Fire, smoke, pandemic: wine industry’s year of heartbreak
Fire, smoke, pandemic… it’s been a heartbreaking year that pushed the wine industry to its limits | TOP 100 WINES
The most incredible film ever shot in the Adelaide Hills could well be the seven-second video Geoff Weaver recorded of the Cudlee Creek bushfire on December 20 last year, moments before the 71-year-old winemaker fled for his life. In the video the fire is consuming the hillside on his Lenswood vineyard, flowing like lava down a volcano. The scene pans to a helicopter buzzing bravely just above the tree canopy in near zero visibility. It drops a payload of water but the wind is so strong the water disperses before it hits the ground. Gum trees thrash desperately in the screaming wind, as if trying to uproot themselves and flee the flames clawing at their trunks.
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In the foreground is the vineyard Weaver planted with his dad in 1982, quivering and green. So preoccupied is he with this fire he doesn’t notice the spot fire that’s jumped up behind him. At this point Weaver stops the video and makes a dash for the farm shed but when he gets there it’s already on fire. His last resort is the dam, 250m away. He makes it to the water’s edge and waits for rescue as fuel drums explode and his car, shed, and all his vineyard equipment is destroyed. Four decades’ worth of his cherished landscape paintings displayed inside his beloved cabin are returned to the landscape as ash. Sheltering beside him is a single kangaroo.
In NSW, the travelling horror show that was last summer’s bushfires hit Tumbarumba in the Snowy Mountains on New Year’s Eve. Tom and Helle Southwell from Johansen Wines got the call that the mammoth Dunns Road fire was heading their way at 4am. They raced to move tractors and equipment to safety and evacuated into town just as the fire front hit. By mid-morning when they returned, their top vineyard was a smouldering mess with hundreds of spot fires still burning. They spent over six hours driving around with a spray unit mounted to their tractor, trying to save anything they could, before the sirens of an RFS truck alerted them to a second fire front that had crept up. The heavily timbered road that was their route to safety burst into flames. Things happened that day that Southwell still can’t talk about. The family lost one vineyard to fire and the other to smoke.
Twenty kilometres down the road, winemaker Adrian Brayne of Obsession Wines fought the same blaze. It took his vineyard and his home. All up 600,000ha would burn in that one fire, which wasn’t put out until mid-February. Brayne describes the scene as a war zone. “At one point the boys in the fire truck are driving along and a kangaroo jumps out of the bush and it’s on fire. It’s lighting up the paddock behind the truck as they drove along trying to put out what’s in front of them.”
Brayne is still living in a caravan beside the ruins of his vineyards. He says it’s better than sleeping on the couch in the cellar door, which he did for a month while the fires were burning. January seems so long ago now, in a year where so much has happened, where so much has gone wrong. Wine is in Brayne’s blood. He’s following in the path of his parents, grandfather and great grandfather. “The thought has crossed my mind to give it away,” he says. “But grapes and wine are my entire life. You can’t get it out of you.”
In 2020, winemakers in south-eastern Australia have been pushed to their limits. The frenzy of flames was followed by weeks of suffocating smoke, which dissipated only to make space for the sinister silence of Covid-19. It was a triple-whammy not even the most hardened farmer could have foreseen. The pain was concentrated on smaller boutique vineyards and wineries, ones that by bad geographical luck bore the brunt of fire and smoke, and whose scale meant they were acutely vulnerable to the pandemic-induced economic shocks. Gone too were the one million international visitors who visit wineries in a year. Then came troubling signs that China would target wine in its trade bans – a situation still playing out.
But sometimes, if you look to the sky, the simplest thing can turn your luck around. Just as the industry hit rock bottom came the sweet relief of drought-breaking rain. Parched paddocks have been revived, the subsoil is moist, buds are shooting and vineyards hum with the happy drone of lawnmowers. Domestic visitors are beating down cellar doors and communities are rallying, bringing hope in the toughest, strangest year in memory.
Mandy Jones, a fifth-generation Rutherglen winemaker,calls 2020 “the year that wasn’t”. Smoke started rolling into the town in Victoria’s north-east in early January. It came in layers, new smoke slipping in under the old, from fires in East Gippsland, Corryong and the King Valley. Just before harvest Jones sent grape samples away to the Australian Wine Research Institute at the University of Adelaide to be analysed for levels of smoke taint. She’d been dreading the day the results came, and with good reason. The numbers were off the scale. She made a necessary but heart-breaking decision.
