The Italian influences on SA wines

In the rich tapestry that makes up the current South African wine scene, Italian immigrants have played a role. Neil Pendock takes a look at their influence. If that's art, I'm a Hottentot" was the reaction of US president Harry S. Truman when shown some modern art purchased by the US State Department in 1947 as part of a travelling exhibition showcasing American culture overseas. The exhibition was cancelled.

Give-'em-hell Harry Truman from Lamar, Missouri, would probably have felt more at home with the mural of Giovanni Salvadori in the tasting room of the Robertson farm Wederom - even if Salvadori was an enemy soldier, interred in the Cape during World War II.

Salvadori's mural is a naïf naturalistic representation of Wederom circa 1942: farmhouse and werf, some bush vines, a lookout tower and barbed-wire fence surrounding a village of tents for the POWs, all rendered in squashed 2D, without any perspective at all. Salvadori, being an officer and hailing from the north of Italy as opposed to the rest of the prisoners who were southerners, was billeted on the free side of the fence, albeit in a converted pigsty.

The mural is a masterpiece of make-do: blue pigment from washing powder, red tones from mountain clay with the rest of his palette provided by coloured pencils. When the mural was restored by the Du Toit family, the story of Bambi appeared unexpectedly from beneath decades of grime. Which threw the whole restoration into a crisis of authenticity, until a Disney expert confirmed that the character of Bambi dates back to 1928 with a silent movie made in 1934, presumably the source for Salvadori's fantasy.

Salvadori's Bambi frieze is a spitting image of stone-age cave paintings executed by San hunters 8000 years ago. Like the ones on show at the Museum van de Caab, established by neuropsychologist Mark Solms on his farm in Franschhoek.

Solm's museum is an excellent example of placing wine in its proper socio-historic context. For most Cape wineries, history starts with Jan van Riebeeck landing on the Cape Town foreshore and concentrates almost exclusively on the activities of Europeans. Solms makes the important point that SA terroir is much older than that and winemaking was far from being an exclusively white activity. So while President Truman may not have been a Hottentot, the contributions of the /Xam, !Kung, Strandlopers, Sonqua, Bushmen-Hottentots and even the odd Italian prisoner of war, are worth recording in the wineries of the Cape.

Quite how Italian POWs ended up on wine farms is a typical South African story. Jan Smuts captured 10 000 Italians in Tobruk, North Africa, in December 1940 and shipped them back to SA. Some ended up building Chapman's Peak Drive while others were shipped to the Worcester Agricultural Showgrounds where they were divvied up among farmers in the region. An official document was drawn up stating that the farmers would return as many prisoners as they took when the war ended. And that was that.

Koos du Toit took 13 home to Wederom, including the aforementioned Giovanni Salvadori. Born in 1911 in Brescia in north-eastern Italy, he is remembered by Tannie Paddie du Toit as "always wearing a white apron and smelling of old oil". Obsessed with brinjals, he spent most of his time looking for them and when he found one, he would fry it in oil.

Perhaps the kind of dish Gennaro Contaldo, friend and mentor to Naked Chef Jamie Oliver, would prepare in his highly rated Passione restaurant in London's Charlotte Street. When Contaldo was in SA two years ago for the Gourmet Festival, he made a pilgrimage out to Wederom as his father was an Italian POW in the Cape.

In a strange burst of synchronicity, so was the grandfather of Chandra Kurt, judge at the Swiss International Wine Awards, run in conjunction with the Gourmet Festival. Although Kurt's pilgrimage was to Chapman's Peak, which her granddad helped build. Along with his friend Paganini whom he met in a North African shell hole in which they spent three anxious days under fire - they parted with a jolly "Ciao, I vediamo in Italia!" Paganini turning left and Chandra's nonno, right, only to meet up again on the prisoner transport south to SA.

Another triumph for Swiss psychologist Carl Jung and his theory of Synchronicity (meaningful coincidence) would be the case of Hollywood director Francis Ford "Apocalypse Now" Coppola. His dad Angelo was a POW at Koffiefontein and now his son makes a Bordeaux blend called Rubicon in the Napa Valley, with the first Rubicon made by Italian winemaker par excellence, Giorgio dalla Cia, on Meerlust.

