There’s a wine dancing around my memory like a sylph. I drank it three days back, on the other side of 100 others, yet still it flickers on the edge of my flavour vision, and leaps out from behind things to surprise and remind me.

Unlike the popular melee of tinctures straining to be bigger and blacker than their genetics permit, it’s a cheeky, almost naive sort of a drink. It has the most disarmingly honest demeanour. But beneath its slightly awkward adolescent front, it has the dark, determined glint of the long-term survivor.

Given our fashionable misconception that ancient vines always give blacker, more sinister flavours than others, it shows no immediate sign that it’s from vines more than a century old: vines which haven’t had a drop of irrigation in more than a decade.

It’s the new-release wine from the last vineyard remaining among the suburbia on Adelaide’s southern plain: the Patritti Marion Vineyard Grenache 2015 ($28).

It has few of the steam-train tannins of much Barossa and Clare Grenache, but is not as slick and dense in its form as many of the silky cherry-and-prune beauties we’re now seeing from further south in McLaren Vale.

While freshly-bottled and thus a tad deceptive, it has enough tannin to carry it for an easy decade. That’ll gradually subside, and what is now a cheery prune/maraschino/marello cherry and redcurrant delight will harmonise and swell. It’s gorgeous. With its current layer of bitter cooking chocolate, it’s an adults-only Cherry Ripe you can drink.

Ideally, it’ll be better unwrapped and bitten in a year.

Apart from a few Shiraz, the single hectare has 1600 ungrafted pre-phylloxera Grenache vines, all on their original roots. Selectively hand-picked, it produced 900 six-packs. The wine will be available for sale at the Patritti tasting and sales rooms from Saturday, October 1.

I’d expect it to be on strict allocation. Get in, or get out.

Bacchus only knows how many folks drive past those Oaklands Road vines each day, unaware that while they’re worrying about kids/mortgage/shopping/rooting/traffic/flood insurance or whatever, they’re a stone’s throw from the oldest productive vineyard known in any city on Earth.

Of course the famous Clos Montmartre below the Sacré Cœur in Paris has several million more passers-by, and still produces small amounts of Pinot noir and Gamay wine made by locals and visitors during the annual Fête des Vendanges, but those vines weren’t planted until 1933.

There’d been vineyards there since the Romans called Paris ‘Lutece’, but any that remained had been killed by phylloxera by the 1920s and the ground left to lie fallow, the daintiest morsel for developers. Typically, it was a bunch of artists that lobbied to save the block and re-establish the vineyard. A constant replanting program on phylloxera-resistant rootstocks ensures any vines still vulnerable to the infected ground are replaced as they fade.

Most of the profits, or the wines – always labelled by local artists – go to charity.

Just between you and me, they’re not a patch on this Marion Grenache.

Since that tiny Montmartre bastion was saved, the Parisian interest has intensified. A group of militant winemakers, Les Vignerons Franciliens, has established and helps maintain 150 vineyards in and around Paris for experimental, educational and community purposes. They won’t be letting those go. Parisians know how to riot.

The Marion vines are the last remnant of the vast swathe of vineyards that spread from Skye through Penfolds Grange to the coast at Brighton and Glenelg by the time the dreaded phylloxera was chewing the roots at Montmartre.

Unlike the French thing, it wasn’t a pestilent bug that ate the Adelaide vignoble, but the dreaded villa rash that replaced what Patritti winemaker James Mungall wistfully calls ‘The Garden of Adelaide’.

Since they were left high and dry, isolated among that suburbia, the Marion vines have had two very close shaves with developers. The owner, the local council, intended to replace them with a concrete precinct of ‘Colonel Sadness’ and ‘Golden Arches’ fat-and-sugar emporiums in the late ’80s. With the help of Brian Miller, who then worked for Richard Hamilton, we saved them during the Adelaide Vines charity project I engineered with The Advertiser; Hamiltons then tended the vines and made small amounts of wine from them.

Some bright spark had another brainwave in 2004, and suggested concreting the whole joint to provide parking for 600 cars in case that many folks wanted to frolic simultaeneously in the smallish outdoor swimming pool next door. The Hamiltons’ arrangement had, should we say ‘withered’ on the vine by then, and this time it seemed more logical for those pesky heritage-aware interferists among us to ask the local winery, Patritti, to take the role.

