Sour Grapes

Sour grapes

Neil Pendock

Tafelberg

Preface

Wine is much more than an alcoholic beverage – it’s a cultural reliquary, a liquid time machine that can instantly transport the drinker back to summers long lost quicker than Proust’s madeleine. People and stories make wine special and the South African Winelands provide some of the most beautiful locations in which they play out.

The idea for this slim volume was spawned at the 2007 Cape Town Book Fair when Tafelberg publishers commissioned this book. I was part of a panel discussion on the crisis (or otherwise) in South African wine chaired by former Sunday Times columnist David Bullard.

Some of the text has appeared before in edited form – in the Sunday Times, Financial Mail, WINE, Winescape, Good Taste, www.winenews.co.za, in my blog, blogs.thetimes.co.za/pendock – and some I wrote especially for this book at the Ouro Minas Palace Hotel in Belo Horizonte between September and November 2007.

This is the result: the inside story on South African wine.

Introduction

‘Listen, all you need to take is a lipstick

and I two bottles of wine’

(Breyten Breytenbach, In a Cab in the Rain, New York)

Kitchen potboilers are suddenly in season: Marco Pierre White spilt much more than the beans in White Slave (Orion, 2006), while Anthony Bourdain didn’t disappoint with The Nasty Bits (Bloomsbury, 2006). My favourite was Heat (Knopf, 2006) by Bill Buford and the subtitle explains why: ‘An amateur’s adventures as kitchen slave, line cook, pasta-maker and apprentice to a Dante-quoting butcher in Tuscany.’

For Bill, whose day job is writing for The New Yorker, can certainly write and he’s a true amateur in the original sense of the word – someone who does it for love.

In South Africa, so-called professionals, self-appointed bibulous boffins, sacred cows, or moos (masters of olfactory subjects they never taught you at university) and wine insiders attempt to achieve status by putting down amateurs and the result is as obvious as a wine lake or a muf bottle of Crouchen Blanc. From serious side effects, like South African wine consumption on a relentless downward spiral, to fear of ordering wine in a restaurant in case of committing a social faux pas, snobbishness about wine is silly and suburban.

Far too many South African commentators are alternately barkers and shills or paid purveyors of PR-speak, the lingua franca of a profession described by Sunday Times restaurant reviewer, AA Gill, (‘Britain’s most waspish and possibly best-paid critic’, according to The Guardian) as ‘the headlice of civilisation’. But perhaps even worse, they’re usually pompous and boring.

A couple of years ago, Nederburg came up with an initiative to make a blended wine to be sold at the annual Nederburg Auction, with the proceeds nobly given to charity. The name of the blend was Nederburg Amateur, recognising the passion that wine lovers feel for the fermented fruit of the vine. While the Fourth Estate assembled the blend, in this case a more worthy constituency would have been people who drink wine and even pay for it themselves, like the members of the 50 wine clubs who enter the annual Blaauwklippen Blending Competition, now in its third decade. The 2006 winning red blend was made by Amanda de Vos of the Knysna Wynproe gilde, while the 2007 was assembled by Roland Frost from the Symposia Wine Society in Durban, who, refreshingly, ‘just threw the Cabernet and Malbec together in equal proportions to get 70 per cent and then added the Shiraz and Cabernet Franc’.

When it comes to writing about the fermented fruit of the vine, amateurs certainly have a clear edge over the pros. One of America’s hippest novelists, Jay McInerney, is also her finest wine writer. Online lifestyle magazine Salon.com calls him ‘the best wine writer in America’. The author of the novel that nailed the hedonistic excesses of eighties Manhattan, Bright Lights, Big City, latterly turned wine columnist for House & Garden, is more bashful. Jay describes himself as ‘a passionate amateur’ who employs ‘a metaphoric language’ in comparing wines to ‘actresses, rock bands, pop songs, painters or automobiles’, rather than a ‘literal parsing of scents and tastes’ à la Platter’s, the wine guide that annually features in the list of South African non-fiction best-sellers.

Jayspeak has a definite louche flair, dating back to his days as a cocaine novelist from the Reagan era. Take his definition of Botrytis, the beneficial fungus that desiccates grapes and produces the concentrated marvels of Sauternes: ‘Not since Baudelaire smoked opium has corruption resulted in such beauty.’ Or his rule of thumb for separating Burgundy from Bordeaux: ‘If it’s red, French, costs too much, and tastes like the water that’s left in the vase after the flowers have died and rotted, it’s probably Burgundy.’

South Africa’s own Burgundy boffin, Anthony Hamilton Russell, recounts Jay cooking him and his wife a perfect steak in his Manhattan apartment, with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s desk in the study, a present from one of his many wives. Which is quite appropriate, given that Jay McInerney could be mistaken for Jay Gatsby, the hero of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, as a result of his sharp dressing and hedonistic lifestyle, flying around the world to eat medieval Kyoto cuisine paired with vintage Dom Pérignon. And in his documentation of the fashionable edge, McInerney is the F. Scott Fitzgerald de nos jours.

