Judges' feedback session: Old Mutual Trophy Wine Show 2009

Thursday, 7 May 2009 - Grande Rochel Hotel, Paarl

MF: I'm pleased to welcome you all to the feedback session of the 2009 Old Mutual Trophy Wine Show. This does have a slightly confrontational look about it - journalists and the industry there, judges here and the verdict about to be passed. But in fact I'd like to believe that these sessions serve a number of purposes, besides the obvious statistical feedback, much of which will appear in the Press Kits and will certainly be available by the time the show results are announced on 1st June. The far more important reason for us to get together here is that it is in these feedback sessions that there's a real opportunity to delve into what is happening at the top end of the wine industry. I like to believe that, by and large, the submissions that are put into the show represent the best of what Cape Wine has to offer at the moment and I'd like to believe that the line-up of judges represents a very fair arbitration panel, not only in terms of wine and wine quality, but in the end a viewpoint we should all be listening to in terms of what South Africa is doing well, what South Africa is not doing particularly well and even perhaps what we are doing badly.

Michael Fridjhon, chairman of the judges at the Old Mutual Trophy Wine Show.

 

We have here in terms of both the local judges and those who are here from overseas, people who have either considerable show judging experience, or reasonably deep experience of South African wine, or people who have a substantial sense of what is happening in the world of wine, so that in this feedback session are going to be real gems, which will result from the judges expressing their views freely and frankly and the audience asking them in question time to unpack some of those observations so that we can really get into the nitty gritty of things. I'm hoping that what emerges from this is something that has guideline value going forward for all the producers of South Africa.

For the last few years the feedback session has also been reduced to a document so it may not always be riveting reading, because it is a very literal rendition - like a Court report - of what actually transpires in this room. But as you can see by virtue of the camera, a podcast that will be distilled from the key discussions and, hopefully, that will add to the body of knowledge that in time will contribute to the industry's overall sense of itself and where it's going.

The lineup of judges is I'm sure fairly well known to the people who read the potted bios that come with the show or else they are known to you all. Very briefly they are:

Gary Jordan who's been a judge now for three years and is looking none the worse for wear.
James Pietersen, second year as a show judge here and a graduate of the Wine Judging Academy of three years ago.
Michel Bettane who judged in 2004 and who is France's leading critic. This is probably your third trip to South Africa, but your second as a show judge.
Julia Harding MW, who edits Jancisrobinson.com and is Assistant Editor to the Oxford Companion and who judges in many places and I think has brought the very important English viewpoint to the South African wine scene.
Carrie Adams, who judged two years ago and is from Johannesburg.
Brian Croser, who has judged also in 2004 and who has chaired a number of the leading Australian wine shows and is also a producer and has been for more years then he's prepared to admit.
Angela Lloyd who has judged at every show here since its inception.
Christian Eedes who's judged for the last two years and is the Editor of Wine Magazine.
[Ginette de Fleuriot CWM - not in attendance at feedback session]

So when questions need to be posed, please feel free either to direct the question to one of the panel, or leave it up to my discretion as to where questions should be put.

Before we begin, I'm going to just review some of the statistics.

We had 1 156 wines entered, which was a substantial increase on last year and all previous years. Last year there were 1 024 entries, so a 15% increase in the actual entries. We have 331 bronze medals which is 29%, compared with 242 from the year before, so in fact bronzes are up ahead of the average of the number of entries, though not substantially. Silvers at 70 compared with 52 the year before are also slightly up. Golds 25 and last year there were 24, so if anything slightly down. Of those golds three were in the museum classes, so those are wines that have been kept back by producers. They are not judged by any other criteria at all. They are put into the same classes, but the judges know that by virtue of their age and their code that they are museum class entries, that producers don't have to have the requisite volumes of those wines, but the benchmark against which they are judged is exactly the same. It's a very encouraging sign to see three museum class gold medals. It tells us something which is only starting to permeate the national consciousness and that is that some South African wines do indeed age.

Most of the judges here were part of the panel that began proceedings on Sunday, with a lineup of old South African wines, something that was introduced last year, and this year the oldest wine was a 1957. There were a great number of them in the 60s and 70s and obviously there were casualties in a lineup of that kind, but the picture that emerged was that old Cape wine did mature marvelously and it's quite nice to see the museum class wines, even in this day and age, where we're told we shouldn't try to age our wines at all.

I don't want to ramble on too much about statistics when the details of the sessions are in many ways much more useful. I'm going to ask a couple of the judges to review their sense of the show (it's useful here to ask a couple of the overseas judges) because their snapshot view of South Africa is perhaps different with the distance they have been themselves and the average South African lineup. I'm going to start with Julia because it's her first judging trip in South Africa and her first visit since 2001, so your overall impressions and your sense of what we're doing well and what we're doing badly. Julia.

