of the taste of H2S. It was present in this wine, unpleasantly so, and I told him.
‘I have just the thing for you, then,’ he said and opened another, more expensive bottle. This tasted of H2S also, and I told him so, to which he replied, ‘Don’t you know that all Burgundies should taste a little like the smell of shit?’
I told him I didn’t care for it and that I wanted the bottle of muscadet I’d ordered.
Andrew Markides of Riverina College had taught us, among other things, yeast propagation, and I turned to him for a yeast culture that was not a big H2S producer. The appropriate one was ‘729a’, and he posted me a small glass vial of it. Inside it was a few match-head-sized dots of a creamy substance sitting on an agar base.
Everything had to be scrupulously hygienic; some grape juice was sterilised in the pressure cooker and allowed to cool to 40 degrees Celsius. A tool made from a 4-inch nail and the tungsten filament of a light globe was flamed to sterilise it, so it cooled immediately, being such fine wire. The hand that held this scraping tool was used to twist off the cap and remove the scrapings, replace the cap immediately and add this tiny blob of yeast to the must. A fish tank air pump was brought into play and, through a sterile hose and cotton wool filters, bubbled air through the must to accelerate the production of yeast cells. This was left bubbling on the kitchen table overnight and, in the morning, would be obviously working hard and producing enough yeast cells to be added to a larger quantity of sterilised juice before being introduced to our vats of must now waiting for inoculation.
Some sulphur had been added at crushing to knock out the wild yeasts, but that would have dissipated overnight and the 729a would dominate the fermentation. I was certainly not going to leave it to ‘wild’ or naturally occurring yeast cells on the grapes—you don’t know what you’re getting with them, as some people learned to their cost in the early days in the Yarra Valley. These days most wild yeast has spread onto the grape skins from the culture used in the winery over the years, anyway, and in France naturally occurring yeasts seem to work just fine, as they often do in Australia.
But, in the event of a failure, winemakers are naturally not going to put on the back label: ‘This wine was spoiled by the unfortunate domination of an undesirable yeast strain.’ No, they’re more likely to flog it off as a cleanskin! Fermentation is slower, too, if a yeast culture is not added. This can create space problems in the winery if fermenters are tied up for too long.
As our pickers were volunteers, the picking was done on weekends. So the Saturday picking would be crushed into the fermenter vat and left overnight, because the sulphur, having done its job knocking out the wild yeasts, would dissipate overnight and the yeast culture would be introduced in the morning. The Sunday picking would be treated similarly, with the yeast being added on Monday morning. Given a fermentation time of about five days, the fermenters could be emptied into the press in time for the next weekend’s pick—hot bedding, as I used to call it. And so it worked well for us. We pumped the new free-run wine out into the 1000-gallon tank I’d bought second-hand at a clearing sale, and bucketed the skins into the press.
What joy, what exhilaration, what a sense of achievement as the dark ruby liquid poured out of the press into the press tray! To taste it was, for me, to be almost transported to heaven.
So all was pressed or being pressed. The cabernet would be picked the following weekend. The vats were clean and sparkling ready for the next batch. We didn’t have a pressure pump then so the cleaning was done with a watering can and brush. But we were better off than the Laughtons at Jasper Hill for they had no mains electricity and had to use a generator!
I hadn’t known about the lead time required for ordering barrels, so I had to wait some weeks for them and therefore had insufficient containers for the wine. We solved this by putting the lids on the vats and sealing all the gaps with silicone, leaving only an airlock that we could remove when topping up the wine with CO2. I fretted in case the flavour of the silicone would taint the wine, but it didn’t.
Conventional winemaking wisdom had it that after the new-made wine was settled in a holding tank it would then be transferred to barrel in as clarified a state as was possible. But there was an alternative—to transfer it directly to barrel without settling so that the wine would mature for some time in the barrel on its own sediment, or lees. So a few barrels were made this way for later comparison and then blended.
In 2012 we drank a bottle of that 1980 wine—one of a couple of dozen that had been re-corked in the early 1990s. Although it had aged, it was a beautiful wine in the classical Central Victorian mould—my first vintage, thirty-three years before our 2012 release.
But there were times during those years when I didn’t know if I was going to make it, much less the wine.