Even the wine professionals think he’s great, with America’s über-palate, Robert Parker, calling him ‘brilliant, witty, comical and often shamelessly candid and provocative’.

Jay’s own winespeak hero and role model is the late Auberon Waugh, who’d certainly get my vote for best wine writer of the last millennium. His comment on the perils of being a wine hack supplies reason enough:

‘Wine writing should be camped-up. The writer should never like a wine; he should be in love with it; never find a wine disappointing but identify it as a mortal enemy, an attempt to poison him; sulphuric acid should be discovered when there is the faintest hint of sharpness. Bizarre and improbable side tastes should be proclaimed: mushrooms, rotting wood, black treacle, burned pencils, condensed milk, sewage, the smell of French railway stations or ladies’ underwear.’

After all, what would you rather hear over dinner – the ghost of Auberon (‘Red, I should say. And very nice.’) or a discussion on whether that spicy character that everyone enjoyed ‘had notes of Brett or Geosmin’ (think ‘beetroot’)?

What follows is my attempt at an amateur’s overview of South African wine: opinionated, outrageous and over the top. Cheers!

Connoisseurs

The Sunday Times Lifestyle supplement ran a short-lived column, ‘Typecast’, taking the piss out of social stereotypes. Wine snobs are deserving targets, as my contribution set out to confirm.

‘Our palates have moved on’, is the cry of the lesser-spotted wine anorak bearing down on the Afrodisiac Restaurant and Voodoo Lounge, their bottles of French in the Alessi Chiringuito wine tote bag complete with mobile phone holder.

‘You see, South African cuvées lack the linearity of flavours you find in claret.’

Usually found in pairs – an audience is an important component of wine appreciation – wine anoraks can be identified at one hundred paces by all the stuff they bring with them.

In addition to the Alessi Chiringuito wine tote, there’s the enormous bespoke bubinga box (that’s African rosewood for the rest of us) for the Riedel glassware (motto: wine tastes better in glasses bigger than your head). Then there’s the compulsory handcrafted Château Laguiole corkscrew (wine opener, as it’s called for a more effete effect), its black horn handle signed by Enrico Bernardo (‘best sommelier in the world, 2004’), nestling like a joey in a leather pouch attached to the Gharani Strok belt.

Unpacking makes an amusing floorshow for other diners, as an array of bizarrely shaped glasses are revealed – different designs for non-vintage and vintage champagne, sparkling versus still mineral water, etc. After a deft final polish with the chamois and a cautionary sniff of the empty glass, they’re off.

To start, something outlandish like a biodynamic oak-fermented champagne from Jacques Selosse of Avize (‘visits strictly by appointment and please only by those with a serious interest in biodynamic and organic wines’), described in Philippe Boucheron’s indispensable travel guide, Destination Champagne, (Wine Destination, 2005) as strictly for serious wine geeks. Bollinger’s ungrafted pre-phylloxera fizz, Vieilles Vignes Françaises, is no longer an option, after all that product placement in James Bond films.

And it has to be champagne: the bubbles of local sparkling wine are far too coarse for the refined lingual papillae of a wine anorak. After the bubbly, it’s carefully away with the crystal flutes and out with the white. Probably a Riesling, a varietal loved by anoraks (and hardly anyone else), with a Riesling Revival punted nearly as often as a Rosé Renaissance by wine magazines that can’t let an alliteration go unpublished. A Riesling preferably from Alsace; however, now that pre-war German nobility is making a bid to return to the heights of society by making wine, something from the Pfalz might do, so long as it’s at least a Spätlese Trocken.

What a pity they don’t drink South African, as a German baron is now making a Bordeaux blend in Philadelphia (Western Cape), using a winemaker who’s a count. Truman Capote would have swooned. So it’ll have to be claret. Château Lynch Bages (Pauillac) perhaps (or maybe not: English wine anoraks disrespectfully call it ‘Lunch Bags’). Or Château Pavie (St-Emilion) 2003. It doesn’t matter that it’s so concentrated as to be almost undrinkable. Robert Parker scores it 95–100 points.

All this whetted my thirst to take the whole matter of connoisseurship a bit further.

Don Quixote was the first modern novel, so no surprise that Miguel de Cervantes chose an enduring theme that has been popular right up to Bridget Jones’s Diary – ridiculous failure. No surprise either that the Man from La Mancha proclaimed himself an ace wine taster:

‘Let me smell one and I can tell positively its country, its kind, its flavour and soundness, the changes it will undergo and everything that appertains to it.’

Wine expertise is often a well-established bluff, akin to dexterity with crystal balls or agility with tarot cards. As Steve Shapin, Professor of the History of Science at Harvard, put it in the London Review of Books:

‘Common sense has always suspected that connoisseurship was just snobbery tricked out as expertise, and that wine connoisseurship was one of the purest forms of pretence.’

Removing wine pundits from the sort of pedestals that contemplative monks like St Simeon Stylites used to erect is a deeply felt democratic urge. The website www.winedemocracy.com proclaims:

‘The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, party dictatorships, or professional wine critics.’

