Flower

Today I feel that I deserve something nice. I am a bit exhausted. Not even a glass of wine could excite me but a flower might bestow on me peace of mind.

I took this photo on my terrace in Bangkok. I have water lilies in different colours. Tomorrow I will go out and check out the wine shop opposite the centre were I am teaching right now.

Cheers from Taoyuan.

Also the foxes like sweet grapes

Ripe Riesling grapes, Herrenberg in Schoden/Saar

Right now it is vintage time in Germany and along the Mosel and the Saar one can admire ripening grapes. What a beautiful picture.

The weather was warm and dry when I accompanied my friend Heinz on a morning hunt in Schoden, Saar. We sat on a raised hide from about 5:30 until 8 in the morning. We watched two red deer does with their young ones making their way through the meadow. Later we went through the hunting territory and checked out a couple of places.

I found the above turd of a red fox. Obviously the beast loves what humans love: the juicy fresh and sweet grapes. Also other wild animals love to nibble from the vines, especially red deer and wild pigs. They can be a quite a nuisance.

Autumn is just such a beautiful time in Germany. I will share more with you soon. Watch my blog entries.

The sky is the limit

It was at a Sunday afternoon, I had one hour for myself before our official meeting was about to start and I decided to have a glass of wine in Vapiano in Mittelstrasse which is near Friedrichstrasse in the centre of Berlin.

Vapiano is a worldwide operating chain restaurant in an Italian style, but at times I like to go there. The standardization means that you know in advance what you are getting.

I went through the wine list and choose the Gavi (6 Euro/glass) which was nice but I should have odered the most expensive wine on the list, the Riesling (8.5 Euro).

GAVI »ORO« GAVI DOCG
La Scolca, Piemont, Italy.
fine, elegant, harmonious and fresh.

GEHEIMRAT »J« RIESLING, SPÄTLESE, TROCKEN
Weingüter Wegeler, Rheingau, Germany.
According to ‘Fine Wine Review’, of the USA, this Riesling is the best Spaetlese in Germany and award winner of the German Riesling competition.

I sat in the “garden” (or better: the yard) of Vapiano and enjoyed my glass of wine in the hope that I was not to be disappointed when later that day the election results would come in. What a splendid hours that was.

Birds growing up

Birds with proper feathers

I regularly monitor the development of my two little birds, and as you can see from the photos, they are growing up fast, very fast. I am very protective of my Yellow-vented Bulbuls and hope they can grow up in safety to become beautiful birds. The nest is now getting smaller for the growing birds.

Always hungry

Also the parents are very attentive and wary of the humans of course.

The Yellow-vented Bulbul or Merbah Kapur (Pycnonotus goiavier) of the passerine family is quite common in South-East Asia. They originate from the mangrove forests and coastal scrubs which were so widespread in this part of the world. They forage not only on insects but also eat small fruit, berries, sip nectar and nibble on young shoots. They are also not afraid to browse for feed on the ground.

The adult birds are about 20 cm long, their crest is slight and they are yellow under their tail. They remind me of Zorro as the black stripes on their face look like a mask. Both parents incubate and raise the young. We had only two eggs but they lay up to five. I look forward to the next stage in their upbringing.

Two young birds

My two little Merbah Kapur – Yellow-vented Bulbuls have grown a little. The parents are very busy collecting insects to fee the two hungry beaks. They have also grown some feathers.

New chicks on the block

Two eggs only

Today I discovered that the little Yellow-vented Bulbul (Pycnonotus goiavier) or Merbah Kapur as we call them in Malay, which had built an elaborate nest in on of the bushes just next to the table on our terrace, and which had laid two eggs some time ago, has had young ones. Our terrace is about 80 sq. meters and we planted a lot of different pot plants. I found the two hungry birds today. Welcome to Bangkok.

Eggs become chicks

Melbourne’s water supply

When I read in the Age that Melbourne is planning to take 10 billion litres (which covers the city consumption for about 10 days only) from the Thompson River to make up for the shortfall which cannot be covered from the Yarra River, I was not impressed. The Labour government is desperate.

The interview of Tim Holding, the Victorian Water Minister, which Plug the Pipe has on its website is revealing. The North-South pipeline is completed ahead of schedule but there is no water. The conclusion I draw from it is, the Minister should change jobs before it is too late. The state’s water policy is a mess.

The cartoon below (from Plug the Pipe) summarises the situation. Whereever Melbourne turns to these days for water: there is none. There is hope though: elections are around the corner (2010).

From the sidelines: Judging the wine judges II

The day I received the results from the 2009 Decanter World Wine Awards, I also received an e-mail from Karl Storchmann from the American Association of Wine Economists announcing the newest publication of the Journal of Wine Economics (Vol 4, No 1).

The lead article in this issue of the journal is about the wine judges and their reliability in judging wines. This was the perfect contrast reading to the long list of award winners from Decanter. Again Robert T. Hodgson has summarized some more research about the topic in question.

The title of the article is “An Analysis of the Concordance among 13 U.S. Wine Competitions”. Hodgson followed over 4,000 wines entered in these competitions of which 2,440 wines were entered in more than three competitions. 47% of these wines received gold medals in one show but 84% of these same wines received no medals at all in the subsequent shows. These results indicate that winning a Gold medal is greatly influenced by chance alone. Or to put it another way: Wines which were deemed of an extraordinary quality by some wine judges were assessed as very ordinary by others.

