Going with the flow: natural wines at Rootstock Sydney

Natural wines polarise people. Supporters love the whole organic, minimal intervention vibe and the unforced, juicy flavours they find in most natural wines. Critics hate the whole achingly trendy hipster scene and the cloudy, volatile flavours they say they find in all natural wines.

You know which side I’m on. I’ve been banging on for years about biodynamic farming and sulphur-free wines and fringe-dwelling winemakers. And the more I immerse myself in the natural wine movement, the more it appeals to me: it chimes with how I feel about so many other things in life.

Take photography. Ever since I started fancying myself as a mini Max Dupain, I have always avoided using a flash, much preferring natural light. If taking a photograph is about capturing not only a moment but also our experience of that moment, then I would much rather make do with what’s really available in that moment than impose the intrusive glare of the flashbulb - even if the end result is a bit blurry.

Take music. I love the acoustic Americana of Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings, who famously record their simple duets - just them and their guitars - in single takes, no overdubs, no tweaking. The performance that makes it to the final record is the one that best captures the spirit of the song, even if Dave plays a couple of bum notes, or Gillian’s voice cracks a little toward the end.

As Gillian once told a journalist, she and Dave accept what other artists would call “mistakes” and rough edges as long as they don’t interfere with the heart of the matter. For her, it’s more important to distil the essence of the song onto tape than give a flawless performance.

Or take philosophy. I had a fascinating conversation recently with Steve Lloyd-Moffett, a Californian religious studies professor who is writing a book about the connections between religion and wine. He draws a fabulous parallel between the minimal-intervention approach of natural winemakers and the Taoist principle of wu wei.

“Literally translated, wu wei means ‘non-action’,” says Steve, “But it is not valuing doing nothing. It means not forcing a solution or seeking to gain control but being aware and going with the natural flow. Think of it more as active non-interference.”

You will have the opportunity to taste heaps of delicious natural wines - wines that might be a bit blurry and might hit the odd bum note but have actively not been interfered with and are definitely full of heart - at Rootstock, the Sustainable & Artisan Wine and Food Festival, taking place on Sunday February 17 at The Italian Forum in Leichhardt.

More: rootstocksydney.com

(A version of this column first appeared in The Weekend Australian, 2nd February 2013. All photographs were taken by me on an old Olympus OM1. On 35mm film. Using natural light. )

Maurice O'Shea, creator spirit of Australian wine, captured in oils

Sacramental wine by Garry Shead 2010
courtesy of Australian Galleries

Nothing's truly new.


Amidst all the chatter about 'natural wine', I popped into the Australian Galleries in a leafy inner-Sydney cul-de-sac recently to have a look at Garry Shead's gorgeous exhibition of new paintings, Love on Mount Pleasant. And these fabulous, whimsical, deeply romantic canvases made me think about how the legendary Hunter Valley winemaker, Shead's uncle, Maurice O'Shea, would be right at home with today's breed of eager young natural grape treaders.


Here was Maurice, devoted to his mature, dry-grown vineyard - already 50 years old when O'Shea was at his winemaking peak in the 1930s - fashioning remarkable, long-lived bottled gems in a dirt-floor tin shed with no electricity. Those vines up there on Mount Pleasant were farmed for decades without chemical herbicide or pesticides - we'd call it organic farming these days. And the wines were made with the minimum of fuss: nothing much added or taken away. Great wine. Slumbering in big old vats. On a dirt floor. Very natural. And revered, now. Iconic, even.

In the kitchen by Garry Shead 2009
courtesy of Australian Galleries

Garry Shead's paintings capture Maurice's obsession, his passion, his connection to his terroir. They capture, too - beautifully - a spirit of place: the light of a hot Hunter summer; bright midday glimpsed through windows in the shed; the relief of violet dusk draping itself over the hills. Shead has been painting the place since early visits to see his uncle in the early 1950s; he knows this country.


There's a mythic quality here, too, in the Chagall-like presence of prancing fawns, floating goats, Bacchus himself, Aphrodite in the form of a black swan ... But this ancient European symbolism is projected through a rough-hewn, thoroughly Australian prism. As Gavin Wilson, exhibition curator says in the catalogue notes: 'the artist, through an intensely personal experience, has illuminated a little-known narrative that lies at the heart of our nation’s cultural life.'

Maurice with Bandicoot by Garry Shead 1966
courtesy of Australian Galleries

The exhibition runs until Nov 27. If you're not in Sydney, you can check it out online: Australian Galleries

Quick! They're hatching!

