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a Riesling Revival punted nearly as often as a Rosé Renaissance by wine magazines that can’t let an alliteration go unpublished.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