An Inconvenient Truth
An Inconvenient Truth
Cheating, lying and cover-ups are rife in the wine industry.
It probably doesn't matter anyway. In a country where perjury is rewarded with appointment to high office, what difference does it make if this year's Diners Club Young Winemaker of the Year actually made the wine upon which his performance was judged - or not? Diners Club doesn't seem to care.
In response to my expression of concern that Clayton Reabow could not possibly have produced the wine (his employment at Môreson only commenced four months after the grapes were crushed), I was told that Diners Club was satisfied he had done enough to justify the award. Môreson's proprietor (who was a lawyer in his previous life) was just as unfazed.
It is possible that there are people in the trade who care, who worry when inconvenient truths are airbrushed away, who are concerned when accuracy - where it is material - is disregarded. However, it's something of a first when the organisers of what used to be one of the most credible of the industry's awards glibly ignore the damning evidence against their laureate.
It is not something new, this problem of breaking the rules if you can get away with it. About 30 years ago, smuggling plant material was almost a national sport - one which enjoyed the participation of the biggest corporates, those in leadership positions and also the smallest of the boutique operators.
It is customary to argue that their activities helped to catapult the wine industry into the modern world. Every year, however, as growers spend millions combating at least one disease imported with these vines, they can ask each other if the quarantine laws they had so much fun breaking were entirely useless.
More recently we've had scandals involving the illegal use of flavourants, the cancelled 2008 Diners Club award and now Havana Hills falsely declaring the actual sugar levels on a wine submitted to a WINE magazine panel tasting. Everyone understands the flavourant crime - that's good old-fashioned cheating. But when a winemaker signs a declaration he knows to be untrue, this is equally an issue of integrity.
There may be folk who argue that this is not a bad track record in an industry with so many players and so many opportunities for crooking the figures. They might be right, except that I suspect it's the tip of quite a large iceberg and it could yet sink our Titanic.
The Chardonnay scandal of the 1980s only came to light because the cover-up (in which the authorities were complicit) failed. The idea that the two winemakers caught using flavourant for their Sauvignon Blanc were the only perpetrators of that particular crime stretches credulity.
We know - in the aftermath of last year's Diners Club fiasco - that the next in line for the tarnished crown could also not meet the volume requirement. I also have no doubt that Havana Hills is not the only producer fudging inconvenient analysis data.
Is WINE magazine going to strike Havana Hills from its list of 5 Star laureates? Will Diners Club cease to hide behind the silence of condonation (which seems to be the strategy it has adopted over this year's Young Winemaker of the Year Award)?
Hamlet tells us the world is not going to grow honest and there's nothing to suggest we're going to see a sudden culture change in South Africa. However, if offenders are not hung out to dry, organisers - and the industry as a whole - will be putting out the same message that the poor prosecutions record of the police communicates to criminals. "Do what you like - you probably won't get caught - but if you are, nothing much will come of it anyway."
