Cape cult?

Jenny Ratcliffe looks at the differences between cult and icon wines, and ponders the chances of South Africa producing wines for these rarefied categories.

The market today is impatient for its thrills, and there is a place for wines that deliver something other than the long-term intellectual stimulation of a great claret.' So remarks Jancis Robinson welcomingly about cult wines (on www.jancisrobinson.com). She continues: 'The world of wine is richer for the emergence of these overpriced, precocious beauties - even if their purchasers are not.'

Cult wines' are much talked about these days, since the phenomenon started mushrooming with all the new money generated by the stock market and dot.com boom of the 1990s. 'Icon' is also a term much bandied about, and some people believe cult and icon to be interchangeable terms. But a number of things generally distinguish the two, as indicated in the table.

Local winemaker David Finlayson of Glen Carlou sums up the situation well: an icon is 'a wine with a history of being consistently world-class and representing ultra-premium quality in the buyer's mind'; the difference between cult and icon wines is that: 'One is a shooting star that is spectacular but may burn itself out. The other is like the Milky Way, always there, steady, sure and impressive.'

For their detractors, cult wines have a number of drawbacks:
o They are overpriced, under-delivering on value.
o They have made it big, but have no track record; how will they age?
o In times of recession, the cult wine movement will all but disappear;
o Cult wines are too directly linked to the American critic Robert Parker - without him there is nothing.

On the other hand, some make positive claims:
o Cult wines improve a country's quality wine profile.
o They encourage higher prices for quality wine, enabling many producers to finance expensive improvements.
o They encourage producers to strive for better quality through one-up-man-ship rivalry.
o They encourage and nurture individualism, quirkiness and iconoclasm.

South Africa has the ingredients to build both cult and icon wines, with good vineyards planted with suitable varieties, and talented winemakers both of the 'revolutionary' (read: innovative and quirky) and 'reactionary' (read: traditional and established) schools. The all-important ratings in America are starting to happen, although the local industry is still new on the international wine scene, and few Cape wines as yet have sufficient international recognition. Moreover, none yet meet the cult wine criteria completely.

Some 100-point scores in a new chapter featuring South Africa in the next edition of Robert Parker's Wine Buying Guide would certainly help. In time we might well see a few wines being traded on the 'grey' market, after being released only to mailing list customers, for a price about equivalent to the GDP of a small country....

Jenny Ratcliffe is Export Manager of Vinimark. This article is based on the dissertation recently submitted for her Cape Wine Master diploma.