The 1980 vintage quantity had been insufficient to enter in the Royal Melbourne Agricultural Society wine show, so I would have to wait another y
ear or two, for higher yields, to have Passing Clouds judged beside its contemporaries. The American oak barrels were made by Schahingers, the coopers in Adelaide. I ordered them ‘no toast’, figuring there was no point in having new barrels then burning the insides of them. I didn’t know then that untoasted barrels were inclined to show a ‘pencil shavings’ character in the wine, thus in future years I ordered partial or full toast, depending on the wine to be put into them. The toasting released different and usually better flavours.
We had picked some pinot, too, but as I hadn’t ordered a barrel for it, it was resting in a food-grade plastic cherry barrel under CO2. We then ordered a 225-litre barrique of French oak for it. I was going to Adelaide for a wine sales tasting and arranged to pick up the barrel in my old 504 Peugeot. It wouldn’t fit in the boot so I said to the boys at the coopers, ‘This is a French car, it will fit in the back seat,’ which it did, with millimetres to spare as it went through the back door of the car.
So the pinot was put into the new French oak barrel, looking and tasting good, exhibiting a density of colour not usually seen in pinots. The temperature had run up quite high during fermentation, but I’d read somewhere that the Burgundians like a high but short peak in temperature near the end of ferment. It reached 29 degrees Celsius at 5 degrees baumé, so I wasn’t too concerned, and it had obviously done wonders for the colour extraction. It was almost 14 degrees baumé when picked so the resultant high alcohol would have aided extraction, too. (Baumé refers to the sugar level—the higher the baumé, the higher the sugar. See the glossary.)
The next year, 1981, promised about 20 tons or about 12,000 bottles, a predicted return of $120,000 gross which, after purchase of bottles, corks, labels, packaging, bottling costs and general expenses, including barrels, was close to our predicted income and should allow us a wage. At that stage we were living on rent from Sue’s house and her wage, my year being taken up with pruning, winemaking, maintaining the trellis and the property in general—and building a tasting room.
Birth of the tasting room
We had chosen a site across the creek from the house for a tasting room, but first a breakaway creek bed had to be filled in with a bulldozer, a flat area created for the car park below the tasting room, and a couple more trees removed. There was an old community hall at Logan 20-odd kilometres away for which the local populace could not afford to pay insurance and electricity bills. It was for sale and I got it at a very reasonable price, as few people wanted such quantities of second-hand building materials.
Of course we had to have a party to celebrate its demolition and I remember that it was a great party, with lots of dancing on the hardwood floor, polished smooth by so many village dances over the years.
The old building was lined with Baltic pine boards, the outside was rough-sawn grey box weatherboards, and the floor itself was four-inch by three-quarter-inch grey box, one of the world’s hardest timbers, not tongue and grooved, but butted together. Two friends from Melbourne, Bob Clegg and Marty Rogers, were keen to have some of that flooring so a deal was struck—we three would dismantle it, take all the building timber to Passing Clouds, their share would be the floor, less a little bit for me to use as the tasting room bar, and Lindsay Brownbill would lend us his farm truck for the transport. A couple of weekends later it was all done, the site cleared and Bob and Marty took their flooring to Melbourne. (Marty’s floor-sanding man found it the hardest wood he’d ever had to work and had to raise the price to compensate for the extra time and sandpaper used.)
I had submitted a plan for the tasting room and the building inspector, Stuart Miller, while inspecting the site for adequate termite protection, mentioned that someone was demolishing a shopfront in the main street of Inglewood which had dimensions almost identical to those of my proposed tasting room. Stuart was very keen to see this piece of 1860s craftsmanship preserved, knowing it was destined for the tip. I met the demolisher, Les Miller, who owned the shop, which he was clearing away in order to build a house on the site. The whole front had been covered with corrugated iron, crudely hammered into the woodwork of the frame with roofing nails, but the wood had not been badly split. Of course, some of the panes of glass in the multi-paned front window were broken.
It had been a funeral parlour, so double French doors allowed the coffins to be brought in and out, and there was another door that led to an office. It was a ghastly green and had many coats of paint underneath that, but it would be salvageable and the absolute bees-knees for the tasting room.
I said to Les, ‘How much do you want for the shopfront?’
‘How much are you offering?’ Les responded.
It flashed through my mind that I could get this for $50! ‘One hundred dollars,’ I replied.
Les looked at me incredulously. ‘You fair dinkum?’
‘Yep.’
Enthusiastically he shook my hand. ‘Done!’ he said.
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘and if you want to take the corrugated iron off it, do so carefully and ring me, and I’ll dismantle and collect it.’
And that’s when I became the laughing stock of Inglewood. ‘That winery bloke from Kingower paid a hundred bucks for Lessy Miller’s old shopfront, ha-ha!’
