Threats to biodiversity when controlling wildfires

I am just returning from what used to be called The Sunburnt Continent, but is now more likely referred to as The Burning Continent — Australia. The latter epithet comes from the high propensity for producing wildfires — those that consume the surrounding natural environment rather than being restricted solely to human constructions (e.g. building fires). *

When I used to live there (a couple of decades ago), as a scientist I studied the effects of wildfires on the native plants, and especially on the effects of attempts to control or prevent those wildfires. Given the recent concern about wildfires in wine-making regions, especially in France (eg. Vintners despair after French wildfire ravaged grapevines) and the western USA (Wildfires have ravaged Napa Valley: will California’s wine industry survive?), I thought that it might be worthwhile to present a perspective from outside the wine industry. The issue of fire management is far more complex than simply protecting the vineyards and wineries.

Let’s start with where on Earth wildfires are most prevalent. These are locations with what are called Mediterranean Climates. These climates are ones with hot dry summers and cool wet winters. Given that description, it is not surprising that fires occur quite frequently during the hotter and drier months of the year.

This climate type is located in those places shown in the following map, although you will find that fires are also prevalent along the south-eastern coast of Australia (which is where I used to study them). You will note that this climate type covers a lot of the world’s wine-making regions, because grapevines grow very well in Mediterranean Climates.

This immediately creates an obvious management conflict between grape-growing and fires. In this sense, wine-makers need to accept this conflict as a natural part of their agricultural environment. They don’t have to like it, of course, but they do need to recognize the inevitability of the conflict, given their operating climate.

The reason why this conflict has become more and more concerning is, of course, climate change (Climate change is causing more wildfires and governments are unprepared, says U.N.). The Mediterranean Climate zones are now getting hotter summers and drier winters; and this combination increases the number and severity of the fires. As I have mentioned before (Statistical variance and global warming), climate change is not just about global warming — the warming creates a more variable climate, in this case both hotter and drier. This leads to droughts, of course, as in the western USA news at the moment:

• North Coast sinking back into ‘Extreme Drought’
• West megadrought worsens to driest in at least 1,200 years
• NOAA: California drought continues for 3rd year as ‘driest on record’
• U.S. drought conditions to persist and expand 
  
• Drought in ’21 cost California ag $1.1 billion
  

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has a map suggesting that the entire western half of the USA has a high probability of the current drought continuing. Drought increases stresses and deaths of forests (Drought year three in California, 2022); and, in addition, this weather change increases the chances of fire occurring and propagating (Likelihood of extreme autumn fire weather has increased 40%). Furthermore, the fire regime (defined below) may be very different to what we have been used to in the past (‘A deranged pyroscape’: how fires across the world have grown weirder), not least because Older wildfire smoke plumes can affect climate.

A Mediterranean Climate creates what we call a Mediterranean-type Ecosystem, or biome. This is a specific combination of plants and animals that live and thrive in that particular climate. Importantly, these plants and animals usually live nowhere else — they have characteristics that allow them to comfortably survive the hot summers, and they do not like it when the  winters get too cold.

The Mediterranean-type vegetation is distinct enough to have been given a set of particular names, such as “garrigue” or “maquis” in the Mediterranean Basin, “chaparral” in California, “fynbos” in South Africa, and “matorral” in Chile. In Australia, the vegetation include heathlands, woodlands and mallee.

The existence of these specific ecosystem names emphasizes the important point that I am going to make in this post. Since these ecosystems are subjected to repeated wildfires naturally, the plants and animals need to have characteristics that allow them easily to survive those fires. Eucalypts (“gum trees”) are the best-known example, which produce epicormic shoots immediately after a fire (see the bottom picture). Originally from Australia, these are now the most widespread trees in Mediterranean Climates, having been actively introduced by people. You will see many of these trees right next to vineyards throughout the world (see the picture above and the second one below).

Far more importantly, though, many of the plant species actually need the fires, in order to complete their life-cycles. That is, heat plays an important role in carrying on their yearly activities. These activities include flowering immediately after a fire (see the bottom picture), releasing seeds only after a fire, and seed germination only after a fire (see the second picture below). (This is a similar idea to marine animals needing to live in seawater, rather than freshwater, and carnivores needing to eat meat, rather than being vegetarians.)

