Wine, beer, Mike & Jacques 20 December 2006

Chris Mullineux listens to some good stories after a long hard day

There is a saying that ‘it takes a lot of beer to make good wine’, and as we in the Cape move towards the middle of summer, a cleansing beer certainly does the trick at the end of a long, physical day in the vineyard or cellar.

I’ve come to realise that for the rest of the year though, the saying could be adapted, with just as much relevance, to ‘it takes a lot of beer to sell good wine’.

A few weeks ago saw the end of the wine show season you see, and this period from the London Wine show in May through to WineX at the end of the year can be just as strenuous as any during harvest. Just as much wine is tasted, and days are spent standing behind a counter pouring sample after sample, answering the same questions, and telling one’s story over and over again.

By the end of the day, feet and legs ache, your voice is horse, eyes are burning, and sitting down to a beer or two is most welcome!

Extra motivation to make it to the amber nectar at end of the day is the fact that relaxing over a pint of beer with other winemakers is always entertaining and fun. You often end up chatting to others you don’t frequently meet with, and the conversation tends to turn to aspects of wine not generally divulged to consumers at the shows themselves.

Oom Frans’s assistants

This year, one of my most memorable post trade-show moments was listening to Jacques Borman of Boschkloof (in the pic) recount some of the stories from his early days working at Simonsig under the legendary Frans Malan. In those days, Mike Dobrovic (of Mulderbosch) and he were the young, green cellar assistants, and it sounds like those who’ve met Mike, and think him to be a pretty special character, would have been blown away back then – quite literally.

Mike is well known amongst winemakers these days as the industry guru to go to with absolutely any wine chemistry problem. Forget your final-year biochemistry professor from university, Prof Mike is the man to go to. His knowledge of complex wine chemistry is so deep, it is as if he has reached a Zen-like Oneness with the world of redox reactions, acid/base interactions, anions/cations, and the like.

What people don’t realize though, is that like all mad, scatterbrained men of science, Mike had his share of exploding test tubes (or should I say wine tanks?) along his path to chemical enlightenment. Jacques recounted a couple of times when one of Mike’s experiments went a touch rampant, and a tank quite literally blew up and out through a hole in the cellar roof, bringing Oom Frans into the cellar, red-faced, fuming and threatening dismissal!

Another of the stories that had the rest of us winemakers smiling in knowing understanding was the game Jacques and Mike used to play with Sawis inspectors (who are responsible for keeping records of wine stocks in the cellar). Most often, winemakers with their creative tendencies are not the best at paper work, so a stock-taking can be a nuisance at the best of times. Jacques and Mike came up with their own chemically inspired solution to the hassle of spot-checks though. By burning hundreds of sulphur tablets (usually reserved for sterilizing empty barrels) in the cellar, just as the inspector’s car arrived at the gate, there was no way the inspector would want to enter the cellar to make his stock-take!

The Sawis inspectors must have become slightly suspicious and extra vigilant with these two pranksters though, and one harvest thought they were really onto them. Back then, one of Sawis’s many bizarre rules made it illegal for an estate to make use of another cellar’s press. The inspectors heard through the grapevine that due to a broken press, Jacques and Mike were doing some late night, extra-mural pressing in a neighbour’s cellar and, eyes glazed with the prospect of reward and promotion, they decided to prepare a midnight sting.

The inspectors hid in the bushes outside the next-door cellar late that night, waiting for the felons to arrive, and just as the two young cellar rats had finished cleaning and preparing the press to fill with grapes, the inspectors leapt out in glee, crying “Bust!” (or whatever the Afrikaans version is). Fortunately for our heroes, in their excitement and haste, the inspectors had jumped out too soon, and as not a single grape had been tossed into the press, the youngsters got away on a technicality… they hadn’t done any pressing yet!

The benefits of time

Timing the day of pressing red wine is something we give much thought these days, with many winemakers giving long, extended macerations at the end of fermentation. In the old days in the Cape, this was unheard of, and considered dangerous even, so an experimental plea to Oom Frans by Mike fell on deaf ears. Determined to try the experiment however, Mike ‘forgot’ to press a tank for a few days … but got into more serious trouble when Oom Frans found out. A couple of years later however, Oom Frans was man enough to admit to Mike that the wine was indeed much better than that from the tanks which were pressed early.  

Listening to these stories got me thinking.

Today’s young Turks often think we are responsible for pioneering change in South Africa’s wine industry. But while it is true that there is much change and innovation sweeping through the industry today, we often forget those who have been at it for years. There are too many to mention, but men like Jacques Borman and Mike Dobrovic have done a great service in opening our industry from a seriously introverted state, and we should be just as thankful for the ground they have broken as we should for the stories they have to tell.