Passing Clouds

by Graeme Leith

  We invested money in a new press and two new variable capacity tanks, known cynically in the trade as ‘variable catastrophes’. This is because the moveable lids are sealed with a large tube like a giant clear bicycle tube, and if it inadvertently leaks and air gets in, the CO2 escapes unnoticed and the wine becomes oxidised and ruined. There’s a pressure gauge on them, beside the pump, and it’s a good idea to check them every couple of days—it’s cheap insurance. We had to build a concrete ramp and platforms for the new tanks. Then, having been fortunate enough to get, for virtually nothing, a truckload of experimental industrial-type concrete tiles, we painstakingly cut and laid them.

  Cameron and his friend Mick helped during school holidays, learning tiling and other skills. It was hard, dusty and unpleasant work. When finished, however, to us it was a thing of beauty, and at last I had a winery to be proud of. (The original winery, having been extended piecemeal according to the demands of the various vintages, was not a pleasant thing to behold. In fact, it was a corrugated-iron blight on the landscape, and I was glad to be rid of it. Most of it is now sheds at Bill Ricardo’s place.) We even built a sturdy catwalk 3 metres high which enabled us to work at that high level with pumps and also clean the tanks safely from above, although for stubborn tartrate deposits someone still had to crawl through the manhole and stand up inside on the floor of the tank to perform manual cleaning, aided by the trusty Karcher pressure cleaner, or ‘Karachi’ as it was dubbed by one of the student clowns who was doing part-time work with us. (The same evening he was blowing his French horn among the vines—Mozart, a hauntingly beautiful sound.)

  Later, we bought a barrel washer that fits onto the Karachi. It has a fixed spray-head that rotates two ways and effortlessly cleans the entire inside with hot or cold water as required. Before that, we had to raise a barrel on the forklift, bunghole down, and perform repeated washings with the Karcher spray lance. In 2002, our endearing and valuable assistant, Miwako, had done most of that work so she was delighted with the new toy the following year.

  In 2003 Miwako shared the barrel washing and other chores with Marian Fitzgerald, who had started working with us. I had done a Passing Clouds tasting at a venue in Sydney and was approached by a young woman who wanted to learn winemaking, work for a small winery and also study the subject academically. I was going to need an assistant after Miwako left and we needed more help during vintage, so Marian joined us. She was an articulate and intelligent team member who lived at Kingower for many months with her boyfriend Sam, and we all got on well together, particularly as she had a great sense of humour, of fun, part of the deal when you work at Passing Clouds. Sue was delighted, for she had another female companion whom she could lure from the winery for conversation and gossip.

  At about that time, towards the end of the vintage and after Miwako had returned to Japan, Marian was away visiting her parents. I had organised for two people to come and work at the winery. But I received a phone call from them; they were sorry but car trouble meant they were stuck in Ballarat, 140 kilometres away. They couldn’t come to work for me, so it looked as if I was in serious strife. I would have to transfer the contents of two fermenters to the press by bucket and then press it out, impossible without labour.

  I was contemplating my dilemma when I observed two cyclists approaching the winery, a very unusual circumstance, Kingower being so far off the beaten track. They happened to be a winemaking couple from Canada who were bicycling around Central Victoria looking at unirrigated vineyards and, as it turned out, would be delighted to bucket grapes into the press for me all day in exchange for a night’s accommodation. They stayed two nights. We worked hard and had a lot of fun, and enjoyed good meals and wine. We talked all the last night and the next day off they rode into the sunset. It seemed that the Angel had flown in again; they were certainly Heaven sent.

  As a postscript to that vintage, when we are bucketing into the press we usually put on some ‘bucketing music’; at that time it was Johnny Cash. Our Canadian friends must have decided to broaden my horizon a little, for a couple of months later I received a Merle Haggard tape from them. Thus for the next couple of vintages he shared the airwaves with Johnny. Marian Fitzgerald later incorporated the Oh, Brother Where Art Thou and Pulp Fiction soundtracks into the mix, and in 2004 Susie McDonald added Seaman Dan and Johnny Jones, cementing the eclecticism of the Passing Clouds bucketing experience.

