With the ending of apartheid, the world’s doors were suddenly flung open and passports were stamped, as young South Africans travelled to the great wine regions of the world. New techniques, tastes and ideas flooded back into the country and previously well-known winemakers at big co-operatives like KWV and SFW made way for guys like Marc Kent, Eben Sadie, Tom Lubbe and Gotfried Mocke - each with their own unique approach to wine, but all with equal energy and commitment to quality. Winemakers were able to express themselves in more ways than they ever thought possible and individual styles were born out of wider access to foreign wines and travel. South Africa was suddenly thrust into the modern wine world.
Twenty years later and South Africa has gone from strength to strength. The number of wineries has more than tripled since its re-entry into the world wine market in ‘94 and it is difficult to keep up with the amount of young winemakers and their ideas and ambitions. Some South African winemakers are now realising that less wood, lower alcohol and better farming practices can lead to more ‘enlightened’ bottles of wine. Exports from South Africa are at an all-time high and perceptions are beginning to change.
However, despite the number of doors that have been opened, there are more that need to be unlocked. I firmly believe that unleashing what lies behind the door marked CREATIVITY represents South Africa’s biggest and most important challenge yet. I’m not talking about forced creativity, as a reaction to modern day trends, but creativity in its purest form. Real creativity makes people around you smile; it forces people to change their own understanding of what they hold as true. I believe creativity is one of the closest things we as humans have to understanding another man’s soul. It is what separates us from other animals (that, and beer).
The very first wine I ever made for myself was a 6-week skin macerated white wine (today we’d call it an orange wine), from a 46-year-old Chenin Blanc vineyard on Lammershoek in the Swartland. It was beautiful. I loved it in all ways possible. It had soft tannins, a nose like nothing I had ever smelt before and it looked like liquid gold. I was in love, like any parent would be with their first born. I managed to scrape enough money together to pay for corks and recycled bottles and, with the help of a few family members, I bottled my first wine. I shared a bottle with one of my major mentors, Tom Lubbe, and his first comment upon smelling it was, “Fucking hell Craig, you have a long road ahead of you”. He was, in his direct way, referring to how I would struggle to certification system, although I didn’t fully comprehend what he meant at the time (he had his fair share of run-ins with the wine authorities when he was working in South Africa and this played a major role in him relocating to France - South Africa lost a true game changer). Not being psychic, I struggled to see the future, but I could see the past and learnt that it takes a lot to change minds in a system where no one can point you to the one person in charge.
On my numerous visits to the Wine and Spirit Board’s (WSB) Pugh Committee meetings to try and ‘justify’ my wines for export approval (or any approval for that matter), there has been many a joke shared and I have realised that it is not the people but the systems which are flawed. These systems were good for a time and a place, but now South Africa needs to change and embrace new wine styles at a quicker rate. You cannot have a set of rules that is intended to control commodities such as plastic bottles or Coca Cola, that also provides the red or green light for wines made in a creative way. We cannot wait two years for a new category to be put in place, just so forward thinking winemakers can finally get their wines certified.
Once a wine is bottled it has to be certified analytically (for levels of volatile acidity, chemical compounds etc) and sensorially (for typicity) before you can export it. It is not like many other countries where if it doesn’t get the official certification, then it can still be sold internationally as ‘uncertified’ (i.e. without appellation, vintage etc on the label), although it can still be sold locally as uncertified. Machines do the analytical part and humans the sensorial part, or is it the other way round? Either way, there is a three-strike system before you go to what I like to call ‘the place with the big wooden table’, where you have to explain your wine and why it should be exported, to the Pugh Committee chieftains.
The humans must do a good job of analysing my wines as they are always within the legal limits analytically, but the machines seem to be faulty, as sensorially there is always a problem. I used to take it quite personally. Then it became quite entertaining. Now it really is a hindrance to our business. We export 80% of our production from a market that doesn’t understand our wine, to markets that do understand but can’t access it, as the guys that don’t understand it don’t want to tarnish the ‘image’ of South African wine.
We’ve had our rosé rejected for having “insufficient colour”. Now tell me, isn’t that precisely what makes a rosé a rosé? The fact that it is a red wine with insufficient colour?! It’s ironic how a country that once had its issues with somebody not being light enough, now has issues with something not being dark enough. I even had a wine fail that had never seen any wood (it was aged in a concrete tank) and the reason given was that it had too much woody, vanilla character! I wonder what they would say if I sent a bottle of Bordeaux in? Other favourites are “not cultivar typical”, “turbidity” and “foreign wine character”.
It would be funny for us too if money was just, as Jordan Belford described it, ‘fun coupons’. But there is also a great deal of time involved - each round of tasting incurs a fee and three bottlesof wine. There are three rounds (three weeks) before you can justify yourself at the Pugh Committee and, only once certified, are you allowed to export. We currently have four orders that have been waiting to be shipped for the past month, but the wines keep failing. Cash flow hell.
So who are these guys that are supposedly qualified to make these judgements on other people’s wine?
Click HERE to read the full aarticle - PDF format.