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Magazine
Time Out
Sideways in Barossa
MUKUND PADMANABHAN
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A journey through South Australia’s premier wine-growing region — vineyard by vineyard and sip by sip.
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Photo: Mukund padmanabhan
wine country: The view from Jacob’s Creek Visitors’ Centre.
“Get your nose in there,” urges Miles Raymond, wine connoisseur and loveable alcoholic, in “Sideways”. “Mmm…,” he tells his friend Jack, “A little citrus…maybe some strawberry…passion fruit…and, oh, there is just like the faintest soupcon of like asparagus and just a flutter of, like, a nutty Edam.” Images from the best wine movie in the world keep flashing in my mind as Sally Pellew affectionately examines the eddy of sparkling white Chardonnay Pinot Noir in her twirling glass. “Mmm…,” she says. “Light…lemony…just the perfect partner for the smoked salmon.” We are sitting at a table at the restaurant in the Visitor’s Centre at Jacob’s Creek, one of the world’s most popular wine brands. With its roof-high glass walls, it feels like sitting in a bubble that has settled in the middle of nowhere. Just outside is an ancient oak tree, beyond which are rows of vines, their gnarled and knotted arms reaching upwards as if in solemn prayer. In the distance, the rolling hills, green and glistening, are unexpectedly reminiscent of English meadows.
* * *
The Jacob’s Creek Visitor Centre is located in South Australia’s Barossa Valley, the country’s best known wine region and home to a clutch of famous brands. A German immigrant, Johann Gramp, planted the Barossa’s first commercial vineyard at Jacob’s Creek in 1847. A picture in the nearby museum presents him as a dour, unprepossessing man (“Grump”, I can’t help thinking). It was Gramp who pressed the Riesling grapes by hand and produced wine in a style that was familiar to his fellow German settlers and laid the foundation of what has become a huge enterprise.
Learning winespeak
As Sally, a coordinator at the Visitor’s Centre, walks me through the history of Jacob’s Creek, a waiter serves up a wonderfully aromatic Chardonnay with a terrine. Soon she is telling me how this “buttery” white complements the onions in the dish. She insists I try the premium Chardonnay Reserve, summons for a bottle, has a twirl and a sniff, turns up her nose, and calls for another. “Something not quite right with this one. Too much acetone, I think,” she says. Funnily enough, I prefer the regular vintage, finding the Reserve, like Miles did of one wine in “Sideways”, “quaffable, but far from transcendent.” As we proceed through the four-course lunch, I like to think I am getting a grip on the delightfully florid and extravagant language of wine, beginning to feel the adjectives on my tongue — ripe melon and nectarine, vanilla bean and passion fruit, nutty and herbaceous. This could be the delusional conceit of a wannabe wine connoisseur. Or it could be the wine itself, which has gone a little to my head. I allow myself to be poured another glass just before it is time to leave. What the hell, I reckon. This is not just a meal. This is an education.
* * *
With his eye firmly on the clock, John Baldwin insists it is time to go. A resident of the Barossa valley for the last 23 years, John has spent the last few conducting tours for a living. A few hours earlier, he had picked me up from my Adelaide hotel in an SUV and driven me up into the Adelaide Hills and down into the valley. At an hour and a half, it is a short but stunningly beautiful drive. The city recedes in a flash and the mountains, covered by wet green grasslands and sparse patches of forest, mainly of eucalyptus, are quickly upon us. “Kangaroo!” I exclaim when I think we pass one. “Wallaby,” John corrects without so much as a glance. But further on, Kangaroos oblige us by showing up near the roadside; so does an Emu with a young chick that can barely be seen over the high grass.
Dressed in a bushy beard and handlebar moustache (“no wax, all twirling”), John has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the region. A restless passion never leaves him as he talks about the Barossa and its wines. This is no ordinary tour operator. As we reach the Valley, the SUV pulls up beside a huge spotless black Daimler. It’s a 1962 Majestic Major Limousine, one of three in John’s collection, and one of the six in Australia. “Hop in,” he says, with a grin, as it dawns on me that we are going to travel through the Barossa in this mammoth magnificent machine.
