Pinotage bashing

It seems that when it comes to Pinotage bashing, it's always open season. What is it about South Africa's contribution to the world of vitis vinifera that provokes this flow of invective?

Is this full-blown cultural cringe or an insight the foreign folk simply lack? Part of the problem may well be that comic trick of always slipping on the banana peel.

The more often it happens, the funnier - rather than the more boringly repetitive - it becomes. Mention Pinotage and the punters expect a cheap barb. If instead you say something complimentary, they look for the jibe. It's a bit like, "Pinotage is a great grape - what a pity they try to make wine from it."

Until Michael Broadbent, in 1977, pronounced that it tasted like rusty nails, Pinotage didn't appear to inspire anything like the naked aggression we see today.

I remember the Pinotages of the era: some certainly showed strong varnish/duco-like aromas in their youth, as well as some pretty lethal tannins. In those days most young red wines were inaccessible, so these features mattered less. There was, in other words, a wider context in which they were understood.

The first time I was asked to judge a class of Australian sparkling Shiraz I was completely lost. I needed to understand the wine, to taste it through its evolution and to sample the great examples at their peak, 30 or even 40 years old, simply to understand the vernacular.

It's possible that Broadbent was a little too hasty in his judgement. It's also possible that he was exposed to some pretty nasty examples. These were wines made when the concept of cellar hygiene extended no further than sending the winemaker's dog outside when it wanted to relieve itself.

He may have happened on some pretty poor wines - but he must also have sampled better examples. He clearly didn't like what he tasted and assumed they wouldn't amount to much. It is easy to understand how, at a time when ‘New World wines' did not exist at the deluxe end of the UK wine trade, it was so much easier to condemn than to attempt to understand.

Almost all the 1970s Pinotages that we taste today are pretty impressive wines. They have evolved in a way Broadbent could clearly not anticipate. In choosing to pontificate about the shortcomings of Pinotage instead of learning what it is - and then using the memorable (but not entirely fair) "rusty nails" description - he created its slippery-banana-peel status. Since then we've taken his message and turned it into gospel.

In this we have been helped along the way by some of the producers whose handling of the variety is never going to win prizes for sensitivity. Now we've given it punch-bag status and get a laugh every time we bloody its nose.

How can we change this? The Pinotage Producers' Association could help by becoming less tolerant of poor winemaking. Bretty examples have crept into the top 20 a few times in recent years. More importantly though, those who influence opinion are going to have to realise that there's no such thing as a harmless joke.

We criticise Julius Malema's choral preferences because we think the lyrics might be dangerous and are certainly in bad taste. Let's stop shooting Pinotage as well.

Michael Fridjhon is a leading wine writer and consultant with extensive international judging experience