Australian readers will be very familiar with this, but for those who may be following this blog from the northern hemisphere, and especially the more northerly parts of the northern hemisphere ... here’s a surprise.

You will know only too well in the north that by the time November comes around (All Hallows, All Souls, Remembrance Day, disaster piled on disaster) nature seems entirely defeated, and is sinking back into gloom, mud, sogginess and vegetative death. You brace yourself for the first frosts and snows, and for those days when it never seems to get light at all. Spring is a marathon away. Anything canny is preparing to hibernate.

Not here. We are now well into the equivalent of November, and it’s evident that the South Australian autumn is a kind of second spring. Perhaps it depends on rainfall (generous lately), but just now in 2009 everything that was brown in the Adelaide area has turned green. There is still warmth in the air, and if the sun shines, the light is generous. P. and the boys have been off to the garden centre, and planted herbs and beans and broccoli and all kinds of crazy things, and they’re growing. Excitement!

The lawn is exploding with mushrooms. You can buy tulips from the florist. Plants which spent the summer merely surviving have tumbled back into life with a frantic growth spurt. Over the road in the Magill Vineyard, too, the leaves are still photosynthesizing. The days are shorter, of course, and sooner or later something will make the vines take a break, but for the time being all is weirdly fecund, and we can’t quite get used to it.

Up in the Barossa, all was post-fermentative contentment. That season which had seemed so threatened in the heatwave of late January somehow came good; it was, it seemed, a freak moment in a dry but not overly hot season. It was a fine vintage in Eden, too. Indeed gauging just how different those two areas are was one of the main discoveries of the week for me.

I met with a group of Eden growers one evening at the Angas family’s Hutton Vale, and asked them whether or not they felt that the proximity to the Barossa was a good or a bad thing. What I had in mind was the fact that the Barossa name is such a strong one, and the Barossa character so marked, that Eden might feel a little suffocated in the relationship, especially given that the two can be subsumed within the Barossa GI. The question didn’t make much sense to anyone, though. Locally, the difference is clear enough; and the economic advantages of that proximity seem to outweigh any issues of identity. Fruit from the two areas blends happily.

Yet just how different the higher, stonier, skinnier boulder-strewn pastureland is from the warm, fecund sediments below with their history of sweet things (candied fruits, nuts and what must be some of the world’s sweetest dry wines) is a memory which still haunts me. The emblematic vineyards would be Pewsey Vale versus somewhere like the Kalleske family farm in Greenock. The former often little more than a breeze-strewn rubble of quartz and marble; the latter rich, red and nourishingly clay-bottomed, with a few handfuls of ironstone for luck.

I loved both the `08 Pewsey Vale Riesling and the `03 Pewsey Vale Contours, both of them structured as only Australian Riesling can be, yet at the same time full of the stony delicacy relished by those who love Kabinett wines from the great vineyards of the far north. Compare that with the sheer luxury of a wine like the Kalleske 2006 Johan Georg Old Vine Shiraz, ballasted with the amplitude of the place, its black fruits cased in chocolate and earth, and you can’t believe they are just half-an-hour’s drive from each other. (Half an hour if you know the roads, that is.)

I was lucky enough to spend a half day each with Barossa scholar, geologist and wine merchant David Farmer, ‘dirtman’ and original thinker Rob Gibson and local sage and witness Robert O’Callaghan; each helped in filling out my knowledge of the Barossa’s sub-regions and its sedimentary kaleidoscope. And of course you can’t spend time exploring the Barossa without marvelling at the fact that you are wandering around the greatest old-vine repository in the world. Some of the photographs of these survivors accompany this blog entry. Remember that if we were looking at human beings, we’d be looking at Dickens, Rilke and Henry Ford, all still with us and all fathering children every year …

Human beings don’t last quite that long – or do they? I was also fortunate enough during the week to get to meet and interview Ray Beckwith at his home in Nuriootpa. I haven’t yet had time to transcribe the interview, but if I am anywhere near at lucid as Ray is at 97 when I’m 67, then I’ll be … um, astonished. Ray’s memories of sweet wine disease, Max Schubert and colleagues and Penfolds as a family company were all intriguing. It was, though, when he rephrased Pilate’s infamous question about truth to apply to ripeness in the vineyards that I realised that some debates truly are perennial.

Stephen Henschke with Hill of Grace GrandfatherWhich leads me to understatement of the week, which goes to Michael Waugh of Greenock Creek who told me, a shy smile playing about his lips, that “we make quite big wines”. With the 2006 Apricot Block Shiraz weighing in at 18.5%, indeed. Do I fret about high alcohols? Not really. Wine is a spectrum. What matters is a wine’s internal harmony and balance, and wines at any alcohol level (from Moscato d’Asti at beer strength to vintage port at 20% or more) can be harmonious and balanced, provided that flavour, texture and acidity are seamlessly and proportionately interfolded.

Alcohol on its own is no bar to harmony. Naturally the alcohol level has some bearing on the moment a wine is served and the kind of food partnerships it will inspire. Naturally, too, higher-alcohol wines require a different drinking approach to lower alcohol wines, though in my experience the human mouth tends to adapt automatically, and you either take fewer sips per minute of vintage port than of Moscato d’Asti, or those sips tend to be smaller. I loved the sumptuousness and vineyard differentiation of the Greenock Creek wines (with an especially soft spot for the grunt and chew of the Alices Shiraz) and would happily have drunk them all. With respect. And maybe cheese.

The tasting notes are now piling up so look out in this blog for some pure tasting note entries before long. Roadsong-wise, I’ll be back to the Barossa before long to explore the Lyndoch and Williamstown end of the valley … and then it’s off to Tasmania, with Eliot’s words coming incongruously to mind. “’A cold coming we had of it,/Just the worst time of the year/For a journey, and such a journey:/The ways deep and the weather sharp/The very dead of winter’”.

Actually I’m sure it will be brighter and cheerier than that, they’ll be no problems with refractory camels lying down in the melting snow, and the scenery, I understand, is a lot better than anything you’ll find along the road from Babylon to Bethlehem.