Passing Clouds

by Graeme Leith

  Dinner at Sue’s with Ross and Cassie; Ross, as usual at this time of the year, making and bottling chutney and jam. Cassie cooked delicious chicken with two quartered oranges stuffed inside with one cinnamon stick, orange juice, half a jar of whole-seed Dijon mustard and marmalade. Sticky date pudding for dessert. Fantastic meal!

  By Graeme Leith

  Sunday, 18 April

  Late start after dinner last night and a good sleep. Shae Maree working today, comes in even later because: ‘Dale left his car keys in Nathan’s car and Nathan went to Ballarat, didn’t he?’

  I’m now able to move some of the fermenters out of the shed with the forklift to create some much-needed space for barrels. There are barrels full of wine everywhere, including in front of the big warehouse shed where the bottling caravan will have to park tonight ready for tomorrow’s bottling. Second out is Pamela. She is used as an emergency back-up, and if I have to use her, I trickle water through her cooling pipes to cool her down, a necessary inconvenience as I wish to leave her intact.

  Harriet’s already gone; every year I swear I’ll never use her again and every following year I run out of fermenters and she gets pressed into service again. She’s too tall for her width, and because of her depth someone has to get in to bucket out the remaining must when no more can be removed from the top with buckets and scoops, and the floor is diabolically slippery. Cameron hurt his back in there one year and I, of course, still feel guilty about that.

  Anna is the last to go outside. She is of such length that she cannot fit through the door sideways so she goes out with me on the forklift on one end and the girls pushing the other end on the trolley jack. (It was early ’80s when we got Anna from Kyabram; Sue drove up in the Telecom ute mid-vintage after we had obtained measurements over the phone and established that she’d fit in the back, which she did, just, with some of her sticking out the sides and quite a bit out the end.)

  At last, half of the barrel room is now clear of fermenters and we can start to collect the barrels on racks scattered all about the place and stack them in order in our beautiful newfound space. This clears the area around the bin tipper so we can begin to crush the Zonnebeke shiraz that has been sitting in bins since last night. Jill Burdett is here, and Shae Maree and Susie, with me on the forklift and between times doing my share of those other jobs around the crusher. So these Zonnebeke grapes go into Claudia and Beryl which we pressed out this morning. Baumé 14.8 degrees, fruit in perfect condition, no need for any more sulphur. Susie makes up the yeast culture and goes over to her clinic to do some Chinese doctoring she’d optimistically booked in some time ago. I add the cultures but forget the stainless-steel pots they’re in and they sink into the must to be discovered by Susie when she hits them with the plunging tool in the morning.

  I’m living hand-to-mouth with the clothes washing again now, just getting off the line what I need after the shower. Very warm and humid tonight, could be a bad moon rising! Patrick arrives with the bottling trailer, unhitches it and goes to Bendigo.

  Monday, 19 April—Bottling day

  I’m woken at 5.30 a.m. by rain on the skylight. Quickly out to the line in the raw to get some clothes off it, cursing a little—so often it won’t rain for months then rains on bottling day! Intermittent drizzle continues; if it starts raining hard the forklift might bog. Get the bottles onto the concrete, it’s just light enough to do so.

  Patrick arrives and soon steam starts to emerge from the caravan as he gets his hot water happening. I make us a strong latte each from the ‘laboratory bar and grill’ and go over to the house to get us some toast. The lights go out and the toaster dies. I look out the window to the caravan and its lights are out, too, and from a separate power supply. Looks like a power outage on bottling day!

  Power outages sometimes occur these days when rain falls after a long dusty period—the electricity tracks down the wet dust to earth and trips the whole system. In the old days, under the good old state-owned State Electricity Commission (SEC), they used to advise us that they were going to clean the insulators on such and such a Sunday and we should be aware that we’d have no electricity between the hours of 8.30 to 12, or whatever. But somebody had a better idea. And so our electricity distribution network has been sold to overseas people, who need to make money out of it to pay the high interest rates at which they have borrowed to get the money to buy the bloody thing and to give their shareholders a good return, so they cut down on maintenance, people like me are inconvenienced and lose money, and some people die agonising deaths in bushfires caused by poorly maintained powerlines falling, while electricity prices will soon go through the roof, but at least the unions got a whacking, that’ll teach them to try to look after themselves! Thanks, Jeff Kennett, enjoy your pension!