  The perils of pinot

  In 1999, old friends of ours, Bruce and Mary Jones, who many years before had planted grapes at Upper Beaconsfield, had some grapes for sale at their lovely vineyard at Narre Warren East. Passing Clouds was not really in a position to buy them, so I shared the cost with two friends who were establishing wineries near Daylesford. We made the wine at the winery of one of those couples, Graeme and Jenny Ellender. The other couple was Ken and Miranda Jones, friends of Julien’s whom I had assisted with the purchase of a house and land, later to be known as ‘Big Shed’ wines.

  Winemaking was new to both couples but having planted vineyards they needed to learn quickly. The process was to be as simple as possible, with no intervention to affect the result, for I wanted a basic assessment of these grapes. So we threw them into a stainless-steel fermenter, added some yeast and foot-trod them twice daily until ferment was finished. They were then pressed and put into a barrel, there to remain for a year before bottling, without clarifying or filtering. A year later the result was impressive; the wine seemed to me to have more of the desirable ‘Burgundian’ character than Yarra Valley pinots I’d tasted.

  So we were hooked, and decided to go ahead with the scheme, sharing everything three ways. I thought of the name—Three Wise Men—and registered it as a business. In the next year we made the 2000 vintage, which was very good, but being split three ways was of insufficient quantity to enter in shows. If I recall correctly it was actually split four ways, for I think I shared my one-third with Bruce and Mary Jones, who had decided that, as well as growing the grapes, they would like to become involved in the finished wine.

  Thus, four wise men being one too many, we disbanded and a new partnership was formed between Passing Clouds and Woongarra, Bruce and Mary’s vineyard. The plan was that they would supply the grapes and I would make the wine; we would share the cost of barrels, while I’d pay for winemaking costs, bottling, corking and labelling. We would take half each of the finished product and sell it as we saw fit, for they were intending to develop a cellar door on their property.

  It seemed necessary to have some new barrels and we shared the cost of some new Australian barrels made by Heinrich coopers in Adelaide from French oak. I felt I had a good handle on the making of this variety by now. Over the two years I (we) had used several techniques in the production of this wine—pre-fermentation soak with and without sulphur, different yeasts, foot-stomped, destemmed, whole bunch, and mixtures of these techniques, all in their different barrels, being tasted and assessed during maturation.

  Ken and Miranda took their half of the previous vintage, and I put all of ours (or what was to become ours and Bruce and Mary’s) into sterile plastic containers and barrels and took it to Kingower for further settling and ultimately bottling, having gained a good idea of what I’d like to do with the next vintage. And by the time the 2001 vintage was ready, so was I, with what I reckoned was the best yeast, the new (previously mentioned) barrels and some good French oak barrels I had previously used for chardonnay, likewise Australian made. All that remained was to wait for a year in barrel and a further year in bottle to see if it had worked.

  At about that time my oldest son Sebastian heard of a married couple, Robert and Vanessa McKernan, who had a good little vineyard at Coldstream, an elevated site in the Yarra Valley. We met them and, convinced of their integrity, skills and thoroughness, arranged to buy their forthcoming crop. Thus began a mutually beneficial business relationship that lasted until 2008 when parts of the Yarra Valley were declared phylloxera-infected areas and, although there
was no phylloxera at the McKernans’ place, we could no longer transport their grapes to Kingower.

  The friendship remains, however. Robert, being an engineer, had done the computations for our winery catwalk in 2002–03 and would always bring a seafood feast when they came to collect wine and taste the new batch. He was always keen to help in the production of their own wine, the grapes for which come from their vines, pruned by Vanessa. Vanessa’s sandwiches are always a triumph, and their combined cleaning-up skills on the Queen’s Birthday wine release are legendary.

  Another pinot noir irony is that, of all our range, the Passing Clouds Coldstream Pinot is the wine our distributors find easiest to sell; they are constantly asking us for more than we can supply. The 2002 was rated above the Coldstream Hills Reserve at the 2004 Melbourne Wine Show.