So, many of the plant species are what we call “fire-dependent”. If you remove the fire, or drastically change the fire characteristics, then the plant species will be dramatically affected as a consequence. Indeed, many of them will become locally extinct. This means that there is often a basic conflict between biodiversity conservation (in which the plants must be protected for future generations) and the protection of human life and property (for the current generation).

I have included below a list of my scientific publications on this particular topic — the effects on the plants of changing the fire characteristics. I will not go into detail here (I would lose most of my readers, even though I find all of it fascinating). However, the basic fire characteristics (the “fire regime”) that can change are:

• intensity (how hot the fires get)
• season (when they occur during the year)
• inter-fire interval (the time between consecutive fires).

Natural wildfires tend to be hot, to occur in summer, and to be quite a few years apart. The management issue, then, is simple — any attempt to change even one of these characteristics can have dramatic effects on the abundance of many of the plants.

There seem to be two main human management responses to wildfires. One is to try to prevent them (eg. The Napa County Board of Supervisors has unanimously voted to place a sales tax to fund wildfire prevention projects over the next decade). In general, this has proved to be impractical; and the methods used are not environmentally friendly (Effects of the fire retardant Phos-Chek on vegetation in eastern Australian heathlands).

The second approach is to “fight fire with fire”. That is, we burn the vegetation before the next wildfire comes, and we burn it in a way that remains (more or less) within our control. We call this controlled burning or “prescribed burning”.

This latter management strategy involves monitoring the build-up of burnable fuel in the native vegetation, and then deliberately burning it before a wildfire starts (Wildfire Fuel Mapper helps landowners manage vegetation). The wildfires cannot occur after our burn, because there is insufficient fuel.

Part of the argument for this second approach is that the native peoples of both Australia and the western USA used “controlled fires” to manage their fire-prone landscapes, before the Europeans invaded:

• To manage wildfire, California looks to what tribes have known all along
• California’s wildfire policy totally backfired. native communities know how to fix it
• ‘Fire is medicine’: the tribes burning California forests to save them
• Californians are turning to Indigenous groups and their ‘controlled burns’ to combat the worst wildfire season in history

However, it is very important to recognize that these peoples managed fire for their own cultural purposes, which were not necessarily biodiversity conservation as we know it today (nor were they interested in protection of vineyards). In that sense, being native does not make you “right”, in terms of managing the local environment, it just makes you different to people of European heritage.

Anyway, the main consequence of prescribed burning (other than preventing wildfires) is quite straightforward — it changes the fire intensity from hot (or very hot) to something much less hot, plus it changes the fire season from summer to autumn, plus it drastically shortens the inter-fire interval. That is, prescribed burning involves frequent low-intensity fires in autumn — we change all three of the fire characteristics, simultaneously. My scientific work was all about demonstrating just how much this changes the plant biodiversity, of the east coast of Australia. For many species, the appropriate word is “decimation”.

Needless, to say, management of wildfires is a big issue, especially where agricultural practices are concerned. For example, the affect of smoke on wine is becoming obvious (How do wildfires affect wine? A new study finds out), and this is a big issue for both grapegrowers and winemakers (Grape growers and winemakers try to decide who bears the cost of smoke damage). Research is, of course, being done (When smoke gets in your vines; Australian university finds new strategy to prevent smoke taint in wine grapes).

So, my point in this blog post is that trying to manage fires for one purpose only, usually protection of human property in the broadest sense, has other consequences, unintended though they may be. Fire management is complex. When we are dealing with natural ecosystems (as we are when we talk about biodiversity conservation), management conflicts will inevitably arise. We cannot change the fires without changing the plants, because the wildfires are a natural part of the plants’ environment. Media attention is, not unexpectedly, focused on the loss of property; but there is more to lose than that. We should all care about the bigger picture, as well.