Anyway, I hired a car trailer, put the whole thing on it and took it back to join the growing pile of second-hand timber and tin that was going to become the Passing Clouds tasting room.
We had to change the interior design slightly but that didn’t matter at all; in fact, the extra setback in one wall gave the place more character. Stuart the building inspector was most helpful and he became, and still is, a friend. With his help I ordered roof trusses and radiata pine for the walls. The idea was to build a brand new frame and roof, then line it with the old Baltic pine boards and clad it with the old grey box weatherboards, topping the lot with the gloriously aged grey corrugated iron, thus adding, as my friend Bob Stinson said, ‘that veneer of antiquity’.
A grey nomad named Frank had been staying in the bush in a caravan. His dog had knocked the heater over and his caravan had burned to the axles, so he camped with us for a couple of weeks. It turned out that he was a retired carpenter, so he got another caravan and lived on our property, working with us for a few weeks until the frame and trusses were up. Between Philip Adam (friend, farmer, self-taught carpenter, sculptor and later grape-grower) and us, it didn’t take long. Then a local lad, Shane Walker, and I lined and clad it. I’d cut a large useless old rainwater tank into half lengthwise and propped it up on some concrete blocks. A bag of caustic soda and a few hundred gallons of water later, with a big fire under it, we had a huge caustic soda bath which effectively removed all the layers of paint from the old shopfront and exposed the beautiful old timber beneath. Soon it was washed off, put in place, broken panes of glass replaced and, with the timber oiled, it almost looked as if it had been there since 1864, although the sign on the glass window above the door says: Leith and Mackinnon; Vignerons; 1974.
For weeks after we would often see cars belonging to Inglewood people sneaking along the road near the entrance, hiding behind trees, to gain a peek at Les Miller’s old shopfront. Ha-ha, one up to me!
The Passing Clouds tasting room was completed in 1982 just in time for the release of the 1980 wine. It was necessary to have this facility to gain a tasting room licence, and this necessitated septic tanks, rainwater tanks, electricity, plumbing, toilets and so on, which were all passed at the final inspection. All that remained was for us to apply to the licensing court. Judge Camford at the Liquor Control Court duly approved our application in 1982 and we were ready to trade.
The ‘boutique bubble’
The year 1981, to be our second proper vintage, had produced an Indian summer. Baumés rocketed up and when the hydrometer was reading 14 degrees, I began to panic. The picking was planned for the following weekend but perhaps I couldn’t wait that long, so I rang around—and couldn’t get pickers. Some Bendigo friends, whom I’d telephoned, had organised to go to the
Avoca races but they called back later and said they’d cancel their social race day and pick for us instead. That’s friendship.
So instead of eating good food and drinking champagne at Avoca, my friends toiled in the Kingower sun. Thanks John, Greg and co.! You know who you are.
The 1981 therefore became a huge wine, concentrated and brooding, and a delight to drink even now. At the time of writing (2013) we have two bottles left, both given back to us by people who purchased them in 1983; they are waiting to be shared with them. But we know that the wine is good, very good. However, I was advised not to show it—my adviser said it would be considered too ripe. I wish I’d shown it anyway for it was, I think, the best wine I made that decade.
The benchmark for full-bodied red wines was of course Bordeaux, and the ’82 wines were made to achieve a more Bordeaux-like 12.5 per cent alcohol, although still matured in American oak. (Even if we had shown a preference for French oak, we could not have afforded it.)
And so in 1982 we began selling the 1980 vintage. It sold slowly but steadily, at a fair price, for at that stage the government had not realised that small ‘boutique’ wineries could be a cash cow almost ready for milking. Things were different then—there were so few boutique wineries, so few labels on shelves, and potential customers greeted any little write-up with interest. For instance, a short complimentary paragraph in the Nation Review would provoke enquiries about the wine and the shops would ring the appropriate winery.
In 1982 we bought an old ex-Telecom orange Toyota utility that, because of its long tray, had a great carrying capacity. So if we got a write-up on Saturday, I’d load twenty-six dozen on the Tuesday if the weather was fine, drive to Melbourne and call at the shops—Saleeba’s Victorian Wine Centre in North Melbourne, King and Godfree and Carlton Cellars in Carlton, Richmond Hill Cellars, and so on, until it was gone. When the orange ute was spotted outside the shop, usually somebody would come out with a trolley, grinning: ‘Saw the write-up, thought you’d be along soon, we’ll have two dozen (or three, or four).’