Wine industry has aged well to please middle-class palate
Wine has only recently become the beverage of choice for SA’s middle class. What was long considered a drink for the elite is now the first choice for 51% of females and 38% of males, irrespective of race or age. Nowhere is this shift more obvious than at events such as RMB WineX.
When the show launched 20 years ago, attendance was predominantly male, almost exclusively white, and with an average age of about 50. Nowadays its composition reflects the reality of middleclass Gauteng, with an audience age of 35-40.
Most SA wine drinkers are only familiar with modern Cape wines. The end of political isolation in the 1990s brought the premodern era to a close. The return to international markets disrupted the cosy and anachronistic wine scene. It is impossible for wine enthusiasts nowadays even to imagine how things were in that longforgotten time: what the wines of the 1980s and early 1990s tasted like, how they were marketed, the limited choice of varieties and styles.
When Platter’s Guide was first published 40 years ago, it was a very slight volume — at least compared with the 700page “brick” wine buyers get nowadays. It was the first attempt to describe and rate the wines commercially available from the country’s 200 producers. At the time, half of all the cellars were co-operatives and they crushed about 90% of the crop. There were fewer estates and private (non-estate) cellars in the whole country than there are just in Stellenbosch now.
In 1980, the world of Cape wine comprised the 1,250 examples reviewed by John Platter. Compare this with the current edition, which lists 6,700 wines — out of a total universe of 8,000 — from 900 producers. When Platter was writing this first guide, Hamilton Russell had just built the first winery in the Hemel-en-Aarde Valley. There was only one cellar in Constantia, none in Elgin, nothing south or east of Hermanus, and no wineries between Malmesbury and Namaqualand.
Then the choice of varieties was strictly limited. Sauvignon blanc, chardonnay, riesling (true riesling, not crouchen blanc), merlot, cabernet franc and pinot noir were trickling into the market for the first time. Choice of clones was largely nonexistent. In 1979, Welgemeend made the country’s first Bordeaux blend, a year before Meerlust’s Rubicon.
The first commercial chardonnays appeared in about 1980, produced from the only legally available clone, which was infected with leaf-roll virus. Frustrated by the quality of the planting material, many of the industry’s key players took to smuggling vines into the country. The first pinots were all made from the Swiss BK5 clone, suitable for Cap Classique production but without the weight, colour or detail to yield a decent red.
Peter Finlayson’s Hamilton Russell pinots, dating from the early 1980s, were something of a triumph, given this limitation.
Most red wines were fermented in cement tanks. Thereafter, they went into large old wooden foudre or into stainless-steel tanks for brief maturation before bottling. Barrel ageing was virtually unknown. Oak casks — which are today delivered by the container-load to our wineries — were something of a rarity.
Good wine was much cheaper then than it is today, even adjusting for inflation — though no-one dreamed of closing fine wine with a screwcap, despite a cork taint rate of about 15%. Nothing cost more than R10 a bottle.
The wines produced nowadays are better than those made in the 1980s from young vines and by winemakers unfamiliar with the use of oak. These first modern-era wines haven’t aged as well as those made in the 1960s.
But not many wines produced nowadays are likely to be available to be put to the test in 2060.