JH: Thank you very much. This is my second visit to South Africa, my last was in 2001 and I was very very impressed in 2001 so I came with high expectations. In fact in the UK I have, in the past, found myself defending South African wine, because I thought the potential and the quality was much higher than a lot of people in the UK assumed - I say assumed because they haven't really had the evidence. I can't say I'm more impressed than I was in 2001 because I haven't seen huge progress, but I'm still as impressed and I will still defend South African wines wholeheartedly to its detractors.

In terms of the actual classes, my experience is limited to the classes I judged, which were Sauvignon, Viognier, Cabernet and Bordeaux blends, so that's quite a limited view, although Cabernet is obviously quite a big category.

In the whites I think I was looking for more aromatic intensity in some of the wines, because I've seen that potential in some of the wines I've tasted before - that on one side. On the other side - and this applies to both reds and whites - I think winemakers need to be less worried about producing slightly lighter, more elegant wines. There were a lot of big wines and in the reds a lot of big tannins which for me masked some of the finesse of the fruit, those lovely pure fruit characters in those wines. You got that on the nose particularly, but on the mid-palate I kept stumbling on big bulky tannins and I think the finesse of the tannin structure is slightly dominating, the heaviness, or the extraction level of the tannins is rather dominating some of the beautiful fruit that's clearly there. I think a few more lighter, fresher styles of red would be very welcome.

Having said that as a criticism, overall the quality was high. I enjoyed tasting them and I think there was really good solid quality level for me in this competition. There was still, particularly in 2006 and further back, quite a lot of brett problems for me, but I found remarkably little TCA, so that was good.

MF: Thank you very much. The brett question has been aired more than once at these feedback sessions and you say 2006 backwards, so in a sense so do you have an impression - and this is thrown to all the panelists - that the younger wines were generally cleaner and better handled.
ALL: ‘Yes'
That's very encouraging. I think I will probably put to Brian to pick up on is the question of fruit purity, in other words the issues around virus - less evident in the younger wines?

BC: I found less problems with brettanomyces. And less problems with oxidation, but very much clearer and purer varietal expression in the young wines versus the older wines.

MF: Brian will you perhaps pick up now and talk about the classes that you judged?

BC: Thank you, Michael. I come to this show for the second time along with Michel, since we were here in 2004. I have a lot of show judging experience in Australia and elsewhere and approach shows - just to give you a perspective of where I'm coming from when I talk about the wines - I come from the perspective more of improving the breed than promoting the results to consumers at the show. The show serves a legitimate in both, but I'm a technician, viticulturist and winemaker and my focus when I come to a show is to look at the wines and to think through how those wines can improve in the future and how to pass the message back to the producers. I trust that other people, who have much more understanding of the market and marketing skill, are going to go out and promote the results to consumers to make sure that good producers are rewarded with commercial success.

From that perspective - and I've been coming to this country since 1998 - I think this country is going through a massive revolution in terms of fine wine versus the branded commodity business which is so important to Australia and South Africa. There's a distinct difference between those wines that are sold in supermarkets for £5 and those that are sold under a brand, where the wine could be traded between wine companies quite easily (it's the brand that sells) and the fine wines that are produced in specific regions where you've got a varietal match. This country is just entering that era, in my opinion, when such specificity is very important to the quality result and I think there's an exciting future ahead. You're getting out of the era of fruit salad vineyards, where every vineyard has every variety. You're getting out of the era of convenience viticulture where cost is more important than quality and people are starting to think putting more detail into vineyard work pays off in quality. And you're getting out of the era of varietally-coded wines, where variety is used to denote a style of wine to consumers e.g. Riesling etc and you're coming down to single vineyard, single region varietal matching, much more sophisticated approach to fine wine.

From that viewpoint, my panel saw some lovely, modern South African wines. The Sauvignon Blanc Semillon class was exemplary. It proves to me that somehow the Indian Ocean is important to Semillon or Sauvignon Blanc Semillon blends, because the best in Australia are produced 9 000 kilometers on the same sort of latitude on the other side of the Indian Ocean and I see just a perfect expression of those mouth-watering fresh wines in that class, demonstrating to me that South Africa can make that style very important fine wine a commercial success.

We saw blended whites and there was one fantastic example which we saw in the trophy this morning that I thought outshone some of the single variety Chardonnays and Chenins and others. One blended wine, which I think from memory was a quarter Viognier, a quarter Chenin, a quarter Semillon and a quarter Chardonnay. It was a lovely, lovely wine and I'm sure it was a site-driven wine.

