A perfect match

A perfect match

A recent trip to Portugal highlights the similarities between South Africa and the home of Port.

The news that Franschhoek is twinning itself with St Helena in the Napa Valley (rather than that volcanic rock in the middle of the Atlantic) raises a few eyebrows.

Is Franschhoek about to exchange black berets and 'Allo 'Allo! accents for high-alcohol, overwooded Chardonnays and California cool? Will 4 July replace 14 July? Does Franschhoek tourism realise that foie gras is banned in the Sunshine State while marijuana is legal only if you have a fashionable medical condition?

I'd have thought a French appellation would have been a more appropriate twin for a place bristling with more French names than Alsace. After all, Franschhoek wineries can already be classified as left or right bank, depending on which side of the road they are located.

Recently returned from a three-week tasting trip around eight of the nine Portuguese wine regions, it was a repeated comic turn to hear a nondescript village described as the St Émilion of Bairrada (Tejo, Dão... fill in your favourite appellation here). If I were in the Gemini-generating business, I'd twin the whole of SA with Portugal.

For starters, sizes match (700 million litres after brandy distillation) and both are struggling to establish export markets after economic isolation for most of the 20th century; in the case of Portugal, thanks to the Salazar dictatorship; in the case of SA, a legacy of apartheid.

Wine consumption is steadily declining in both countries (albeit from a much higher level in Portugal) and both are dominated by farmer co-operatives that are rapidly collapsing as grape growers, dissatisfied with prices received, establish their own boutique brands and bottle their own.

Both countries are associated with unfashionable cultivars that are mercilessly pilloried by the colonial winewriting elite: Pinotage in SA; Baga in Portugal. And both exhibit excellent valuefor- money character as the convincing selling point for their products.

Both are large Port producers from the same varietals, even if this is a style threatening to follow in the footsteps of Spanish Sherry and slip away into curiosities or cults. If global warming continues, perhaps Calitzdorp will have to build dams on the Nels River to control flooding, as was done in the Douro in the ‘70s.

Very few producers in either country are 100% confident in English, the lingua franca of the international wine trade, and so rely more than they probably should on their respective generic marketing bodies: WOSA, in the case of SA with a R30-million annual budget and ViniPortugal with five times this firepower.

Both bodies are hypnotised by English wine writers, with ViniPortugal recently hiring Charles Metcalfe to promote Portuguese wines in Brazil. Producers in both countries devote serious resources to supporting UK-based wine competitions like the Decanter World Wine Awards, the International Wine Challenge and the International Wine & Spirit Competition.

The winelands in both countries are tractable wine tourism destinations and are roughly the same size: Portuguese vineyards stretch 900km from the Douro in the north to Cliff Richard and the Algarve in the south. If you rotate Portugal clockwise through 90 degrees, it would fit nicely within the Western Cape. Of course, this ignores the wineries along the Orange River, which is what SA wine marketers often do, anyway.

If there had been more strandlopers around in the late 15th century as potential slaves, we'd have all been merrily fala'ing Portugues today. In spite of air connections being problematic, fraternal connections are springing up like Jonkershoek mushrooms: Dirk Niepoort and Carlos Lucas are frequent visitors to the Cape while Beyers Truter, his braai and his Frank Sinatra CDs are a legend on the Douro.

Neil Pendock is wine writer for the Sunday Times and Financial Mail