29 September 2004
The Brett Police

We in the Cape are catching up with Australia not only in conning people into accepting that sweetish alcoholic fruitjuice is wine but also, they say, in ever-rising levels of brett. You know, that spoilage yeast that sometimes seems to be a nice thing, but is more than often anything but. (Someone once told me I was rather like a bretty wine – never maturing properly, just getting older and nastier – but that was unsubstantiated malice of the type that I’m sure we all just treat with contempt.)

Anyway, the Brett Police are out and about. The problem is that there’s much more opinion than knowledge or certainty out there. At the recent Winex show in Cape Town half of those attending seemed to be rushing around whispering to each other to go and try that one also – full of brett! So that just about every wine has an accuser, and often a defender too. (I’ll only believe people when they show me the laboratory analysis sheet from now on, I think.) The whole accusation business is getting into the open now. The latest Wine mag has Michael Fridjhon saying that there’s brett in Rust en Vrede wines, and someone else writing in to accuse Springfield....

So it’s a sign of the times and of a rather worried industry that a big workshop on brett was held in Stellenbosch recently. No-one from the press was allowed, we discovered, even if someone thinks she has a legitimate existence beyond scribbling occasionally for a rag like Grape. Perhaps this ban was to encourage confessions: ‘Hi, my name’s Koos and I’ve had brett in my wines for two years....’ But I do wish that winemakers would try to educate the hacks a bit more, rather than just moaning at their lack of knowledge and understanding.

André’s little game

The little flurry of excitement around whether or not superstar winemaker André van Rensburg is to leave Vergelegen seems to be subsiding now – though, as I write, André is still refusing to confirm that he’s staying until his new contract is actually signed. Presumably a much more lucrative one, that he’s wrung out of his notoriously stingy bosses by at least implicitly threatening to go.

So who was it, one wonders, that started spreading the rumours that he was off to L’Ormarins, thus putting pressure on the Vergelegen bosses just prior to their budget meeting? Could it have been our dear André himself?

What is pretty certain is that this is not the first time he’s applied for other winemaking jobs, or responded positively to headhunters. Not that he always gets the offer – it was very strongly rumoured a year or so back that he’d applied for the position at Klein Constantia (probably also to either feed his ego or to further his battle with his bosses), but had been gently turned down. Not every winery is equipped to cope with an enfant terrible....

The ones I feel a bit sorry for in the whole situation are the guys who are already making wine at L’Ormarins. I wonder when they heard that they were to have a superstar put in above them. Great for morale.

Of course, if the Rupert ambitions at the Franschhoek winery demand a newsworthy winemaker (and Rupert money is endless, of course), who will get the job, if not André? One gossip-monger suggests John Loubser of Steenberg – rumour has it that that property is to be carved up into ‘gentlemen’s wine estates’, which is probably not the sort of future that a serious winemaker wants.