We saw the usual range of Chenins, a couple of gems in a big seam of fairly ordinary wines, but the gems make it worthwhile. South Africa's come a long way from the fruit salad Chenin style. It's persisted with that variety which is particularly difficult and I think there is an evolution going on and its all aiming in a more sophisticated wine direction.

I saw a lovely Riesling. I just wish I'd seen more. It was an international standard Riesling, very aromatic and very typically Riesling.

The star class for us was Shiraz. We spent one whole day judging 164 Shiraz's and if you want to talk about palate fatigue, that's probably in my 31 years of judging, the most palate-fatigued I've ever been, to the point where we just called a halt at the end of the day and decided to make a decision freshly the following morning. I think Shiraz has a great future in South Africa.

I don't want to say all things positive about South African wine. I think Julia has already said that the quality improvement in South African wine isn't as dramatic, over the decade I've been coming here, as is the diversification of South African wine. There's been a huge spread of style, region, variety, producer proliferation and there are so many more interesting wines in South Africa now than there were. That's what's happened in the last decade. The next decades will lead to the significant improvement of the best of those. So it's a two-phase process and you've just gone through the first phase.

There has been quality improvement, but the quality improvement hasn't been as dramatic as the increase in region and style and interest. And I don't think you've discovered even a fraction of the areas that are capable of producing great wines in this country.

The Shiraz is uniquely South African, very aromatic. They do have traces sometimes of more porty and raisin but they're uniquely South African and very aromatic.

We were disappointed in the Merlots, as we were told we might be before the event, very hard and green and not many Merlots showing the true plum, ripe, blocky tannin structure that Merlot should show - a combination of the wrong areas and obviously the wrong climes, which this country suffers from as does Australia.

We had the pleasure of doing the fortifieds and there's a vestigial industry here that was once very big, as there is in Australia. There are some treasures to be treasured, nurtured and retained into the future. There are not many of them and they are disappearing. I just hope this industry keeps supporting them. All in all I really enjoyed being slave driven for three days in probably the hardest working show I've ever been in and by far the most bureaucratic. I've never filled out so much paperwork in my life.

MF: This is South Africa remember. We do things with lots of paper. Brian, thank you very much indeed. Before I pass the microphone around to any other judges, this might be a good time to field questions either directed at the panel. We'll come to Michel in a moment. I just want to see if there are any questions from the floor. I see Michael Ratcliffe.

MR: There was quite a big statement made earlier about younger wines being cleaner, more pure and the older wines perhaps having larger traces of brett and various faults. How do you define younger and older?

BC: A clear break between 2007 and previous.

MF: In other words 2007 is the modern vintage.

MR: So is there going to be greater interpretation of that comment? Because it's quite a big comment that's been made.

MF: It is indeed. I'm just going to see starting with the Cabernet panel which was chaired by Julia. Do you want to talk about 2006 backwards?

JH: I'm not sure that it needs much unpacking. It's quite a simple observation. Going through the 2007s we had a greater percentage of fresher, cleaner wines than once we got into the 2006. And both of them were very big groups of wines and for me it was noticeable that there was a higher percentage of what I thought was probably brett in some instances - I'm not a great expert. So it's not a complicated comment. It definitely seemed there was a higher percentage of cleaner wines in 2007 compared with 2006 and prior.

MF: It seems a good time to put a question to Michel. Michel on the first day had the slightly painful duty, while everyone else was doing white wine or doing all red blends other than Bordeaux blends. That group sat down, worked hard and they knew that they would had Shiraz blends, then Pinotage blends, then other red blends. So it's not as if it was a complete fruit salad. They had markers on the way to tell them when the contents of the fruit salad changed. So you saw that class and then yesterday, quite willingly, Michel having been something of a supporter of the better styles of South African Pinotage, he did the Pinotage class as well. So would you say that 2006 and older is where the fruit problems are most evident?

MB: Well I have to judge on the basis of the wines which were shown here. I'm sure that some hidden treasures exist somewhere and were not shown at the show. For me the improvements in the overall quality of the Pinotage begin at the 2006 vintage. I didn't see a lot of difference between 2006 and 2007, but 2006s already had far better, cleaner nose. I remember four or five years ago 90% of the Pinotage had brett notes in it which is perhaps now the reverse - 10% at the maximum. On this point there is a lot of improvement. As for the red blends outside of Bordeaux, they are very interesting because very often in the southern hemisphere you have the varietal philosophy which indicates that the best wines come from only one varietal, because it's easier to remember and to sell. But it's the contrary of most part of the Europe where the blending of varietal, even with one which is predominant, which is really necessary, you have to add one third or 25% of other things to give complexity and refinement on the flavours and on the tannins - the beginning of civilization. It's like a work of art, the blending is a science but also an art. By blending the winemakers will make a lot of improvements. When you have not only different varietals but also different planting of the grapes, also different origins of the grapes to make what we call a round cuvee.

