Supermarkets, KWV coffee, and great old
bordeaux from Paarl
27 November 2007
I have, I fear, been rather silent of late. That nice young
man Michael Oliver is one who has concernedly asking after my health. Well,
I can tell him (and those others who have been missing my cheery missives
and asking about my possible death with a note of hope in their voices) that
I am as well as can be expected – albeit a trifle weary.
Well, I see that dear Kader hasn’t yet solved the riesling
problem and persuaded the Wine and Spirit Board to listen to him rather than
Distell – but it’s early days yet and he's trying. Meanwhile, I believe that the
makers of cruchen blanc that call it riesling with the blessing of
the Board have been trying to get some sort of international endorsement for
their deception (cheeky bastards, my husband would have called them, but he
was never very refined). Apparently a couple of these masqueraders were entered in
the International Riesling Challenge. Can this be true? Mind you, given the oddness of
some results from the less-massaged kinds of tastings (are there any
straightforward ones left, I wonder, where the winner is simply the winner
without going through the Byzantine hoops that that Wine seems to be
making a fine art of?), I suppose we should be grateful that a Cape cruchen
wasn’t crowned world champion….
Support for
supermarket specials....
Talking of competitions, weve been hearing a lot from the
People’s Winewriter about supermarket Spar’s wines – Neil Pendock greatly admires one
called Quintette and uses it to lash some more fancily priced ones (and of
course he’s quite right to go for the cheapie if he can’t perceive any quality
difference). Spar is also something of a hero because it
didn’t submit its wines to Platter this year – Platter being another enemy
of the good honest wine-loving masses since declining to make use of the people’s ‘most
trusted palate’ as one of its tasters.
So it wasn’t a thundering surprise to have Neil interviewing
Spar’s Ray Edwards on his Sunday Times page a few weeks back. The
real point was, of course, to allow Edwards to say that
he doesn’t submit wines to Platter because of possible prejudice against
supermarket labels: ‘We made a decision’, says Ray grandly, ‘to submit our
wines to panels where the judges taste blind’ (I wonder if that’s also how
Spar chooses the wines to go under their label).
Well, they submit their wines to some panels, perhaps.
Fascinatingly, they seem not to have submitted any samples to Wine mag in
recent years, going by the mag’s rating records. Could this be because their
Country Cellars wines have perfomed so consistently badly in the past? Most
get one or two stars max, and I doubt if any other producer has quite such a
track record of getting that ominous label ‘no stars awarded’ – meaning the
blind tasters either thought the wine faulty or simply of dire quality.
So, still trying to be a dutifully researching journalist, I
turned to Veritas. And lo, five of Spar’s Olive Brook Country
Cellars wines got medals this year! One had reached the dizzying heights of a
Silver (ie, a third-level award), and others had got Bronzes – the
reputation of which award is surely not really enough to justify Ray and his
acolyte swelling their bosoms with pride or being self-righteous. Neil’s
wonderful Quintette, incidentally, was among the Bronze medallists – meaning
that charging seventy bucks for it is rather excessive than otherwise, if
you’re really a believer in the penetrating judicious wisdom of
blind-tasting panels. I suspect Ray might have done no worse submitting to Platter.
I’m no scholar myself, but my dear husband was fond of a line
from Shakespeare that I think Ray shoud ponder in relation to his wines and
their star-ratings: ‘The fault, dear Neil [or was it Brutus?] is not in our
stars, but in ourselves…’.
KWV coffee for the Vietnamese...
Perhaps Spar should enter their wines into one of the
far-flung competitions that have so much more credibility than dreadful old
Platter. In Vietnam, perhaps. The KWV has just gleefully announced that
their Café Culture pinotage has just been lauded at the International Wine
Challenge event held there. Not exactly vastly prestigious, but the award will surely have the Sonnenbergs of
Diemersfontein gnashing their teeth in fury. The KWV wine was made, you see,
by Bertus ‘Starbucks’ Fourie – the person who made the Diemersfontein
Pinotage famous (or infamous if you valued the flavours of oak less than
those of grapes); the person that Diemersfontein wanted to sue when he
abandoned them for the KWV. Because, they bizarrely insisted, his recipe for
making pinotage that tastes of coffee belonged to them and them alone.
Well, that didn’t work, of course, and Bertus is now applying
his recipe on behalf of the KWV – Can it be a rare little bit of ponderous Paarl
humour that led to the name of Bertus's pinotage suggesting that it was more
appropriate to a café than a wine-bar?). So there he is, ‘crafting’ his
wines from ‘grapes harvested at optimum ripeness’ as the press release
inevitably has it. (KWV takes over its clichés as well as its winemaking
recipes from others, it would seem), to the
acclaim of the Vietnamese. That’s
the way to turn around those big KWV losses!
... and
not-quite bordeaux for Observatory
Here’s a nice little tale of greed and ignorance in our wine
industry (surely not, you might cry!). The tale starts in a flooded private
cellar under the house at Welgemeend, the farm in Paarl where now-deceased
Billy Hofmeyr produced the Cape’s first Bordeaux blend in 1979. The farm was
not long ago sold by the Hofmeyrs, and the new regime ‘discovered’ this
cellar, and the bottles of wine it contained. Of course, the drowned bottles
were label-less, but there were on some of them to be clear traces of the
labels of Château Pétrus, the legendary Bordeaux domaine.
Great excitement! They go to Observatory and chat
conspiratorially to the biggest and best local importer of Bordeaux. One of
the wines is broached and pronounced superb – just as a mature
Pétrus should be. Plans are made to buy up the little stock of great old
Bordeaux. It seems no-one involved in the deal thought it might be a good
idea (or simply nice or honest) to ask the departing Hofmeyrs why they had
apparently left behind this very valuable collection of wine.
Ahem! Someone hears the story, and remembers hearing other
stories, and relates them to the lucky beneficiaries of this bit of dealing.
Firstly, how Billy Hofmeyr had dug a cellar under the house but quickly
abandoned it, and the not very important wines in it, when the water table
proved a bit of a problem. Secondly, how in the early years of establishing
his Bordeaux blend, Billy would make tiny bottlings of Welgmeend wines
according to the recipes of the different great Bordeaux producers he loved
and understood so well – Pétrus, for example. On the bottles he’d stick
photocopies of the labels of the wines he was trying to imitate.
There was no fraud, of course, this was purely Billy’s
personal game. The corks and the capsules used were Welgemeend’s. You’d have
thought that these latter-day Bordeaux experts would know what a Pétrus
capsule looked like, wouldn’t you? No, but they did eventually recognise the Welgemeend
corks after the stories were told to them and they opened a bottle or two
more and examined them….
I wonder whether the person who’d been so thrilled by the
‘Pétrus’ he’d had was delighted that now he could, if he wished, buy the
rest for a much lower price, once they had been revealed as mere Welgemeend
rather than one of the world’s priciest wines.
There’s a lesson there somewhere, and I’m sure the People’s
Winewriter could tell us what it is.
From
Christian Kuun: