This little piggy....

Sitting over lunch at  the thousand candles farmstead, Bill Downie reminded me that the first time we met we talked very little about wine and more about pigs. I told him of my love for Jamon and of my unlikely plans to persuade my neighbours to give up a few metres of their garden in order to create a communal pig run. In turn, Bill told me of his plans to keep pigs and experiment with different foodstuffs to see what difference it made to the flavour of the subsequent ham.

Many years on and while I still obsess over great jamon, my garden remains a porcine free zone. I did almost persuade my wife, and some neighbours, to buy some “micro” pigs but in the end, the risk of my wife returning home to find me cooking one of these bite sized piggies was deemed too high. Bill, on the other hand, has embraced the self sufficiency model and is busy rearing and butchering his piggies very successfully.

But I wasn’t there just to chew the porcine fat, this was my chance to absorb the thousand candles vibe – and a very chilled out vibe it turned out to be. Much has been said about thousand candles over the past year and it’s clear that Bill has grown a little weary of the somewhat spiteful attacks on the project by sceptical fellow winemakers. It’s difficult to see why this well intentioned project could elicit anything more than praise for being brave enough to do things differently.

Thousand candles aims to express the character of one vintage on one farm, with all the vicissitudes of climate and weather that accompany it. This is a very real exploration  and communication of a very Australian notion of terroir. Bill volunteered that he believed that the Australian interpretation of terroir needs to be different from that accepted in Europe.

Many people comment on how the sky in Australia seems larger, higher, more soaring than that found in Europe. I asked Bill why he thought this was the case and his explanation went some way to elucidating his notion of Australian terroir.

Australia is an old land, something often overlooked by those looking at its relatively recent modern history. Australia is a low country, its flesh almost seeming to sink back down towards its skeleton, revealing its bones, its very structure. The result is that the land shrinks away from the sky, providing more space and more height. In Europe the land is younger, more urgent – continually pushing itself up towards the sky resulting in less space, less volume.

Given these fundamental differences, it’s not unreasonable to hypothesise that the way in which nature interacts with its environment will also differ. In Europe, the notion of terroir is very heavily weighted towards what is below the ground – the soil, the drainage, the nutrients. Downie hypothesises that the Australian notion of terroir must be weighted towards what happens above the ground. In such an old land, the soils are more homogenous, more consistent and while pockets of unique soils exist, these are the exception rather than the rule. We must therefore look towards unique climates, micro climates and original interactions between the climate and the vine. Against such an exaggerated canvas it is the colour above the ground that paints the Australian concept of terroir.