  Jan Graham drives down to see if our power’s out and goes back to ring the electricity company. I’ve already tried—their lines are predictably busy. Our bottling crew arrives in their separate cars, disconsolate because they can’t start work. Then after another twenty minutes, ‘ping’, and the lights come on again. We have to wait a bit until the water heats and we’re finally away.

  Susie puts some shiraz back into barrel, Vanessa arrives at about 10.30 a.m. so that gives us three people to man the line while the crew is having smoko so that we can claw back some time. Patrick has to leave us tomorrow night and go to Rutherglen for his next job. When this happens I usually take the job of removing the bottles from the washing carousel and passing them to the conveyer belt going to the bottling filler. I revel in the mindlessness of it. It’s not necessary to look at what you’re doing—catch bottle with left hand, invert, pass to right hand, place on conveyer. I stare at the caravan wall ahead and try not to think of my low regard for the cork industry.

  Bottling is successfully completed, we have a beer with the bottling crew and they go home with their wages and some of the newly bottled wine. It is wine they could never afford to buy and they treasure it. Increasingly as years pass they open up some of their older ones and have come to see the joy in, and the beauty of, good red wine. The gift doesn’t do their self-esteem any harm, either, and increases their already strong loyalty to Passing Clouds.

  This vintage we’ve bottled 500 dozen Angel Blend, 722 dozen Graeme’s Blend, and 425 dozen Reserve Shiraz—or about 29 pallets all up.

  The Fermenta bags have concluded their gestation period and we can press them out whenever we like, for they are immune to the deleterious effects of oxygen while they stay in their bags, so we decide to taste them now. It’s always intriguing how the same grapes in different fermenters can produce different results and, later, wine from the same ferment in different barrels likewise. So we pipette some wine from the five bags into glasses. The results are surprising, for all of the wines had identical origins and treatment before they went into the Fermenta bags.

  1 – Fresh, berry cherry on nose, clean, fresh on palate, lovely flavour, great finish.

  2 – Deep, rich, great mouthfeel, long finish, more concentrated than 1.

  3 – Neutral on nose, seems in concentration to be between 1 and 2, good rich finish.

  4 – Nose deeper, bit of a not unpleasant (in fact, nice) pong, no cherries or strawberries, more floral or perfumed, good finish.

  5 – Good fruit, touch of straw, deep rich flavour, more plums and roses. No cherry berry, good finish.

  Jamie rings: three weeks ago he cut some bunches off our Musk vines and let them fall to the ground so he could observe the difference in ripening of the vines with the full crop and the ones with the depleted, or thinned crop. His readings are consistent: Chardonnay full crop, 9.7 degrees baumé; thinned crop, 11.5 baumé. Pinot noir full crop, 10.6 baumé; thinned crop 12.5 baumé. As most of the crop is not thinned, we have a way to go, but we’re getting there!

  Tuesday, 20 April

  Press blue bin Three Wise Men. Foot-stomp batch.

  Wednesday, 21 April

  Coldstream from Silver into barrel. Early
finish tonight.

  Thursday, 22 April

  Brian rings from Axedale, he’s got a couple of tons remaining unsold, do we want it at a reduced price? It’s about 15 degrees baumé and he will deliver to us. Yeah, why not? It arrives a few hours later and we crush it and clean up.

  Friday, 23 April

  Press one Fermenta bag of Coldstream pinot and Sister Maria, both look good. I have to go to Daylesford to be with son Jesse—a good opportunity to take a trailer-load of fruit boxes and picking bins to Musk ready for the harvest there, whenever that may be. Can’t find the spare wheel for the trailer; halfway down I realise that we must have lent it to Richard when he shredded his trailer tyre. Too late now, but our tyres look good anyhow. Meet up with Jesse as planned at Ruthven Street. He’s sick, doesn’t want to go to Musk, even with the rifle. Must be sick.