Here's a message I just received from Sam Hughes, one of the Natural Selection Theory crew. It's about the imminent release of the egg-fermented semillon I wrote about here. It's self-explanatory, really - and a wild ride of a read:


'Testing 1,2 3!

TO YOU ALL!
To our friends, lovers, believers, sceptics, fall guys, fly girls, maitre d's, back of houses, he-men, sirens of thy song, the time has come for our en-primeur to come to a close.
Following a leisurely 4000k, 5 day drive through South East Australia, encountering rain fronts, snow drifts, floods, backburns, man sized 4wd spooning and many a beautiful soul, our quest is over.
We have the eggs, and we have impregnated them with a wild vinous child never before seen in our times, and we people, we are proud, damn it - proud and LOUD!
We are putting the final spit of polish to the accompanying 12inch album, and then after a small amount of rest in the eggs, the history of Australian wine shall change forever! No shit!
So as such, our en-primeur will be closing this Sunday the 31st of October at midnight.
If you'd like to secure your piece of history, we need your payment details asap.
Prices will jump for your 3 pack from $250 to a rrp of around $500 at one minute past midnight monday the 1st of November, so blow us down like the gravity fed, unfiltered, unfined, wild yeast beast that we all would love to be!  There are only 53 sets of said collection produced - so first in, best dressed. Forget a fondue party, the semillon anti terroir terroir party is sure to be the hippest and most happening event on the foodies' social, nu-blog calendar, PERIOD!

After this we will release a one off blend of all 3 soil types and all 3 skin ratios at $250-$300 per 900ml egg plus the album, to be available in mid to late November, this time a limited run of 162 units. That's right, a blend of all 9 components dancing to the wild beat of a natural drum encased in a house the form of a phi ratio sphere - WOW! 

SO to be plainly boring, as stated before, the coming of the end of en-primeur is upon us. I repeat in frank freakness, THE END OF THE EN-PRIMEUR IS UPON US, as are soon the stagnant old ways of the Australian wine industry.
The coming of the egg brings in the birth of a new time, a new spirit, an alternate future to our day and age. This wine, your wine, is unlike any to come from this country before. She is natural, charming, multi faceted, textural and light - yet for a wine of such litheness, extremely serious, multi-lingual and concentrated.
Make no mistake - we are deadly serious about this - this wine represents a faultline in the history of Oz wine culture. After this nothing shall be the same again. We put our names to this, as we do our reputations: Tom Shobbrook, 2010 Young Winemaker of the Year, Gourmet Traveller Wine; James Erskine, 2009 Sommelier of the Year, Gourmet Traveller; Anton van Klopper, the Godfather of Oz Vinous Grunge & Sam Hughes, your Voice and Keeper of the Eggs.

There are just a handful left of the 55 X 3 packs available, then just 162 bottles of blended benchmark old school new world white.
If you are keen, jump, for these are pure packages of beauty, intellect, spirit and playfulness.
We thank you for your interest and please remember this: times are a changing - help speed it up and be part of this beautiful moment in history.
Let's tie this up, then throw her out into the world beyond!
Peace.
Till soon,
All at Natural Selection Theory.
WORD!'

samhughesis@gmail.com

Winemakers: they're everywhere

Winemaker Kevin McCarthy siphoning
 some pop-up nebbiolo for us to taste

Forget trendy pop-up bars or restaurants. Two pop-up wineries appeared in the heart of Melbourne and Sydney during the 2010 vintage, both producing some of the most exciting booze from this year's harvest.

In late March, lunchtime office workers and shoppers bustling through the Southgate complex on the banks of Melbourne’s Yarra River were treated to the unexpected sight of big vats full of nebbiolo grapes, bubbling away inside an empty shopfront.

Winemaker Kevin McCarthy from T’Gallant and chef Simon Humble from Southgate restaurant Tutto Bene were the hearts and minds behind this crazy 'garagista' project. As well as bleeding off some juice for a pink wine and pressing off the bulk of the wine for an earlier-drinking red, the pair also decided to leave some wine in the vat in contact with the grape skins for another three months before pressing, to extract the finest tannins and flavours.

This is extreme winemaking, even by the standards of Barolo, the Italian heartland of nebbiolo. But Sydney wine retailer, artist and musician Sam Hughes took winemaking to an even more extreme place.

