Passing Clouds

by Graeme Leith

  Saturday, 30 March

  Pinot noir is showing an uncharacteristic ripening, some perfectly ripe berries and some green berries on the same bunch. This is troubling, but suddenly the green berries start ripening at an accelerated pace, and it looks as if it’s all going to come into balance. Baumé steadily and slowly creeping up, the chardonnay beginning to show the awaited golden colour on the skins, and flavour developing. We’ve stopped spraying now. Hope with all the work we’ve done that the crop is adequately protected.

  Sunday, 31 March

  Looks like that’s it for fruit coming in from the Bendigo region now. We just have to look after all the ferments and get them safely housed in barrel.

  Monday, 1 April – Sunday, 14 April

  Things have finally started to calm down a bit. Still doing bird patrols. Dad sleeping at winery some nights so he can do patrols and take some of the pressure off us. In the last fortnight we have been pressing out the Bendigo reds as they finish fermentation. We’re working through the wines in settling tanks, racking them into barrels which we wash to free them of their sulphur protection, for the wine in them must go through its desirable malo-lactic (sometimes referred to as the secondary fermentation) and any sulphur will inhibit or prevent that.

  Only the extended maceration experimental wine remains unpressed, quietly stewing in its own juice while we monitor the chardonnay and pinot, tracking their agonisingly slow journey to ripeness.

  Monday, 15 April

  Pinot baumé hits 12.8 degrees and the flavours are ripe! Dad and I high-five each other and we ring Natalie to organise picking. We’re going to use all the Burgundian tricks that have worked for us in the past on this vintage. The pinot is a little riper than the chardonnay, so we’ll pick it first.

  Wednesday, 17 April

  Natalie and crew arrive, and the job is on! Fruit sorting before destemming, then pre-ferment cold soak a portion of whole bunches—these little babies are going to get the works. The pinot is measured by the hydrometer at 13.1 degrees baumé, pH is 3.35, no time to do a TA (titrateable acid test, to see how many grams per litre there are) but it is looking perfect at the moment.

  Our Musk vineyard was planted at this altitude according to the proposition that the best wines are made in a warm vintage in a cool climate, and awareness that the best DRC wines (of the Domaine de la Romanee Conti itself) come from the last vineyard of the domaine to be harvested. We will find out in a year or two whether or not it has worked for us at Musk, for it’s a warm year and it’s certainly a cool climate!

  Friday, 19 April

  The pinots are fermenting and the chardonnay has reached the desired level of ripeness. Natalie is alerted when we receive a weather report—it’s going to rain seriously on our projected second day of picking! Can she do the impossible and double the number of pickers? She’ll see what she can do. She’s an organisational genius. If anybody can do it, Nat can.

  Saturday, 20 April

  The next morning at dawn the cars start rolling in. How do these people do it? On short notice they’re here for us. They must have been up since 5 a.m. in Malmsbury and Kyneton, more than 30 minutes’ drive away, and they’re going to try to get our crop of chardonnay off in one day!

  Before long they’re in the vineyard going for it, a whole football team in number. Dad is on the tractor collecting the grapes. Me, Luke, Daryl and Raoul are in the winery, and my younger brother Jesse is even lending a hand on pick-ups in between his cellar door duties. We are whole-bunch pressing this year and didn’t have the money to set up a chute for the press so the grapes have to be manually loaded into the hatch of the press and the cycle started. It’s hard work and the press roars and hisses all day and into the night.

  While the press is doing its cycle, one of the winery crew goes out on the trailer behind the tractor to collect the buckets and load them into the bins on the trailer and redistribute them up the rows ahead of the pickers. No sooner do we unload than we’re back for another load. If the press is being loaded, Dad grabs one of the pickers to pour the grapes into the big bins. As the pickers start to tire, Natalie asks if she can have Darren back in the vineyard. Dad suspects he’s her Stakanovite; she wants him there to set the pace for the other pickers, so we let him go.

