The five most expensive wines in South Africa (Vergelegen V, Ernie Els, Saxenburg Shiraz, Waterford Gem and Eben Sadie's Columella) have something in common: they all rate 4½ stars in the 2008 edition of Platter's Wine Guide. A cynical interpretation would be they were all proposed for five stars by one of the fifteen Platter pundits but failed to get the nod at the blind tasting.
But this being South Africa where nothing should be attributed to design which can be explained by incompetence, the truth gives even less comfort to wannabe first growth producers. The last two wines failed to make the five star tasting, despite Columella being the first South African wine to garner a classic (i.e. 95/100) rating from Wine Spectator.
Leaving out the Gem and Columella was a classic stuff up that even a Platter's associate editor felt moved to point it out. While such tribulations are a source of great mirth and hilarity to the industry and great copy for commentators and the competition in Pinelands, they are ultimately damaging to South African wine writing and writers who come across as a bunch of "parochial, barely qualified fans with typewriters" as UK guru Tim Atkin pointed out last year.
The problem with sighted tastings for the guide are two-fold: the fifteen Platter pundits are partial. One is the chairman of a major producer, others are professional winemakers, others are retailers while yet others earn money from producers in various capacities (the most controversial being offering tasting assessments for a hefty fee) and all benefit from cordial relations with producers to support their habit of free samples and invitations to functions.
It's not enough to make sure obvious conflicts of interest are avoided. In some sense every wine tasted sighted is either a friend or an enemy and this is reflected in the partial nature of the ratings accorded. Examples of "the same wine" with wildly different ratings are legion but perhaps even more worrying are mediocre wines receiving unexpectedly high ratings - the most recent is Platter's 4½ star Racetrack 2006 Chenin crashing in a Winelands blind tasting last month – while the reverse is common like the widely tipped Lismore Chardonnay 2006 that languishes at 2½ stars.
Both wines were rated sighted by the same high-profile taster so the utility of the guide is easily confirmed by performing a calibration exercise on these two wines for yourself and seeing which you prefer.
The other problem is that some producers have such towering reputations, it takes a masochist to publicly downgrade them as the taster's identity is revealed to the broader public and to the producer in particular. Would you really tell big Schalk Burger that his barrel fermented Welbedacht Chenin is kak? Well I wouldn't because it isn't – on the contrary, it's brilliant.
Which highlights another problem. I was involved in a minor altercation earlier this year with a producer concerning additives and was told "no, you've got it wrong, it was only the show tank that was affected". How many Platter tanks and barrels are being made, that secure a score which is then applied to the rest of the production?
The solution to this Wither Hills phenomenon is simple: buy your own wine from a retailer. At R140 a copy and a circulation north of 60,000 copies plus all the paid for punts for places to stay and eat in the Winelands, surely the machine is making enough money to pay for tasting stock? Heck, even the notoriously mercenary food magazines pay the bills for the meals in the restaurants they review! As one disgruntled producer told me "we paid to advertise our guesthouse in Platter's in the hope of getting a better rating for our wines - but then the reverse happened".
While my criticisms of Platter's is becoming a tad monotonous (not least for me), I've no desire to play Samson and bring down the temple of Bacchus around my ears - my ponytail is still in place. Platter's the guide (John P sold it ten years ago, has nothing to do with it and is reportedly mortified at all the bad press that reflects on his patronymic) is a great institution and a valuable asset for South African wine. It's just that with one simple change – blind assessment – it can become an order of magnitude better and truly the best wine guide in the world.
After all, blind vision is the right thing to do. As James Laube wrote in December "Wine Spectator has always believed in blind tastings, in which the identity of a wine is not known. In practice, that means that tasters review wines in coherent flights in order to provide a context. They know the region, the vintage and the grape variety, if relevant, of the wines in a flight. But they do not know the producer or the price, two factors that hold the biggest sway in people's perceptions of quality."
"This is the fairest, most objective method of evaluating wines. It allows each wine to stand on its own merits, in context with its peers. And it eliminates any bias that might result from knowing the producer or price. Some people say they aren't influenced by this information, but many studies have shown that this kind of bias is almost impossible to eliminate."
Of course in the South African context, knowing the region upfront may be problematic as there are definitely fashionable appellations (Stellenbosch and its various bergs: Helder, Simons etc.) and unfashionable ones, so this piece of information is perhaps best left undisclosed to tasters.