The blends with Pinotage seemed to be very suited because the tannins are not so aggressive as the Shiraz based blends. There was a lot of discussion between the judges on this very specific point. Is it necessary to add a small amount of Viognier to Syrah or not? It's done of course in Côte Rotie with very good results. Here I think the blend of 2% or 5% of white varietal can be a very good thing if the berries come from the same place. That's the problem. In Côte Rotie when they blend Syrah and Viognier they pick both berries the same day and vat both berries. Here because the viognier and the Syrah don't ripen at the same moment it's sometimes the wines which are blended. I don't know exactly what they're doing - perhaps they keep it in the fridge. I think it's a good thing. It gives more freshness to the perfume. The juice of the white berries is covered by the skins of the black berries during the fermentation process and the juice of every great varietal has no colour at all, which indicates that it's not a crime to blend in the vats a small amount of white berries. The only problem is the marriage between Cabernet Sauvignon and Syrah, which is done in the south of France since the 19th century.

There was a lot of experimentation in blending Syrah and Cabernet and the results were very good. The best Bordeaux which were blended with some Hermitage wines had a very high price. They even planted Syrah in parts of the Medoc. The Cabernet and the Syrah in the south of France, especially in Provence is a very good solution because sometimes the Mediterranean varietals are too heavy or too green and the blend can make a better balance between the acidity and the fruit.

Some of the blended wines were very good, but not all blends - for the moment.

MF: Michel, thank you. Anyone want to pick up a question there? I'm going to pass the microphone to Christian. He was on the Shiraz panel and has been for two years. The question of Viognier and Shiraz blends is something that you had a lot of occasion to discuss in your panel and I wonder if you'd pick up on that?

CE: There's a lot of Shiraz that shows a very fragrant character. Rianie Strydom was an associate judge on that panel and she made a very good point that we get that character when there's no Viognier involved at all. So that's quite intriguing. I personally am less sympathetic to it than possibly Brian or Michel. I find it dilutes the wine and the tannins end up being slippery and we need to be cautious about that. You get aroma at the expense of those spicy tannins that one might associate with the Rhone.

Picking up on Mike Ratcliffe's question. I don't think we should view 2007 versus 2006 and back as some kind of magical threshold. I think as long as you're picking ultra ripe and ending up with juice with high pH's, as those wines age all those bacterial problems will come to the fore, so at the moment we're seeing all that wonderful primary fruit. I'm sure next year we'll look at the 2007s and be less enamoured with it.

MB: The problem is that brett can develop in bottles. That's what's so dangerous. You can have no perception of brett just after the bottling and if the bottle is kept in a very hot place and if you have a little amount of brett they can develop into the bottle and within days it's possible to have many more brett compounds in the bottle.

MF: I'll pass this to Angela for a comment on partly the divide that Christian says we may not see. Every year that you've been on this panel and on this feedback session every year, we say we're getting better and then say it wasn't the vintage of the century.

AL: think really the point to make here is that when the producers put their wines on the market and they're sold out a lot of the wines that we get on here - perhaps some older vintages - the best wines have gone. So certainly with some of the older wines that aren't museum class but are still hanging around - you can understand why they're hanging around - they shouldn't be.

I think in 2007 the only red category I did was Bordeaux blends. Apart from one or two, they were generally made to be drunk early, because they were fruity and fresh. So one would only expect to see the more serious wines coming on line next year and the year after.

Could I just make another point? Brian raised the very important issue of diversification being more impressive than the quality improvement and this is something I noticed. I judged on Chardonnay, but also two smaller classes, Viognier and Rosé. In the Chardonnay we got an unoaked gold - the first time ever - and I think this shows exactly what we can do. It was Michel's favourite Chardonnay of the whole lineup. A lovely wine. So we mustn't close our minds to what we're able to do. I wasn't looking forward to Viognier - heavy, hot, alcoholic, over-oaked. We got a silver and a few bronzes and I would urge you when you go to the show, do taste this silver medal Viognier because it's a lovely wine. It proves what we can do. We must change our mindset with not being able to do varieties like that in a good way.

Rosé is seen as frivolous, not for shows - we got a silver medal there and some really lovely fresh, fruity wine. It's a popular category. If Viognier's fashionable, Rosé's popular but popular doesn't mean you can't get a medal. So please go and taste the silver medal in the Rosé category.

I didn't do Pinot Noir and I didn't do Riesling but I noticed huge improvements because the winemakers are dedicated to these varieties now. We can do much more than we think. Because we are spreading the areas and finding much better sites, we are really able to do a lot more quality wines right across the spectrum, which to me is hugely encouraging.

