Stories of spring in the winelands
30 September  2007

It's spring, and the vines are waving their little fistfuls of brilliant green leaves. Everything in the Cape vineyard is lovely...

Bubbling prices

It’s hardly the first time that an award-winning wine has suddenly jumped in price – but it does seem a little excessive that a Graham Beck bubbly goes from the R180 they quoted Wine mag before the Cap Classique competition, to R700 now. It’s almost as though they don’t want to sell the stuff, now that they’ve got the publicity out of it…. Could it be that they want to carry on serving it at their own special occasions? Maybe there’s not a whole lot of it left (amongst other things they’ve entered it for this competition at least twice before)? One of the entrance requirements is that the wine is commercially available – and who can deny it in this case? Or perhaps they really think it’s overnight quadrupled in value, to the price of a luxury genuine champagne. Either way there’s something just a little iffy about the Graham Beck marketing department’s machinations in this case….

Riesling gets a champion

You might remember South Africa’s leading bow-tied winewriter commenting a few months back about the travesty whereby riesling in South Africa has to be prefixed ‘Weisser’ or ‘Rhine’ while crouchen blanc is officially called riesling. He pointed out that the KWV-Distell axis still effectively rules the local wine industry, even though ‘Kader Asmal may think that, because he chairs the South African Wine Industry Council, he is running the show’. Well, I hear that the little Professor took this challenge to heart and is determined to bring justice to the noblest of white grapes, or to his reputation at least.

If he succeeds, I promise to never (almost never) say anything rude about him, and to treat with the greatest respect the academic title he fought so hard to be allowed to retain, despite not having served the normally requisite number of years as an actual prof.

Independence rules

Incidentally, while my dear friend with a bow tie has on occasion sent out press releases announcing the confirmation of his status as ‘the country's leading wine judge and wine taster’, who do you think is now jumping up to say: no, no – it’s me, me! and proclaiming that he himself is our ‘leading independent wine commentator’ (the italics are his, to make a pretty clear point)? Neil P, of course, in his new Sunday Times blog. And to forestall any whose opinions as to his preeminence might differ from his own, Neil cites that Wine mag poll I have referred to once before, which voted him SA’s ‘most trusted palate’ – though we calculated then that what he has called the ‘broader wine public’ in this case consisted of about 50 people (or one person pushing the online voting button 50 times). Ah well, could we be in for another public clash of Gauteng egos again?

Five star squabble

Here’s a nice little story of contemporary wine values. It seems there was something of a technical glitch (email failure perhaps) when one of the Platter tasters sent in the nomination of three Waterford wines to go forward to the five-star taste-off, and they weren’t included in the line-up of possibles. Bad luck for Waterford. The Platter publisher and editor were later horrified to realise what had happened, but after much agonising decided that the best they could do was make a special mention and apology in the book.

The Platter people could just have kept quiet about it, of course – only a handful of people (not including Waterford) knew what had happened. But publisher Andrew McDowall is a gent of the old school (being a lady of the old school I know that means he naively expects other people to be as nice as we are). He thought the decent thing to do was to tell the Waterford people what had gone wrong and offer to make what amends he could.

But my dear husband could have told him that perhaps one shouldn’t have high expectations of the sort of person who builds a pseudo-Tuscan winery in the Cape winelands.

Anyway, Waterford owners IT-rich Jeremy Ord and winemaker Kevin Arnold were having none of this – no taking the blow in sportsmanlike fashion fir them. Lawyers were invoked, threats of preventing publication were made. Our Jeremy and Kevin insisted that the tasting of the relevant categories be done over again, despite all the announcements having been made already, this time including their precious wines.

Charming men basically, I’m sure, and kind to their children and dogs, and not really like Violet Elizabeth Bott who’d thcream and thcream and thcream until she got her own way. So, crumbling before the threats to effectively financially cripple this great institution of the wine industry, the Platter publisher agreed to re-run the tastings. We now know that the Waterford wines didn’t make it, and the only result is a rather sour taste in the mouth of a lot of people when they think about what is apparently proudly called ‘the Waterford way’ of doing things.

And another…

Another wine that doesn’t feature among the five stars, as you might have noticed, is one regarded by many as among the Cape’s best – Eben Sadie’s Columella 2005 (even the ghastly Wine Speculator got things right and gave it the highest score ever given to a Cape wine). Well, these things happen, you might say – it’s a panel tasting after all, where things are likely to go wrong. But in this case, Columella doesn’t even feature in the list of those which failed to make it. Apparently, for the first time in the wine’s admittedly short history – and after having twice previously got five stars – Columella wasn’t even nominated this year by the person who was, for the first time given it to rate. Perhaps Platter should beware of something in addition to offending rich winery owners – like wondering about the expertise of a taster it itself describes as bringing ‘a hearty consumer perspective to the guide’: more a question of what Tim Atkin might call amateurism and bringing the guide into something like disrepute, I’d have thought.