Pendock Unfiltered - Cuvée Harry Potter

Friday, 4 February, 2005
Neil Pendock
Neil ponders the relationship between the art of wine and philosophy and expresses hope that the increasing intellectual and scholarly attention bestowed on the product will set it free from the 'pseudo-scientific tyranny of wine ratings' as practiced by Parker & Co.
Great ideas come to people in the most unlikely places, with the bath popping up quite frequently. It was the venue for Nicky Oppenheimer’s idea of delisting De Beers and taking it private and, famously, where Archimedes came up with his neat trick for measuring volumes. Quite where Johnny Nel came up with the name Philosopher’s Stone for his crackerjack blend of Shiraz and Merlot from the 2003 vintage is not clear. Since it's in the current edition of Platter (rated 4.5 stars by Christine Rudman with a retail price around the R50 mark, making it one of the best value-for-money Shiraz blends available), it must have been before the KWV flavourant scandal. The philosopher’s stone was a mythical substance which could be used to transform base metals into gold, with green peppers the Paarl interpretation. Alchemists get a bad press today, as the two KWV winemakers dismissed last year for attempting to transform insipid Sauvignon Blanc into show medal gold using a philosopher’s stone fashioned from green peppers, will confirm. But it wasn’t always so. Sir Isaac Newton spent far longer looking for the philosopher’s stone than he did unraveling the laws of physics. In fact all that fiddling around with mercury is suspected of damaging his sight to such an extent that he missed discovering the wave nature of light, plumping rather for the 'fiery particle' theory. Perhaps Johnny’s inspiration came from reading Harry Potter, in which case author JK Rowling won’t be pleased as the target audience for the Potter series should still be teetotal. Or perhaps he is a fan of Van Morrison with a song of the same name on the album Back On Top. Or perhaps he had seen an announcement for a conference entitled Philosophy and Wine: from Science to Subjectivity, which was held at the University of London in December. If you think about it, wine is a most appropriate field for philosophers, with organs like Decanter and Wine International full of earnest dissertations and bitchiness worthy of academia. The intellectual successors to Archimedes and Aristotle gathered in London to hear Kent Bach from San Francisco State University address the issue 'What Good is Knowledge (in enjoying wine)?' followed by Paul Draper from Santa Cruz who discussed 'The Art of Wine Growing vs. The Craft of Winemaking.' Draper is no stranger to South African oenophiles, having been invited to choose wine for South African Airways in the past. Briton’s own philosopher of plonk, Roger Scruton, who moonlights as wine correspondent for the New Statesman magazine, ventilated on 'Philosophy and the Intoxicating Properties of Wine' directly after coffee and registration, while Barry C Smith discussed 'Questions of Taste' before tea at 4.15 in the Common Room. With such heavyweights weighing in against pseudo-scientific wine appreciation, with its dissertations and exams, faux-academic 'qualifications' and non-reproducible wine ratings out of 100, perhaps sanity will return to the art of wine appreciation hijacked by Robert Parker, Wine Spectator and a band of sensory accountants determined to condense a glass of wine into a score accurate to the third decimal point. The only problem with this campaign against the tyranny of wine ratings is that philosophers are a dying breed, with 2004 an especially bad year for them. In October Jackie Derrida, the founder of deconstructionism, died, or as AOL put it in baby talk: 'cancer claims snowy-haired philosopher.' The big C also did for Susan Sontag, the brain of Manhattan, in December. But with wine on the curriculum in the Philosophy Department, student numbers should be up strongly this year, with the Philosopher’s Stone from Camberley Wines prescribed drinking for the course.