MF: Thank you very much indeed. I have to say this was a mean-minded bunch of judges who couldn't even be persuaded to look at that Viognier for gold and the truth is that it's probably a year or two off its prime. It was very impressive to have a Viognier that's at 14 rather than 15.5%, with lovely, bright fruit, not huge dependence on oak, no clumsy bit of finish.
We are certainly seeing, like the Riesling that Brian's panel saw, we are seeing standout wines in categories that we've almost forgotten about. There's a disappointment with Cab Franc, which we know can produce some quite interesting wines in this country, and which failed to deliver anything of note.

I'm going to pass the microphone to Gary because you chaired the Bordeaux Blend class, which was long hard work yesterday and a few comments would be very important.

GJ: Thanks very much Michael. I chaired Bordeaux Blends and also was on the panel with Michel with red blends other than Bordeaux. Of course, tasted the Viogniers and had the pleasure of doing the Shiraz panel with Brian. Please - I say that because three years ago I was part of that fateful panel three years ago with Jancis - and to come back to what Brian was saying earlier and people not saying whether it's a defining moment for 2007 or not - I don't think you need to look at it like that, but remember then, three years ago we were also tasting young wines and we found a lot more breakage and a lot more spoilage than what we do nowadays. So I think the show in the last couple of years has succeeded in giving the producers a bit of a wakeup call. While we don't want to be the brett police, it's a valid problem that we've had in the past from the industry and it's nice to see fewer of them now.

I think when you look at Bordeaux Blends though, I'd agree with Angela that the best Bordeaux Blends are still to come, because from 2007 quite a few haven't yet been released and simply weren't on the show. In fact we found some very interesting examples from some of our older wines.

Getting back to Viognier, I would also like to point that out. It was superlative and we just couldn't find it in our hearts to give it a gold as it wasn't quite world class, but it's close. I think it's a very interesting wine to watch.

The red blends other than Bordeaux with Shiraz in them were quite exciting. There were some interesting wines there which stood out amongst a few others.

MF: You saw some quite scary sweet wines in that class.

GJ: Yes. Please don't do that to me again. We had some wines, 17 grams sugar, a couple of 18s. Those wines don't deserve to be entered here. In classes that are getting larger and larger, I'm not sure why they're there. Perhaps it's what Angela says - they're not too sure what to do with the wine and let's see if we get a medal. It's not going to get past a judging panel of this calibre.

MF: Questions in the room at this stage?

Q Just referring to the sweeter red wines, did you find sweeter red wines in the Shiraz category chasing Yellow Tail?

GJ: I think it'll be interesting for Brian to answer that; we did through the tasting also call for what the sugars were. Many of them are around 3gms of sugar is how they were presented to us. Maybe Brian wants to add a little more on sugar levels.

BC: We have (after the fact - not before we judge) some analysis put in front of us of the various wines and I was surprised by the consistent high level of residual sugar in reds. To give an example, I think more than half of the reds were 3gms plus of residual sugar, in the Shiraz and in the other red classes. It's my experience as a winemaker that sugar should be less than 1gm per litre at the end of fermentation. Obviously South Africa is different from Australia. My last vintage I think the highest residual sugar in the ten reds I produced was .2gms per litre. So there's a big difference between .2 and 3. I wonder what that is. It's probably unfermentable sugars because of the unique South African experience, but I'd like to know more about it and you, as an industry, deserve to know more about it and I know Gary's on a mission to find out more about it. At 3gms, it doesn't disturb the palate. It's not something that's going to change results - it's just an interesting technical background. Above 3gms per litre becomes very obvious in fine wine classes like those we're judging and some of the wines that had more than 3gms per litre were fine wines until the sugar took over from the tannin where it shouldn't and they were worse for the addition or retention of sugar than they would have been if it hadn't been there and that's a pity.

CE: On the Viognier subject it's something of a hobby horse for us. We have the feeling that South African Viognier - we're doing what we did to Chardonnay 10 or 15 years ago. If it didn't have loads of new oak in it, it wasn't worth drinking. If you say to South African winemakers - have you ever tasted Cote Rotie and they say "what's that?". That explains why we're seeing so much over-oaking of Viognier - they actually don't know the grape.

MF: But that raises a question around retail itself and since Carrie's here with a very firm sense of the fine wine market in Johannesburg, it's a good time to pass the microphone to Carrie firstly on to what extent people are looking for, or are receptive to these more marginal or marginalized varieties. In other words is it that no-one is out there promoting them that makes it difficult to sell them. And maybe the next question to what extent the punters still want to buy oak.

