by Graeme Leith
The full-bodied reds—the Graeme’s Blend, the Angel and the shiraz—are not labelled, capsuled and cartoned until they get closer to the point of sale some years down the track. The exception is the ever-increasing amount of screw-capped wine, the bottles of which are laid down on specially designed plastic nests to avoid damage to the capsules.
It is an accounting nightmare, but we’re not here for the ‘quick quid’; we’re here to make, mature and finally sell wine—wine as good as we can make it! Indeed, it could honestly be said that we’re not here for any sort of quid at all. As James Halliday once wrote: ‘A winery is a black hole into which you continually shovel money.’
On the rare occasions when people ask me about the financial aspects of the business, I cheerfully tell them: ‘We don’t make money, we make wine.’ This is true. Sue and I have never paid ourselves more than a labourer’s wage and, had I not sold my Melbourne house years ago to finance Passing Clouds, and had Sue not sold an investment property she was paying off, we would have been financially better off than we were as wine producers. But then we wouldn’t have had the wonderful and exhilarating rollercoaster ride that the vineyard and winery took us on.
Sue was very proud of our achievements, that we had built it all from virtually nothing. Some criticised Sue’s brother Hamish for not giving Sue money from Kaladbro, the Mackinnon family property on the Victorian-South Australian border. I once overheard a conversation between Sue and one of her visiting friends.
‘You should get money from your family. Your brother lives like an Eastern potentate and you can’t afford decent clothes!’
Sue replied, ‘I’ve never done anything for Kaladbro. I don’t need their money, they do.’ And, indeed, Passing Clouds became better known than Kaladbro; no longer did people say to Hamish, ‘Oh, you’re one of the Mackinnons from the Western district.’ It was more likely to be: ‘Oh, your sister is a partner in Passing Clouds, isn’t she?’ However, she apparently did receive a small stipend from the family but I never knew what she did with it; I guess it went into her ‘Going to Greece money’ bank account which she used mainly for charity donations, though once she went into a syndicate with friends and bought a racehorse! Hamish at one stage managed to talk her into mortgaging her house for Kaladbro; perhaps that was why she thought they were poverty stricken.
Corks—Portuguese roulette!
We calculate the litreages and order the appropriate labels, capsules and corks. We used natural corks for many years but when I found myself referring to bottling time as ‘Portuguese roulette’—for about 5 per cent of the bottles would be cork tainted and therefore spoiled to a greater or lesser extent, from having a slight unpleasant odour and taste, to being foul-tasting and undrinkable—we, with many others in the industry, sought alternative closures. It is more than annoying and frustrating to make the wine carefully and conscientiously, nurturing it through its various rackings, treating it like a baby, only to end up with about 5 per cent rendered unacceptable for drinking. This travesty is promoted by whacking pieces of cork bark into the bottles. Unfortunately, some of these corks are contaminated by a mouldy smell, 2,4,6-Trichloroanisole (TCA).
This travesty would be, of course, unacceptable with any other food product. Imagine what people would think if 5 per cent of their favourite cola had to be thrown away! It is as well that the Portuguese don’t make brake pads for automobiles, or artificial valves for human hearts, where the 5 per cent failure rate could be more than embarrassing. They’re lucky that cork taint does not kill!
According to the Portuguese the actual source of cork taint is still, amazingly, open to speculation. But the problem is certainly mould that exists in some of the bark before it is punched out into corks. I don’t know how the Portuguese can get away with claiming they haven’t worked it out yet! When a beagle dog at an airport can detect an apple in a suitcase or some cryopacked marijuana in a handbag, and the cork producers can’t detect a foul odour in their own product, you have to wonder, don’t you? You could write a PhD thesis on it. I wish someone would!
We have used screw caps since 2004, and also another product called Diam—still cork, but ground fine—bombarded with CO2 in an autoclave that removes the taint. This cork powder, for it is apparently little more than that, is then moulded and compressed into a cork shape and colour. You then have a natural cork product that has no taint and, because of its uniformity, is less prone to leakage. For some years we have found them to be spot-on (so far, so good). My only regret is that the Portuguese are getting some money out of it, having cost us so much over the years. At one stage our American marketers asked for screw caps but the next year they wanted cork, as the fashion had changed, so we use Diam for them always.