This time, the location, fittingly, was an art studio in a crumbling 19th century terraced house directly under the flight path near Sydney airport. As the 747s roared overheard, I looked on in wide-eyed wonder at Sam’s pop-up semillon, made from Hunter Valley fruit.

The wine was fermented in nine large ceramic egg-shaped vessels, each buried in a drum. And when I say ‘buried’, I mean it literally: three of the ‘eggs’ were buried in sand, three in clay and three in crushed shells. Each group of three eggs had sound played to it while it fermented: the sandy group had the high-pitched tone of a finger running around the rim of a glass, the clay group had a heartbeat, and the shells the sound of a single note played on electric guitar. Some of the eggs contained just fermented juice, while some contained whole grapes - skins and pips and all. There was no temperature control, and nothing was added to the wines: no yeast, no acid, no sulphur. In other words, all the modern rules of white winemaking have been gleefully broken.

But the wines I tasted from those eggs were amazing: full of wild fruit flavours and concentrated textural characters I’ve never before seen in Hunter semillon. I think it’s fabulous that someone is pushing the boundaries of wine so very far beyond what is considered acceptable - and, like Kevin and Simon at Southgate, is having an enormous amount of fun doing it.

For more on the egg semillon: http://www.naturalselectiontheory.com

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A version of this story was first published in The Weekend Australian Magazine, April 10, 2010. 

What? No sulphur?

photo: Natural Selection Theory

Preservative-free wines used to be vinous fringe-dwellers, lurking unloved in dusty corners of Australia’s bottle shops and organic stores. Now you can find excellent preservative-free wines flying off lists in trend inner city restaurants and bars.

It’s all part of a move towards more ‘natural’ wine - wine that hasn’t been buggered around too much with in the vineyard or winery. I’ve reviewed some of Australia’s pacesetters in this field before: Torbreck in the Barossa, who first produced a wonderfully spicy ‘Natural Wine Project’ preservative-free grenache in 2009 (look out for the even better, brighter-tasting 2010); Lowe Wines in Mudgee, whose briary-tasting 2010 preservative-free merlot is out now under the Tinja label and whose 2009 preservative-free merlot is tasting better and better with bottle age; and Gippsland-based Bill Downie, who first made a preservative-free gamay in 2008, and is now selling a very pretty, juicy no-sulphur 2010 pinot noir.

This year sees more newcomers to the natural wine scene; they deserve to be tracked down not just by people who would rather drink wine without preservatives, but also by anybody who’s interested in drinking wine with delicious, interesting flavours.

Because what’s remarkable about many of these preservative-free wines is how they change and reveal more complexity as you drink your way through the bottle.

Take the 2009 Aziza’s Preservative Free Shiraz from Harkham Windarra in the Hunter Valley: over the couple of days it took me to finish this, it kept revealing more and more berry fruit and typical regional dusty soil characters. Similarly with the 2010 Battle of Bosworth Preservative Free Shiraz: typical black jubey McLaren Vale fruit richness at first, but it gradually revealed stunning aromatic dried-herbs and currants.

The most innovative of the new preservative-free wines comes from a mob of renegade South Australian winemakers called Natural Selection Theory. Named (either pretentiously or cheekily, depending on your point of view) Voice of the People Winter 2010, the wine is a dense, slurpy, spicy blend of Adelaide Hills and Barossa red grapes and is being sold through restaurants and bars in 23 litre glass demijohns, with a layer of olive oil floating on the surface of the wine to stop it oxidizing, and a neat siphon system installed to access the deep purple liquid underneath.

Have a look for yourself: http://www.naturalselectiontheory.com

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UPDATE: This article first appeared in The Weekend Australian Magazine, July 17, 2010 - just as I was finishing the last of a bottle of utterly delicious 2010 vintage chardonnay from Harkham Windarra in the Hunter Valley. According to winemaker Christian Knott (who also works in Burgundy), this wine had ‘no additions full stop (no acid, no sulphur, no enzymes, no yeast, no fining agents etc)’ and was not filtered.

High quality no-sulphur Australian white wine is rare, but this (all 25 cases of it) is a beauty: redolent of place, it is golden, sun-kissed, with a tang, like chewing on pineapple core, that I associate strongly with Hunter chardonnay. One of the many arguments about not adding stuff to wine is that it helps the grapes speak with integrity and authenticity of where they’re from: this chardonnay lends that argument considerable weight.