---

1. Morrison, D.A., Cary, G.J., Pengelly, S.M., Ross, D.G., Mullins, B.M., Thomas, C.R., and Anderson, T.S. (1995) Effects of fire frequency on plant species composition of sandstone communities in the Sydney region: Inter-fire interval and time-since-fire. Australian Journal of Ecology 20: 239-247.
2. Cary, G.J., and Morrison, D.A. (1995) Effects of fire frequency on plant species composition of sandstone communities in the Sydney region: Combinations of inter-fire intervals. Australian Journal of Ecology 20: 418-426.
3. Morrison, D.A. (1995) Some effects of low-intensity fires on populations of co-occurring small trees in the Sydney region. Proceedings of the Linnean Society of New South Wales 115: 109-119.
4. Morrison, D.A., Buckney, R.T., Bewick, B.J., and Cary, G.J. (1996) Conservation conflicts over burning bush in south-eastern Australia. Biological Conservation 76: 167-175.
5. Torpy, F.R., Morrison, D.A., and Bloomfield, B.J. (1999) The influence of fire frequency on arbuscular mycorrhizal colonization in the shrub Dillwynia retorta (Wendland)Druce (Fabaceae). Mycorrhiza 8: 289-296.
6. Morrison, D.A., and Renwick, J.A. (2000) Effects of variation in fire intensity on co-occurring species of small trees in the Sydney region. Australian Journal of Botany 48: 71-79.
7. Morrison, D.A. (2002) Effects of fire intensity on plant species composition of sandstone communities in the Sydney region. Austral Ecology 27: 433-441.
8. Knox, K.J.E. and Morrison, D.A. (2005) Effects of inter-fire intervals on the reproductive output of resprouters and obligate seeders in the Proteaceae. Austral Ecology 30: 407-413.

---

* As Murphy's Law suggests must happen, rather than fires, the Australian east coast has experienced floods this year, with historically high total rainfall (Flood map and rain charts show extent of Queensland and NSW disaster). Mind you, the rescue service in Sydney has said that the damage after the floods can be compared with the violent forest fires in 2019 and 2020.

Wine and health is never a simple topic

Many physicians accept that moderate wine drinking is okay for you, and may even be beneficial (Debating the health benefits of wine: an update), while others do not. Wine may even be seen as part of a healthy lifestyle (Wineries can tap into growth in health and wellness category). However, the public is often given apparently contradictory headlines, such as these:

• Study finds drinking wine with meals was associated with lower risk of type 2 diabetes
• A drink a day could be associated with brain changes, study finds

It therefore seems worthwhile to review some of the issues here, and try to clarify the situation.

I have written before about the basic issue (Wine and health — why is there so much argument, pro and con?), which is that human bodies are complicated things, and therefore we cannot expect a simple answer to any question about what is good or bad for us. Something that is good for one person may not be good for another person, or may not be good under all circumstances.

This should surprise no-one just at the moment, given the very variable responses that people have had to the SARS-Cov-2 virus. Some people die of Covid-19 (the resulting disease) while others show hardly any symptoms at all (There seems to be a lot of public misunderstanding about the coronavirus). This is precisely as we expect it to be, when dealing with living organisms.

This general issue is exacerbated by a lack of any conclusive data regarding many, if not most, health issues. Even for the current pandemic, with 470 million cases worldwide, and 6 million deaths, we are still not very good at forecasting any given person’s likely response to the virus. We can make general forecasts, for sure, using age, gender, and health issues, but that it as far as it goes. I am an elderly man with high blood pressure and Type II diabetes, so you can image how far away I keep myself from potentially infectious circumstances.

Well, it is even worse for alcohol-related health studies (for some critiques of alcohol studies, see: International Scientific Forum on Alcohol Research). As Lewis Perdue has put it: Wine is healthy. Wine is dangerous. All studies on both sides of this are totally inconclusive. My point here is this: everything is potentially dangerous to a living being. A plate of fish has lots of nutrients, but you can choke on a fish bone. Walking gives you exercise, but you can get run over crossing a road. Breathing is essential, but some gases will poison you. You get the idea.

So, the situation is always inconclusive, in the sense that nothing can be said definitively one way or the other. That is, we can only speak in terms of probabilities. Some things are more likely to be dangerous than others, such as running across a road without looking for traffic. Some things are more likely to be dangerous under certain circumstances but not others, such as inhaling next to a busy highway compared to out in the forest. Humans know (or should know) all of this, having acquired experience while they grew up.