“We didn’t make any wine,” Jones sighs, as we chat in the barn built in 1860 that’s now the winery cellar door and restaurant. The ceiling is layered with the original stringybark tiles, and memorabilia from more than 100 years of winemaking colour the walls. Jones’ family has been here since 1927. “It’s just devastating,” she says. “We would normally make 30,000 bottles. Instead we feed it to the cattle.”
Smoke taint is a little-understood science. While a fine whisky can make a virtue of a smoky flavour, wine can only suffer. Drinking smoke-tainted wine is like kissing a chain smoker. Cruelly for winemakers, you can’t tell if your grapes are smoke-tainted by tasting them; the taint will only be revealed by testing or after you’ve gone through the trouble and expense of fermentation. Jones says one of the more mysterious characteristics of smoke taint is that it can have a delayed effect. In 2003, Jones Winery made a lovely merlot from grapes that had been exposed to smoke. Well, it was lovely at first, fleshy and fruity and without notes of ashtray. But after ageing a couple of years and losing that plush merlot fruit flavour, the noisome taint was revealed. What had been a delicious wine was suddenly undrinkable.
Jones says the year has left her shell-shocked, but the rain has raised spirits. The cattle graze not on grapes but on grass that grows higher than the fence; the vines are budding and bursting with life. She walks to the oldest section of vineyards, planted in 1905. The wood is thick and tough as leather, gnarled and twisted. When times are tough she looks to these vines. “These guys are survivors,” she says. “They’re crusty old bastards who know what’s coming. If it’s going to be a hard, dry year they’ll stop growing to conserve themselves. They’ve seen droughts, tornadoes, two world wars, and they still give year after year. They’ll survive this.”
Up the road Stephen Chambers is welcoming visitors back to his cellar door, under strict Covid-19 protocols. He wipes down tables and records names and numbers with the same fastidiousness he puts into crafting his award- winning wine. Here, fortified is king. The internationally renowned Chambers Rosewood muscat, topaque and muscadelle are aged in a dark shed that adjoins the cellar door. It’s the smell that gets you first – that sweet toffee, rose petal and raisin aroma that wafts through rows of ancient European oak casks. Chambers says he’d normally process about 150 tonnes of grapes a year but smoke wiped out virtually the whole vintage. It was so thick he couldn’t see the end of the vineyard, the sun a feeble ball in a sky the colour of muscat. “Smoke can knock out a year,” Chambers says. “But Covid could be worse. We don’t know when or how it’s going to end. That’s the hardest part.”
A 30-minute drive from Rutherglen leads to the fertile hills of Beechworth, in the foothills of the Victorian Alps. It’s Australia’s smallest geographic wine region but commands one of the highest per bottle average prices, working on a quality over quantity maxim. Mark Walpole’s vineyard perches on top of an escarpment that drops dramatically into the lush Ovens Valley. Last year had been a good growing season and Walpole was looking forward to a bumper crop for his Fighting Gully Road Winery. But his hope dissipated as the summer smoke started drifting in around December.
Then, in mid-January, a lightning strike sparked a fire in the Buffalo River near Myrtleford, about 20km south. “It went up like a nuclear blast,” he says. “Huge pyrocumulus clouds shot up, and then overnight the whole system collapsed.” When Walpole woke, the sky was falling. Ash, white powder and flecks of burnt, blackened debris floated down and settled like snow. The smell of smouldering eucalypt and pine was overwhelming.
Having seen the effects of smoke taint from bushfires in 2003 and 2007, Walpole says he knew straight away his crop was finished. He had no choice but to rip 70 tonnes of grapes off the vine and throw them on the ground. “It’s just terrible going along and literally kicking it into the ground, rather than putting it into a bin and taking it away to the winery,” he says. “I was completely gutted. Making a wine that’s not quite right is not good enough. I wasn’t prepared to put out a wine where you had to make excuses for it.”
To fully understand the financial impact for the region Walpole surveyed wineries across north-eastern Victoria and produced a report for the City of Wangaratta. It revealed an estimated loss in retail sales of more than $140 million. In Beechworth just 54 tonnes were harvested, about six per cent of the grapes. For the 25 producers in the Rutherglen district, smoke taint cost wineries nearly $30 million. Across the border in Tumbarumba there will be no 2020 vintage at all. Bill Mason from Kosciuszko Wines calls it a lost year. “Lost vineyards, lost vintage, lost customers, lost jobs. A year of incredible loss in this part of the world.”