A compendium of wine reviews submitted by e-mail, Winedemocracy is a do-it-yourself Platter’s with a couple of benefits: potentially more up to date, certainly cheaper and with no obvious conflicts of interest, which sabotage the hard copy Platter’s (the taster who rated the estate from which she sources grapes for her own brand; the producer-tasters who rate their competition sighted; the taster who wears a retailer’s smock under his anorak; the taster who doubles as a highly paid consultant to several wineries and is chairman of a major producer, and the taster who will come and rate your wine and tell you where you’re going wrong, for an obscenely large fee).

Not too many South African entries in Winedemocracy yet, but let’s hope it doesn’t become the wine world’s equivalent of Amazon.com, where book reviews in the form of the most over-the-top gushes are often sent in by the authors themselves under assumed names.

The late philosopher Susan Sontag was not wrong when she noted that ‘taste has no system and no proofs’. Nowhere is her point made more sharply than in the results of South African wine competitions. While only a pedant would expect total consistency between shows, at least broad trends should be preserved. Not so. While, in 2006, WINE acclaimed a record number of five-star wines (seven as opposed to a ten-year annual average of 2.3), Platter’s recorded an all-time low: only 11 five-star stunners, down from 17 the previous year, which makes you wonder if the pundits were tasting the same wines. Or, perhaps, did monkeys do the selection? (See appendix.)

Lawrence Osborne, author of The Accidental Connoisseur (North Point Press, 2004), could have had Sontag in mind when he told The New York Sun he’s really not a wine writer. He’s actually into norms: ‘My real subject is the creation of norms, inside ourselves, I mean, not outside.’ Just like those proposed by wine competitions, perhaps.

Proofs aside, Sontag did detect ‘something like a logic of taste: the consistent sensibility which underlies and gives rise to a certain taste’. But then it’s unlikely she had South African wine competitions in mind, which are typically run for profit by people trying to sell the stuff or advertising space in magazines – the equivalent of foxes guarding chicken coops. Even features are tarnished when the advertising department calls asking if you’d like to place an ad, as the reporter will be doing a survey story on your Bovlei appellation. No pressure.

As Financial Times columnist Patrick Marmion reminded us on the eve of the Academy Awards:

‘In an age of cultural relativism, the creations of pantheons of perceived excellence consecrated by televised ceremonies may be all we can agree on. If so, artificially created league tables must not be allowed to slough off their manmade character, lest they be mistaken for truth.’

But when it’s the TV celebrity who puts in the boot, you’ve got a real problem. Like design guru Sir Terence Conran (his dad, Gerry, came from East London), who massacred South African haute cuisine and Carrol Boyes cutlery when he attended a Cape Town Design Indaba with glamorous wife, Lady Vicki. Or the Clarkson crash …

Inappropriate ones

Connoisseurs fall naturally into three categories: the inappropriate, the accidental and the genuine. Nothing spins the bow ties of wine snobs faster than when ‘unqualified’ palates dare to pass comment. Something that happened with bells on when Jezzer roared into town.

Sunny Cape Town is a popular destination for British journos during the UK winter, when living in London has all the charm of a dirty, wet lettuce. Which explains the annual summer migration of opinion formers and hacks down south. Jaguar jetted motoring journos to the Winelands in February 2006 as part of a 53-day global launch of the XK Convertible. In April, Wines of South Africa (WOSA, the exporters’ association) decanted the wine press into the Convention Centre for Cape Wine 2006, the biannual industry show and tastefest.

Alas for WOSA, Jeremy Clarkson, the most famous petrolhead of them all, had rubbished South African wine in a review published in the Sunday Times the previous month. The Sun and Sunday Times car columnist, outspoken author and presenter of BBC2 motoring programme Top Gear (which boasts 350 million viewers worldwide), Clarkson is to car journalism what Robert Parker is to wine rating, Oprah Winfrey is to book reviews or Adamastor is to sea monsters.

Clarkson was billeted in the luxurious Lanzerac Hotel in Stellenbosch, and an evening tour of the estate cellar was laid on for him and his wife. The result: a PR pile-up, when Clarkson described the all-singing, all-dancing Lanzerac cellar as:

‘Full of huge steel vats and pressure gauges. It was like being in a nuclear power station’ with the end result ‘pretty much like the stuff that comes from the outlet pipe at Sellafield [a nuclear power station in the northwest of England]. I doubt the French would put it in their windscreen-washer bottles.’

Lanzerac becomes a symbol for South African wine and Jezzer develops his antipathy into a theme running right through the story. On the evidence of one evening’s tasting, South African wine is given the flick: ‘You certainly don’t go to South Africa for the viniculture.’

We shouldn’t be too surprised; after all, Clarkson is no stranger to xenophobic controversy. As Wikipedia records, at the Birmingham Motor Show, he claimed the people working on the Hyundai stand had eaten a dog and that the designer of the Hyundai XG had probably had a spaniel for his lunch. German fan belts last 1,000 years (a reference to Hitler and his 1,000-year