In this sense, any formal pronouncement by a government or semi-government authority is an over-reaction. If the World Health Organization, for example, says a blanket “yes” or “no” to anything, then they are saying nothing more than which way the probability seems to lie for the majority of people.

Tobacco smoking was the classic example — a large amount of data indicates that most heavy smokers will eventually develop lung cancer; and so a warning to everyone was deemed necessary. People can still smoke, but they now know what the nicotine is doing to them, and to those around them. Equally importantly, those around them also know what the potential danger is (I was very glad when both my parents gave up smoking, in my youth).

Of more direct relevance to this blog, the same is true for alcohol. Like nicotine, alcohol is among the potentially most addictive drugs in the world (10 most addictive drugs list); but there is a big difference between one glass of wine and many glasses of wine, consumed consecutively. In particular, a large amount of data indicates that trying to drive a car when drunk is dangerous to the driver, the passengers, and everyone else in the vicinity. So, drink-driving has been banned in most countries, and involves heavy financial penalties.

However, not all governments have agreed on where lies the boundary for being drunk — there is no definitive line that can be applied to all persons. Common official limits for driving are 0.05% or 0.08% blood alcohol content by volume; but I live in a country that uses 0.02%. The main issue for drivers, though, is that there is no general way to work out how many drinks you can have before you reach any given limit — it varies by person, as well as by drink type. So, most Swedes won't drink alcohol at all, when they are the designated driver — it would take about 4 hours to get your blood alcohol down from 0.08% to 0.02% (How long does alcohol stay in your system?).

So, what about the recent media-reported kerfuffles regarding wine drinking?

A classic example of lack of data, or imprecise interpretation of inadequate data, was the recent BBC report on sugar in wine (Two glasses of wine enough to hit daily sugar limit). There was an immediate reaction, of course (Misleading info about sugar content in wines by BBC). People asked the obvious question (How many calories are there really in your glass of wine?), and re-evaluated the data (No, your wine is not packed with sugar).

Note that this has nothing to do with what is indicated on a wine label (Sugar content in wine revealed: health experts deem alcohol labelling ‘woefully inadequate’). Most food consumed by human beings has a list of contents, but this is only sporadic for wine bottles — apparently, only about 40% of people say they actually want such a list (Survey finds scant interest in wine ingredients). Indeed, the only label information that seems to be compulsory is the alcohol content, and even that may not be all that accurate (What’s your tolerance?). In Sweden, the alcohol retailer also lists allergens, the most common of which (for wine) is sulfite.

Even worse, most food has nutrition information (the Nutrition facts label), including protein, fat and vitamin contents, as well as carbohydrates. This is not currently required for wine, although there are moves to make at least part of it compulsory (A perfect storm: Nutri-Score, alcohol and health). I think that it would be very unwise of the wine industry to oppose this sort of idea. Wine is consumed by humans, and those humans must be accurately informed as to what they are consuming — this should not be negotiable.

Recent studies have seriously questioned wine’s relation to health:

• Data from over 350,000 people have really bad news about 'moderate' drinking
• Why the drinks trade should be afraid of WHO
• Positive effects of alcohol on the heart a ‘myth’ says new study
• OIV meets WHO to discuss wine, health and warning labels

In response to this sort of thing, the European Union has recently considered the idea of putting warning labels on alcoholic drinks, just like those on cigarette packets (European Union lurches towards Prohibition). This is extreme, indeed, given the vast difference in evidence for the effects of alcohol versus nicotine. A fuss was made in response to the proposal, not least by the agriculture industry; and the politicians then backed down a bit (Amendments made to alcohol and health recommendations in Europe; EU: No drastic warnings on wine; Close shave for European wine industry).

The official reaction in China has been no better (Kerry Wines fined in China for promoting wine’s health properties).

At the other extreme, there are definitely people who act like wine is healthy. One classic example: 108-year-old woman credits red wine as the secret to her long life. More directly relevant, a recent survey (New study explores motivations and behaviors of U.S. wine consumers before and during Covid-19 lockdown) indicates that 4% of the respondents listed “health reasons” as one of their motivations for drinking wine during the pandemic. Sadly, this may also have lead to problems.