  But a more delicious moment was at hand, for at the 2003 Victorian Wines Show, held at Seymour, the Three Wise Men was entered as well as my Passing Clouds wines, so I was competing against myself as well as everybody else! I had labelled wine in the new barrels as ‘Reserve’, supposing it would be better than the remainder in the other barrels, and I entered it in the pinot noir section. When I sent the samples to James Halliday for tasting, I had written in my winemaking notes that the only difference between the ‘standard’ wine and the Reserve was the oak barrels used. In his write-up he questioned this, suggesting that there was another factor involved. Years later, to my embarrassment, I read the vintage diary and realised that the Reserve had been picked a week later, so was a little riper, something that had not escaped Halliday but had escaped the winemaker!

  Bruce Jones was with me at Seymour and we sat down on a bench, frantically thumbing through the results sheet, not knowing where to look first. Then, having found the appropriate class, fearing to look up to the winners, I disciplined myself to start at the bottom. We were not in the also-rans, but we were not in the Bronzes, either. My eyes crept up the printed lists, heart thumping, into the Silvers—top-scoring silver, Three Wise Men . . . Yes, and incredibly, in the Golds and second from the top, Three Wise Men Reserve!

  I punched Bruce on the knee so hard it must have hurt him. He was not as excited as I was; it was almost as if he had expected it. I was elated, ecstatic, over the moon!

  Once more, we were pipped for the trophy by half a point. This time it went to Lindsay McCall of Paringa—to be expected, as he is, if medals are anything to go by, Victoria’s leading pinot noir maker. Lindsay uses barrels made in France; I was using barrels made in Australia. One can’t help wondering, for it’s generally accepted that French barrels are usually made from better quality or better matured timber, and all serious pinot winemakers use them.

  But what a result! It should mean, among other things, that we should have a wine in the $50 retail bracket. We might even make some money at last. The Passing Clouds Pinot was a top-scoring bronze, so we had four medals from four wines, three of them pinots, plus a top bronze for the ever reliable Graeme’s Blend shiraz cabernet, against all those people making all those pinots! All those winemakers who travelled the world attending pinot noir seminars, all those who went to France each year to unlock the secrets of pinot noir, all those teams of winemakers employed by companies who would throw as much money as was required into their search for the holy grail, and the ageing boy from the bush, maker of cabernet and shiraz, Graeme Leith, had won the second top gold and the top silver medal!

  It was heady stuff, indeed. David von Salden, then winemaker at Waterwheel, said years ago when we won the gold for the ’82 Shiraz Cabernet, ‘That is the stuff that dreams are made of!’ And so to me, on that day, it was!

  Sadly, the dream went sour a few years later when Bruce and Mary, having trouble selling their half of the wine, discounted it, despite my pleas, thus damaging the reputation of the label and, in some quarters, mine as well, for now wine that I was selling at $20 wholesale could be bought online for $20 retail! So that was the end of that. All that work wasted; I had done quite a bit of sales work in Sydney and had built a trusted clientele for the wine. I sent their next batches of already-made wine down to Bruce and Mary, and we had no trouble selling our share of it, labelled as Passing Clouds Reserve, over the following years and at a good price, for they were wonderful wines.

  The year 2004 looked like being a good vintage. We would have fruit from all over the place, apart from our own crop which was restricted due to encroaching drought. There was again shiraz and cabernet from Wedderburn, and shiraz from Axedale, which had certainly proved its worth. I was first asked to make wine from there in 2002, for the directors of the company wanted some wine made for their own purposes and, as their previous contract had not been concluded happily, it was suggested that I should do it. I agreed. It was another vineyard from which to make wine, always an exciting challenge, and contract winemaking puts a bit of money in the bank more quickly than waiting for your own wines to mature in barrel and bottles before sale.

