Bad journalism, lack of rain and outsprinting the enemy 3 April 2006

Martin Moore is surviving the harvest

This is the time of the year when winemakers seriously envy the lucky ones with nine-to-five jobs, especially after a week such as we had recently when we pressed 1 900 tons. Yes, in one week! That’s almost a quarter of our total capacity. But then, when the last bunch of the vintage tumbles into the crusher, however tired you are, you are grateful that you can share in the excitement and the rush of adrenalin each vintage brings, and the endless promise.

The vintage is quite late this year and, unlike other years, we are not going to finish by the Easter weekend. To which I can only say, thank goodness two weeks later for Freedom Day and Workers’ Day.  These two holidays, with some astute manoeuvring, can be combined into an even longer weekend!

What irresponsible rubbish!

The journalist who raised the spectre a few weeks ago of a poor 2006 vintage because of power outages in the Western Cape – “Power cuts could make plonk out of SA wine” the headline said - not only did the local industry a massive disservice but also destroyed his own credibility. How can you place in jeopardy an entire vintage, produced under immensely varied conditions in an enormous geographic area, and then quote, out of context, a single winemaker to support your sensational claim?

The writer singled out, in particular, our white wines as being affected most by these outages. I would like to point out to him that by the time we experienced the first power failure all our white wines had already undergone fermentation and were resting in the settling tanks. And when these outages did start, we were all well prepared, having known for weeks they were imminent. If anything, I believe 2006 will be remembered first and foremost for its white wines, for what we have in the tanks at present is of a truly beautiful quality.

Lack of rain

We are struggling a bit, though, with the late-ripening red cultivars, and then not because of a lack of electricity, but a lack of rain. We did not have the usual downpours in November and December and some of the young vines with their still immature root systems have been a bit stressed, so here and there we are finding bunches shrivelling before being fully ripe.

There also seems to be a fairly widespread phenomenon with getting sufficient colour on the Merlot. Good colour in the case of this cultivar seems to be dependent on a variation of factors like availability of water to a need for fairly high variations between day and night temperatures, and that we have largely been lacking this summer. And good colour in a wine is more than just nice to look at. Poor extraction of the anthocyanin pigments in the skins usually also implies fairly low tannins which tend to affect not only the balance of the wine but also its maturation potential.

These are typical of the problems a winemaker has to battle every vintage. The art, born out of experience, is how to manage them. You can rest assured that no shrivelled bunches or pallid grapes will find their way into our wines. We sample the vineyards from about three weeks before picking. The data collected – sugar, total acid and pH – is plotted on a graph and from that I can see when a block is close to optimal ripeness. And then you have to get out into the vineyard, trudging from one to next, sampling here and there to also convince your palate the grapes are ready.

Outsprinting the enemy

You get so engrossed in this task that you sometimes become quite oblivious to the world around you, although in my subconscious I am always aware that in late summer these vineyards are literally crawling with snakes. I was thus rudely brought to my senses by the flickering movement of a grey snake-like object I had nearly stepped on in the long grass. The next moment I was sprinting over the clods with arms flailing when halfway to the end of the row I was passed by a frightened squirrel, his long grey tail undulating behind him. I felt rather foolish but then, you can never be sure. As we say in Afrikaans, 'liewer Bang Jan as Dooie Jan' (which translates somewhat lamely into English as rather safe than sorry).