However, as I am emphasizing, things are more complicated than a simple yes / no answer:

• When is the best time of day to drink alcoholic beverages?
• Here’s why you should eat when you drink
• Why does alcohol mess with our sleep?

Some lifestyles promote health, and others demote it. Your own relationship to wine needs to be assessed in relation to your own lifestyle, not to some generic standard for all of humanity. After all, a healthy 75-year-old can have a longer life expectancy than an unhealthy 65-year-old (like me). At least some groups are finally trying to collect data to find out what people think about this: Wine Market Council releases results of study on the role of wine in a Wellness Lifestyle.

Perhaps the most interesting idea is that of the so-called ‘licensing effect’, where those who feel that they have done something ‘good’ (such as go for a run) are more inclined to reward themselves with something ‘bad’ (like an alcoholic drink). Thus, it has been observed that increased fitness can be associated with increased alcohol intake (Do people who exercise regularly drink more alcohol?).

Conclusion

The bottom line is this: everything depends on context. For example, we need water (our bodies are 60% water), but try sticking your head in a bucket of it, and see how you get on. We need to be told clearly where the limits of safety lie, not be given a blanket declaration one way or the other. In short: Don’t blame the booze – serious health conditions are multifactorial.

The ups and downs of Champagne exports this century

We have been told about various problems in the wine world arising from the Covid-19 pandemic, not least in the more up-market regions like Champagne (Inflation, supply chain creating rare challenges in Champagne world). On the other hand, while the year 2020 was poor compared to 2019 (ie. pre-pandemic), 2021 was apparently a vast improvement (2021 a record year for Champagne exports). Of interest to many Americans, it has been reported that the USA outstripped the UK as the biggest export market by volume, for the first time (Massive sales surge sees US become biggest Champagne consumer after France).

However, pandemic-driven trends can be very misleading, if viewed in isolation. It is therefore worth looking at the long-term market patterns, which is what I will do here.

Annual data are available for each export market from the Comité Champagne. Here, I will look at the volume of exports (in millions of bottles) for each of the top 10 markets this century. These annual data are plotted in the graph, up until 2020. Note that I am covering only the export markets — France itself is far and away the biggest market for Champagne consumption.

Note, also, that the choice of these 10 export countries is based on their average purchases across the past two decades. In any given year, other countries sometimes made it into the top 10. For example, in 2020 Sweden was the 9th biggest export market, out-doing both Spain and the Netherlands. Indeed, Sweden has been a bigger market than the Netherlands since 2011, in spite of having only 60% of the population size.

As you can see in the graph, some countries have been relatively stable Champagne markets through time, including Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Spain, and the Netherlands. Other markets have grown considerably, such as Japan, and Australia (and Sweden, as noted above). Italy has been a variable market, with a peak back in 2006–2008 (since which time their own sparkling wine has boomed).

The graph also makes obvious the effect of the pandemic, with a distinct export down-turn in 2020 compared to 2019. However, both Belgium and the Netherlands remained unchanged at that time — there were presumably no supply problems for these two nearest neighbors to the Champagne region itself. On the other hand, the only market to show a 2020 increase in imports was Australia, which is the furthest market away!

In a similar vein, the effect of the 2008 Great Recession is also obvious in the graph, with every single country showing a marked decrease in imports in 2009. Sales rebounded in 2010, in all cases, as I recently discussed in: Did US imported sparkling wine recover from the Great Recession?

Finally, the graph shows that the two biggest export markets have been the most variable of all, through time.  Essentially, the pandemic put the United Kingdom back to where it was at the beginning of the century, having risen rapidly to a market peak in 2007, never to return. The dip from 2007 coincides with the Great Recession, after which exports continued at a lower level, until 2015. The subsequent decline seems to coincide with the Brexit shenanigans (and the rise of local sparkling wine production).

On the other hand, the USA, while remaining the second-biggest export market, has shown a continual increase in imports since the Great Recession. Champagne is obviously how you show recovery from a recession! Even without the pandemic, the forecast for 2020 would have put the USA and UK roughly equal as markets.