  I’m surprised when the tyre loses its tread just out of Daylesford, but perhaps I shouldn’t be. I’d been going very fast on the back roads between Kingower and Maldon and it’s becoming apparent that the Angel doesn’t like Musk! Tyre service place is closed, so leave trailer outside the cemetery and go looking for another wheel. Can’t get onto one, so go back to Jesse and make some dinner for us. Julien is away which is why I’m staying at the house to be with Jesse. I nip out to the cemetery at 6.30 a.m. and the trailer’s gone, despite this being a well-travelled road day and night. Report to police, leave message on answering machine, go to Musk and take samples, return to Kingower for we have to crush remainder of McKernan fruit arriving early this arvo, which it does. Susie’s parents Karin and John arrive. A couple of peaceful days are anticipated.

  Saturday, 24 April

  Freezing windy day. Neighbour from Musk, Brian Wilson, and son Scott arrive with their chardonnay. Musk is about an hour and twenty minutes away with the big trailer behind. They’re exhausted and Brian’s hand is still frozen almost solid. They’ve been picking in the snow, for today is the day they had chosen and, as his pickers are friends of his and Scott’s who all have to be back at work tomorrow, it had to happen today despite the weather. Brian never allows anything to defeat him but I think today tested him severely. ‘It’s too hard,’ he said. ‘It’s just too hard.’ But they’ve managed about 2.5 tons of grapes and that’s a lot of bunches with frozen hands. They’re not quite ripe enough for still table wine and it’s going to cost a lot of money to get it turned into sparkling. Brian’s young wife seems to be leaving him and it looks as if he’s going to lose the property that he’s put all his money, heart and soul into. After we make up the base wine, we’ll put it into cellar bags and see what transpires with the wine and the marriage.

  Our grapes at Musk, at a slightly higher altitude, will need a little more time to ripen, so we joyfully anticipate stripping the nets off, packing them away and taking our team of pickers from Kingower down to Musk. I ring up Castlemaine Hire and book a Porta-loo, but am unable to give him a firm date—it all depends on the ripening gods.

  PS

  A year later, almost to the day, I was driving to Musk past the cemetery from where the trailer had been purloined. There were some people there by the side of the road, chainsawing up a fallen tree and loading the cut pieces onto a trailer, which, although of a different colour, bore a striking resemblance to my trailer. So I stopped and investigated. My trailer was not your normal trailer, having, among other things, mudguards made from chequer-plate steel, not the usual tin. There were other unique features as well, so I knew that it was my trailer. The people loading the logs tried to ignore me; they appeared to me to be European, perhaps Yugoslavian.

  ‘Where did you get the trailer from?’ I ventured. The men ignored me and kept working.

  A woman replied, ‘Fromma de Sunshine market.’

  ‘That’s interesting, it’s my trailer.’

  ‘We bought im fair and square from de Sunshine market. You can’ta prove anyting.’

  So I rang the Daylesford police station and informed them of my dilemma and the duty constable drove out there—generously, I thought, for he was on another case and had a naughty girl he was taking to her home in the police car with him.

  His assessment of the situation was that, even if it was my trailer, I was unlikely to get it back. The welded identification numbers had, as I had previously observed, been ground off and it’s very difficult in the circumstances to establish ownership. But he was sympathetic and we arranged to talk the next day.

  I quickly drove back to Daylesford and returned with my camera to find the people still there. Rather ostentatiously I took various photographs of the trailer, including some from beneath, thinking that would keep the pressure on them. I spoke to the constable the next day and he reiterated that I was unlikely to get it back but he agreed to go and visit them at their nearby property with a view to hopefully pressuring them some more.

  He rang me late that afternoon: ‘Is it all right with you if I hook your trailer up to the police four-wheel drive and bring it to your house at Ruthven Street?’

  ‘How did you get it from them?’ I asked, surprised.

  ‘Well, they say they didn’t steal it, but they want you to have it back!’

  Now that’s what I call good old-fashioned country policing. I could hardly wait to see Bill’s reaction when I returned to Kingower the next day, for I knew that he would recognise the trailer as soon as he saw it. The look on his face when I drove in towing the trailer was worth the wait.

  PPS

  Brian Wilson lost his house and subsequently, after a jaunt to the Philippines, most of his remaining wealth. These misfortunes were later compounded by the tragedy of the death of his beloved son Scott, who was accidentally killed when chainsawing down a neighbour’s tree in the US, where he was then living.

