Passing Clouds

by Graeme Leith

  Thursday, 1 April

  Richard McHardy’s shiraz keeps arriving—he only has a small trailer so he brings it one half-ton box at a time. I don’t know about the logistics at the other end but it works for him and for us as well, for we unload his box, he goes back with an empty one, and we crush when we’ve got 2 tons or so. This enables Susie and me to fine, with egg white, the laid-out barrels of last year’s shiraz. Our big tanks are all going to be spoken for, so we rack each barrel off lees (sediment) and into a clean one with the beaten egg whites and restack them.

  The truck arrives with new barrels and Bill gets them off, but we find that there are only ten instead of eleven. The forklift is running erratically so I get Bill to clean the spark plugs while I get on the ‘dog and bone’. We’ve got some pickers coming tomorrow and Vanessa Buck is arriving soon for her annual working pilgrimage to Passing Clouds; we’ll need her again this year. The cooling unit (the ‘gelati machine’) is working flat-out as we move its cooling coil from tank to tank to control temperatures. In the old days during a hot spell I would sleep in the garage (for that was what the old winery then was) and set the alarm for every two hours or so. One night Halley’s Comet went over when we had a houseful of pickers, and they all got up at some stage through the night to have a look at it and thought that while they were up they might as well go to the toilet. The pressure pump for refilling the toilet cistern did that thing that pressure pumps noisily and incessantly do, cutting in and out, and it was in the winery shed, very close to my ‘bed’ on the floor, so I didn’t need the alarm clock on that best-forgotten night.

  Dinner tonight—flathead that Vanessa has brought up, as arranged, with Susie’s special vegetables and a couple of bottles of reisling that I ‘home made’ from a few vines we have here. It’s surprisingly good. And I then spoil us with a bottle of the 2001 Gold Medal Three Wise Men Pinot, which is spectacular and provides a unique experience to some—not everybody gets to drink gold medal pinot noir.

  The weather report tells me there’s a gale warning for Port Phillip Bay—therefore strong winds at Musk. Can’t be helped. As Jesse said to me recently, ‘Don’t worry about anything that you can’t change, Dad.’

  Friday, 2 April

  Beautiful day dawns bright and clear, a good team ready to go. Hugo, family friend and uni student, came up with his mother Mary last night. He’s a good strong lad and also has a killer wit which endears him to me—a good addition to the team. We’ve got Kim, Jude, Barb, Ian and Rohan the human gramophone out there picking. Hugo and Vanessa have dropped the picking bins out and then they’re away on the creek block shiraz.

  Some years ago I had a lovely young Englishman named William Wolseley working here and staying with me. He was obsessed with pinot noir, and while pruning, whenever he’d find a gap in the shiraz, he’d stick a pinot cutting in. Against all odds they prospered and so when the first load of grapes arrived it was disconcerting to see some very overripe pinot bunches among the shiraz. My first inclination was to remove them, a time-consuming business on such a busy day. I think I’d read somewhere that the legendary Hunter Valley winemaker Maurice O’Shea had once made a wine, later to become famous, from this unlikely combination of pinot and shiraz, so we left them in. William left Kingower in 1983 with his car carrying the canoe he’d made in the tasting room on the roof rack and the boot full of shiraz and pinot cuttings, to establish his own vineyard, which he did, on the Bellarine Peninsula. I haven’t been there to visit him yet, but I will!

  I’ve got to go to Wedderburn to check the ripeness of Beau Foster’s fruit—it’s a 30-kilometre trip so I jump on the motorbike. The fruit’s good, and ripe enough, so I give him the go-ahead; he’s got pickers ready. Coming back I open the throttle and, as the speed rises, something strange and frightening happens—at 160 kilometres per hour there’s a bang, a shock and the bloody bike starts violently shaking its head. I am going to die. My life flashes before me—all the close shaves I’ve had on motorbikes or in cars—and now they’re going to scrape my remains off this lonely road. Then as suddenly as it started, the violent shaking stops. I am to live!

  I halt the bike and examine the wheels and brakes. All is in order, so I slowly ride back to the point where it happened and there’s the culprit, a pothole about the shape and size of a large pudding basin.

