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Sauvignon Blanc is often associated with wee. In fact it’s affectionately referred to as “cat’s pee on a gooseberry bush” in New Zealand where there are so many sheep, cat toilets are forced into the shrubbery. In Johannesburg, there is also something urinal about the grape as restaurateurs use it to take the piss. Exhibit A is a glass of Sauvignon at Orient restaurant in Melrose Arch this lunchtime. R150 for a small glass of Cecil John from Boschendal (trade price R130 a bottle) – sorry I didn’t catch the vintage as I asked the waiter for a glass of Sauvignon Blanc, the most popular white wine in SA.
Cecil John's modest Muizenberg cottage
To spectacularly mix metaphors, Alan Pick, Big Chop at the Butcher’s Shop & Grill on Nelson Mandela Square in Sandton, is the Mohamed of SA wine. Well he does have three restaurants in Dubai although his new project involving Dubai World taking a share in his Johannesburg business to fund an expansion in London has been put on hold after the Dubai wobble late last year. “Dubai is a three tier market” explains Al: “normal dining which is where we are is holding up fine; ex-pat restaurants and then tourism, both of which have taken a knock.” That said, Al is still in expansion mode with a project in Abu Dhabi on the menu “but we’ll be totally fruit juice in that conservative market” he continues.
Eben Sadie, Alan Pick, Catherine Marshall
The Cape spittoon is bubbling over after an apparent style U-turn by judges at the annual Chenin Challenge last week. Wood, alcohol and residual sugar are in, elegance and finesse take a back seat and financially hard-pressed consumers are being asked to stump up a premium for Chenin over Sauvignon Blanc which is enjoying its best vintage ever in the shape of 2009 wines. As investment bankers say to clients these days: “good luck!”
The folks over at Two Oceans are laughing like Jackass Penguins at Boulders Beach in Simonstown. Sales are up double digits according to the man guarding the rope which separates penguins from punters at Boulders and rumours doing the rounds in Stellenbosch that Distell wine sales are down 35% will be exposed as dodgy on February 17th when results are reported. Two Oceans whites sold locally are Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Grigio with the Sauvignon a remarkable 11.6% alcohol. Both wines have significant residual sugar (5.8 g/l and 6.3 g/l respectively) so it comes as no surprise to report that WINE rated the Sauvignon 4 (out of 5) stars in the Chenin (February) edition of their organ. Both wines retail for R26 (less in supermarkets).
Two Oceans sales in the US are rumoured to be especially spectacular, even after widespread coverage of the Zimbabwean swimmer taken by a Great White in False Bay hit the wires. Two Oceans brand manager and keen surfer Brad Gold was in the bay during the attack and comments “while a tragedy, it adds to the mystique. It’s Africa.” Perversely sales may even be boosted if “great white” makes it into the zeitgeist in a wine context and the shark involved gets filed away with the rest of the African tourism horror stories.
Further news from the US indicates that this year’s Chenin Challenge judges shouldn’t be blamed for being seduced by sugar, oak and alcohol as they couldn’t help themselves. Their decisions depended on the number of taste buds.
Jeff Quackenbush (surprisingly not a penguin at Boulders) reports that wine judges can be penguinholed into one of three categories: “hypersensitive tasters have the most tongue buds and tend to be averse to bitterness and alcohol and can gravitate toward sweeter wines. At the other end of the spectrum are the ‘tolerant’ tasters, who have fewer taste buds and often like bold flavors, such as dry, intense, ‘big’ wines. In the middle, physiologically, are ‘sensitive’ tasters.”
WINE panels clearly need more sensitivity and rather that certificates of competence or Veritas tasting tickets (often two contradictory “qualifications” according to SA’s most experienced taster) counting buds will suffice with mediocre scores ensuring jury selection resulting in wines more popular with consumers and eliminating the extremes at both ends of the spectrum.
An aversion to meat is becoming as popular in Cape wine tasting circles as wood to a Chenin Challenge judge. I’d always suspected the reason for requesting a vegetarian meal on SA Airways was to get served first, giving you more time to peruse Desmond Sampson’s riveting in-flight magazine Sawubona. Certainly after tasting the excellent porcini risotto (George Jardine’s vegetarian option for Leigh Robertson and Graham Howe) at Table 5 on the De Morgenzon side of the Chenin Challenge awards lunch on Thursday, I realized that vegetarian doesn’t need to be an afterthought – it was better than the dry quail. Or perhaps George needs a sous-vide water bath to keep his birds succulently moist like Rebecca Mathyssen, chef at the Schulphoek Guest House in Hermanus, who produces the finest food in that seaside town.
Leigh, Graham and Myrna Robbins (curiously absent from the Chenin lunch) form the backbone (or should that read trunk) of the Mother City Meat-Free Wine Writing Sisterhood. Although its numbers have recently been strengthened by Platter sighted guide associate editor Tim James, who must really have been serious to stick to the crayfish and foreswear the excellent jambon from Oak Valley at a Paul Cluver lunch of Friday.
