All in the vineyard is lovely...  27 October 2006

With a minimum of sardonic irony, in a recent article in noseweek,
Tim James welcomes spring

Spring is not a time to be curmudgeonly. Let others do their bleakly useful business of finding fault – but here [in noseweek], in an established springtime tradition going back at least a year, we look on the brighter side.

The days have lengthened in the Cape winelands, even if daily sunshine and warmth can’t yet be guaranteed. All the vineyards are at least waving brave leafy flags, and most are already marching forward to summer in serried ranks under massed green banners. True, not quite all of nature rejoices: seeing the merry, underpaid labourers spraying herbicides and insecticides to bring the landscape to a proper state of monocultural sterility, a wandering ladybird makes an about-turn and flies off disconsolately. Dozens of farm children also get organophosphate poisoning each year, but we’re not to think of them now.

For everything in the vineyard is lovely. Including, we trust, the one which Stellenbosch University’s Institute for Biotechnology is planting with genetically modified vines: the country’s first such, with more to follow – aren’t we making great strides?

Offshoots of the wine industry also feel the sap rising, as nature performs her annual miracle, with the kindly help of the agrochemical industry and the people in white coats. Publicity managers finalise marketing plans for the end-of-year rush and the tourist invasion; winewriters note all the invitations to lunch-launches of various superb products and put off dieting for a little longer. Accountants examine spreadsheets with renewed pleasure or dismay depending on the winery’s relationship to the worldwide glut.

Winemakers might be particularly cheerful this spring (unless they’re amongst those wondering what the hell to do with all the tankfuls of unsold wine from last year that will soon have to make way for the next harvest). Their scope for manipulating nature’s frequently inconvenient equations has recently been expanded, with new regulations allowing for various high-tech ways of reducing alcohol levels. They can get the utra-ripe flavours and thick textures that are currently fashionable, and not have to worry about the results of all that sugar converting into alcohol.

Spring it is, and everything in the vineyard is lovely – especially when nature can be put firmly in her place: cajoled or gently bullied or brutally corrected.

But that sounds a little sour, and it is not the occasion for churlishness. Let me tell you instead of a poignant aspect of this time of year that hadn’t occurred to me till Chris Williams mentioned it in an article he wrote for the Grape website. Chris is winemaker for Meerlust and The Foundry, with a pleasanter relationship to nature than many, and one of the more literate and thoughtful of our winemakers – and charmingly sentimental on occasion. A good deal of bottling gets done around this time, and he wrote of taking his Rubicon red blend from their barrels, sharing his sadness at having to ‘let it go’ following years of tender care. After the ‘trauma of bottling’, will it ever, he wonders, ‘re-emerge as a thing of beauty and eloquence’?

It’s possible, then, to anthropomorphise, to think of young wine as a creature loved and cared for in its youth and then, as Chris says, let go (nicely dressed, and with a dose of sulphur dioxide as the equivalent, I suppose, of a handful of condoms and some useless parental advice). The French use the verb ‘élever’ for raising both a child and a wine, and ‘élevage’ is also used in English for the careful processes between fermentation and that tragic-happy moment of bottling.

Continuing the analogy, one imagines some later scenes between offspring and inadequate parent: ‘Why didn’t you warn me about wine judges?’ ‘If you’d used only new oak for me, I’d be able to get into America!’ (‘We did what we thought best, and even sacrificed the merlot so that you could have some new barrels!) ‘People treat me funny – if I had a screwcap instead of cork I’m sure I’d be much fresher!’ (‘We didn’t properly understand in those days….’)’

Eternal youthful ingratitude. But it is spring, and all in the vineyard is lovely. Wine is simply a benign, joy-bringing thing. No scandal, greed, exploitation. The very worst that can be imagined is that Bruce Jack brings out another Flagstone wine with a bizarre name, or the Wine mag panel makes some preposterous ratings, or the new Platter guide offers some particularly pretentious descriptions. We can live with all that; there’s no room (this month) for grumpy commentators.

• This article first appeared in Noseweek, 'South Africa's unique investigative magazine'