  This motorcycle is a Honda 250 CBR. It is a street racer and accelerates at a phenomenal rate, but is not a country-road high-speed tourer and it doesn’t have a shock absorber for the steering. Cameron (who is overseas right now) and I more or less share the bike. He was living in the city at the time when I got it and, as his work was about 5 kilometres away, he needed something that would accelerate from 0 to 100 in nanoseconds to get to work and open up the bar. When Cameron returned from overseas, I said to him, ‘Cam, this thing’s a widow-maker on country roads, we’ve got to sell it to somebody in the city.’ But he didn’t believe me and it was only when he hit a bump mid-corner at high speed and had a similar experience that he actually agreed. And so we sold it.

  Soon Beau Foster arrives from Wedderburn with his huge trailer loaded to the gunwales with shiraz, most of which had been picked last night. There’ll be a few more loads before the weekend is over. Some cab sauv comes in from Bill and Margaret Humphreys from their vineyard just down the road. He’s a good operator and I don’t have to worry about his fruit quality. He’s nicknamed Billy Merlot for that is what he mostly grows, with some cab franc and some cab sauv, part of which we buy and some of which we make up for his own label, Hallmark.

  The weighing machine begins to give crazy readings. These electronic devices are anarchic and evil sometimes, and the bane of my life. This one, I’m beginning to conclude, only works with a fully charged battery. If I had another battery charger I could probably hook it up semi-permanently, but the battery charger is required to top up the bin tipper battery.

  So the shiraz keeps pouring in—it is load, unload, tip them onto the chute, rake them into the crusher, crush, destem, change the hose over to the next fermenter, get rid of the stalks. It seems to go on ad infinitum and always with the added spice that something might break down any time!

  Bruce Jones rings, wants to pick Wednesday but will confirm tomorrow. Presumably he needs to organise pickers—he uses the Cambodian crew, who turn up by the white van full and are generally considered more reliable than part-time Aussies, and everybody probably needs them at the same time. He’s expecting about 6.5 tons of pinot for the Three Wise Men.

  Robert McKernan rings from Coldstream; he, too, would like to pick soon but the baumé on his pinot is not quite high enough for us—a compromise might have to be reached. He’s got a whole season’s work hanging on the vines, increasingly vulnerable to mildew as it’s too late to spray them again because we are well into the withholding period.

  The team is still working like a German band. I offer Susie a couple of days off but she won’t take them, thank the Lord. Bruno, ever the retriever, appears with a pair of panties in his mouth; nobody seems to know where they came from.

  Saturday, 3 April

  All still happening, the roar of the crusher the dominant sound in the winery—our fruit, Richard McHardy’s, Beau Foster’s and a bit from the Humphreys. Weighing machine still playing up. Finally get chardonnay racked from Bertha into barrel ready for Zonnebeke.

  Sunday, 4 April

  An 8.30 start for pickers. Bloody weighing machine playing up. Okay, machine, if you like high voltage, I’ll give you some! I measure the voltage that the battery charger gives out, it’s 18 volts, much higher than the 12 volts that the machine is supposed to require, but I hook it up direct to the charger and it works perfectly.

  PS (and for the rest of vintage): I am buying some grapes from that really good vineyard at Axedale. I know it’s good for I have made some contract wine from there for the owners. Stefano de Pieri and I have decided to make a wine to be sold exclusively at his restaurant and I reckon these grapes will fit the
bill. A large wine company tasted some of the wine I made, did a trial batch of their own last year, and are now purchasing the bulk of the grapes for one of their prestige labels. The fruit is machine-harvested and, as they’re not going to crank up the machine for our pathetic few tons, we’ll have to take ours at the same time, so I’ve got to ring Vinni the vineyard manager soon.

  We start off by working through last night’s backlog of grapes. Vanessa working like a Trojan. Susie and I start on emptying Silver into the airbag press, never an easy job. The big pump has to serve two masters, the press and the crusher, so the crushing has to wait a while. Things are starting to look a bit frantic when the Angel flies in to help: Richard’s picking crew has been reduced to four so that’ll take some pressure off. (There must have been a big party last night at Korong Vale, where his pickers live.)

