Maybe I was wrong again. Jeez. Too much wishful thinking …
People increasingly ask which fad might follow the current unmade, unfinished, “natural” wine affection, which also remains stubbornly unplugged.
I usually suggest that some hi-tech might be nice.
If the hipster yearning for vinous antiquity stays firm, and it can’t be Bob Dylan clicking a Strat into a Twin Reverb and rockin’ into Like a Rolling Stone before Pete Seeger or some luny firm zealot chops the cables with an axe, the new wine wave could even be retro hi-tech, like Kraftwerk, no? At least that has some rhythm, and South Australia has a German culture. Ask the tourism commissioners. Ask Nick Cave.
But nah. The next sommelier-driven lunge of wine fashion is a lot damn hotter than that. And older. It’s volcanic.
Influential McLaren Valer Rebecca Hopkins reminded me of this lurch with a link to her buddy Peter Weltman’s wine-searcher.com piece, The lava lover’s dream.
Working out of San Francisco, Rebecca is the communications strategist at Michael Mondavi’s Folio Fine Wine Partners, formidable shippers of many premium Italian wines from volcano country. Among others.
Weltman writes of the Toronto-based Master Sommelier and evangeliser John Szabo, author of last year’s Volcanic Wines: Salt, Grit and Power, who says things like “Think of volcanic soils like cheese.”
While I’m sure Bec wouldn’t be the type to put all her vinous eggs in one such explosive/runny basket, I can’t help thinking that if it’s volcanoes that make the difference, she shoulda stayed in Australia.
Australia has volcanoes and volcanic geology from arsehole to breakfast. Take the eastern coast and its ranges. Some of those rocks erupted as molten sizzling goo onto the bottom of an ocean about 520 million years ago. Australia wasn’t even here then.
Queensland’s Granite Belt is built of crystallised magma that cooled and solidified about 240 million years ago, but never kissed the sky until erosion exposed it about 50 million years later. Good wines there.
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Forget cheese for a moment: Imagine the Earth as a huge bowl of stew. You know those big globby bits that form on the top if you don’t stir it? How they’ll move around and crash into one another, build up, or just plain sink, or boil away? That’s the Earth’s crust. We ride on that. Its buoyancy and movement is all about its composition, surface tension, and the great swirling currents in the molten magma and its temperatures beneath.
Since Australia bounced off Gondwanaland about 132 million years ago, to bullishly head back north at about 75 kilometres per million years, a great swathe of its east coast cruised over a very hot spot in that molten liquor below.
This pushed a string of zits up through the skin. Speaking generally, these cool, set and age as their piece of crust travels north past the hot bit. So the northern ones are older and colder than those down south: Very far south, in the case of Australia’s only erupting volcano, its tallest mountain, Mawson Peak. That beauty’s on Heard Island, just 1500 kilometres short of Antarctica in the Southern Ocean.
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