CA: It's difficult to say really. There's a hugely elevated intellect surrounding the wine buyer in South Africa at this stage of the game, compared to five years ago. They are quite adventurous and they do look to different varietals. They are very receptive to the diverse broad spectrum of new varietals that are being experimented with in South Africa. And I do think that, from my perspective anyway, this show I judged two years ago and this year, there's also an intellect that has come into the industry from the winemaker and the wine producer's perspective, because we no longer just have the mealie farmer producing wine on the other corner of his farm. He does need to spend a lot more time being more site specific. My name is Mrs Appellation Control so before I die I do hope we have it in South Africa.

It is actually getting a whole lot better and I think it's extremely noticeable that the level of intellect being applied to winemaking in South Africa has gone up and so I do think that in the next 3 or 4 years we'll see the categories in this show getting ever stronger. I do think that the wine producer needs to bear in mind that while his intellect has increased, so has the consumer's and he's not going to buy rubbish wine and he's not going to settle for too much oak or any of that, because there is just so much wine available that he has the opportunity to select that that he thinks is best.

MF: There's no magical formula to how the medals pan out. I don't go to the panels and say you're really being generous, cut back in the second half of the day. Over the years we've pretty much had the same percentage of medals at the end of three days. The fact that Day 1 this year, we looked like we were going to get desperately generous - it happened to be a day dominated by white wines - and I think the pattern that emerged a few years ago, of whites being stronger probably than reds, explains that. By Day 2 the medal count, even in bronzes, had dropped dramatically.

But having said all that, we do see that the number of bronzes and silvers has increased ahead of the proportion of entries. I think that really is a reflection of a lot more good wine coming through the system. You can't jiggle that one! If the industry is always improving - which is pretty much what we hear every year at these feedback sessions - why aren't we getting more golds and silvers. Well, James Halliday answered that a few years ago by saying because at the same time you're raising the bar. The truth of the matter is that I think performance is rising faster than the bar is, and that the gold of five years ago may very well be the bronze of today. We see it in the high number of bronze medals and the high number of silver medals that the average class entry - the top half of the class - is rising quite quickly. I thought I might put that as a lead question for James. You've judged two shows and you were an associate the year before, so you in fact have a perception over three years. Do you think, with a much closer sense of detail, that that's a true reflection of what's happening?

JP: Yes I think there's definitely a more expressive purity of fruit and I think that's where we're starting to find more quality wines. Two comments on my experience, I think as a panel raising the bar, we're also starting to look at other aspects of the wine, because as the other judges mentioned there's improvement to the intellectual application to the winemaking. I think what's happening now is the interpretation to try and lead that application and give it some further guidelines. It seems to me there's more detail involved in the appreciation of the wines. I think it's really heartening. I think there's great quality and it's incredible to hear how positive the international judges are about South African wines.

I tasted Merlot which is something we try to be as generous to as much as we can. It's a category that needs attention when winemakers are making Merlot. It's becoming the new Pinotage kind of panel to sit on. There's attractiveness on the nose, pluminess and then suddenly you struggle on the palate. The sugar issue is very disconcerting and also quite interesting.

I tasted backwards on all the panels that I sat on and I sat on all the red wine panels. So starting with wines that have 17.2 RS and alcohol of 5.1 and 5.9 made it a very difficult show for me, because I tended to start at that end on every panel I sat on. We had a cab with 4.7RS and 15.9 sugar and it smells like Shiraz. I find it very interesting that we have those kinds of wines in the categories where it's a quality show. There are a lot of tricks being applied. We sniffed them out, but we also saw a lot of really beautiful purity of fruit coming through.

MF: Questions from the floor?

Q Angela a question to you. You said you did the Rosé, well Blanc de Noir. Did any single variety stand out to you on the Blanc de Noir side of it or the blends?

AL: No. The very first wine we had was a Pinotage from this year, which was delicious. We saw afterwards it has got a smidgeon of sugar, but it's got such wonderful fruit and lowish alcohol - under 12, I think it was. It was lovely. There was a Blanc de Noir that was also very nice, but for me, apart from the colour in some of them, I can't see the difference. You get a lot of Rosés like Blanc de Noir and a lot of Blanc de Noirs like Rosé, so to try and differentiate between the two in quality is very difficult to say. There was one very odd Blanc de Noir that didn't seem to have any Noir in it at all so perhaps it lived up to its name properly. Michel was on the panel. He has a wonderful, open mind. We might get a bit snooty about some varieties going into Rosé, like Muscat. Michel thinks it's charming. I think as judges we've also probably become a bit more broad-minded.

Q On analytical levels, we've heard quite a lot about sugar and about alcohol and tannin levels and so on. In the past we've also heard about acid and I would like a little feedback on where our acid levels are, what the balance is looking like in that respect and also feedback on the oaking of the wines. No-one's mentioned that oaking is overdone, so could we get some feedback on that?

