Wine guides favour safe bets rather than examples of perfection
Most SA wine competitions release their results around the third quarter of the year. This appears to make sense, given that yearend festive season sales account for about 40% of liquor turnover. However, when it comes to fine wine, trade is less seasonal: the rarest wines tend to sell out as soon as they come to market.
Show organisers say that timing is driven by factors that have little to do with the selling season (assuming one even exists). The grape harvest takes place in the first quarter of the year. The Young (bulk) Wine Show is judged in August because the wholesalers who buy by the tank can make their decisions as soon as the wines are in a commercially viable condition. The bottled wine equivalent (the Veritas competition) is judged a little later, with the fresher whites already in bottle, and the reds from the previous year already offering a little evolution.
The Platter Guide’s ratings appear in mid-November — ahead of the publication of the latest edition, which is timed to arrive in the bookshops as a festive season stocking-filler. The guide’s primary tasters begin their (sighted) labours in the middle of the year and complete their deliberations in August/September to produce the shortlist for the five star blind-tasting. Wrapping up the editorial work and getting the manuscript to the printer creeps ever later each year. If Xmas book sales were not the metaphorical line in the sand, it’s anyone’s guess when this huge exercise would be completed.
The Guide’s list of five star awards and the “highly recommended” selection (which finished just below the 95-point five star threshold) wraps up the competition season. Its most highly rated wines — 213 five star laureates and a further 424 that finished on 94 points — represents almost 8% of all the wines rated by the guide.
It includes many of the usual suspects. There’s just about every high-end name in the industry, as well as hundreds you’ve never heard of before.
This is not completely surprising: this year 31 producers appear in the guide for the first time. So while it’s hardly news to discover that the 2024 Winery of the Year award goes to Sadie Family Wines — for the fourth time — the Editor’s Award, which gives Philip van Zyl the flexibility to make a broader statement, deserves our attention.
His choice turned out to be Bosman Family Vineyards, “for their achievements in winecrafting as well as outstanding contributions in the spheres of social empowerment, environmental care and development of the wine industry more broadly”. No-one could dispute that call.
My abiding concern with the Platter ratings is that the bar has not been raised significantly over the years, whereas winemaking competence — and therefore average wine quality
— has improved dramatically. When about 10% of the more than 8,000 products reviewed score 93 or more out of 100, the standard appears about as meaningless as a matric pass.
THE PLATTER GUIDE PROVIDES A ONCE-A-YEAR OVERVIEW OF THE WHOLE INDUSTRY
On the surface the Veritas statistics mirror those of Platter: 260 golds and double golds, 263 Silver Outstanding (a double silver, I assume) and 426 Silvers out of 1,200 wines judged. There is a difference, however: the Platter guide reviews vastly more wines than Veritas, including many that the winemakers would know better than to submit to a competition. Its purpose is to be comprehensive: except for a few sulky producers who refuse to submit their wines, the Platter guide provides a once-ayear overview of the whole industry. Veritas (like all competitions) judges only paidfor entries — which would be the wines deemed by the cellarmaster to be in with a chance for a gong.
So what to make of these two guides to the form? Most obviously, they are too broad to provide a guaranteed “hot tip”. But they are, for exactly that reason, utterly and completely uncontroversial. Gold and above at Veritas is a safe buy; 94 and higher in Platter is decent juice. Least pain at a sensible price may be a better call than the quest for perfection.