Cork taint is really expensive for the industry. Often the consumer doesn’t recognise or identify cork taint but rather assumes that a wine is badly made, or is just not nice to drink, and will not be buying that one again, thank you very much. And this, when the winemaker’s only sin was using natural cork!
This is the reason, of course, that natural cork closures have largely been replaced with screw caps. The French are not immune from the curse, either—many wine waiters both here and in France have had to pour some very expensive French wine down the sink because of cork taint!
Bottles and labels
As bottling approaches, Diams and/or screw caps are ordered some months in advance, and these often have to be printed. You might have to order 30,000 to 50,000 to get a good price. Labels have to be printed for the new vintage year, alcohol levels established so that they can be stated on the label, and any other additions included. For example, ‘fish products used’ if isinglass (a dried product made from the swim bladder of the sturgeon) has been used for fining, or ‘egg products used, traces may remain’ if egg whites have been used for fining and tannin removal.
Bottles are ordered by the tens of thousands and are kept out of the sun even though they are plastic-wrapped when they arrive and washed by us before filling. Once we had a lot of bottles that were badly made—misshapen—and we had to abort the bottling until the men in suits came up from Melbourne and tried to get out of it as cheaply as they could, even offering to sell us the bodgie bottles at half-price. I told them, among other things, that I couldn’t see the logic in that.
But usually it goes well, although in 2004 we had two boxes of Diams go missing. When they didn’t arrive the carrier tracked one to Adelaide and a week later the other box to Brisbane, having a holiday in the sun—very difficult to bottle at Kingower when 5000 of your corks are in Brizzie! Susie brought the message back from headquarters that they’d been located. I rang to ask Sue what had gone wrong and, with typical Sue wit, she quoted from a Tom Lehrer song of the 1950s: ‘I make ze rockets go up, but where zey come down, is not my department, said Werner von Braun.’
The operators of the bottling caravans have become friends over the years, but none of the original operators is still in operation. Even the Victorian chief Ian Matthews has sold his interest in the bottling line and now works as an adviser with the new company that took it over. However, he continued to visit Sue, always bringing a bottle of Sauternes; after dinner he would sit on the end of her bed and they would talk for hours while they sipped the unctuous nectar. If they didn’t finish the bottle, he’d cook her breakfast in the morning and serve the remainder with it, insisting that it was the perfect accompaniment to that meal, before going back to work in Melbourne.
The hours are long and hard for the operators. When bottling or labelling for us is completed, they clean up, pack their gear, hook the 3-ton caravan onto their huge American utilities and go off to the next job—Rutherglen, Mornington Peninsula or wherever. Our loyal bottling crew—four for a bottling and five for a labelling—were locals. Kim and Jude used to come with their baby girls, who are now both mothers, and Kim and Jude still work with us, sometimes with their daughters Shae Maree and Zoe. The Collies, Ian and Barbara, were always there, as were Bill
Ricardo for reliable backbone and Rohan the Ratbag to provide constant levity. The whole team was loyal and devoted to Passing Clouds, and if one couldn’t work for some reason or other they’d find someone else to fill in. If we needed another couple of hours so that the operator could finish and move on to the next job, they always voted to work on even though they were almost exhausted after handling up to 20,000 bottles. They are the salt of the earth and we could not have done it without them.
In earlier days, before we could afford all the concrete required to use a forklift, we used to borrow a tractor with a fork attached. It was a terrifying thing to use, because from the glass-louvred cabin it wasn’t possible to see the end of the forks, and we were glad to dispense with ‘Mad Max’ when we poured concrete slabs and could use a conventional forklift. Unfortunately, bottling often has to be done during vintage and that can mean that a winery crew and bottling crew have to work from the same location. That calls for some fine-tuning. We try to pick a lull in vintage proceedings but that’s difficult when you are looking many weeks ahead, so sometimes we get caught with a forklift serving two masters, the picking crew and the bottling crew. When that happens, it makes for interesting times!
