Christian Eedes: July 2008

Accepting that a lot of SA reds display an unattractive pong is the first step to recovery. By Christian Eedes.That the 1.3 million-case-producing Nederburg should emerge as most successful producer at this year’s Old Mutual Trophy Wine Show might come as a surprise to some, but I would argue that it is apt reward for the renaissance cellarmaster Razvan Macici has bought about since taking over in January 2001.

However, over and above the competition’s role in rewarding quality, whether this is through acknowledging the “seeded players” or identifying emerging talent, it also functions as a vital forum for debate. Every year nine judges officiate, including high-profile international wine personalities who bring global perspective. Modus operandi is that judges are divided into three panels of three, each panel assigned to review different classes, a total of some 1 000 wines coming under scrutiny over a three-day period.

It’s an incredibly intense process, with your fellow judges constantly asking you to account for why you rated a particular wine the way you did. Lazy thinking and prejudices are inevitably exposed. As a result, the Trophy Wine Show goes a long way to shaping debate. Judging at the inaugural competition in 2002, Dr Tony Jordan, CEO of three of the big names in Australian and New Zealand wine, namely Cape Mentelle, Cloudy Bay and Domaine Chandon, warned that brettanomyces (a spoilage yeast) was a time bomb waiting to go off in the South African wine industry.

During judging, he discerned worrying signs of brett in many wines on show that did not concern his colleagues on the panel nearly as much. He predicted that local judges would become increasingly sensitive to the way brett presented itself in a wine, while also pointing out that brett proliferates if left unchecked. Correct, on both counts.

This year, the hot topic was “burnt rubber”, the term coined by Jane MacQuitty of UK newspaper The Times to describe the problematic odour she and many other foreign critics encounter on so many present-day South African reds and which has already become shorthand to describe the more complex problem of why so many of our wines appear to be paradoxically over-ripe and green.

To date, I suspect local winemakers and critics have not faced up to the shortcomings of our reds due to a combination of honest lack of understanding and more dangerous denial. However, tasting with Joel Payne, editor of German magazine Meininger’s Wine Business International, winemaker and consultant Sam Harrop MW, and Anthony Rose, wine columnist for UK newspaper The Independent, it gradually became clear that their concerns are entirely legitimate: there are too many local reds that have an unattractive vegetal pong on the nose and then show dark, sometimes dead, fruit on the palate while counterintuitively also being overtly herbaceous.
As to what causes local reds to present in this manner, nobody is entirely sure just yet. Regarding the “burnt rubber” character specifically, the speculation is that this is due to a sulphur-based compound resulting from a stressed fermentation, while the overripe/green character is thought to be caused by vineyard stress.

The “burnt rubber” issue needs to be seen in perspective. By no means do all South African reds have these characteristics, and one suspects that UK critics are a little guilty of autosuggestion: show them a South African red and they experience the aroma of wheel-spinning Pirellis even when it’s not there. However, we won’t be looking past the wines that do exhibit the character in the future, thanks in large part to the Trophy Wine Show.