  Bill comes in after lunch, having returned from shopping with wife Marion who doesn’t drive, and brings with him a new battery charger—our worries should be over! Susie’s neck is bad; she didn’t have much sleep last night but she elects to stay, so we rack T2 to barrel and the balance into Jill to give us room for the Angel Blend and we’re all fined and cleaned up by 6.30 p.m. Yeast into Silver, now with about 4000 litres in her. As we move barrels out, we put Olivia in place ready for the next onslaught. Bruce and Robert both phone again, worried about ripeness.

  Oldest son Sebastian calls me about coming up to Kingower on Friday. He usually comes up to help his old school mate, Mark Gilmore from next door, during vintage. It gives him a chance to catch up and work with his other Kingower friends and stay with his old ‘Da’. I look forward to this. It’ll be good to spend some time with him. Youngest son Jesse rings; I had called earlier to ask Julien if she’d take Jesse out to Musk to check nets. Jess reports one rip repaired and birds driven out. This might be so.

  Monday, 5 April

  Trying to talk to Vinni on the phone with Hugo’s licorice sticking my teeth together. The panties that Bruno found had disappeared but now are returned. We wash them and hang them on their stick for Susie’s friend Domenique to see; for some reason they seem to annoy him so we keep doing it. He brings a sandwich along for Susie’s lunch but doesn’t comment. Marian, who used to work and live with us with her boyfriend Sam while he wrote the Great Australian Novel, has driven from Cobram to help us. Great to see Maz again. She has brought with her a huge zucchini frittata thing, which is delicious and so doesn’t last long. Susie and I keep nipping over to the house fridge and eating large slices of it while the other’s back is turned.

  Vinni rings back to say he thinks Monday next week will be okay for our shiraz. If we manage a big pressing on Sunday, we should be clear—we’ve got a lot of ferments going now and some should be ready to come out by the weekend. Bruce Jones calls to change picking to Thursday—grapes should arrive at 8 p.m. in a temperature-controlled truck. Robert McKernan rings, very disconsolate and verging on panic; the latest weather report is very bad for Yarra Valley and he doesn’t think the grapes will hold out over Easter. If it does rain heavily as forecast, then the sugar levels will drop and we’ll be worse off than we are now, so I suggest a compromise: pick two-thirds before Easter and leave one-third on the vines in the hope of a bit of Indian Summer that we often get at this time of the year. We’d better go for it. Can he pick Friday and Saturday? Do Cambodians observe Good Friday?

  I do some calculations: we’ll need more fermentation vessels than we have, so I ring and order a batch of Fermenta bags, large plastic bags in which wine can be fermented. They only hold a half-ton each, but we’ll need them, and I’ve always wanted to try making some pinot in them. They can apparently produce good results; you simply fill them up with must, or even whole bunches if they’ll fit through the orifice, add some yeast culture, screw the lid on with its tube sticking out the top to allow the carbon dioxide to escape and no oxygen to enter, then leave it to its own devices. If you want some post-fermentation maceration, then you just leave the must in the bag for as long as required. There’s even a cooling jacket on the outer skin through which cold water can be circulated if needed.

  One of Susie’s patients, a local farmer, has hurt his back, so even though she has told people that the clinic is closed for the duration of vintage she takes pity on him and nips over the road to her clinic to treat him. Vinni rings back from Axedale; the large company has done its tests on the Axedale fruit and insists that they be harvested Friday and Saturday, so that means ours, too. Susie returns an hour after she left to find that all has changed in that hour. We are looking at all our fermenters being filled to capacity and more than 20 tons of fruit arriving over Easter. We’ve got to hope that those Fermenta bags arrive on time or we’re in serious trouble, although we can start pressing out Dionne and Esmé on Friday. Bill won’t be here but Vanessa and her friend Vicky should be here Friday afternoon, and maybe Jesse as well, if he can get a lift from Daylesford.

  Richard McHardy’s car has broken down towing its penultimate load and is stranded up the road a bit. Mercifully I’m able to fix it and he’s away again. I’m tiring now. I feel physically tired and emotionally drained and we’re hardly a month into vintage. I think enviously of my Burgundian friends, whose picking is spread over a mere ten days. Fortunately, Susie is thinking ahead, getting malo-lactic cultures into the still-warm wine in barrel and monitoring the ferments, leaving me to worry about fermentation space with Jesse’s words ringing in my ears: ‘Don’t worry about anything that you can’t change, Dad.’

