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| Wine producer Stephen Hickinbotham takes friends and dogs on a tour of his family's Mount Anakie Vineyard on the slopes of a dormant volcano, one of more than four hundred on Victoria's basalt plain. |
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| Photo by Jenny Hickinbotham, 1980s. |
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| Winemaker Sylvie Spielmann’s family vineyard in Alsace, France, looking towards the village of Blenheim. 'In Alsace our vines are planted much closer together, because our land is so expensive,’ Sylvie explained. |
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| Photo by Jenny Hickinbotham, 1994. |
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Vintage hadn’t yet begun and already the autumn rain was upon us. It came down steadily turning the rich volcanic soil into slippery black sludge. I could hear the phone ringing and tried to run, but with all the mud clinging to my gum-boots I was in great danger of falling on my back-side. I pulled my boots off and raced between the vines in my socks. My coat was soaked, and so were my jeans. I could feel water trickling down my legs. And still the phone kept ringing.
I reached the winery door, pulled off my now very black and sodden socks to spare the floor, opened the door, and breathlessly grabbed the phone: ‘Hello?’
‘Hello’, a young woman’s voice replied. ‘My name’s Sylvie Spielmann, I ‘m from Alsace in France and a friend told me you might be able to give me a job for vintage.’
‘Ohh’, I said recovering my breath and my equilibrium, ‘What sort of job are you looking for?’
‘Anything in the vineyard or winery.’
‘Are you a winemaker?’
‘My family has a winery in Alsace. My mother makes the wine but I am learning. I’ve done a course in winemaking and viticulture in Alsace and I help my mother.’
‘Our winery and vineyard is only very small,’ I told her.
‘That doesn’t matter,’ she enthused. ‘My friend said you were the best family to work for.’
‘That’s a lovely compliment from your friend. Who is it?’
‘Vincent Williams? Do you know him?’
‘Oh yes! He sells our wines at Darling Harbour in Sydney.’
‘That’s right.’ Sylvie laughed.
‘Well, if he recommended you to us why don’t you come to the winery so we can talk about where you’ll live and what work you can do? Where are you now?’
‘In a youth hostel in Sydney,’ she said in her beautiful French accent. ‘I can get a bus for Melbourne tonight and be there by 8.00 am.’
‘Okay. I’ll see you then.’
The rain slowed then eventually stopped. I waited till late in the day before I ventured out to test the sugar levels in the Chardonnay. Yesterday’s sample was thirteen Beaumé, but the vines had been soaking up so much water since then that I expected the sugar levels to have dropped. And I also had the Cabernet Sauvignon to worry about! I dearly wanted the rains to hold off for another month so the fruit would ripen to a full thirteen Beaumé. Yesterday’s reading was only at eleven, with acids around 3.4 and pHs of 2.6, and until the fruit was off the vine anything could happen. Vintage is such a stressful time of the year.
Our Geelong region is known for producing good cool climate wines. Much of this quality can be attributed to what’s called the terroir, a French word that integrates local climate, soil type and profile, aspect and topography. Rainfall is about 400 millimetres each year, not an enormous quantity, but sufficient to grow a crop of grapes, particularly since most of it falls in winter and spring when the vines need it most. The black volcanic soil holds plenty of water making it easy for established vines to feed the crop throughout the growing season. The main risk associated with our terroir is what we were now experiencing, autumn rain, which can dilute the sugar content in the fruit, encourage mould and reduce the flavour and acid quality of the wines.
That afternoon I listened anxiously to the weather reports with Stuart, the winemaker: fining up for the next four days, the weatherman claimed. ‘Great’, I said, with relief. ‘We can give the Chardonnay another day or two then pick before there’s any more rain!’
Stuart was expecting about twenty tonnes of fruit. He was sure it’d make excellent wine, and I hoped he was right. ‘Oh, by the way,’ I told him, ‘we’ve got a young French winemaker coming to join us for vintage. She’s made wine in Alsace and wants to learn some Australian techniques. Maybe she can teach us something.’
‘A French woman!’ he said. ‘I don’t think I could work with a woman!’
I was shocked. ‘But I’m a woman; you can work with me!’
‘Yes, but that’s different. You don’t get involved with the winemaking. You just grow the grapes then taste the wine and sell it!’
He was grinning. Damn him! I thought. He’s baiting me, and I am not going to bite! I ignored his comment: ‘Her name’s Sylvie,’ I said. ‘I’m picking her up at eight in Melbourne and we’ll be back around ten.’