Pitfalls and pleasures
The 2004 vintage was the last really substantial vintage before the drought tightened its grip on us. In 2005 we bought more grapes as our own crop diminished, and an even greater proportion in 2006, and so on until we felt we had to call a halt to grape purchases in 2009. For, instead of growing $50,000 worth of grapes we were buying them in, and quality was becoming the major issue as our neighbouring vineyards fell victim to the drought.
We were still buying good quality fruit from the Adam family at nearby Rheola and some great shiraz from Axedale, located between Bendigo and Heathcote, and so kept the Graeme’s Blend to a high quality standard. But the drought persisted, debilitating the vines at Kingower to the extent that the trunks on the harder soils were splitting and withering, and some vines were actually dying. By the end of the 2007–08 season, it was obvious that sections of our Kingower vineyard should be removed—it was simply not worth pruning, spraying and netting the remaining vines.
The bird prevention measures alone are always demanding, but the predations of kangaroos are becoming annually more troublesome, too. Their numbers used to be controlled by amateur shooters, as undesirable as that may be. But they were, and are, protected and it has become increasingly difficult for the young men to gain a shooter’s licence unless they live on a farm and/or can establish that the firearm will be used to control pests. In 2006 I took to doing a kangaroo patrol before bedtime and again at 3 a.m. but they kept coming; there was nothing to eat in the bush. Carcasses on the road became more common, and at present cars that have run into kangaroos are the mainstays of the rural panel-beating industry.
The Musk vineyard, despite being deprived of that best of fertilisers—the master’s foot upon the soil—has been producing more fruit annually, although the cost in terms of labour and stress are great. We kept a tractor and spray unit and slasher at Musk, but as I could no longer live in nearby Daylesford it meant a 100-kilometre trip each way from Kingower to spray or slash at Musk. We didn’t have a proper shed there for many years, just a shipping container; the rest of it had to wait until the niceties of property settlement had been completed.
For all that, we hope and cheerfully anticipate that the 2013s live up to the great expectations we have of them in the barrel, and that we can continue to get excellent grapes for our big reds.
What the critics are saying
Here’s a selection of reviews of our 2012 wines.
The Angel 2012 ‘Cabernet cannot get much more elegant than this without losing its mojo; the finesse of this wine is magical, as is its purity and balance. Enough to please a pinot drinker.’ 96 points – James Halliday
Graeme’s Blend Shiraz Cabernet 2012 ‘Yet another major success from 2012; blackcurrant and blackberry fruit play tag with each other on the bouquet and palate alike, the oak integrated and balanced, the gently savoury tannins doing no more than providing structure.’ 94 points – James Halliday
Macedon Syrah 2012 ‘Standout wine in a bracket of Victorian Shiraz (or Syrah, if you are so inclined). Blackcurrant, cracked black pepper, violet perfume, grilled meat, touch of vanilla. Medium bodied, clean acidity, lovely silky tannin, some raspberry peeping through and a fresh finish. Delightful!’ 94 points – Gary Walsh; Trophy – Best Shiraz, Macedon Ranges Wine Show
Kingower Vintage 2004
Diary of a typical year
by Graeme Leith (with Susie McDonald)
Tuesday, 23 March
The day dawns bright and clear. The Burdetts’ fruit seems to be ready. It is grown at Bridgewater on Loddon, 15 kilometres away from Kingower. We buy some of the grapes outright and others we make up for the Burdetts to sell under their own label, Old Loddon Wines. The grapes are always good—Russell is a skilled and conscientious viticulturist and his wife Jill is a great supporter and organiser. Our tests show what experience has taught us is the correct level of ripeness for their varieties, merlot and cabernet franc, both at about 13 degrees baumé. We’ve been expecting the Zonnebeke sauvignon blanc to come in first but it stopped ripening at its predicted rate, probably due to a little stress from the heat, so it’s the Burdetts’ merlot and cab franc that are the first cabs off the rank.
Their first trailer-load arrives at about lunchtime. We forklift them onto the bin tipper, start the crusher, and with a person each side of the bin tipper slide, armed with rakes to drag the bunches down, we’re away! Vintage proper has commenced!