* * *
Having been shepherded out of the Jacob’s Creek Visitors Centre and into the capacious back seat, John hits the accelerator for the next stop — Penfold’s. The largest wine group in Australia, Penfold’s owes its beginnings in the mid-1800s to a doctor, who believed in the medicinal qualities of wine and began serving port and sherry to his patients. Not surprisingly, both his medical practice and his profession as a vigneron flourished. His son-in-law expanded the business and further acquisitions cemented the growth of the company.
After a quick tour of the facility and an introduction to blending in a wine laboratory, I am handed a white overcoat and an assortment of beakers and measuring glasses. The challenge is to recreate the Bin 138, a popular Penfold’s Red that is a blend of Grenache, Shiraz and Mouvedre. The first provides the wine its aromatic lift, the second its richness and body and the last its perfume and complexity. I get the combination almost right in the third attempt — blending a 40:30:30 ratio against the correct 35:35:30. “It’s about as close as you can get,” says a Penfold’s official comfortingly before handing out a bottle of my blend. It has the Penfold’s label with my name as assistant wine maker printed on it.
* * *
Next stop is Yalumba, the oldest family-owned winery in Australia. The light is beginning to fade and the Daimler chunters amiably in the soft and comforting green of the countryside. In “Sideways”, Miles and Jack travel through California’s Napa Valley in the summer, when the vines are green and fruiting and when the surrounding hills are partially desiccated. Here, in the dead of winter, it’s quite the opposite. The vines are all twisted branch and the hills are damp and glossy with dew and rain. “It’s nature’s way of compensating,” someone tells me.
A beautiful old stone building with a clock tower fronts Yalumba. Behind it lies the winery, a modern industrial-sized operation. A walk through the facility is a reminder that winemaking, even in a heritage winery as this, is less romantic art and more hardheaded science. No harvest dances in barrels here. Giant crushers press the grapes into must, the fermentation takes place in tall aseptic metal tanks, huge pipes transport the liquid from one place to another, and the further processes of filtration and clarification are just as mechanical.
* * *
It is time for the last appointment — dinner at a nearby restaurant with a small group of independent wine growers. Each of them brings his or her own vintages and over the meal, we have the wine growers’ version of potluck. It is impossible to resist having a sip of just about every bottle on offer and listening to the qualities from those who actually produce them. All the bottles are worth a mention, but I can recall only John Curnow’s luscious and leesy Shiraz (branded 1847), and a spicy Grenache and a full-bodied Riesling from Wayne Aherns’ Small Fry Wines.
Simile and metaphor are integral to the language of wine, but unlike the French — who can sometimes get overly earnest and nationalistic when talking about the beverage — the Australians seem to recognise the irony in the florid and hyper-fermented lexicon of winespeak. It is not unusual for someone to liken a wine to carambola or cedar and then bring you back to earth with a hearty thump and an offer of “another glass, mate?”
Pride of place
Shiraz, the most common red grape variety, has the pride of place in the Barossa. The climate in most parts is unsuitable for the Pinot Noir, the celebrity grape in “Sideways”. In an unforgettable scene, suffused in a romantic and wine-soaked haze, Miles explains to Maya why its flavours are the most “haunting” on the planet. “Only somebody who really takes the time to understand Pinot’s potential can then coax it into its fullest expression,” he says. “Did you know,” someone tells me at the table, “that Pinot sales shot up by 20 per cent in some countries after the film was released?” I didn’t.
There is an animated debate about wine snobbery and the tendency to run down Rieslings, which Small Fry’s Aherns defends as the purest, being immediately bottled and thereby unadulterated by oak and “the interference of the wine grower.” And there is a discussion over the merit of screw tops over corks — about 70 per cent of Australian wine is screw topped. Some wine growers in the Barossa, like the award-winning Kalleske vineyard, are contemplating switching to synthetic corks, which retain a traditional appearance while avoiding the problem of natural cork taint.
It’s almost midnight, it’s been a long day, and my constitution — unused to more than a glass or two — is suffering a little from the wrath of grapes. I go out like a light the moment I hit the hotel bed. Sideways. In Barossa.
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