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Couple of interesting claims from Jancis Robinson in the Weekend Financial Times today. “Berries and cherries tend to dominate American tasting notes while South Africans in my experience are the only ones to routinely find guava in white wines.” Which is probably because SA is the major producer of quality Chenin Blanc in which guava flavours often occur naturally. Or do some producers surreptitiously add them as they used to do with green peppers?
A fascinating interview with Australian novelist Peter Carey in the Weekend Financial Times yesterday for a couple of insights into wine consumption in tony restaurants. The strapline is pretty much what you’d expect for an antipodean author “over lamb and an expensive glass of wine, the novelist talks about his fears for the planet.”
Peter does Priorat
Charles Banks, who used to manage the money of basketball players in the USA, uses Jerry Maguire-speak to describe the future of SA Chenin and calls it “a game changer.” In fact he calls the whole SA wine game “delicately poised” and remarked over a cornucopia of gourmet pizzas on just how badly the stuff is marketed overseas.
Charles Banks
You can’t blame Rudera for trying it on. Listed first in the ten winners of the inaugural Classic Wine Chenin Blanc Challenge, they Facebooked “the Rudera Robusto Chenin blanc 2009 has been declared as the overall winner of the Chenin blanc Classic Top10 Awards at a glitzy event last night at the Pierneef Restaurant, La Motte Winery. The Robusto outshone wines the like of Tokara, Spier, Rijks and De Morgenzon, establishing once again the iconic status of this wine.” Robust marketing indeed from a rude boy producer.
“You turn down being a taster but still crack an invite to the awards” was my greeting on Friday night from Ronell Wiid, one of the Classic judges at the Top Ten Chenin awards. Which is true, but it was my birthday and not stage fright that was my excuse to bow-out back in December. Looking at Classic’s Top Ten, I wish I’d been born the previous week as while believable, two things about the Classic selection worried: all the wines were wooded and none were from the Swartland. And the Paardeberg in particular, that fiery Mount Doom in Mordor (JRR Tolkien’s Black Land) that some would call the natural home of Chenin in SA.
The top table at Friday night's elegant affair
After reading the last 2011 edition of NewsNow, the latest news aggregator magazine rip-off of The Week by Media24, I’ve decided to suspend my latest entrepreneurial project: the manufacture of hygienic disposable iPad covers in China. I figured that toilet reading material would inevitably go digital and fastidious hostesses would soon be buying iPads for their loos and so provide a captive market for my iPad covers. Certainly iPads have done for lunch party conversation. After a New Year’s day braai in Oaklands, guests adjourned to the couch and fired up Grinder on their iPads, a free app that locates sexual partners within a specified radius. Or maybe randy people without cars, as one Standard banker pointed out.
The parking lots and manicured lawns of Spier were buzzing with mosquitoes and wine hacks (Stellenbosch specializes in blood suckers) last night. Well at least those not yet ripped up, anti-Joni Mitchell style, to plant vineyards as the Platter guide 2012 hilariously claims. The occasion was Jay Pather’s White Lights Party which lifts the curtain on the launch of a new all-singing, all-dancing tasting facility at lunchtime today.
Frans K Smit
Hot on the heels of being the only SA wine in the Wine Speculator’s Top 100 for 2011 (De Morgenzon Chenin Blanc 2009) comes the news that Wendy Appelbaum’s DMZ Syrah 2009 is the only red in the FT festive season laundry list of Jancis Robinson.
Wendy and Hylton Appelbaum
Reading the summer smalls laundry list of Ma Nolte (AKA Mr. Min) in the Sunday Times Food Weekly on Sunday, one brand in particular rang a bell (as Quasimodo might have said) – Franschhoek Cellar Statue de Femme 2011. Although the cost direct from the cellar (R40) is 20% cheaper than Ma’s published price (R49).
I’d made a note to sample the statue as I was intrigued by descriptions of “green and yellow apple” from the recent FNB blind tasting Ma referred to, and wondered what had happened to those juicy small red ones they sell in Woolies. Amazing buds these tasters have, that they can divine the colour of the fruit in the bottle, blind. Next they’ll be saying the apples are imported from China, or grown hydroponically in Israel – perhaps upside down like the plants stuck to the ceiling of my latest favourite restaurant, Dear Me, in Longmarket Street, Cape Town.
Well the Wine Spectator’s Top 100: their “annual roundup of the year’s most exciting wines”, is out and it’s party time at ViniPortugal and glum faces for SA wine marketers. For Quinta do Vallado storms in at #7, two other Douro Boys are picked (Crasto and Vale Meão) while most importantly in the current financial climes, Quinta de Cabriz is placed at #42. At $9, it is the cheapest in the whole hot 100.
De Morgenzon Chenin Blanc 2009 sneaks in at #93, confirmation of the hard work Wendy and Hylton Appelbaum have expended on their brand in the USA and also confirmation of the almost total failure of SA wine marketing in the richest wine market in the world. The Portuguese and SA wine industries are approximately the same size and the question facing SA wine marketers is why is Portugal doing so much better in the USA?
Carlos Lucas
