The Widow’s sour grapes

What fun the awards season always is! But how boring that Veritas produced a comparatively respectable list of double-golds this year. None for Bon Vino! Presumably sales will plunge, and be transferred to Boland Sauvignon Blanc. Rather sad, I think, that one of the most plausible winners, Villiera’s Vintage Brut 1995 comes trailing flags of Veritas dubiety. How can it be acceptable to have not one, but two Villiera representatives amongst the seven awarding judges? I imagine – well, I hope – that the Griers of Villiera are embarrassed (though they chose not to recuse themselves, and it is scarcely possible that they didn’t recognise their wine), but I doubt whether the Veritas organisers are sufficiently alert to even see it as a not untypical problem.

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Some people learn from criticism, though. May I pat myself on my arthritic old back, do you think, about the reversion to proper French orthography in the latest Platter? Last year I gently chided them for leaving accents off French words like ‘Médoc’ and ‘crème brûlée’. This year, I am delighted to say, the editor has restored proper standards. It continues to be fascinating to follow descriptive fashions in Platter, however. Last year nearly all the shirazes were, apparently and implausibly, ‘Rhône-like’, and inevitably ‘peppery’. In the current edition they are no longer so assiduously related to foreign examples, but an extraordinary number of them have aromas of not just pepper, not just black pepper, but ‘cracked black pepper’.... Does that pseudo-precision mean anything, do you suppose, other than the insertion into a few tasters’ minds of a pretentious phrase they’ve picked up, probably from some wandering Australian overtrained in analysis?

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If Veritas has regained some crebility this year, so too has the Diners Club Award under the new management of dear old Tony Mossop – and I use the word ‘old’ with more affection than precision, I hasten to add, recalling some public criticism of the greyness of his tasting panel. Most unfairly, though, he seems saddled with next year’s (long-planned) category – brandy. Not only is it odd to want to call a brandy-maker a wine-maker – but there are actually few brandies that could even vaguely plausibly be said to be made by one person. Most are extremely blended, and I can’t imagine the KWV and other big boys (or Diners Club) wanting the competition limited to the half-dozen or so estate brandies? To avoid a tedious non-event – and the inevitability of an even greyer, maler panel, I hope Tony manages to maintain the new momentum and extricate the Award from this trap.

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Strange things happen in Paarl. The Paarl Vintners are lucky that Walter Finlayson and that British MW chappie Remington Norman are forgiving types – or just forgetful. Earlier this year Rem was one of the people asked by Paarl Vintners to help select the Paarl contingent of wines for the International Shiraz tasting;  Angela Lloyd was another. They made their choice from the line-up, only to be informed that some they hadn’t chosen had to go through, because they’d won glittering prizes. Now, fancy judges don’t like being over-ridden, and complained to PV chair Walter Finlayson, who incensedly eventually got the interlopers to withdraw. Lo and behold, when the international tasting took place (with Rem as Chair), these wines were included, plus another that had initially been rejected as faulty but had gone on to win an award gold on some un-fussy London Show. Having had their decisions abused in this way, Rem and Ange wrote feisty letters of protest.

It was with amazement that dear Angela this year received an invitation to judge on this year’s Paarl Shiraz Challenge. She declined with all the righteous indignation at her command (quite a lot). The forgiving and/or forgetting Remington, however, accepted – as did Walter Finlayson, despite his Glen Carlou having earlier withdrawn from the Paarl Vintners in, one presumes, anger and exasperation. Another refusenik was Neil Pendock – no doubt remembering last year’s tongue-lashing from Gesie Lategan, now the PV Chair, for writing something she didn’t approve of.

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The Platter’s African odyssey by all accounts makes a ripping yarn. I myself would rather spend a rare few hundred rands on a bottle or two, and wait for someone to lend me the book, but I have rifled through its pages at the shop. Enough to allow me to agree with the comment by someone whose name I should regretfully withhold. If a coffee-table book is like a cult Californian cab (all gloss and glamour), this person suggested, and a leatherbound classic is like an old Bordeaux, well ... the Platters’ book looks rather like a 1970s wine from an obscure part of the south of France. A rather too unkind thought for my liking, but a delightfully appropriate image. Have a look at the little un-glossy colour travel snaps (some at arty angles), cheap paper and brown sans-serif text and I’m sure you’ll see the analogy. Though the text itself is, I’m sure, as splendid as Frank Prial and all the Platters’ other reviewer friends say it is.

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Have you noticed the squalid little legal battle going on between Distell and Shoprite Checkers over Graça, that glory of Cape viniculture? Actually it’s not really about wine, of course, but packaging – apparently the most important part of wine these days, after advertising. I’m sure the lawyers find abundant subtleties, but Distell makes the point that Shoprite is copying Graça by using the bottle shape that an admiring and sophisticated public associates with Graça. (The name ‘Muchas Gracias’ also seems somewhat rip-offish.) Isn’t it in some way symbolic – or at least revealing – that Distell is fighting to protect an image that it itself took from Portuguese wine (both the name – which isn’t there to honour Samora Machel’s widow – and the bottle shape)? In fact the Portuguese producers of Vinho Verde and, more particularly, of Mateus Rosé themselves appropriated the flagon ‘bocksbeutel’ shape from Franken in Germany, but long enough ago for frenzied European protectionism to allow them to carry on using a shape otherwise reserved for the Franconians. To my mind the squabble reveals the contemptibility of both parties. Isn’t it sad to fight over something like Graça? And isn’t it a sign of lack of imagin-ation or conviction to think that we really need a second rather dismal wine from the Cape with a specifically Portuguese name and a specifically German bottle?

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What can one do, except reach for a glass of something altogether nicer. Cheers!