  By lunchtime they’re halfway through the vineyard. We might make it yet, as the storm clouds gather. It’s almost half-past five when the last grape is picked. One of the pickers punches her fist at the sky: ‘We came, we saw, we conquered!’ These people are truly the salt of the earth. What have we done to deserve such loyalty?

  Those pickers who want a glass of wine are welcome to it. They sit, talking at the tables outside the tasting room, sipping their glasses of Graeme’s Blend, their preferred tipple. Some go down to the business end of the winery to watch the fruits of their labours being pressed. As has become the custom after picking, Dad joins them and shares the camaraderie, they take their presentation bottle of wine, payment is made, and they depart into the late dusk.

  ‘Thank you for the work,’ they say as they go.

  ‘No, no,’ protests Dad, ‘we should be thanking you!’

  We’ll see them next at an end-of-vintage dinner at a Kyneton hotel that Natalie is organising; we are all to dress up, and there’s to be a prize for the best-dressed person. They have braved the elements and worked like Trojans; their financial reward for the day is less than the amount a lot of people spend on lunch.

  Back at the press we are still working. I am by the press, monitoring the flavour and taste of the juice, before deciding when to shut it off. Luke and Raoul are busily cleaning the buckets and bins and removing the pressing to the compost heap as the light fades.

  We’d been having issues with the Karcher pressure washer all vintage and had discovered how vital it is to the winemaking operations—after all, winemaking involves a huge amount of cleaning up. Anyway, it had to be sent for repairs for three days. It finally expires again at 9 p.m. but Dad, the electrician, has gone home by then. The boys grab the hoses and I struggle with the problem, knowing that if we can’t get it going then clean-up is going to take a lot longer. Eventually a dodgy switch is isolated and is able to be bodgied up to get us through the night. (Of all the times for this to happen, of course it happens on the busiest day in vintage!)

  Sunday, 21 April

  Luke and I are back at the winery early this morning to rack and inoculate the chardonnay and put the higher quality batches in barrels.

  Monday, 22 April

  Things finally start to slow down in the winery as the chardonnays are the last of twenty-five batches to be processed and the tally is added—70 tons in more than twenty-five batches is a lot to keep in one’s head, particularly when it is considered that there are batches within all the batches, whether they be yeast trials, indigenous versus cultured yeasts, cold soak, whole-bunch percentages, and so on!

  Tuesday, 23 April

  Luke had brought a spit along early in the piece and we had been enjoying throwing some cut of meat on in the morning and enjoying a beautiful warm lunch once a week, and then having excellent sandwiches for the rest of the week. Our families had also been enjoying coming out for these occasions, as it was a rare thing throughout vintage for Luke and I to sit down and have a meal with them. Even then, we would always have to get up and check the press or unload a truck.

  So we take great pleasure in finally sitting down to the spit we had been planning all vintage—venison wrapped in lamb wrapped in sausages. This keeps the venison beautifully moist and rare, and is a perfect way to finish off vintage with all the Passing Clouds team and their families. Accompanied, of course, by a few good bottles from Dad’s ‘cellar’—a couple of potato boxes turned on their sides holding special bottles dating back to 1980, five years before my birth!

  Although we will still be working seven days, our hours will return to almost normal now, and batches can be tasted and minor adjustments made if required. It is also possible to get the fi
rst real indication of the quality of the vintage, although it’s hard to generalise with so many wines from so many sites generally showing a real depth of flavour and colour with powerful fruit and structure.

  But vintage 2013? It looks like being a cracker.

  PS

  Passing Clouds was awarded two gold medals at the Victorian Wines Show on 18 November 2014—one for our Fools on the Hill Pinot Noir, made from the fruit from our Musk vineyard, the other for our Bendigo Shiraz, made from fruit from three vineyards, including the Axedale grapes that Cameron wrote about in his diary on 16 March 2013.

  Winery dogs

  I seem to have always had a dog at Passing Clouds, at Kingower or Musk. Some of them were purchased and others just happened. A winery doesn’t seem to be complete without a dog, man’s best friend.