MB: OK. As for the analytical point of view what was really dangerous was the level of sugar in both the white and red wines. When you have Pinot Noir for example at 3.5/3.6 you have the beginning of sweetness which is boring. And that's a real problem. Brian is right. If it's possible to have less than 2gms of sugar you would have better definition, even of the tannins. For the tannin, what is very important is the integration of tannin and tactile sensation of tannins, which is a difficult thing to obtain, because you have to get it during the winemaking, but also by handling in the oak with the oxidation, which helps with the polymerization of the tannins. The reason why it's necessary to have oak - you have some that are over-oaked, but not as many as I remember five years ago. The problem is the quality of the oak and the quality of the oak is not the winemaker's but the barrel maker's problem and the drying of the wood. I'm not sure of that, because of demand the barrel maker's are producing very high quality barrels. The great problem is to find the right barrel maker and the right type of oak for your whites. It's a question of experimentation.

AL: On the question of oaking and over-oaking, there were a few wines that were over-oaked, but it certainly wasn't anything that stood out to me across the red wine categories at all. There were one or two, but generally not at all. But I think this question of tannins for me was the big one. Every year I taste a new vintage in Bordeaux, so I'm used to tasting very young, very tannic wines, but it's not to do with the volume of the tannins in the wine. It's to do with the quality of the tannins, the finesse. In quite a lot of the really big reds I found chunky tannins that seemed to block off the fruit in the wine. I wasn't convinced it was just a question of time before they subsided. You can have a wine that's massively tannic, but the tannins are so fine and so beautifully integrated that you know they're absolutely beautiful tannins, even though they're massive. For me some of the tannins were just too brutal and I don't know if that's over-extraction because the grapes were so ripe, heavy-handedness in the winery or if it's to do with viticulture. I just don't know the reasons, but that was my main worry about some of the reds - tannin quality.

Q The question was asked about acids?

BC: I guess it's a feature at this sort of occasion that you're dealing with people who have already chosen their sites, their method of viticulture and they're trying to improve the breed by oenological practice, but these sessions become very oenocentric and ignore very basic things - the choice of right site, the choice of right viticultural practice to achieve the right fruit flavours and balance. And that is far more important than any of the things we've been talking about - use of oak, tannin extraction, retention of sugar or acid balances. Just to address the issue of acid balances, again as we're confronted with the analysis, I note that most of the wines were less than pH 3.6 and an average would have been around 3.5. The average of acids would have been in excess of 6, probably around 6.3 or 6.4. Given the right site for Shiraz and Cabernet I would expect to see 5.1/5.2 acid and 3.7 pH at the end of the process without acid addition. So a lot of the wines we're looking at have had significant acid addition to bring down the pH. I think that's an over-reaction, but it's a necessary addition because of the inappropriate site varietal match and the industry will grow out of that as producers find better sites and use better viticultural methods to get natural balances. The objective of every fine wine maker should be to make a wine that comes out of the vineyard and needs absolutely no amelioration on the way - just the elaboration of the winemaking process. So to an extent, to me it's frustrating to talk about tweaking at the edges, when the major issues ahead of the South African and Australian industries are making sure that we match the varieties, sites and viticultural methods absolutely fastidiously and meticulously and then the winemaking solves itself.

MF: Brian, thank you very much. We're moving towards the end of show time, but I don't want to close down before we've fielded any important questions that might be lurking in the room.

Q Was there any specific feedback on Pinot Noir?

MF: The Pinot panel was Christian's.

CE: Thank you. The Pinot reds was a small class, as might have been expected. The feeling of the panel which included myself, Ginette and Michel was that it's making huge strides and it's no longer a case of picking the Walker Bay wines and moving on. It's suddenly a stylistic spread and again, I think Angela made the point that it's a category where you can see the dedication to the winemaking that's gone into it. We picked two silvers and a bronze out of it. I was quite pushed to give at least one gold but the reason we didn't give golds is that, whilst overall quality has gone up significantly, the wines still lack a little distinction, although they're very good. We no longer need to be apologetic about the category, but there's a sense of young vines, a sense of still a lot to learn about how best to elaborate the grape. It's a very exciting category and I think it's not far off till we see excellence coming through.

MF: I'd also like to pick up on that for a moment. I'm certainly very enthusiastic about what's happening with Pinot Noir in this country. When the review of that class did come up yesterday, I was out there, very keen to see a gold medal. I think actually we've raised the bar faster than the class has kept up. In other words our expectations have rushed ahead of what's available in the bottle. But it's also a category - to touch on Brian's point - where there's been very serious matching of variety to site and where we've seen new clonal material. The issue there is because it's new clonal material and new sites, they are young vineyards. Overall it has certainly been a very exciting class and I think we are also forming a more coherent view of what we're expecting from Pinot Noir in South Africa. I think there were thirteen wines judged, which is small as a class. I think there will be quite a lot of growth in numbers and in the medal count within those numbers. Rianie - you have a question?