Two tons go through the crusher uneventfully and the must is pumped into Jill and we make up the yeast culture right away—the sooner it’s fermented the better.
The afternoon pick usually comes in at about 5.30 p.m. The grapes will be too warm from being on the vines in the sun, and we will leave them to cool down overnight because to add the yeast at this temperature would create an explosive situation—it would take off like a bushfire and be as hard to control. We don’t like using Jill as a fermenter for it’s hard to drag the pips and skins out of her when the free-run wine has been removed. She has a cooling jacket on her, useful for fermentation, and it looks as if we’re going to need a lot of fermenters fairly quickly as, apart from the sauvignon blanc, everything is ripening fast in this hot weather.
A quick motorbike trip 5 kilometres to Phil and Anne at Zonnebeke and a tedious picking of single berries for a 300-berry sample taken for baumé across the vineyard reveals, on return to our laboratory, that it is now ready to go. As Phil and Anne have friends staying with them as house guests and potential pickers, they are ready to start picking, so we set it up for the morning. Phil brings his trailer up while we’re crushing the last of the Burdett merlot and takes some half-ton boxes and bags to pick into.
We clean up the winery and get ready for the whites. We’re often not sure how we will make this until we see the fruit come in, then we have to decide on whole-bunch pressing, crush/ destem, or crush only into the press. If healthy, the stems or stalks don’t detract from the quality of the wine and during pressing the stalks assist in draining. Then we add sulphur, to avoid oxidation spoilage, and also some specialised enzymes to assist separation of the solids and juice and, later, clarification. Whichever way it goes, we are going to need the cooling machine hooked up to one of the large tanks, with a cooling jacket—either Silver or Gold. The cabernet franc has cooled down to an acceptable 17 degrees Celsius and is now ready for yeast inoculation so that the cooler comes off Silver and goes on to Gold.
The Burdetts’ afternoon pick fruit comes in at about 5 p.m. We unload the bins into the winery with the evaporative cooler on; we will crush them in the morning when they’ve lost some of their heat load.
Wednesday, 24 March
Comes the morning and we decide to crush the Burdetts’ fruit without destemming, with a good dose of sulphur straight into
the press through the big 100-millimetre hose, and away we go. There is still some warmth in the grapes in the middle of the bin, but it will average out okay. Refill the press and begin immediately to press out and pump into Gold, under cover of inert C02 to prevent oxidation, and when the level rises high enough in the tank to be influenced by the cooling jacket, we set the gelati machine into action.
‘Woolly’ Graham comes in with some pinot noir grapes from his block up the road. The Grahams have been growing grapes for us for many years and, although Kingower pinot noir fruit is now passé for pinot (we’ve moved to cool-climate fruit for our pinots), we’ll take it and make it into rosé. It’s ripe, so they get the go-ahead. (‘Woolly’ has had a cancer scare and chemotherapy, so has become bald. The local wags now call him ‘Shawn’.)
Bill Humphreys comes in with samples of his merlot and cab franc and it’s ripe, too, so he also gets the go-ahead. It’s all about to happen—fast. We’ve cleared the skins and stalks from the first sauv blanc pressing and the second press is draining when the Burdett merlot comes in. We wash and clean up the bin tipper slide and crusher and put them all through, pumping the must across to Beryl, who is soon full. There’s a bit too much for Beryl, so half a ton also goes into Francine.
We have a quick dinner then it’s back to the winery to clean up in preparation for the morning, leaving Beryl to cool down a bit overnight.
Thursday, 25 March
The morning reveals the sauvignon blanc in Gold is down to 5 degrees Celsius; we’ll leave it at that with the sulphur, but wrap it in an insulating blanket of foil-backed mat. Jill is bopping along nicely, starting to ferment well, but we have to keep an eye on her temperature. We add the yeast to Beryl and are ready for the first batch of the Humphreys’ merlot, which comes in at about 11 a.m. and is crushed, destemmed and pumped into Claudia. We’ve just got that done when the Grahams’ pinot arrives and we decide we’re not going to have time to muck around making rosé, so we crush and destem it—it’ll be a Kingower cleanskin pinot. Their cab franc is coming in next; they’re picking it already.