Mike the First, and the Great Palate 19 February 2007

Mike the First

My husband always urged me to push myself forward a bit – ‘You’re too diffident, dear’ he’d say, drowning his disappointment with another cirrhotic glass . And if the Grape lot weren’t such a dour, drab bunch holding me back, now that I’ve blossomed a little with maturity, I could have my own banner heading: Exclusive! The first widow in the world to passionately and exclusively bring you hand-crafted insights from the winelands.

The dear man never knew Mike Ratcliffe of Warwick and Vilafonté, or he might have better appreciated my charming reticence.  Amongst other pushy things, being the first – or claiming to be so, whenever possible and even when not – is something Mike clearly values highly. I don’t know whether he learnt this passion for primacy all by himself (along with the art of massaging auction prices for his wines), or through his wine marketing education in Australia: perhaps there was a course that trains you to be creative with the truth, and then, if you’re publicly caught out, well, just change the story.

Some of us were first led to wonder about this when we noticed a sycophantish report on Winecoza about the American magazine Wine Enthusiast’s enthusiasm for Warwick Trilogy: how and where, one puzzled, could the magazine have got hold of the untruth that this was ‘the first Bordeaux blend from the Cape’?

More recently, the same easy-going website (which is apparently not all that fussy about what it carries, especially if payment is satisfactorily made) offered a press release from Vilafonté, the winery in which Mike is a partner. Another Ratcliffe first proudly proclaimed: Groundbreaking! The first winery website in the world to carry online videos of the harvest! Trouble is, the claim was patently untrue and misleading, as was courteously but firmly pointed out in a comment posted on the website by Gary Jordan, who’d been doing video-things at Jordan Winery for a while already.

Then Winecoza showed its willingness to also remove anything from one of these paid-for pieces if some contradicting truth arrives to embarrass their client. If you looked on the website a day or so later, the original untrue claims had been magicked away – along with Gary’s comment (let’s hope he doesn’t mind being thus censored without so much as a by-your-leave). Unfortunately, much of Mike’s prose remains. It must be his, surely: appalling as many PR consultants are, surely no professional could switch off their pomposity filters so effectively as to allow them to perpetrate some of the stuff there – like the sentence suggesting that the purpose of the not-quite-world-first videos is ‘to bring the passionate consumer closer to the real face of winemaking and give them exclusive insight into the remarkable lengths that we go to to create serious red wine’. Those remarkable lengths, the passionate consumer can pantingly and exclusively discover, seem to go even as far as picking grapes and fermenting them – wow!

But other, as yet unchallenged, first prizes are claimed for Vilafonté on their own website as well as in their portentous press releases. This is, they say in big print, ‘South Africa’s first luxury brand’. Well, it’s an odd claim, but it’s difficult to see that ‘luxury brand’ means much more than very expensive; and one doesn’t need to look far to find local wine producers predating Vilafonté by having only expensive wines – Hamilton Russell Vineyards a long time back, for example, Sadie Family more recently with wines that are quite a bit more ‘luxurious’ in price than Vilafonté’s.

Another declared primacy is that Vilafonté is ‘the first joint venture between American and South African vintners’. Well, there is of course the partnership between the Ernie Els partners and Silver Oak which produced Cirrus Syrah – launched with the 2003 vintage, just like Vilafonté’s wine. A pretty close call, I’d say. Is Mike quite sure that his joint venture really was the first? Judging by his other claims, I doubt if he has bothered to find out for sure.

The great palate

I look at the unseemly public squabbles between that other Mike (Fridjhon) and Neil Pendock with some sadness. Why oh why can’t people just be nice to each other in our happy industry? I sigh to myself.

Far be it from me to comment on the substance of the debate and risk enflaming things futher, but I must say just something about Neil’s response to Michael’s insulting letter to the Financial Mail, which had essentially accused Neil of being a mere amateur and a pathetic winetaster. I’m sure you all saw it. Well, Neil’s riposte the following week, after alluding to Michael’s many apparent conflicts of interest, was mostly a triumphant reference to a poll carried in Wine mag – ‘voting me’, as he said, ‘SA's most respected taster (Fridjhon came a distant fourth)’.

Now, most people I know had simply had a good chuckle over the poll and Michael’s likely apoplectic rage about it, assuming it was more or less a joke, or rigged, or both. Neil clearly took it seriously, however. For him, this was evidence, he said, that the ‘broader wine public values the views of "enthusiastic amateurs"’ like himself. If you’re a more avid follower than I am of the drivel in the local wine press, you will probably have noticed this poll in the January edition of Wine, but you won’t have seen, as one does when polls are respectably reported on, anything about the size or nature of the constituency. I believe that it was about 150 clicks on their website that prompted Wine mag to proudly offer this as a valuable insight into the views of the public. No doubt they were not being irresponsible, but were confident that this was a representative sample of people who are in a position to judge.

Neil got a winning 33 percent of the votes. He’s the mathematician, I know, but to me it seems that the ‘broader wine public’ he boasts of, who rate his palate so highly, can be calculated to consist of nearly 50 people. Or, for all I know, one person pushing the voting button 50 times.