Sylvie shared the house with me and worked in the winery with Stuart. She won him over with her love of food and wine, her happy laugh and her enthusiasm. Two days after she arrived we picked the Chardonnay. The quality was magnificent. Full ripe bunches with bountiful flavour and just a little mould to add complexity. The Beaumé was 13.5, the acid 3.2 and the pH 2.7, just creeping up, but we harvested before it got high enough to destroy the natural acid.
Although Sylvie and Stuart worked well together they couldn’t agree on which style of Chardonnay to make: a leesy varietal, left to mature in the barrel on dead yeast and fruit cells for the next six months, or a finely filtered wine. They came to me with the problem. ‘Why don’t we split the crop in half?’ I suggested. ‘Make two Chardonnays: one called Sylvie’s and one called Stuart’s.’
‘What about calling her’s Froggy Chardonnay?’ Stuart laughed.
‘Why do you call me Froggy?’ Sylvie demanded.
‘Because it’s your name and your background all in one word!’
‘But my name is Sylvie,’ she insisted. ‘Please call me that!’
‘Okay, Mademoiselle,’ Stuart relented, then turned to me: ‘What about the market-place? Don’t retailers want larger quantities of wines rather than smaller parcels?’
‘We can sell all the Chardonnay we make to restaurants and mail-order customers,’ I reassured him. ‘And independent retailers will stock both styles if they like them. So make sure they are both good!’
‘They will be,’ Sylvie enthused. ‘I’m going to make mine the way my mother taught me, a long time on lees in the barrel.’
‘Doesn’t that make a creamy, less fruity wine?’ I asked.
‘Yes, creamy. And slightly less fruity, but you can still taste the melons and apricots. They’re just more subtle and the yeasty flavour is stronger. I think it’s more balanced,’ she said with a broad smile.
‘Which of the new barrels will Sylvie use?’ I asked Stuart.
‘We’ve agreed she uses the Limousin oak from France.’
‘This will be the best Chardonnay ever,’ Sylvie assured me.
‘I’m looking forward to tasting it,’ I said, and winked to Stuart.
After vintage friends and family got together for a grand celebration at The Source Restaurant in Geelong. Sylvie entertained us all with her stories from back home. ‘In Alsace our vines are planted much closer together, because our land is so expensive,’ she said. ‘We have tiny little tractors that go between the narrow rows to maintain the vines.’
‘How different is your terroir from ours?’ my father, Ted, asked.
‘We have loamy soils with lots of rock and high acidity. And a short growing season. We’re so far inland the temperatures are quite low in Spring and Autumn. And it’s very flat. The only hill we have is one that was built to burn witches on in the eighteen hundreds.’
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| Sylvie Spielman shows friends around her family's property in Alsace. In the background is the small hill where, centuries ago, women were burned as 'witches'. If they survived the fire they were considered innocent! |
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| Photo by Jenny Hickinbotham, 1994. |
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‘Wow! How many witches were burned on the hill?’ my sister Valerie asked.
‘I don’t’ know exactly’ said Sylvie, ‘but there were very many.’
‘Our hill used to be a volcano,’ Valerie boasted. ‘One of four hundred on our plain, and our rich soil is a result of all their eruptions.’
‘But do you have any witches?’ Sylvie insisted.
‘Of course!’ Barry, my brother-in-law said. ‘I read in the Age that we have hundreds of witches in Victoria!’
‘Well, we should have a witching festival to celebrate the end of vintage and the re-emergence of witches after what we did to them in Europe,’ Sylvie suggested.
‘We’ll do a commemorative wine then!’ I added. Call it ‘Witch Volcano’!
‘But didn’t people in Europe throw witches into volcanoes?’ our friend Bronwyn asked. ‘If they came out alive they were considered normal and allowed to live, but if they didn’t survive the volcano …!’
‘I read somewhere that one women accused of being a witch asked to be thrown into a particular volcano because she knew there was a ledge she could hide under,’ Bronwyn’s partner Michael added. ‘I wonder what happened to her!’
Sylvie persisted over our wine-induced banter: ‘We should have the party on top of the volcano,’ she said.
‘With a big bon-fire!’ Stuart added, thinking of all those glowing French witches. He looked at Sylvie: ‘And you’re the first candidate for the volcano!’ he said.
She laughed. ‘I’ll love this new Witch Volcano wine. I’ll be able to sell it in Paris. Will it be Chardonnay, or Cabernet Sauvignon?’
Copyright Jenny Hickinbotham, 2003.
Story fixed 26 May 2003.
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