  PPPS

  The Passing Clouds Reserve Shiraz 2004 was rated in the highly respected Jeremy Oliver Wine Annual (2007) at 96 points, which placed it above the current release Penfolds Grange at 95 points, the Grant Burge Meshach at 95 points, the Hensche Hill of Grace at 91, the Rockford Basket Pressed Shiraz at 93, and the Wolf Blass Platinum label at 95. During subsequent rackings and blendings, the small batch with the few overripe pinot noir bunches was combined with others and I don’t know whether the final barrels selected for the Reserve Shiraz actually included that tiny percentage of pinot noir. I’ll never know, but I sometimes wonder!

  Musk Vintage 2013

  Diary of an exceptional year

  by Cameron Leith

  Leading up to vintage we spend a lot of time in the vineyard, ensuring the canopy is open enough, that there is enough leaf but not too much—essentially that the vines are in balance and will be able to produce the best fruit possible.

  My father Graeme does most of the spraying for mildew these days. Fortunately, because of the warm dry weather, we did not have to do too much spraying this season. In fact, 2013 is turning out to be an extraordinary year because of its predicted continuing warmth.

  Wednesday, 30 January – Sunday, 17 February

  Dad did a sulphur and copper spray then grabbed a couple of days off and went fishing in the Snowy Mountains. To his surprise, when he returned, he found that Luke and I had built a brand-new deck over the dam in the anticipation of it filling eventually.

  The dam had been built many years ago but didn’t hold water successfully due to the porosity of the soil, so fairly recently we had it lined with bentonite mat. This was quite a project, as it requires a lot of earth to be taken from the bank, then huge rolls of thick bentonite ‘carpet’ to be laid with the aid of the big digger that feeds the spools out. They are then covered over with the removed earth and so lie there, concealed. As the contractor Brian Williams said, ‘You’ve spent a lot of money making it look as if no money’s been spent!’ But now the dam holds water, which is fed to it from the windmill via our old Furphy tank that we mounted on a big pipe so it sits above the projected high-water mark, and the water pours or trickles, depending on the wind velocity, into the da
m. It is unlikely to be full by the end of vintage, but it’s getting there!

  Monday, 18 February

  Vintage approaches with more pace than last year due to the unusually dry and warm weather. We do not net for birds at Musk as we used to, due to the high winds and unusual trellising system. Instead we employ a bird-scaring device. A little beyond veraison (when the berries begin to accumulate sugars and the colour of the pinot berries changes from green to red), the device has to be set up and got running. It is a complicated system requiring the erection of large poles to hold the radar scanners. These are set up at either end of the vineyard and energised with solar-charged batteries. When a bird flies through the radar beam, it alerts the other pieces of electronic equipment to bring into play various scaring mechanisms. These include speakers situated in different parts of the vineyard that, when alerted, emit the distress calls of various birds.

  There is also an inflatable ‘scary clown’ who rises up and waves his arms about, and a gas gun can be connected to the system to emit a loud bang. These things are all randomised so that the birds don’t become familiar with the pattern and generally it works successfully, especially with crows (that is, ravens) which, being intelligent, are more or less easily frightened off. On the other hand, the pied currawongs are stupid and are not so easy to discourage, and it is often necessary to patrol the vineyard with rifle in hand. We fire blanks at them, or occasionally ratshot, which doesn’t reach them but sends them packing for a while. This becomes increasingly tedious as ripeness approaches and it is necessary to mount dawn and dusk patrols.

  We are quite familiar with the erection procedure of this device by now, and the job takes a surprisingly short time. This year we have Luke and Darren who are working with us as casual employees over vintage. Luke is with us today and, after some tense moments when the radar is hoisted on posts 5 metres high, the thing is screeching away and the scary clown is popping up and waving his arms around when there’s any bird activity. Our nearest neighbours are about 500 metres away but if the wind is in the right direction they can easily hear the distress call. Some of them don’t mind it, but a couple do. We know this because we’ve received a few phone calls over the years—unfortunately anonymous, so we don’t know who we are annoying.