The Widow’s sour grapes

May I live to see it. Word is that the bunch of Important People who got together recently to discuss aspects of wine and the law are recommending that the Wine of Origin system be re-jigged to allow for single-vineyard wines. At present there may be no mention of vineyard on our labels, to protect the official estates, the smallest official unit of origin. Which reminds me to wonder if that big gun in the Estate Producers Association (largely dedicated to prevent anyone illicitly using the word ‘estate’) still has that sign outside one of his properties, improperly proclaiming ‘Bouwland Estate’. Will the Estate Producers have the energy and conviction to fight an overhaul of the system? As my dear husband would point out, never underestimate the retarding powers of well-established people. Don’t hold your breath waiting for this vital bit of legislative change.

***

An Important Person apparently going into eclipse phase just now is dear Michael Fridjhon. (I’m sure it is temporary – there are rumours of him getting up to something new.) But MF does insist on quarrelling – he was even rude to me once (only in print, but ‘verveless veuve’ still rankles). One knew that his relationship with the powers in the Min. of Ag. had not been of the most cordial; now his position on the Wine Industry Trust has not been renewed; he’s been replaced as chair by someone no-one in the wine industry seems to have heard of, so that all seems very promising.

***

The SAA wine-selection process, hitherto a Fridjhon fiefdom, is uncertain terrain now. The politics of it all are too Byzantine for me, but personal antagonisms play a role as well as money. SAA had better hurry up and decide if they’re going to have some form of public competition again this year, though. But it seems that any selection process must cost less than before – and involving different (and cheaper) head personnel. A few luminaries, it seems, have been flown up (separately) to SAA HQ, apparently to be sounded out about taking charge of whatever it is the bosses have in mind.

***

A Cape wine-person truly in eclipse, I fear, is Oscar Foulkes. After years of gathering rumours of financial problems (though he nonetheless acquired a handsome new house – now alas gone), the crunch has come. One branch of Enoteca closed a few months back ... and then there was none. Which leaves Southern Suburbanites like me unsure of where locally to go for our wine. Picardi-Rebel in Claremont might tempt – but unless they’ve put in a cooling system since I last sweated my way around it, I think I’ll not risk those bottles.

***

For someone like me who thinks that Robert Parker and Australia are the two biggest disasters to have hit wine since phylloxera and oidium, there was a morbid interest in observing them get together last year, when the great American ventured his modest opinions on those modest wines. He didn’t much care for most of the established icons, like Grange and Hill of Grace, and lavished praise on a few tiny producers who have so far resisted being taken over by the enormous companies that control most Oz wine. In fact, one recipient of Parker’s scoring largesse, David ‘Duck’ Anderson, predicts that, if ‘consolidations’ continue at their recent pace, his might soon be the only independent winery left in Australia. Incidentally, David trebled the price of his wine after the Parker pronouncement. (Clearly it is an even more important achievement than getting a Veritas Double Gold is for some of our chaps. I didn’t notice Bon Vino suddenly able to cite international demand frenzy as a justification for a massive price hike.)

Come to think of it, Parker’s prose tends to be rather like Australian wine – rather overripe and excessive. And damaging to established definitions, as in his almost self-paradoxic remark about Three Rivers Shiraz: it ‘should prove to be immortal’, he said; and added: ‘lasting 30-50 years’.

***

I oversaw an interesting bit of correspondence between the Grape editor and the editor of a proper (rich, powerful, American) wine magazine, who’d seen the suggestion made in the last Grape that advertising was not conducive to freedom of the press. Hardly unpredictably he objected strongly to this, and also made some Quixotic defences in relation to editorial matter in the Brit journal Decanter being apparently rather more closely influenced by advertising than is ideal. (He eventually decided that he didn’t want Grape to publish his letter, by the way.) I wonder if he bothered to notice in the March Decanter, alongside the very gratifying tasting of Cape chardonnays, the advertisement for Chamonix Chardonnay, proudly proclaiming the five stars it had garnered. Clearly Chamonix had been informed of the result well in advance – by the advertising department? Decanter used to claim there was no connection between advertising and editorial.... Dare they do that still?

***

‘No fool like an old fool’, my grumpy husband used to say to me, accusingly, on occasion. Although I might say to him now (and I do) ‘better an old fool than a dead hero’, it is only with half conviction. Lots of wine people seem to be dying these days – people who understood and cared for wine in a way quite beyond the humourless passion of Robert Parker or the industry known as Oz Clarke. We should mourn what they stood for: Harry Waugh, the great English wine merchant, best known perhaps for introducing Californian wines to British connoisseurs in the early 1970s, and for his reply to the question as to whether he had ever mistaken claret for burgundy: ‘Not since lunch....’ Parker could never make a mistake. And Edmund Penning-Rowsell, the poshly educated and accented socialist, whose book on Bordeaux remains a standard, but whom I think of mostly as the writer of the annual guide to ‘what to buy and drink’ in the Compleat Imbiber of the ’60s and ’70s – witty, literate and humane, and deeply informed. He was to your average modern wine-hack what a decent old-fashioned bordeaux was to a mega-brand invented by an accountant, achieved by technology, and made successful by advertising.

For people like that it would be just if death followed the broaching of the last bottle of great wine in their cellars. I hope EPR polished off his Cheval Blanc ’47 with his dying strength. There are, of course, people who deserve only a last drop of Jacob’s Creek.

• Return to Grape 14 contents page
• Return to home page