If meeting wines on Tinder seems dodgy, try a better way
Afew weeks ago I received a press release hyping the results of a tasting hosted by a local wine distributor and retailer. The “judges” were the company’s well-heeled clientele and the line-up had been selected from local wines selling for R1,000-R2,000 a bottle.
This must seem like a marriage made by Tinder, a perfect match of luxury-looking wines paired with a roomful of wealthy bidders — useful perhaps as dipstick research but valueless noise in the world of wine communication.
If you wanted to determine the attributes men seek in women and chose to conduct a survey at Hooters on a Friday night, you shouldn’t be surprised to find “large chest measurements” finishing high up on the list. You wouldn’t use this information in a marriage guidance practice.
Then there’s the question of the only entry criterion for the wines: all the submissions had to be on the market for at least R1,000 per bottle (and not more than R2,000 — “in order to keep the wines affordable”).
If bust size is used to determine employment prospects at Hooters, you don’t ask the candidate to submit dimensions using arbitrary and uncalibrated units of measure. Retail wine pricing is significantly more subjective than that.
Spending R1,000 for a bottle without an established trading history is likely to get you an overpriced wine whose primary appeal is the status it confers on whoever has the disposable income (and fragile ego) to buy and serve it.
There are other ways of attempting to determine wine quality and the recent release by the Cape Vintners Classification of its first set of results deserves thoughtful scrutiny. Producers entering wines for this benchmarking event were required to submit five vintages to a blind-tasting panel whose job was to confirm the consistency of quality across the spread of vintages.
There were other criteria. The five vintages had to be produced from the same designated sites — they had to reflect the potential of the terroir and the competence of the wine making. The wine had to be produced on a site where farming practices comply with the requirements of the Integrated Production of Wine legislation. The producer’s labour practices also had to be audited by an independent body and meet the specifications of the Ethical Trading Initiative. The cellar-door environment furthermore had to be consumer friendly.
The first public showing of the Cape Vintners Classification-certified producers contains a largely unsurprising list of players (22 at this stage, with eight more pending). Neil Ellis (pretty much the founder of the single-site concept in SA), Kanonkop, Simonsig, Tokara, Morgenster, Rust en Vrede, Vergelegen, Dewetshof, Waterford, Anthonij Rupert and Groot Constantia are all in the starting line-up.
I am, however, a little curious about some names I expected to see there but were absent. Didn’t they enter, or did their wines fail to make the cut? I had been a panellist in August 2017 at a blind tasting aimed at assessing the quality and aesthetic unity of the submissions, so I was curious to see what had emerged from the process.
At the launch event I tasted most of the wines. They confirm what we already know about the strengths of the established cellars (Dewetshof and chardonnay, Kanonkop and pinotage) as well as the fit between region and variety.
It wasn’t difficult to conclude that the Cape Vintners Classification methodology beats the wine industry equivalent of seeking a coherent judgment from a bunch of testosterone-charged teenagers, whose idea of a good time is happy hour at Hooters.
In a world where wine shop shelves are crammed with an endless display of wines, all bearing a confusing array of stickers purporting to offer a quality stamp of approval, the Cape Vintners Classification bottle seal delivers an assurance of some value.
Visit https://winewizard.co.za/article/504 for the full list of CVC-rated wines.