Superstimuli cuvées
Father Ted does for the Emerald Isle what Crocodile Dundee did for down under and Sex and the City for Manhattan: popularising a clichéd vision of touristic terroir to an audience of global couch potatoes. Drop the Father, capitalise and TED performs the same function for eggheads.
In a series of serious conferences (TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design and certainly not the Transvaal Education Department of my schooldays), the slogan ‘ideas worth spreading’ was confirmed by a recent tour de force presentation by Professor Mark Solms (available on video at www.guardian.co.uk/tedx/mark-solms-south-africa-neuropsychoanalysis- wine) which does more to explain the status quo in the SA vineyard than any number of glossy coffee-table treatments of the winelands or braai books. For it starts to address the elephant in the national cellar: if SA is an African country with a 350-year tradition making wine, how come SA wyn is so overwhelmingly monochrome? Both in ownership of the means of production and consumption at the top end.
A neuropsychologist, at one point in the video Mark jokes “it’s not brain science”, but the points he raises are certainly worth thinking about. When he took over Solms-Delta farm in Franschhoek a decade ago, seven families living on the land came with the buildings and vineyards, voetstoots. Descendants of the Khoi people who had lived in the valley off and on for 10 000 years plus genetic material from slaves and African and European migrants, he throws question marks at the whole land-ownership model in SA.
But rather than Mugabe-style land grabs and Malema-esque nutty nationalisation, Mark embraced Investec Bank and got it to fund the purchase of the neighbouring farm for his workers, with Delta farm as collateral.
But, while Mark’s economic model may not be brain science, his wine styles certainly are as they’re something animal behaviourist Konrad Lorenz would have surely made if Austrian vineyards were as prolific as those in Franschhoek. By nipping the vine stems with a pair of pliers at le moment juste in the growing season, flavours in the berries are concentrated and the resulting wines become superstimuli with concentrated, almost exaggerated flavours, textures, colour and character.
The strangulation process is called ‘desiccation on the vine’ and was popular in ancient Greece, as were neuropsychologists, although they didn’t call them that. By exaggerating selected features in a wine through desiccation, Mark is embracing an evolutionary strategy that, according to Wikipedia, sees “small songbirds which laid light blue grey-dappled eggs preferring to sit on a bright blue black polka-dotted dummy so large they slid off repeatedly. Territorial male stickleback fish would attack wooden floats with red undersides – attacking them more vigorously than invading male sticklebacks if the undersides were redder.”
Niko Tinbergen was a student of Nobel laureate (and one-time Nazi) Lorenz and he showed that herring gulls’ chicks begged for food from a red knitting needle with three white bands painted on it, more enthusiastically than from their mothers, even if knitting needles are notoriously poor providers of food and comfort.
Things are even worse down under where the males of a certain species of beetle are sexually attracted to large orange females – the more Oros Womanlike the better. Things went from bad to worse when males started to mate with beer bottles of just the right hue. In fact, males were more attracted to beer bottles than real females, mating behaviour which has now spread to Bruce, your average ‘little Aussie battler’, and finally explains the precise shade of orange adopted by Veuve Clicquot Champagne.
