IF you want to see the new Barossa Valley, ask Michael Voumard to show you around his garden of Eden, five biodynamic acres near Rockford Winery in Krondorf, writes The Weekend Australian Magazine’s Necia Wilden [21-22 Nov 2009].
Thin, black-haired and intense, Voumard is talking nineteen to the dozen, affectionately mimicking the locals’ patter, as he leads us past rows of spiky artichoke bushes to a young family of white mallard ducks busying themselves by a creek. Suddenly, as one, the parents look skywards. Dutifully, so do we, craning to see a speck of a hawk wheeling high above. ‘Now, how did they know that was there?’ Voumard asks in wonder at the mysteries of nature.
All 80 birds here, ducks and rare-breed hens, roam freely during the day and are secured at night, the very model of modern, environmentally aware farming. Voumard says he uses ‘negative energies’ to keep the foxes out, which sounds a bit loopy. But not one bird has been lost to foxes since he introduced the bully-boy treatment two growing seasons ago, five years after moving here from NSW – where he was a chef at top Sydney restaurants MG Garage and Fuel – to work as both gardener for Rockford owner Robert O’Callaghan and cook at his invitation-only winery lunches.
If you want to see the old Barossa Valley, drop by a shop called Angaston Cottage Industries in the town’s main street, where the region’s home cooks have sold their country-fair produce cheaply and anonymously, in the spirit of collective enterprise, since 1972. ‘They’re not allowed to brand their products,’ says the local I’m with, as I buy a packet of biscuits and some marmalade. ‘It’s a tradition. They’re a superstitious lot sometimes, you know.’
Superstitious, conservative, hard-working, stubborn: you don’t have to dig far to find the stereotype of the old Barossan. The oldest wine region in Australia, the Barossa Valley is unique in having continuous documentation of settlement since the 1830s, much of it German Lutheran. The claim to great age extends beyond European migration, too. Outspoken winemaker Dave Powell of Torbreck likes to tell the story of meeting the winemaker from Washington State, US, who boasted the soil in his vineyard dated back a million years. ‘That’s nice,’ replied Powell politely. ‘The soil where I come from dates back 600 million years.’
Pride in history and connection to the soil have made the Barossa Australia’s most identifiable wine region, not only for big companies such as Yalumba – celebrating its 160th anniversary this year – but increasingly for small ones such as Shobbrook, one of 82 producers in the region with a vineyard size of less than 10ha. Trouble is, it’s no longer enough. The speck of a hawk over the Barossa Valley today is the threat of urban sprawl and the loss of precious agricultural land to housing developments, a feared long-term outcome of the state government’s draft 30-year Plan for Greater Adelaide, of which the Barossa is a part.
As prominent local identity Jan Angas told a gathering of winemakers and food producers over brunch at Charles Melton Wines during the Valley’s biennial Slow Food festival last month, the best protection for the region’s greatest asset is economic viability. ‘And the key to economic viability here,’ she said, ‘is food.’
Food such as Jersey Fresh milk and cream, produced by Jeff and Erica Kernich on their 84ha property at Greenock from cows fed on grain grown on the farm. Gruff but talkative, Kernich is something of a hero of the growing resistance movement against multinational dairy companies sending struggling small farmers broke by underpaying them for their milk. Today, he’s holding court in the mud outside his modest milk factory, surrounded by a group of Slow foodies shivering in the unseasonably cold and wet spring weather.
For the past five years, Kernich has pasteurised his herd’s milk himself. ‘I was sick of being ripped off by the big processors,’ he says. Now, his business is viable once more, and Jersey Fresh’s defiantly unhomogenised milk and thick, glorious cream are a highly valued part of Barossa food culture.
Or food such as SchuAm Berkshire pork, produced from the black Berkshire pigs at the SchuAm piggery at Freeling and appearing on the menus of top Barossa restaurants. Historically a conventional piggery of shed-raised white pigs, the SchuAm family grew after owners Daniel Schuster and Damien Amery heard about the great eating qualities of the Berkshire and decided to give them a go. Now, they can barely keep up with demand. A visit to the farm confirms the black pigs get the prime real estate, with big sunny yards and views, but that also – thankfully – the white pigs’ sheds are roomy and clean and nothing like the wretched conditions of intensive farming.
Foods such as these could help the Barossa Valley protect itself, as Angas explains, because the farmer makes more money on a niche, artisanal product than on a rock-bottom commodity. It’s called ‘value-adding’, an increasingly popular concept helping farmers all over the world find new markets, from American dairy farmers diversifying into profitable raw-milk cheese-making to Australian cattle farmers specialising in beef untainted by additives.
‘It’s about raising the profile of small producers,’ says Angas. ‘It won’t be Coles or Woolworths that will come in and save us.’ If the concept of value-adding is relatively new, the food culture of the Barossa most definitely isn’t. The dear old Valley hasn’t finally caught up with food fashions: it’s the other way around. Suddenly, disused wood-fired ovens in the grand 19th-century homesteads are being dusted off and fired up, while the regional traditions of preserving, pickling, curing and smoking are finding a whole new fan club. Kitchen gardens, for long an unremarkable part of daily life, are springing up again, this time intended for community and educational use, like the one currently at seedling stage in the grounds of the Bethany church community centre.
The woman who first unleashed the Barossa brand is Maggie Beer, cook, author and TV star. On the Friday of the festival, we drop by her Farm Shop at Nuriootpa. The place is chockers, the rain no deterrent to the crowds lunching in the smart-rustic cafe or milling around the shop shelves, waiting for the daily cooking class to start. One young couple have come all the way from Perth, they say, just to visit Maggie’s farm. The feelgood factor is high, so I’m disappointed to find out later that Beer’s new line of chicken stock, attractively packaged like all her products, is made from non-free-ranging birds.
The local farmers’ market, in its eighth year and drawing 1000-plus people every Saturday, is also helping promote the Valley’s food culture, with many of its products finding markets interstate. But more needs to be done, says Angas, who cites the American wine region Napa Valley’s radical introduction of an agricultural reserve 40 years ago as an inspiration. ‘We need more good restaurants, more good accommodation,’ she says. “We need good growth.’
At stake, she says, is not just the integrity of the Barossa, but of every food and wine region around the country facing the same population pressures. ‘If we can’t save a region with a food culture as authentic as this one,’ she says, ‘how can we save other regions?’ Or, as Michael Voumard puts it: ‘There’s such an aliveness here. There’s so much potential.’
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Reproduced from The Weekend Australian Magazine [21-22 Nov 2009]