Sticky with chardonnay, mauve from merlot:
reality bites 11 April 2007

Chris Williams rests from harvest strains with dirty cookbooks

By  now, I am sure even the most dedicated winelovers are bored with hearing winemakers say how tough and exhausting harvest can be. While I have heard some of my colleagues making wild assertions about working 48 hours without sleep or food, I can attest to the fact that picking, receiving and processing a year’s worth of grapes is challenging, but not life-threatening.

One of the things I like to do when I get home in the evening, shirt stained with mauve merlot lees, socks sodden by sticky chardonnay skins and pips, is lie in a warm bath and read recipe books. This way my exhausted brain doesn’t need to follow any coherent narrative and I can ogle the delicious looking photographs and dream about exotic dinner parties that I probably will never host. Recently I have been delighted by the Les Halles Cookbook by Anthony Bourdain, the bad-boy of head-chefs who makes even Gordon Ramsey look like a Christmas fairy. Bourdain gained literary notoriety by exposing the drug-fuelled, sex-soaked underbelly of the haute cuisine world  in his exposé Kitchen Confidential. The book explores Bourdain’s childhood initiation into cooking, his many hard years as a line chef and emergence as a not-half-bad commander-in-chief of a kitchen himself at the end of it all.

He addresses  the reader in  the  stern-but-caring tone of a head chef addressing his staff. He wants to see you succeed in preparing a faultless soufflé but rightly berates you for stupidity when the whole thing collapses. He tells you to begin again and pay attention to the finer techniques of whisking and emulsifying.

The ‘reality exposé’ trend in entertainment was welcomed by television producers and audiences but almost universally looked down upon by more highbrow commentators. These days almost anything is liable to be exposed. I recently finished a book by Blair Tindall called Mozart in the Jungle, about a well known orchestra and what actually goes on behind the proscenium and backstage after completion of the evening’s rendition of Les Miserables.

Indeed, harvest blogs and mini-videos have been produced by quite a few wineries this year, to give winelovers a glimpse of behind-the-scenes winemaking. Tony Hindhaugh at Eaglevlei has even documented his weekly travails as an investment banker-turned-winegrower in a series for Discovery channel. How long will it be, I wonder, until some journalistic tattle-tale writes a juicy exposé of the real behind-the-scenes life in the SA wine industry, beyond what the wineries actually want the public to know… the jealousies and rivalries, the infidelities, the financial scandals and internecine family feuds.

I remember about 15 years ago Erica Platter (way ahead of the pack as usual, it seems) wrote a fictional account of our local wine industry, not so loosely based on some of the pre-eminent characters at the time. Who could miss the caricature of the pony-tailed winemaker on the front cover as a thinly disguised Mike Dobrovic of Mulderbosch?

The problem with this ‘behind the scenes’ view of anything is that the public becomes desensitized and more and more voracious for ‘forbidden’ or non-mainstream material. What do you do when you have shown all the secrets, catastrophes, highpoints and  disappointments? Is there not a risk of losing something of the mystery of wine, one of the things that make it so intriguing to wine lovers in the first place? I am all for demystifying wine to consumers at large to make it more accessible, but in doing so will we lose the magic and romance of winegrowing?

My friends and fellow amateur chefs know me as someone who looks down my nose at the Jamie Oliver phenomenon. In public I claim that it is his pretentious game of being chef of the people, me old mucker. kind of bloke (look, here is Jamie serving up spaghetti vongole to Andy the gas man, who just happens to have the chiseled countenance of a model and thus photogenically sets off our old mate Jamie). In truth it is just envy. How can this pre-pubescent choir-boy of a chef have taken the world by storm, made a fortune and released his own brand of cooking pots and then finally presume to tell the British public what their little darlings should be eating in the schoolyard, and yet still be in his twenties?

Also I get irritated by people who name their kids after ingredients: Honey, Poppy, Apple etc. I believe that Chardonnay is a very popular name for girls in the UK these days. By visiting the local crèche you could have a three course dinner with wine just by reading the attendance register.

Compare Jamie with Anthony Bourdain, who has a skull in a chef’s hat over a pair of crossed carving knives embroidered on his chef’s tunic, who delights in recounting some of the gruesome wounds he has received from blunt knives and white-hot cooking surfaces and wears them as badges of honour. In Kitchen Confidential he tells us about a 200 pound Mexican line-chef who tries to get romantic with him in the pastry section of the kitchen and how he defends his honour with a paring knife and the lid of a braising skillet. Now this is the kind of guy I want cooking for me. It might not be pretty, but it will be dripping with foie gras, bone marrow and veal stock. Who is the local equivalent in our wine industry? I suppose it could only be André Van Rensburg.

By all means have Jamie Oliver’s book on your kitchen counter to show the in-laws, but I am sure most of us have Bourdain hidden in our sock draw to guiltily peek at in our darker moments.