Q Where is South Africa standing now? Better whites or better reds?

MF: A show of hands from the panel? Who thinks it's red and who thinks it's whites?

JP: Well Rianie - 11 golds for white and 7 for red.

Q Michael, you said that TCA was down. Is that due to more screw caps?

MF: I was waiting for the question and Carrie has agreed not to participate in this discussion. It's an interesting set of stats and you obviously need to look at bigger classes because a percentage in a small class will throw it. 19% total entries in the show were under screw cap, which I would have thought is a significant increase and in classes like Sauvignon Blanc around 50% of the total entry is now under screw cap. Why I say you can't trust the results in small classes, you would have thought that 100% of all the Rieslings would have been under screw cap just because fragility of aroma is where you need it to be. But given that there were only three entries in the Riesling class and all of them under cork! That said, Chenin Blanc unwooded - 61% under screw cap, red blends - obviously other than Bordeaux blends - 14%, Shiraz blends 22%, Pinotage blends 29%. These are all categories where there would have been queries around quality, with fingers pointed sometimes unjustifiably at the closure. Shiraz as a total class - 13%. Last year the trophy-winning Shiraz was closed under screw cap. Chardonnay wooded - 21%, unwooded - 56%. So there is a definite trend there and it's a trend you would want to see in those particular classes and I think all that's happening is that we're attracting an international trend, it's just taking a bit longer.

It remains for me to thank a number of people.

First of all, thank you for attending. For me it is very important that this session takes place. It is important that producers attend. It is a golden opportunity to get feedback from people who are at the cutting edge of what is happening in the quality wine industry around the world and that feedback can make a huge difference to meet the one spec of a show of this kind, which is that spec for improving the breed. You don't hear what's going on if you don't interpret the data or if you don't have the data interpreted for you. It's really pointless.

So, thank you all of you who have attended. For those of you from the press, presumably in one form or another, some of the messages emerging from this discussion will get to the wider industry.

I would like to thank Celia Gilloway and her team. The producers in the room know Celia - she's the woman who tells them they haven't filled in the form correctly. If you don't fill in the form, it won't be in the show. And the bureaucracy begins with this sense of meticulous detail, without which it would be impossible to manage that number of wines, in this space over that period of time. Celia to you and your team, thank you very much indeed.

Finally of course to the judges. Everyone who doesn't know what this is about thinks this is a job made in heaven. It may be, but if you asked them if they'd like to do another 200 wines, I suspect the answer would be a solid No. They have put in extraordinary time, the show has in a sense grown beyond itself. I'm not sure how we are going to make sure it doesn't grow any more, because the burden on the judges and therefore the pressure on the result becomes increasingly difficult. I think we have a splendid set of results and just to put a context on that certainly more than 50% of the golds certainly around 60-70% are gold medal winners from previous years. Something like half the medals have gone to three or four producers. In other words there are several producers who have had more than one gold medal - some with three. In that sense there's a very even and focused sense of quality, because those are medals across several classes, so it's not one panel identifying one style that they particularly like and rewarding them with gold.

I make a point of not looking at what comes up for gold, in case in the trophy judging I'm expected to cast the Chairman's vote, which so far has never been the case. That said, when I did, at the end of the trophy judging, walk into the steward's room and see what was on the table, I think this is a result of which the judges can be proud. It's been a really extraordinary process over three days and 1 150 wines, in which the usual suspects, more or less, percolate to the top. I think it's a tribute to the quality of judging and the amount of effort that goes into making this thing work. So to the judges and to all of you, thank you very much indeed. Thank you for joining us. We'll see you same time, same place next year.

BC: As by far the most senior person on this table, I have the right of the last say. I just want to say to the South African wine industry how lucky you are to have Michael Fridjhon. He attracts to this country judges of leading international stature. I'm not reflecting on my own stature, but I know who's come before.

We operate in an environment that is beautifully organized and innovatively creative. The system of trophy judging I was exposed to this morning is the first time I've been in that process where all the wines are lined up and you add to the 90 base point the point that you think the particular trophy candidate should get more than 90. What this means is that you can judge all the trophy wines in one hit, from delicate white down to sweet fortified and come up with a meaningful answer, without the horrible elimination process which we tediously go through in Australia. I congratulate you on the elimination.

More than anything else, Michael is focused on quality improvement, improving the breed. He's got the interests of the South African industry at heart. I can only think of one other person in the New World who's done as much for his own native industry, that's Mondavi in California and Len Evans in Australia and Michael Fridjhon in South Africa. I think you're very lucky to have him.