We Want Real Wine
Friday, 18 August, 2006
Neil Pendock
It was Karl Marx who said 'all progress in capitalist agriculture is progress in the art, not only of robbing the workers, but of robbing the soil.' His comments sprang to mind recently over a glass of freshly squeezed carrot juice in Rosebank.
If it wasn’t for the lurid orange colour (shades of an SA Airways Boeing tail circa 1966), I’d have battled to tell I was drinking liquidized carrot, the taste was so non-descript and bland. In fact, if it wasn’t for the added ginger root, the beverage would have had no taste at all.
In his polemic We Want Real Food (Constable & Robinson, 2006) agricultural reporter Graham Harvey notes that in the UK in the half century between 1940 and 1991, vegetables have lost one quarter of their magnesium and iron, half their calcium and three quarters of their copper. There are two main reasons for this: the widespread use of pesticides has produced sterile soils. A teaspoonful of healthy soil contains a whopping 5 billion living organisms – almost the entire human population of the planet – from over 10 000 different species. In addition to mega fauna like dung beetles and earthworms that aerate and fertilize the soil, there are myriad species invisible to the naked eye.
This microscopic ecosystem is vital to the uptake of minerals and trace elements by plants. Widespread use of pesticides results in sterile soils and is a root cause of the widespread 'hidden famine' caused by vitamin and mineral deficiencies, which undermines physical and mental health.
The second reason for this mineral famine is the widespread use of nitrogen fertilizers that stimulate excess growth of sappy tissue and thin cell walls at the expense of nutrient density. The upshot is large and beautiful looking fruit and vegetables without any taste and reduced mineral content. Often harvested unripe, for shipping with minimal spoilage to supermarkets, and ripened in controlled environments in warehouses, industrial food may be convenient, but it comes with a terrible price in terms of flavour and nutrition.
With pesticides and fertilizers widely used in SA vineyards, growing grapes is all too often an exercise in commercial agriculture with organic vineyards extremely rare in the Winelands.
SA wine has a patchy record on the subject of additives, with the most bizarre case Tim James offering Noseweek readers a glass of three penis wine in July (the penis in question once belonging to a dog, deer and seal). From a flavour and nutrition perspective, he’d have been better off recommending shit wine – literally.
Victorians were avid gardeners and the secret of their success was the widespread used of nightsoil. In fact it was so popular in London, parliament debated relocating itself after the Great Stink of 1858. Alas, from the point of view of soil health, the lawmakers decided to commission Joseph Bazalgette to develop an ingenious system of sewers instead, which started the inexorable decline of the fertility of London soil.
Manure of human, animal or fish origin is an excellent way of replenishing the mineral content of soil. Pliny the Elder, who died from inhaling poison gas during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius which did for Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79 AD, reported on a vineyard owner who made a fortune by thoroughly dunging his vines over an eight year period.
With the Cape not short of manure, how long before some smart wine farmer follows this ancient and eminently sensible example.