Rejected and praised (in different quarters) 24 May 2006

Chris Mullineux tells the harrowing but ultimately happy tale of a wine
that officialdom didn’t like

Jancis Robinson’s positive sentiment towards the Swartland last week (click here for the article) made me smile for reasons other than just the positive review. It reminded me of a meeting I had a short while ago, and it’s one I’d like to let you in on.

It was a meeting with the technical committee of Sawis, who are responsible for certifying wine in South Africa (on behalf of the Wine and Spirit Board). This meeting was an appeal/plea/attempt to justify of one our wines they felt was not fit to sell.

Most winemakers understandably think of such a meeting with a sense dread, and you might ask how Sawis can decide which wine we can and cannot sell? Well, I should explain part of the process of certification, as it is quite a complicated and interesting affair, and will give you a clearer idea of what it can take to get a wine on the shelf.

After careful work from the vineyard to bottle, winemakers submit their wines for a final two-step (chemical analysis and tasting) process of certification. This is to ensure wineries are not selling faulty wine to unsuspecting consumers – a good thing, of course. The chemical analysis is fairly simple: the wine is tested and given its official alcohol level, residual sugar, pH, and so on. It is also chemically analysed for any potential faults, such as volatile acidity, excessive sulphur levels, etc.

The wine is then tasted blind by a panel of five tasters who sit isolated from each other in cubicles, and are presented wines which they taste blind. After a swift smell and taste, they either press a green button for pass, or a red button for fail. If a red button is pressed, reason(s) are given for the failure. These reasons are purely quality-related, and range from excessive volatile acidity or oxidation, to lack of varietal character. Unfortunately they cannot reject a wine for over wooding, lack of balance or any other subjective call, but that’s what wine critics are for!

If a wine receives a majority of green lights it passes, and is certified. If however, three or more judges fail a wine for the same reason, the wine is referred to the technical tasting committee, who are Sawis’s group of experts. They taste the wine later in the day, and pass a final judgment on whether the wine should be certified or rejected.

I hope you’re with me so far… but it goes further.

For wines that simply tasted bad on the day, it is not the end of the line. Each wine gets three chances to prove itself worthy of certification, and most often a wine that is rejected on its first submission will get through on the second or third.

Sometimes though, a wine is truly faulty or simply refuses to conform to what the panel feels is true and good, and after three strikes is out in wine limbo (apparently about 3% of all wine submitted for certification receives this fate, and is effectively unsellable).

Now, it might not sound like something to boast about, but this recently happened with one of our Tulbagh Mountain Vineyards wines – the 2006 TMV White. It was rejected three times by the tasting panel, and we were faced with the horrible possibility of not being able to sell it.

What makes it interesting is the fact that our 2005 White was also rejected three times, but sold out very quickly, and was positively reviewed by Jancis Robinson, the Wine Spectator, and by the Platter guide.

How then were we able to sell the 2005 if it was rejected? Well, if you feel strongly enough about a wine, you can appeal the rejection, and meet with the technical tasting committee to justify its existence. This is what I nervously put myself through last year on behalf of our 2005. After psyching myself up for days (it’s quite a test of self-belief to have to justify your wine to a panel that has spat it out in disgust three times), the meeting was actually quite pleasant. After explaining how the wine was made, and making it clear that it was deliberate, the panel re-tasted the wine and unanimously passed it.

The same happened this year (though I was nowhere near as nervous for the meeting, having been through the experience last year), and 2006 wine passed again. 

During this year’s meeting with the committee, we got chatting over a cup of tea (they’re not such a bad bunch of guys!), and I was interested to learn that they’ve only had a dozen appeals since the committee was established. Scary that I’ve made two of them, but interestingly, two of the other wineries that have appealed are also mentioned in Jancis’s article on the Swartland.

So, what made me smile as I read her article is the possibility that a truly unique style is emerging from the Swartland, one that might confuse Sawis’s tasting panels at the moment, but one that stands out in today’s sea of wine, and it seems that critics both locally and internationally appreciate it.