  It was successful. I made some for them and some for me, until the company changed hands, after which we purchased for our requirements. There were some tense moments with the first 2004 batch, which was machine harvested. The magnets on the harvester that pluck any foreign ferrous metal object from the picked fruit must not have been working because heavy-duty vineyard staples came through the crusher and into our beautiful must pump below, seizing it when a staple jammed between the housing and the lovely sculptural form of the stainless-steel lobe that rotated and forced the must into the hose and then into the vats. We reversed the pump and fished it out, now a grotesquely shaped staple, leaving a scar on our beautiful machine, but before long another staple followed.

  Brian White, the vineyard manager, who had stayed behind to help us before collecting his bins and returning to Axedale, rang his crew to inform them that they must have a problem with the magnets on the harvester, but it was too late for our batch and we had to painstakingly sort through the bunches on the slide between the bin tipper and the crusher, finding a couple more in the process.

  As well, we had fruit from Zonnebeke, 5 kilometres down the road from Kingower, and some from another grower nearby, Richard McHardy at Wiela. Marian and Miwako had worked the previous vintage but they were both gone. Miwako was working at a winery in Japan. Marian and her boyfriend Sam, who had come to live with us and spent six months in the writer’s garret above the garage while attempting the great Australian novel, had both returned to Sydney.

  But the Angel flew in again. Susie McDonald, my wife Julien’s niece, lived down the road, opposite Phil and Ann Adam at Zonnebeke in Ross and Dorothy Reading’s old place, a house on 40 or so acres, and she used to come up to visit. She and her boyfriend Dominique were both involved with cooking and catering, and had cooked the last Queen’s Birthday meal at Passing Clouds, a traditional thing we do to coincide with the release of the new wines. (The ‘Ugly Uncles’ come out to sing and to play their great music, we have wine tastings and barbecue fires, plus we serve 120 or so meals cooked in ‘the big pan’. This is actually the cast iron end of an old boiler, saucer-shaped and able to cook an enormous amount of food. I think they did a cassoulet in 2003. I’ve never met a chef who has laid eyes on that pan and not wanted to cook something in it.)

  Susie McDonald was a qualified Chinese medicine practitioner and needed a workplace. As it happened, Sue Mackinnon and I had bought a house over the road from the Kingower vineyard, directly opposite the entrance to the tasting room. It was a small place, about twenty years old, that Una Richardson had lived in until her departure to a better place in 2003. The bank agreed to stake us and we bought it for about $40,000 at auction. We were motivated to buy it because the idea of ‘ferals’ moving in did not appeal. There were some people in the area who tended to drive around in old V8s with bad exhaust systems during the night, then sleep most of the day at each other’s houses if the recreational medicine had overwhelmed them. They also had a habit of driving the cars into the ground and leaving the expired car
casses at their houses. We couldn’t have that at the entrance to our beautiful tasting room.

  Anyway, the house across the road had been virtually empty for about twelve months and fitted the bill perfectly for Susie. We had the floors sanded and lacquered and some nice lighting put in. Susie installed the massage table and ran her practice from there for a couple of years. As her hands began giving her increasing trouble, her thoughts turned to winery work. Being an asthmatic she thought she could not work in a winery: some years earlier, when visiting a winery nearby, she had inhaled some sulphur fumes when sulphur was added to some white grapes being crushed. This is actually quite a hazardous practice because such fumes can be toxic. But after setting her mind at rest that Passing Clouds had no need of such methods, she decided to give the winery a go, and she took to it like a duck to water—except for eating and sleeping and emailing, for the whole vintage Susie was hardly ever out of the winery.

  Winemaking is very much like large-volume cooking. Provided the basic foodstuffs are of top quality and everything is kept clean, the timing of all subsequent operations becomes critical, and perhaps that’s the difference between a great chef and an ordinary one—and so with winemaking. Susie fitted neatly into the system and we became virtually a three-person team—Susie, Bill and me. Despite the age difference of about thirty years between Susie and me, we worked well together, developed a rapport and enjoyed each other’s company, often carrying on like teenagers. This was just as well because it was at about this time that my wife suggested I leave Daylesford, so I appreciated support.