  Protos

  The first vineyard dog was Protos, whom I inherited from my friend Vicki Barclay. She had received him as a gift from her friend Basil Efthamidias, hence the Greek influence suggested in the name—as in prototype, the first.

  Protos was a cross between an Afghan and a standard poodle and shared the best characteristics of both breeds. He had grace, a natural haughtiness, an elegant and streamlined frame and long hair from his Afghan side but lacked a certain amount of concentration. From the poodle side he had intelligence, cunning, loyalty and black colouration. He loved to chase things, which did become a concern during his last months in Melbourne when his attention turned to postmen on bicycles. One of these must have aimed a kick at him at some stage because he had to be called off a couple of times when frenzied barking from down the street revealed Protos in pursuit of the inedible in uniform. Derelicts, too, aroused his ire, and it can be assumed that one of them had aimed a kick at him at some time, so any shabbily dressed shuffler copped a good barking.

  Protos was probably past middle age when Sue and I first started going to Kingower, and he spent his last years there as a permanent resident. He was an amazing dog and had earned something of a reputation as a free spirit in Melbourne during the early 1970s when I was working the electrical contracting business, Carlton Lighting. He was never on a lead or chain as he considered them undignified and dog-like, so he was left to roam.

  At one stage, we were engaged in some fairly extensive wiring work at Lazar’s restaurant in the city, in King Street. I was living in North Carlton at 453 Canning Street, next door to Susie Palmer. Protos could always calculate how long the job would take, within reason, and wouldn’t venture far from the van if a screwdriver and pair of pliers were the only tools taken onto the job. But if it was a full toolbox and some fittings, he knew he was okay for a lap or two of the block. If the pair of steps and ladder came off the van, he knew he was set for a bit of decent adventuring. So he would leave the job at Lazar’s for longer and longer periods. This may seem irresponsible of his owner, and it certainly was. The owner has no excuse except to say it was a different world then.

  Anyway, one day it became apparent that Protos was returning from somewhere late in the afternoon, shortly before knock-off time. Where from, who knew? Then Susie next door said to me one evening, ‘You came home for lunch today—I saw Protos on your doorstep, but I didn’t see your van.’ I had not been there for lunch, but Protos had. Three kilometres through the busiest part of the city, crossing maybe fifteen sets of traffic lights to go home. Just because he could! And then to return to be back in time to get into the van and go home again!

  In his whole career, Protos was never picked up by a policeman or dogcatcher although he thoroughly deserved to be. When he was younger and I lived at 330 Drummond Street, opposite the Pram Factory, a noted test route for learner drivers, he would indulge himself by lying on the road and yawning lazily. If ‘L’ drivers approached, he knew they wouldn’t run him over. The distraught instructors would sometimes have to resort to knocking on doors if he didn’t want to budge. It was always on Saturday afternoons or Sundays that these anarchic events took place, so little traffic built up behind the learner drivers, but it was often enough to create a minor gridlock in front of the police station, a few doors away.

  Once, Sue and I were expecting friends at her place, 28 Carlton Street. The friends were a few minutes late and explained that there was a small traffic jam up the road, outside the Lemon Tree Hotel. When Richard got out of the car to investigate the cause, he could see that it was Protos and a lady dog engaged in an exhibition of intercourse in the middle of the intersection.

  Indeed, Protos was indefatigable in his pursuit of bitches in season, and a couple of times a year would return after being AWOL, usually for a day and night, bloodied but triumphant. North Fitzroy and Carlton were like a village then, many people knew us, and reports would come in. Daisy was one bitch to remember, a girl who knew how to flaunt her charms when the season was upon her, and would trawl up and down Brunswick Street with a chain of slavering, snarling and brawling would-be lovers behind her. It was winner takes all with Daisy!

  One Sunday afternoon we visited Peter Freeman and Rosemary, who had a pretty Afghan bitch, Poppy, just coming into heat. They lived in North Melbourne, about 3 kilometres from Carlton Street, and when the time came to leave, Protos was reluctant. He must have thought about it during the night, for the next morning, when I was loading the van, he bolted towards North Melbourne. I got into the Mini and the race was on, dog versus car through the morning traffic to the Freemans’ house. I had barely parked the car outside the house when Protos rounded the corner from the other direction, bright eyed, bushy tailed and hot to trot. ‘Hello, sailor,’ I said and opened the door of the car to a very unwilling passenger.