Alas, "would be" are the operative words in this case as these "facts" come from Mercedes magazine in a feature on Salvadori and his marvelous mural. They do not stand up to the scrutiny of the people's encyclopedia Wikipedia.org which presents the inconvenient facts that Francis Ford's dad was called Carmine and was presumably on hand in Detroit, Michigan, in 1939 when Francis Ford was born. Still, it makes a good story.

The third case of synchronicity is that of Michele Agostinelli who was born in the same year as Salvadori, but into a farming community in the mountains of Southern Italy. Yet another Italian POW from North Africa, Agostinelli also spent his captivity in charge of a gang of prisoner farm labourers. But while Salvadori returned to his homeland in February 1946, Agostinelli settled in his country of exile, "managing vineyards and making cheese" as the Fairview website puts it.

Credited by Fairview owner Charles Back with setting up the prosperous Fairview cheese business in the '80s, Agostinelli is commemorated in a range of wines. The maiden vintage was the epony-mous Agostinelli 2004, a value-for-money blend of Barbera, Sangiovese and Primitivo, followed in 2005 by a single variety Barbera and Sangiovese.

While Roberto Moni was making red and white Chianti-style wines in the '30s, Italian varietals were late in coming to the Cape, a fact Giorgio dalla Cia puts down to SA being "a mirror of English attitudes towards wine" and the Brits drank only French plus Port and Sherry. Which explains his initial success at Meerlust.

Arriving in Stellenbosch from Northern Italy, which had been extensively replanted with classical French varietals in the late 19th century following the phylloxera epidemic, Dalla Cia knew how to deal with these varietals. After five years at Meerlust, he thought about introducing indigenous Italian varietals but held back for two reasons: there was no export market worth speaking of and local consumers were very conservative.

With Cabernet, Pinotage and Merlot saturated in the local market, go-getters like Charles Back at Fairview and retired Johannesburg banker Alberto Bottega at Whalehaven in Walker Bay and Idiom on Sir Lowry's Pass, have seen a gap in the market for Italian blends and single varietal bottlings and are introducing SA wine lovers to an exciting new spectrum of flavours. While at Asara, Jan van Rooyen has made a most unusual Amarone-style wine from Pinotage. Plantings of Italian varietals remain minute with Barbera 0.03% and Sangiovese just 0.05% of the national vineyard.

But as is clear from the popularity of Razvan Macici's Italian blend at the annual Nederburg Auction, local wine lovers have a penchant for Italian cultivars, due in no small measure to the popularity of Italian cuisine in the country. And vice versa, with the SA winelands an increasingly popular destination for Italian investment.

In addition to POWs who ended up in SA involuntarily, the vineyards of the Cape have attracted the attention of Italian investors. The most successful being wool magnate Giulio Bertrand, whose Morgenster operation in Somerset West produces a benchmark Bordeaux-influenced Cape blend.

Less successful was helicopter heir Count Riccardo Agusta who bought himself La Provence, the oldest wine estate in the Franschhoek valley as well as neighbouring property Haute Provence. Combining the two into Grande Provence, for a while it was a lavish pied à Cap on which he would spend extended (as long as his visa would allow) summer breaks with exotic friends, like alleged Sicilian Mafiosi Vito Palazzolo, from whom he bought yet another farm in the valley; La Terra de Luc.

Now back in Monaco after bribing Western Cape politicians to facilitate golf estate developments, his departure brings down the curtain on a fascinating Italian interlude in Franschhoek's chequered recent history.

Another Italian job that failed to deliver also involved a Count. This time it was one of the most respected Italian winemakers, Piero Antinori, who for a while was partner in Baron Alexander von Essen's Capaia operation in Philadelphia. Brothers Francesco and Orgnelio de Franchi have had more success at Monterosso in Stellenbosch while Toni Bianco is a high profile member of the ongoing Tulbagh renaissance, with his wines flying high on Singapore Airlines.

The latest chapter in the saga of Italian involvement in SA wine is being written on the curiously named Slent farm in the up-and-coming Perdeberg appellation. Owned by a consortium of Italian investors, the Ayama brand has all the classic Italian hallmarks: great design, finesse and a flair that comes from making the stuff in the old country for millennia.