There was a distinct recovery of exports in 2021 (Everything you need to know about Champagne in 2021), although I do not have the complete data to put in the graph. The main point of note is that the exports to the USA (34 million bottles) easily exceeded those to the UK (29 million bottles) for the first time. Both of these figures exceed the 2019 numbers, the US one by a long way. This was not true for either Belgium or Australia (which were roughly the same as before), although in 2021 Germany imported more Champagne than it had since the turn of the century (15 million bottles).

Clearly, the UK still has a greater per capita Champagne requirement than does the USA — the US has nearly five times as many people as does the UK, and so the British are consuming five times as much Champagne, given roughly equal import volumes. Indeed, it seems that moves are afoot to change things for the UK (Champagne's hopeful vision of the future) (Tyson Stelzer on bringing Taste Champagne back for UK buyers).

Also, these are solely volume figures, of course. This tells us nothing about the quality of the wine being imported by each country. I covered this topic in a previous post: This is who drinks the priciest champagne. The UK chooses much more pricey Champagne than does the USA — more than 3 times the price, on average. So, in terms of total value, the UK still leads the country pair.

Indeed, for our chosen countries, the per capita volume of Champagne imported in 2020 was:

Country Belgium Switzerland Australia Sweden United Kingdom Netherlands Germany Italy Japan Spain United States

Bottles / person 0.773 0.558 0.330 0.324 0.312 0.168 0.120 0.115 0.086 0.065 0.063

How did Australian beer slobs become wine drinkers?

Writing about a single country may seem like a bit of a restricted viewpoint, but in this case the example may contain interesting ideas for the wine industry at large. Wine is currently consumed by a greater percentage of Australians than is beer (46% versus 36%, according to a Roy Morgan poll), and Australia is in the Top Ten for wine consumption (according to the OIV). Believe me, this was not always so!

When I was young (in the 1970s), young people in Australia did not drink wine. They drank beer — wine was snobby / snooty / elitist, and the cheap stuff was undrinkable. These days, wine is quite respectable, and Australia is a leading global wine producer (and quite proud of having some of the oldest grapevines in the world). This is a pretty serious change. I am not going to try to explain this change, but it does seem to me that a number of relevant factors have been involved, and I will look at some of them here.

The archetypal, cliché, Australian male of the 1960s and 1970s, often referred to as Norm, was like this (Let sleeping Norms lie):

He slumped on a lounge chair, gazing at the TV over an enormous beer gut, tinny [beer can] in his hand ... He was an unapologetic middle-aged slob, who resisted all entreaties to exercise. “I’m an all-round sportsman,” said Norm, but he was referring to the games he watched on the small screen, not to actually playing sport.

This situation got so bad that, in the mid 1970s, a cartoon character Norm (pictured above) became the anti-hero of TV ads for an official government Life. Be In It health campaign. He drew laughs, for sure, but also embarrassed gasps of recognition across Australia.

This, then, was one of the major changes — being a beer slob was no longer an aspirational lifestyle. The re-evaluation of what a healthy lifestyle actually meant, in practice, created a climate that the wine industry could (and did) take advantage of. After all, one drinks less wine than beer, and not usually while slumped in front of a TV. So, wine was presented as part of the new aspirational lifestyle.

Another background change was the recognition of cultural diversity. Other countries have lots of migrants, sure, but Australia is in a very different situation because of the large percentage of them (as opposed to a large number). According to government statistics, at least 40% of the people are either migrants themselves (c. 25%) or their parents were. That is, the “language of the home” (as opposed to school or workplace) may not be English (or the Australian version of it). So, that cliché “ocker” Australian image (eg. Crocodile Dundee), so beloved of the foreign media, misses a lot of the reality. This blatantly obvious ethnic situation was ignored under the previous British cultural dominance. *

I am happy to say that my generation was the one that started to change this. We Baby Boomers were the first ones to explicitly have a government minister for “ethnic affairs” (the flamboyant and unforgettable Al Grasby), and (much later) one for “Aboriginal affairs”. Things have continued to improve since those formal recognitions of the state of affairs in multi-cultural Australia. More recently, of course, there has been interest in other forms of cultural diversity, such as gender and sexual equality, in addition to this ethnic diversity.