Paul Cluver, a ham and Tim James
“Why doesn’t Johannesburg get Chenin?” wondered Cheniniste Jasper Raats “all they want to drink up north is Sauvignon Blanc.” “Perhaps because the Sauvignistas have gimmicky brands like Splattered Toad” I ventured “with a squashed green amphibian on the label.” The dude responded with a quote from the Coen brother’s cult 1998 bowling movie: “times like these call for a Big Lebowski.” A Big Lebowski Chenin Blanc. But then the dude hadn’t entered his Rudera wines into the competition, arguing rather for an industry-wide tourney along the lines of the Pinotage Association’s ABSA Top Ten Competition. “I hate beauty pageants” muttered the dude.
Jasper Raats
Reading the first 2010 blog posting from Angela Lloyd, most senior taster on the Platter sighted wine guide, I was depressed by her opening comment “there are few things about South African wine more frustrating than to see the annual multitude of new producers deliver nothing more than mediocrity.”
After singling out a couple of newbies destined to trip the light fantastic, she continues “but when one considers that these handfuls account for no more than one eighth (at best) of the newcomers, who usual total between 40 and 50, that leaves a lot of mediocrity. I’m not implying the wines are poor (though some are), but there is little or nothing to set them apart from the mass of South Africa’s six thousand odd wines, nor from many others in the wine world.”
Angela and Cape Wine Master Allan Mullins
Move over Duimpie Bayly and take your Demarcation Committee with you! It looks like the Advertising Standards Authority is to decide on that vexatious pocket (pace Elmari Swart and Izak Smit) full of frogs aka SA terroir. Reacting to a complaint by Cape Point Vineyards, “the only grower and producer of wines in the Cape Point district”, the ASA ruled that Distell’s Two Oceans brand “must withdraw some of its ‘misleading’ television and internet advertising, and must change its packaging.”
The irony of Cape Point owner Sybrand van der Spuy wrapping himself in terroir will not be lost on those hairy sandals long protesting his kaolin mining operations on Chapman’s Peak. Nor will his trucking-in of grapes from the Paardeberg for (presumably) other brands in his portfolio be overlooked by true terroiristes. But when one of the canniest investors in SA wine starts moving to protect his terroir, perhaps marketing of SA wine is moving to another level.
Cape Point winemaker Duncan Savage and Sybrand van der Spuy
After being blamed for the bad weather at last week’s launch of the Platter sighted wine guide that had anoraks huddled in Black Hole of Calcutta Conditions to pay homage to oxidative Shiraz, I made sure the weather at the Splash Café at the Vineyard Hotel was tip-top this afternoon for the launch of The People’s Guide. As Bob Dylan sang it “you don’t need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows” (especially in Cape Town) but an honest blind assessment for under R100 of some of the most widely available SA cuvees might come in useful to consumers, a market TPG is unashamedly aimed at. It seems that consumers agree as WINE magazine has come back to us twice to ask for more copies of TPG for the subscription special they are running (subscribe to WINE and receive a free copy of TPG).
The People's Guide was launched this afternoon
Linley Schulz, chief winemaker at Distell, is leaving SA’s largest corporate wine producer at the end of the month to start his own consultancy business. In a vote of confidence for SA wine, Australian born and educated Linley is staying in SA, planning “to start something of my own. I’m 46 years old and have been working for Distell for eight years now. My dad worked for the Australian equivalent of Telkom – there was no family farm. I have three kids aged three, five and seven who I don’t get to see very much when I’m working 14 hour days. I’ve achieved pretty much all I wanted to achieve at Distell and the time is now right to pursue other business opportunities.”
Linley Schulz
It’s a sign of hard pressed times when the Financial Mail asks for your summer shopping list, and you’re encouraged to focus on value for money. Not a hard thing to do with 2009 a comet vintage for Sauvignon Blanc and the year SA Pinot Noir came of age. Herewith my options for the hedonist and hoarder from this week’s FM:
Sauvignon Blanc is top of the terroir pops, reflecting special sites like a dentist’s mirror. 2009 is a comet vintage so good, it would have taken a flying saucer landing in the vineyard to stuff things up. While Henry Ford made Model T’s in any colour so long as they were black, SA Sauvignon comes in four styles: grassy, dusty, flinty and tropical – a NWSE compass of flavour identifiable on a map by taste.
Kiwi green stylistics with lashings of grass and gooseberry hails from the northwest coast where viticulture is rapidly replacing diamond mining. The vines of producers like Fryer’s Cove at Bamboesbaai are so close to the surf they have to spray water on the plants to take off the salt. While no prices are available as the secretary is getting married in Windhoek and the office has taken a week off, if it’s under R100, it’s a gimme.
The berries for Wendy Appelbaum’s DMZ come from Lambert’s Bay and although she hates Sauvignon, she’ll make an exception for this classy fin de siècle duif eie blue (duck egg blue) bottle which she insists is Tiffany blue. At R55 a bottle, Charles Lewis Tiffany is reportedly rotating in his grave.
Wendy Appelbaum & DMZ Winemaker Stefan Gerber
