handtomouth

The act of pouring a half glass of 2004 Ernie Els blended red into the spittoon for a more satisfying wine becomes more significant than it should be because this is one of South Africa’s most expensive wines, at over R500. Perhaps I was spoilt for choice, or just spoilt, but perhaps the best wine for the occasion was not necessarily the one that was the most expensive.

In fact, in our climate of confusing quality with stickers (including the cost of bottle sticker), the better wines are often not the most expensive. When prestige based solely on price, quality is in fact easily manipulated by the cunning, who know better how to present what’s in the bottle than what to put in the bottle.

My suggestion is rather to look at track record. Look for a commitment to making good wine that has lasted a good few years. Wine is not a quick success, and this intrinsic fact is, in some way, wine’s antidote to the ersatz attacks on its position as a fine drink. The sudden wines, often with bulky prices, often don’t stick around. Sure, there will be another to take its place, and you can spend your life chasing fashion in wine like in any other pursuit. But if you like to build a bit of a relationship with wine, you will prefer to track a wine’s development through a few vintages.

All this is not to say that Ernie Els is a poor wine. It’s a bold wine, it’s a confident assembly of the building blocks that make good wine. It just did not tantalise me that day, it didn’t draw me in or seduce me. It was also not refreshing.

Which brings me to the more practical point of this column. The Old Mutual Trophy Wine Show will soon reveal its winners of the 2006 competition, and recently the local and international judges shared what they thought, in general, about the entrants. There always seems to be one major issue that crops up at this event, and this year it was… cork spoilage.

To choose one category: badly corked or noticeably corked wines in the Sauvignon Blanc tasting – 20%. The accepted figure over all wines is currently 7%. As one of the judges asked, would you accept it if 7% of your milk was sour?

Then again, it does boil down to recognising corked wines. Just last week, at the Cape Times Waterfront Wine Festival, I sampled from a bottle of shiraz, poured by the wine maker and already half empty, that was seriously corked. Never mind debating a wine’s intrinsics if we, and wine, are made fools of by an inferior seal.