  Tuesday, 6 April

  I wake early, having had my first good sleep in a month, from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. The winery reveals temperatures rising. We had the cooler in Dionne all of yesterday afternoon and she’s down to 22 degrees Celsius, but Esmé, Claudia and Anna are all rising. So we plan to put the cooler into them in that order but it doesn’t quite work out like that. It’s only been in Esmé an hour when we see that the cap on Silver is rising above the fermenter like a muffin top, so of course the temperature, too, is rising, fast. We disconnect the hoses from the cooling coil and connect them to Silver, not daring to agitate the must, for that will increase the rate of fermentation. It’s necessary to remove some must from Silver, now beginning to trickle down the sides, so Susie and Hugo set to with buckets and get some of the surplus into Sanai (the emergency green bin), while Gelati goes about his ministrations. It feels pretty warm, and it is. At 26 degrees Celsius, Silver’s gone up 2 degrees since 8 a.m. I decide we’d better get the old inefficient cooler from the shed and see if it still works. We’ve got to lower the temperatures in Claudia and Anna.

  The old cooler looks like a heap of neglected rubbish but I manage to coax it to life. It works on a separate circuit so it doesn’t overload the one we’re using, and we leave them both running flat-out while we go about normal winery duties, keeping everything crossed, for if one of them fails, or we have a power outage, I could ruin some of the best shiraz I’ve had in my twenty-four years of winemaking! Nothing goes wrong, and by 12.30 p.m. the temperature in Silver has fallen to a more comfortable 24 degrees Celsius. Whew, a close call!

  We’ve unpacked the cellar bags, large plastic bags for storing wine, for the sauv blanc; it’s fermented almost to dryness so we rack it into the bags from Gold, leaving her ready for the next onslaught of McKernan pinot on Friday night or Saturday morning. The Fermenta bags arrive with the courier ‘just in time’ but with no instructions for assembly. However, it transpires that the Fermenta bag instructions arrived with the cellar bags.

  Jesse and his mate Will arrive—Julien must have driven them up but she doesn’t like to come over to the winery when I’m working with those people whom I once foolishly referred to as ‘my other family’. Vanessa’s sister Vicki, husband Serge and possibly daughter Jessica are due to arrive tomorrow afternoon also, after calling in at Musk on the way to take some photographs. We’ll run out of beds so there’ll be some air mattresses on the floor. I think I’ve organised enough food.

&n
bsp; The Jones’s fruit arrives from Narre Warren after an uneventful trip so, being cool and sulphured, is forklifted off and put in the winery ready for tomorrow. The grapes are from three different vine clones, mainly MV6, with a smaller amount of the 114 and 115 clones. We continue pressing out, so the press is hissing and roaring all day.

  Wednesday, 7 April

  Wake at 2.30 a.m. not sleeping too well—a few things on the mind and not all to do with winemaking. Start in the winery at 3.30 a.m.—want to get temperatures in order and readings done before Susie arrives so that we can get cracking on the pinot. Temperatures are finally under control so when she gets here at 8 a.m. we set up our new Fermenta bags in their bins and we crush/destem a couple of tons into Marilyn and Beryl. Vanessa and Vicki arrive, and we decide who’s cooking what and when, then we deal with the rest of the pinot—some into the Fermenta bags, some into vats for foot-stomping, and some destemmed and only lightly crushed. The small amount of 114 and 115 clones are crush/destemmed and kept separate. I make up yeast culture. I’m not risking wild yeasts; I can’t trust them and, besides, they take longer to ferment so they tie up precious fermenter space.

  A horrible grinding noise signals the arrival of Jesse and Will in the Telecom ute, the front suspension of which they have comprehensively wrecked. They have a prepared speech, of course—how it wasn’t a very big ditch that Will drove over and they weren’t going very fast. The front wheels pointing in different directions tell the true story so they cop a good telling-off and skulk away, to return later and apologise, Jesse not having to think too hard to decide on the best course of action to take with Dad. I have some lunch and a couple of glasses of pinot, shower then off to bed, leaving the rest of the crew to continue pressing out.