Dalí-dynamism and Jolyspeak
Thursday, 15 December, 2005
Neil Pendock
Neil Pendock reflects on vintage 2005 and identifies the opening of the annual Nederburg Auction as his highlight.
That Buddha of biodynamism, Nicolas Joly, was the most controversial personality to open the Nederburg Auction since the Minister of Police and Prisons, Jimmy Kruger, did the honours back in 1979. The penny dropped for me during Joly’s workshop on the eve of the auction, when he related how his friend, an Austrian vet, cured a cow by forcing it to eat a live trout. In the biodynamic world, a cow is an inward process and hence linked to water and we all know what fish do in water. It was pure Salvador Dalí with Joly brandishing an electric field detector in theatrical fashion (it looked like a transistor radio with a shiny aerial) whereas Dalí relied on his waxed moustache tips to pick up electrical emanations from the higher spheres.
To criticize Joly for the arcanae of his craft – burying cow horns filled with manure and hanging a stag’s bladder stuffed with yarrow in a tree – besides being boring, is to miss the point when his aim is to highlight the contradictions in our thoroughly modern world of technologically driven wine. In the same week that Thomas Do Chi Nam, technical director of Château Pichon Lalande and Tony Moinnereau, an ‘award-winning French sommelier’ (amongst others) chose ‘SA’s champion Bordeaux Blend’ in a competition sponsored by a French bank and a French airline, Joly was in full-on Emperor’s New Clothes mode when he noted ‘I’m interested in trying to find a wine that tastes of SA. If it tastes like a French wine, what’s the point?’
Doubly so if it’s more expensive than a decent claret like Do Chi Nam’s own Château Bernadotte 2001 (available from Reciprocal Wine Trading for R139.50 a bottle) as some of the entries were. Which was another contradiction aired by Joly (admittedly from inside a glass house as his Coulée de Serrant is no price mismark): how come wine is so expensive when it’s ultimately a gift of nature or in Jolyspeak ‘a salad will not bring you an invoice.’ And a contradiction which will blow up in the faces of top end producers worse than a well matured stag’s bladder when an icon wine such as Domaine du Vieux Télégraph retails for R260 a bottle from Wayne Visser’s Great Domaines company.
In a curious case of gratuitous product placement, MasterCard conferred local icon status on VT in their TV ad for the best things in life which can be paid for with plastic when they featured the wine being served at a romantic tête-à-tête – an unbeatable marketing opportunity Vergelegen V’s advertising agency should have killed to star in. And an answer to that hoary old question as to where SA’s first icon wine will come from – France.
Until SA wine stops seeking to impress by imitating French style, local Bordeaux blends will keep banging their heads on a R139.50 price ceiling while the flood of fashionable Rhône blends are not much better off at a R260 maximum RRP. Local MCC producers chasing the champagne chimera are in the same boat when a Grand Cru bubbly like Marguet Bonnerave, recently raved about by Jancis Robinson in the weekend FT that is widely circulated in SA, is available for R185 and Corné Delicatessen has a handful of famous marques like Heidsieck Monopole, Pommery, Vranken and Jacquart at well under R200/bottle.
The twin pillars of local high prices: consumer ignorance and limited importation are fast crumbling as Samsons like David Brice (Wine Cellar), Sam Hackney (Boutique Wines) and Wayne Visser expand their activities and market their imports to local wine lovers through a series of restaurant ‘wine dinners’ that provide unbeatable forums for showcasing wine with R150 000 worth of orders placed, not uncommon.
M. Joly and his campaign for honest wines that taste of the places the grapes were grown is an attractive way out of the current dead end – even if he knows a man who duplicated Chartres cathedral inside a small box (by replicating frequencies).