The story was repeated in Canberra, where Tim Kirk of Clonakilla Wines dropped his entire vintage on the ground. “We sent grapes off to be analysed for smoke taint and they came back with screamingly high numbers.” He says it was an easy decision to make; compromise is not an option. Clonakilla’s shiraz viognier alone is worth millions of dollars a year in bottled value. One tainted vintage could ruin that good name forever. “The most important aspect of any family winery is your brand. We’ve worked so hard for so long to give people that association with genuine quality. We can’t put that in jeopardy.”
In the NSW Hunter Valley, smoke was doing damage before it even got to the grapes – by keeping visitors away. According to the Hunter Valley Wine and Tourism Association, losses to the visitor economy between October 2019 and March this year totalled $76 million. Christina Tulloch, association president and CEO of Tulloch Wines, says the smoke taint nightmare colliding with Covid-19 was surreal. “You couldn’t imagine in your wildest dreams those things would come together. The silver lining is now that cellar doors are open again visitors are coming in droves. It’s been such a welcome relief.”
Four years of drought in the NSW Central Tablelands had already reduced the yield by 90 per cent at James Sweetapple’s Cargo Road Winery in Orange. Fires in the Blue Mountains from October then cut Sydneysiders off, which took 65 per cent of Sweetapple’s income at what was usually his busiest time of year. “Then in February we got the results of smoke taint tests, five days before we were due to start harvesting. It was off the scale. I had to walk away.”
When lockdown hit, the forced isolation couldn’t have come at a worse time for trauma- hit communities. Sweetapple knew that human connection was desperately needed, so he got together with his friend James Kendall, who runs Small Acre Cider, and the pair started broadcasting Sunday night tastings and fireside chats on social media. “James’s family is in England and he was feeling alone, and I had gone through all this economic grief, loss of crop grief, then home-schooling two boys… mental health was very tough. Getting together and having a bit of fun once a week was great, and it kept us engaged with customers.”
Orange is now green. The ground that was rock-hard a year ago now squelches underfoot. The cellar door buzzes with visitors; Sweetapple says it’s the best he’s ever seen it. Wine’s a bit like that; you have your good seasons and your bad. And then you have 2020. One out of the books.
For small wine producers without major retail clout the challenge has been getting people to buy direct from the cellar door. Again social media has provided the conduit, with clever campaigns such as the Cellardoor Challenge, in which people take a photo or video of what they’re drinking, get creative with the art direction and a spiel, then nominate friends to do the same. It’s all part of a new way of marketing in which stories are told through the experiences of everyday people.
The fire brigade picked up Geoff Weaver beside his dam. He was shaken but safe. He lost almost everything in the Cudlee Creek fire, but amazingly still managed to make some wine, because that’s what winemakers do. He’s just bottled some Geoff Weaver riesling and sauvignon blanc, which he says turned out wonderfully. If those grapes could talk…
Weaver’s Adelaide Hills vineyard is a warm site in a cool region. At night the cold air drops off the hill into the valley. That’s the secret to his grapes; they grow slowly and steadily, ticking along like the gentle farmer who tends them. “The winemaking process is magical and beautiful and driven by forces we understand only a bit,” he says. “We spend our whole lives trying to unravel the mysteries of chemistry and wine flavours, but I hope we don’t get there. I want to keep that mystery and romance.”
Weaver’s parents’ ashes are scattered here, under a row of candlebarks planted in their memory. His one regret is that he wasn’t here to fight the Ash Wednesday fire in 1983 that took the house, the shed and the Toyota, leaving the family penniless and hocked to the eyeballs just one year after planting their dream vineyard.
But there’s another tree that’s special to him, a walnut tree he used to sit under and eat lunch with his dad, on one of those rare occasions when he wasn’t bailed up at a fancy wine function in the glamour days when he was chief winemaker at Hardys. “I’d sit with him under this tree and I’d say, ‘Henry, I’ve been all over the place this week, but the best lunch I had was here with you under the walnut tree.’” You can lose a lot in fires, but it’s moments like those Weaver wishes he could have back. The walnut tree burnt in December. It’s now just a fire-blackened arch, a memorial to his dad and their lunches.
Weaver knows that if his dad could survive Ash Wednesday he can survive now, because the best wine is nurtured by deep roots. “I chose to be a small winemaker sailing my own ship through these great storms of life. Right now we’re out in the ocean, we’ve been dismasted but we’re still sailing. We’re still pointing in the right direction.”