In come the Decanter World Wine Awards 2009 results. What does the study say about these awards. Nothing, of course. My skepticism about wine shows, however, is rather stronger then before.

One may ask the question are the Hodgson findings about wine shows in the U.S. applicable to shows such as Decanter? Can we safely conclude that some of the Decanter award winners would be seen as ordinary by other wine judges at other shows, and that some of non-winners could easily win a Gold somewhere else. Or could the Decanter wine judges replicate the tasting with the exact identical findings? Or what would their “margin of error” or inconsistency be?

What Hodgson’s study also tells us is, that wine judges are just human beings who are inconsistent and unpredictable. But we might rightly assume that they are trying to do the right thing but fail in this from time to time. The judges at the wine competitions surveyed, though, seem to have a shared idea about the wines they do not like and therefore win no awards at all. That’s at least something.

A few wine blogs have taken up the issue as well. Alder Yarrow for instance writes on Vinography about the AAWE paper and calls for a stop of the proliferating state wine shows. He admits, however, that the shows surveyed where, and I quote, “essentially the largest and most prestigious wine competitions in America”.

What does this tell us wine consumers? Well, wine quality and medals won at wine shows are not “orthogonal”, the presence of one doesn’t imply the presence of the other. Therefore, trust your own taste and buy what you like, possibly after tasting and let the wine shows be wine shows.

How about the vintner? Well, it is very nice for any wine producer to be recognized for outstanding quality and performance. So it is nice to win a medal at a wine show or getting a five star winery rating from James Halliday for instance. But it is not the end if this is not coming along. Most important is that ordinary people like to drink and buy your wine; the rest takes care of itself.

Cheers folks, trust your own judgment and taste as many wines as you can.

A new tractor for Two Hills Vineyard

During our family vacation, we awere also looking for a new tractor. Our old FIAT tractor had broken down some time ago. We were searching the internet for a while for a used tractor but we were either too late or the right machine did not come up.

Therefore, we looked for new equipment. First we had our eyes on a Kubota from Japan but then fellow vintners suggested to have a look at a Korean brand: Daodong. I had never heard of Daedong before. At Rees Miller Estate we had the opportunity to inspect a one-year old 55 hp Daedong cabin tractor with a frontloader.

We asked for a couple of quotation, and to cut a long story short, decided to go with the Korean Daedong. The photos below show the vineyard tractor with 55 hp plus frontloader.

Until it is beeing delivered, we have to sort out the finances but I am confident that we will get our Daedong tractor so that I can work with it during our next visit.

Blogging from a blogger’s desert

The conference banner outside the BICC

Another week without a blog entry from me. There is a simple explanation for it. I attended an international conference in Beijing, China, which was a great success also for the host, the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Science (CAAS).

But whereas blogging from rural Australia was just an infrastructural challenge, this time the great firewall of China prevented me from communicating and reaching my blogging platform: wordpress.com.

It prevented me also from accessing my facebook and twitter accounts and various other sites of interest, for instance the Open Wine Consortium (which uses a NING platform format). Needless to say that youtube was also down.

I am not a political blogger, just a wine and food enthusiast, and by training an agricultural economist which was the main reason why I attended the 27th International Conference of the Association of Agricultural Economists (16-22 August 2009) titled: “The new landscape of global agriculture”.

Experts on the dais

To say it from the outset, the conference was a full success. It was just great. I cannot but praise our Chinese host and the organizing committee as well as the Chinese agricultural organizations involved in its preparation and conduct.

The highest level of the Chinese government gave full support to the event and thereby to a field in public policy which had been largely neglected by the global financial institutions and many national governments alike during the last two decades. Vice premier Hui Lianyu, a native of Jilin province and a Chinese Muslim (Hui nationality), officially opened the event.

The great firewall of China, however, prevented me from publicly heaping praise on the Chinese government and the organizers, because I could not access the internet. Well, to be precise I could access some sites of the internet. We also had wlan-wifi connections during the duration of the event but the censorship exercised by the Chinese government did not allow for life reporting. A shame, good things could not enter the bloggosshere. There is a cost to such kind of censorship policy. China misses a chance to improve its public image.

Moreover, I wonder how many of the world’s top creative people would bother coming to a place where they are cut off from the world, their creative batteries, their inspiration and their audience for so long and from where the results of creative processes could not immediately find their way into the world wide web. This is another part of the costs incurred by the censorship policy.

We all know that the control of the internet by governments is a rat’s race. The whiz-kids, digital natives and techno freaks of this world, the Davids, to speak in biblical terms, are magically drawn to places like China in order to show and test their skills in beating Goliath: the Communist government. And therefore it is no surprise that there is ample support out there for trapped bloggers and others to circumvent the censors and jump over the great firewall of China by using proxy servers, and software designed to avert control. Alas, we are not alone in this tech-world of the 21st century.

Congratulations again to our Chinese partners for hosting such an important international event. May your government realize that it has more to gain than to fear from co-operation, sharing and the reciprocity through the inter connectivity of the world community and finally give up the censorship of the internet.

And then there is the saying of Mahatma Gandhi:

“When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always triumphed. There have been tyrants and autocrats, and for a time they seem to be invincible but in the end they always fail.”

It’s better to change when there is time for it. The communist party of China has shown wisdom in the past when it came to points of no return, for instance when they tolerated that farmers dissolved communes on their own accord and without prior sanctioning of the party. Let us hope they can draw on this wisdom also when considering the censorship policy.