For the wine industry, the recognition of ethnic diversity was a veritable boon, because many of these migrants came from countries where wine was a normal part of the culture. The importance of this cannot be overstated (as shown in the graph below). Once you recognize the people, you also recognize their cultural heritage, and this then becomes part of your own contemporary culture. Drinking wine was no longer snobby, but was instead now perfectly normal; and the subsequent TV and print ads produced by the wine industry reflected this.

Naturally, Australian Millennials are rightly carrying on the work. It does seem possible, to me, that this may have something to do with the recent observation that these Millennials are apparently also drinking wine (Australian), unlike their contemporaries elsewhere (Australian millennials drive wine consumption post-pandemic).

There is, of course, no purpose to changing the culture if there is no-one to lead the way towards something new, in this case wine. This is where Len Evans comes in. The adjective always used to describe him was “ebullient”, and it fitted perfectly. Len was your classic “man of the people”, and he loved to communicate the enjoyment of wine. I have described his many, many (lasting) effects on the Australian wine industry in my post on The Len Evans effect, so I won't repeat them here.

Of course, this is not to say that there was no-one else involved, because there were plenty of other prominent people in the Australian wine industry. The most notable of these was James Halliday, especially through his roles as writer and educator. His approach was more up-market than that of Len Evans, but no less important, once a person got started on their interest in wine. His James Halliday’s Australian Wine Guide (1986) was invaluable to me.

Rear L to R - James Halliday, Peter Hoj, Philip Laffer; front L to R - Len Evans, Hazel Murphy and Wolf Blass.

Lastly, we should not overlook the inestimable concept of bag-in-box wine, or Cask Wine, as Australians know it. This classic wine presentation had its 50th birthday quite a few years ago (The wine cask turns 50), having been pioneered in Australia in 1965 (1965 — Cask wine invented).

There are many aspects to this practical invention, from storing open wine without spoilage, to portability for parties, to its eminent recyclability (being a plastic bladder in a cardboard box, not glass) (The wine innovation that deserves more attention). There is much current discussion of putting wine in cans, instead of bottles (Wine in cans in 2020), but this long-standing method should have just as much appeal for environmentally conscientious wine consumers (Wine packaging in the modern world is not (yet) sustainable).

The point here is that Millennials have made it clear that they care about their future, and the wine industry must join them. Innovative packaging helped change Australian drinking culture back in the 1970s, and there is a need for this to happen again now, globally. The best stuff comes in bottles, we all know that! You don’t lay down a cellar full of “Chateau Cardboard” (as we also called it in Australia); and, so, the bag-in-box packaging has not been used for the best-quality wines. Presumably the same will be true for cans — cellaring “a 12-pack of wine” will not be the same as laying down “a case of wine”. This must change; and it may already be doing so (Is a boxed wine revolution on its way?).

The advertisers can do it. Back in the 1970s, the most successful Australian brand of bladder wines, Orlando Coolabah (launched in 1973), had a series of television ads based on the slogan: “Where do you hide your Coolabah?” (see Australia Remember When). It showed examples such as hiding your wine cask behind a large pot plant, so that the other party-goers could not get their hands on the good stuff. This is still firmly embedded in my memory, over 50 years later, so there is no reason to expect current advertisers to be any less successful.

Conclusion

This may all sound pretty extreme, since I have covered a change in an entire national culture, with many aspects to it. However, isn't that what the wine industry is currently faced with? If Millennials are not happy with the current wine culture, then the future must also involve a cultural change, one way or the other (The wine industry is asking the wrong question).

---

*  In Australia, the most murky past is therefore not being a migrant! My own murkiness thereby comes from the fact that 7 of my 8 great grandparents were all born in Australia, which makes me pretty rare. The 8th one, by the way, was the Scotsman who brought in the Morrison name. Through one lineage, I can actually trace myself back to the Second Fleet, which was the second lot of British boats to invade, in 1790. Should I be proud of this?