Is This Bottle Corked__ The Secret Life of Wine - Kathleen Burk [34]
It seems extraordinary that an underground ocean, its origins lost in the darkness of geological deep time, could affect the price of wine today on the other side of the world; but that world is increasingly and inextricably interconnected, however, and sometimes the past comes back to bite us.
The fertile southern tablelands of Australia—including the great wine-growing regions along the Murray and Darling rivers—lie upon just such a subterranean sea. Once they thought it came to the surface, and expeditions were launched to find the so-called Great Inland Sea, at the cost of many lives. The quest was in vain. The Great Inland Sea doesn’t exist. But its legacy does. Beneath the soil lie deep deposits of heavily salt water. For millions of years, it simply didn’t matter: native species evolved to cope with the salinity of the soil, and plants and geology lived in balance.
But then came the Europeans, and with the Europeans came European crops—particularly the grain and the grape. These, unable to handle the salt levels, needed irrigation, and the rivers were there to provide it. But the cost was high. The water for irrigation sank lower than the natural freshwater from the rains; as one farmer put it, we were pouring three feet of fresh water on land designed to cope with ten inches. And so the freshwater leached down, dissolving the lower levels of highly salty earth and seeping into the saltwater tables. Fresh and salt began to mix, and the saltwater rose to the surface or into the waterways. The results were potentially catastrophic: as one water engineer told us over ten years ago, “By the time you’ve realized the problem, you’ve missed the boat for the solution.”
And just to make absolutely sure that we realize the indifference of nature, the “Big Dry” of 2007 posed an equal threat to the region’s wine growers, promising to halve the 2008 grape harvest from 2 million metric tons to between 800,000 and 1.3 million. Australians seldom refer to “drought,” preferring to talk about “a bit of a dry spell,” but at the time of writing, the D-word was being bandied about freely.
Yet there is something about viticulture that brings out the best of human ingenuity. Partly it’s the sheer figures involved today. Australia earned $1.9 billion from wine exports in 2006, exporting 176 million gallons, 40 percent to Britain and 30 percent to the United States. The majority was exported by Australia’s largest wine company, Southcorp, which owns well-known labels such as Penfolds, Lindemans and Rosemont Estate, and nearly 2.5 million acres of vineyards (and whose biggest single customer is the U.K. supermarket chain Tesco); but individual winemakers, as well as selling to the big shippers, are producing small but increasingly high-quality house wines of their own.
This is currently all under threat: some growers are allowed to take only 10 percent of the water they would normally use for irrigation. As crop yields fall, prices increase; the good-quality, mass-produced “clean-skin” wines that Australia has become famous for will no longer be such excellent value. There is no way out of the economic loop.
Yet the reversal of the salination process in the Murray/ Darling Basin has been hailed as an example to the rest of Australian agriculture. Tammy Van Wisse, of the Murray Darling Rescue project, described salinity as “arguably the greatest environmental threat facing Australia today. No one is immune. Salinity is spreading like cancer.” The farmers of the Murray River have seen that cancer halted by a combination of engineering works and the management of water flows, and a national campaign is now encouraging the planting of perennial crops, trees, and salt-tolerant species such as Atriplex amnicola and a hybrid gum tree whose name clearly explains its most prized quality: the Saltgrow. Individual vines are drip-fed water—each one gets precisely what it needs and no more.
Whether it will be enough remains to be seen. But the two commonest phrases among Australia’s farmers are “no worries” and “she’ll be right.” These originated