 I confess I am quite intrigued, though, as to how anyone comes to assess Neil’s tasting ability at all these days – I am a devoted (though occasionally puzzled) reader of his writings, and it’s quite a while since I saw him saying anything substantial about any actual wine. Take, for example, a recent description of Withington Shiraz/Cab, a ‘Pendock’s Pick’ in the Sunday Times: I quote his review in its brief entirety:

Medieval merchant Dick Whittington famously went to London to see the Queen and this near homophone and fellow merchant Charles Withington, does a lot of travelling to source grapes, in this case out to darkest Paarl.

The result is a generous spicy red with good persistence. As Cape Town retailer Vaughan Johnson said, 'I’d rather have this bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.'

Now, this is unquestionably not intimidating, and quite possibly quirkily charming (though the first sentence has a rather lame analogy, clumsily expressed, and a misplaced comma). But this pretty typical example of Neil's prose and his wine criticism doesn’t really say enough about the wine to give any evidence of a palate at all, either good or bad, does it? 

COMMENT

From Christian Eedes of Wine magazine:
That the online poll conducted by Wine magazine concerning which local palate is most respected has caused such a stir is proof once again of how humourless wine commentary in this country is.

The online poll has always been intended primarily as entertainment and we have never made any claims about its statistical validity. I can confirm that winemag.co.za has about 8 500 unique users a month, with the poll in question running for approximately four weeks between end-October and beginning-November attracting precisely 155 ballots. As no more than dipstick research, one must decide oneself how much faith to place in the outcome.

Of course, anyone with a just a bit of Internet knowledge would know how to manipulate the outcome but most sensible people would surely agree that voting more than once is silly.

It is interesting to note the outcome of the poll featured in the March 2007 issue which saw supermodel Minki van der Westhuizen emerge as voters’ 'dream dinner guest' ahead of Eben Sadie, Beyers Truter and André van Rensburg. Once again, draw your own conclusions.

From Mike Ratcliffe of Warwick and Vilafonté:

If I may respond:

•  Regarding Wine Enthusiast: Please be sure that I have not ever made any claim to Warwick Trilogy being the first Bordeaux blend from the Cape. I am sure that Wine Enthusiast would clarify the origin of this comment. Warwick does not and has never made this claim verbally or in any of our PR.

•  Regarding ‘Worlds First’ harvest video: It is our belief that the Vilafonté video blog was indeed first – I would refer you to the Vilafonté harvest video on March 18^th 2006 and the subsequent harvest video of April 8^th 2006 with numerous others that follow these dates. Vilafonté initially launched our harvest reporting with podcasting and published our first podcast on February 10^th 2006. Searching Google at the time, we could not find another winery utilising the same harvest reporting modus operandi. I again Googled ‘wine harvest’, ‘harvest video’ and ‘wine harvest video’ this morning and could not find another winery predating Vilafonté. We remain open to being corrected.

•  Regarding the ‘removal’ of the offending comments by Gary from wine.co.za: I did not initiate or request any changes. I am sure that nothing sinister transpired.

•  Regarding the ‘pomposity’ of my prose: My ‘turn of phrase’ does effectively convey what we are trying to do – and we seem to be having some success. We will be resuming more frequent postings now that harvest is well and truly under way and hope to further inform our customers and followers.

•  ‘First Luxury brand’: I have considered your criticism about the positioning slogan on our website and have decided that I agree with your comment and will be removing it from our site. Thank you for your thoughtful comment.

• On being the first US/SA joint venture: Vilafonté predates Cirrus by some years – although the actual wine ‘Vilafonté’ was launched officially with the 2003 vintage in May 2005 (6 months prior to the November 2005 Cirrus launch), the joint venture business began in 1997 when the Vilafonté property was acquired. Wines were produced by Vilafonté from the 00, 01 and 02 vintages and sold under a variety of different labels until the 2003 vintage which carried the brand Vilafonté. The American involvement, ownership and participation in a South African winemaking initiative by Phil and Zelma commenced in 1997. The only other American involvement that we are aware of is Silkbush Mountain Vineyards www.silkbush.net, a grape growing initiative owned entirely by Americans. Although open to correction, we do not believe that we are misinformed.

The Widow responds:

Gosh Mike, how nice to know that you can also write in a straightforward, sensible and less purple way! Thanks for your restrained comments. For a change, I have little to say now except that:

1. As to the 'corrections' made to your piece on Winecoza - it is one of the many problems related to the murky business of paid-for coverage (advertorials) that the lines of responsibility are obscured and it is unclear who is doing what, for what reason. Whether the changes were made at your instance or by them acting in your interests is not obvious to the viewer; the whole business of undermining the independence of journalism through advertorials seems pretty 'sinister' to me, though.

2. It occurs to me that, in fact, given that the actual Vilafonté thing started comparatively recently, the first US-SA joint venture could in fact be considered to be the short-lived one between your present partners and Michael Back of Backsberg (the deal that fell through, to be replaced by the one with you)!