Enough to make you blush

An Englishman goes on a quest for decent rosé in New Zealand.André Morgenthal boxes above his weight: WOSA media liaison, Great Wine Capitals (GWC)heavyweight and one of Lannice Snyman’s silver service 30, an elite and elitist jury that judges the San Pellegrino World Top 50 Restaurants Awards. So when he called in response to my blog recommending that GWC start a category for sex facilities in wineries (and that WOSA send him to New Zealand to investigate), I thought I was in yet more hot water with the exporters’ association.

 

The idea for rating winery sex had come from Wine Spectator’s review of a bohemian travelogue to New Zealand, Going As Far As I Can (Profile, 2008) by Duncan Fallowell. The Speccie didn’t like it, noting rather prudishly: “This isn’t a book for everyone. Some will find his diary-entry style too self-indulgent. Others will be put off by his sexual preferences, for this is also an account of a search for like-minded men, eventually found through escort listings and in the basements of gay sex shops as well as in bookshops and wineries.”

Which could explain the sudden success of NZ wines in Notting Hill: sex and not Sauvignon is the attraction, as a bottle of Cloudy Bay (R450 at Ritrovo) will soon convince. Alas, Fallowell is no Joe Orton and the only blue bits (“eau-de-Nil in full light”) are the south Pacific – there is hardly any sex and what little there is does not go down in wineries.

What does go down is his opinion of Kiwi rosé, for this is more a reconnaissance for rosé than romance. Fallowell starts off at the top, eliciting a recommendation from no lesser figure than Kiwi Master of Wine Bob Campbell.

Bob’s pick is an Ata Rangi: “Balanced acidity and fruit but a slightly too confectionary nose and the colour is too red. The taste should be less serious, should have something scenty and frivolous about it. It has depth but not height.”

It gets worse. “Open the Rippon Gamay Rosé, mid-pink, 12%, pour a glass and put my feet up. Ah… sickly smell of boiled sweets followed by a sudden tart taste of extraordinary brutality. Long bitter finish… very long, very bitter… It’s not off. It’s oral rape.”
Salvation comes from wine-dealer Tim at The Grape in Central Otago with a Gibbston Valley Blanc de Pinot Noir. “Tim: Cabernet Sauvignony? Rieslingy? And... cut grass. Me: I don’t smell cut grass. Tim: Very slight now. More like… uncut grass.”

Fallowell is a quick study and soon sizes up wine appreciation as a “vinigame of mutual suggestion, advancing an idea, half withdrawing it, proposing an alternative, groping for a parallel, a simile, an elucidation of… a smell, a taste, a savour”. In fact, he’s soon a MW (master of winespeak). On the Gibbston: “In this case the bouquet suggests the overture to a ballet with pastel Japonaiserie parasols and perhaps a kind of pre-pubescent flirtatiousness, not that I’m suggesting it’s a twirly girlie rose-cheeked fluttereyed molestation-type experience.”

In the mouth it’s “a waltz which carousels out of a pavilion among blue and yellow vistas as, turning in mid-air, the flavour unrolls along a meandering avenue to springtime…” And so on, and so forth. Alas, none is available as the wine is a sample – and it’s pricey. “All wine from this country is expensive. In France I’d get a rosé of this quality for £5. This, I believe, is over £10.” At £39 an hour, Fallowell should have stuck to Kiwi hookers.

Meanwhile André just wanted the weblink to send to his mate, the mayor of Mendoza, a fellow Great Wine Capitalist.

Neil Pendock writes for the Sunday Times and Financial Mail. He judged at Concours Mondial this year.