And yet, by his own admission, Clarkson is no wine expert. He once noted in a review:
‘When you’re out for dinner, why does the waiter invite you to taste the wine? Why doesn’t he do it himself? He’s the expert and as a general rule most customers would struggle to tell the difference between a 1945 Château Petrus and a glass of Ribena. I certainly fall into this category. I know nothing about viniculture and, having smoked half a million Marlboros, have no taste buds either. You could pee in a glass and if it were chilled enough I’d be happy.’
Which, nonetheless, didn’t stop him trashing Lanzerac and, by extension, South African wine. His smoking habit rings true. He was expelled from his English public school, Repton (founded in 1557), ‘for drinking and smoking’, before going on to sell Paddington Bear toys for his parents and, from there, to journalism.
Not that he’s by any stretch a gastronomic ignoramus, having claimed to have eaten seal flipper, which tasted ‘exactly like licking a hot Turkish urinal’. He’s also tried whale, which ‘tastes like steak, but with an iron tang’.
‘The waiter asked if I wanted some grated puffin on my whale and how do you say no to something like that?’ Which all sounds a bit like a Monty Python sketch.
However, Clarkson draws the line at turtle: ‘I’ve eaten snakes, dogs, small, whole birds in France and crocodiles, but Tommy Turtle is my line in the sand. I don’t care if turtles turn out to be the antidote for cancer, I’m not eating even a small part of one and that’s that.’
When it comes to buying wine, Jezzer offers a few tips: ‘For home consumption I have two very simple rules designed to make sure my guests don’t spend the night driving the porcelain bus. I never spend less than £10 on a bottle, and I only buy stuff that’s French.’ Which rules out South African on both counts, with most Cape cuvées languishing at the £3.99 level in the UK.
South Africa, though, is not the only wine producer to get the Clarkson treatment:
‘I’m told the Bulgarians make a decent drop these days, but I imagine that they also make a lot of rubbish. And how are you supposed to know which is which? Which will take you out with the immediacy of a poisoned umbrella and which will be like angels copulating on your tongue? Maybe wine should come with press cuttings on the label, such as you find outside a West-End theatre: “An absolute corker” (Oz Clarke). “I’d rather lick a monkey’s nostril” (Jilly Goolden).’
That said, pundits are not the complete solution, since they:
‘ … talk in a language that nobody understands. You think torque and scuttle-shake are a dark art? I once heard Goolden say that one wine tasted like “hot handbags in a Bovril factory”. Is that a good thing? Anyway, because of this wine minefield, I always breeze past the offerings from Uruguay and Tibet and buy only French. In the same way that people who know nothing about cars only buy BMWs. There’s a sense you can’t go too far wrong.’
Recent developments, however, might spoil his love affair with le vin français:
‘Now, though, it seems like my simple and rather brilliant plan is to be wrecked, because Australia recently overtook France as the biggest wine supplier to Britain and the French have decided to fight back by making Aussie-style, easy-on-the-palate, industrialised global plonk.’
An observation confirmed by the news that French authorities are to permit the use of oak chips as a wine-flavouring additive and sanction the use of the Australian spinning cone to reduce alcohol levels. In addition, the names of grape cultivars are to be permitted on the labels of wines classified as vin de pays and above.
Clarkson, who is something of an old fogey at heart, is not well pleased:
‘This move has traditionalists in France in a state of high dudgeon, and I’m not surprised. For them it’s the thin end of the wedge, an Anglo-Saxon free-market hammer blow to their subsidised villagey way of life. For these people, with their berets and their pre-war tractors, wine should speak of its origins and taste of the soil in which it was grown. And who cares if no one actually buys it. I have no idea what they’re talking about, of course. If I tried a wine that tasted of soil I’d send it back straight away. But I know what they mean and they’re right.’
British Sunday newspapers have a habit of sending inappropriate celebrities to South Africa to report on wine. The Sunday Telegraph did it a couple of years ago when they packed former England cricket captain David Gower off on a wine tour with their wine pundit, Robert Joseph. Tasting at Meerlust, Gower opined: ‘If anyone catches me trying to buy this wine, will they please shoot me?’ of his host’s Chardonnay 1999, a wine rated four stars (out of five) in Platter’s, with John Platter himself on hand as part of the Gower tasting.
John Platter is a victim of collateral damage in the many and messy fights involving the eponymous wine guide, which he sold a decade ago. Which is perhaps to be expected as Platter is an old and venerable brand. Historian Peter Ackroyd reports in London (Chatto & Windus, 2001) that in the early 17th century, Thomas Platter described ‘endless inns … beer and wine shops for every imaginable growth, alicant, canary, muscatels, clarets, Spanish, Renish’. One wonders whether the ‘endless inns’ paid to be included in that ancient Platter guide, as is the case with the contemporary one.
Editors love it when inappropriate connoisseurs like Clarkson and Gower pronounce on wine. But the big difference between Clarkson on cars and Platter on wine is that British motoring journalism is consumer-driven, with Clarkson credited with single-handedly destroying both the Vectra and the Vauxhall reputation, for example. Indeed, Clarkson’s annual Sunday Times ‘Car of the Year’ feature highlights the worst as well as the best. By way of contrast, a cynical summary of South African wine commentary as increasing degrees of fabulousness would not be too far off the mark, paid for as it often is by the wine producers themselves.
While indisputably useful, a list of the worst wines available to consumers is unlikely, however, to gain much traction in the producer-driven world of South African winespeak. With Clarkson’s main aim to entertain, his comments on cars, wines and life in general are hugely entertaining and a breath of fresh air – the kind you get driving a Jaguar XK with the hood down at 130mph.
Sometimes, the fickle finger of fate conspires to thrust connoisseurship into your lap.
Accidental ones
Sommeliers, or rather the lack of them, are one of the main differences between a South African fine-dining experience and the equivalent in France or Germany.
The approach run to the hamlet of Hattenheim, coming down from Kloster Eberbach, the medieval monastery where Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose was filmed, was a bit of a challenge. An early March blizzard had dumped eight inches of snow onto the Rheingau. Here, in winter, if the snow tyres lose their grip on the cobbled street, either the suitably named ICE (Inter-City Express) or the medieval German masonry gets you. If you make the bend, you come to a half-timbered Weinhaus called Zum Krug. Most German restaurants seem to be called zum something or other and this one translates as ‘zum jug’. Or zum very expensive French champagne.
Battling the blizzard from Frankfurt, we had stopped only once for a tasting at Weingut Künstler at Hochheim am Main. Of all the Rheingau Rieslings, like Rüdesheim, Johannisberg and Hochheim, Queen Victoria preferred the last, hence the generic term Hoch for a fine Rhine wine. Or, as Basil Fawlty might have put it, Vic certainly knew her Bordeaux from her claret.
The wines of Hochheim, and those of Gunter Künstler in particular, were assured of renewed British interest, with the winery displaying the FIFA logo on its Riesling labels in the run-up to the World Cup that summer. As the man pouring the wine in the Weingut put it, the aim was to offer an alternative to beer-swilling soccer hooligans (Riesling rioters, perhaps?). Quite how English supporters pronounced names like Kirchenstück, Stielweg