  It was the same car he was sleeping in, on the back seat, when Sue lent it to her brother-in-law, Mick, to visit his daughter Anna at school in Geelong. He didn’t know the dog was in the back seat until Protos got up, stretched and placed his massive head beside Mick’s, to look out the windscreen. Mick naturally thought there was a gorilla in the car with him and died a thousand deaths before regaining control of the car without hitting anything. Protos was unperturbed and looking forward to the rest of the trip—he hadn’t been to Geelong for a while.

  He also had that extra sense that some dogs have, enabling them to anticipate arrivals or events. Twice, when I returned from Tasmania, I was surprised to find Protos on the front doormat. In both cases he had inexplicably broken out, in both cases somehow scaling 6- to 7-foot high corrugated iron fences, in both cases leaving his minders bewildered but very relieved when I rang them and informed them of his whereabouts. One was my brother Greg, at the time living about 10 kilometres away from Carlton in Reservoir, a place Protos had never visited but where he had happily stayed for nine days until deciding that Daddy was coming home tonight, which even Greg didn’t know.

  So Protos had a few adventures before he got to Kingower, where his greatest sport was chasing kangaroos, which he would overtake and push over with his shoulder whenever he was able. He would then stand back, wait for them to regain their footing and head off, whereupon he would pursue them again and attempt to repeat the performance. I watched it once in the Little Desert, and that’s how we know.

  His love affair was eventually consummated with Poppy the Afghan, which was a mistake as he should have been crossed back with a poodle. The resulting pups were all beautiful, but had a little too much of the Afghan in them for their own good. One of them, Amy, came to Passing Clouds with Protos and us, but she fell into bad company, killed sheep and was shot.

  He’d had a few adventures and was loved by many before he grew old and a tumour appeared on his rump. It was deemed incurable by the vet, who said after a preliminary operation that it would grow more quickly now that the air had got to it. It did, and I was weeding the garden one day when Protos came up and nudged me with his nose and whimpered, something he’d never done before. I put him in the car, rang the vet to organise an injection to allow him a painless and dignified death, then drove him to St Arnaud, Protos looking out t
he rear window of the car at what he was leaving, another thing that he’d never done before. He died in my arms and was taken home to Kingower, to wait for his grave to be dug in the inhospitable soil beside the creek; angry sparks flew from my crowbar and pick in the enveloping darkness.

  Mister Blue

  I can’t remember where Mister Blue came from; Sue would have known. He was a blue heeler and we got him as a pup in about 1998. He showed a facility for climbing so we arranged a series of boxes and ladders and things and, with the aid of meaty-bite rewards, he would scale these things and get onto the water tank. This was in the really early days when there was no electric pump, just gravity-fed tanks, so they were on stands and quite high. It was fun for us all and an adventure for him.

  His name came about from our neighbour at Kingower, now unfortunately deceased, and because this story could arouse old unreasonable prejudices it was never explained to anyone. Only our neighbour John Sendy, his wife Dawn, Sue and I were in on the joke, which ran thus.

  In 1950 John was a member and, I believe, an official of the Communist Party when Prime Minister Robert Menzies’ Communist Party Dissolution Bill was passed, and he was advised (as all members of the party were) that he had better get his bum out of Melbourne or go to jail. The party sent John to South Australia, gave him a modest sum of money, and told him to go to a hotel somewhere and keep his head down. What he hadn’t considered was an alias, so when the hotel clerk asked for his name, he panicked, knew that he mustn’t say anything that sounded like red, and blurted out: ‘Blue! Mister Blue!’ An irresistible name for a heeler.

  I wrote a song for Mister Blue and we’d sing it around the campfire:

  I’ve got the blues, I’ve got the Queensland blues.

  My mother she was a heeler, my father he was a heel too