So another nasty battle ensued, and the block was once more redeemed.

Patritti winemakers James – whose Mum, Ines, is a Patritti – and Ben Heide, have supervised a rigorous viticultural rejuvenation which now has the vines looking fitter than they have in my memory; perhaps ever.

The Patritti family has made wine in nearby Dover Gardens since the patriarch Giovanni settled there around 1926. They still run a thriving business there in their big winery and fruit-juicing complex, but have no more vineyards on that once-lush plain.

Patritti winemakers James Mungall and Ben Heide. Photo: Philip White

Patrittis earned their own knowledge of the fickle nature of governments and their attitude to vineyards however old or significant. Their last vineyards, adjacent to the winery, were compulsorily acquired by a Labor government when the wave of housing was threatening to stifle every growing thing in the early ’70s. Being good honest citizens very grateful to have been welcomed to Australia, they accepted the government line that a school was a good thing. They co-operated, happy to take fruit then from beautiful old vineyards just over the escarpment at Morphett Vale and further south in McLaren Vale.

When Max Schubert was dreaming of his recipe for Grange, flying back from his epiphanous post-war trip to the great wineries of Spain and Bordeaux, he decided that half his Grange grapes would come from those Morphett Vale vineyards in the water-retentive 650+ million-year-old siltstone which simply pumped flavour.

Max loved that fruit, but that siltstone is all under concrete and tar now; the only plantable bit left of the entire geological group is disappearing beneath intense Tupperware Tuscany at Seaford Heights as I write. That travesty seemed to be the deposit the concerned winegrowers of McLaren Vale had to pay Labor to have the rest of the region saved by the McLaren Vale Protection Legislation.

Of the school that replaced those last Dover Gardens vineyards, James Mungall says with unusual bitterness: “After a few years they knocked the school down, sent the kids further away, sub-divided the land, and built more houses.”

There’s still one spread of farmland left alive among those suburbs in the south: the 200ha Glenthorne Farm, which Wirra Wirra proprietor Greg Trott and I spent years engineering to have transferred from the CSIRO to the University of Adelaide for continuing research.

The CSIRO agreed to keep its asking price to only $7 million, a tiny fraction of the land’s true worth. The Liberal state government paid that, then passed the entire property to the university. For one whole dollar.

The deed, signed and sealed by university Vice-chancellor Mary O’Kane in 2001, says: “The CSIRO has only agreed to sell the Land on the proviso that the Land will be preserved and conserved for agriculture and other related activities and will not be used for urban development.”

The university solemnly agreed that it would ensure the land was “preserved, conserved and used for Agriculture, Horticulture, Oenology, Viticulture, Buffer Zones and as Community Recreation Area, and is available for Project Research Activities, University Research Activities, Education Activities and operating a Wine Making Facility”.

The deed continues:

“The University covenants with the Minister that it will not at any time hereafter … undertake or permit Development or seek to undertake Development of the Land for uses other than those specified.”

This would seem to preclude the university from even seeking to develop this precious stretch of ground. Which was our intention, when drafting the initial notes for the deed. It repeats ad infinitum: no urban development.

The university attempted a major subdivision before the ink had been on that deed for one single decade. I spent most of the late 2000s in daily warfare, stopping the university’s plan to flog off enough blocks for 1200 houses. That was its opening effort. Only after tireless public and private struggle was that august institution forced to honour the deed it seemed to have lost or forgotten.

I’ve been waiting for the university to try on another one, with Labor’s determination to fill the southern electorates with grateful mortgage-bound voters and ‘shoppies’ happy to get a house. The best hint was when government excluded Glenthorne Farm from its much-lauded McLaren Vale ‘Protection’ legislation those few short years ago.

It ignored the region’s official Geographical Indication boundary, which, after years of expensive negotiation, is recognised in international trade law, and drew the boundary for its new ‘Protection’ law south of Glenthorne Farm. Which means it’s not protected.

I believe the university’s new ‘detailed concept plan’ has hit the Cabinet table.

Which means, in the spirit of good sense and my own community’s well-being, for the ghosts of dear Trott and now his departed daughter Emily, for the bonnie children yet to be born, it’s time for folks like me to re-arm. I’m not dead yet.

drinkster.blogspot.com