South Africa wine trip as guests of WOSA - Part I

I’m not quite sure how we wangled it, but on Sunday 28th January, at 9 o’clock in the morning, Graham Price and I stumbled off flight BA059 into the blinding light and dusty heat of a cloudless Cape Town morning.

The flight had been pretty awful – well, completely dreadful, to be honest. I was suffering from an evil back, and the guy in the seat in front of me was a horse of a man who needed every inch of room he could get, which basically meant intruding his seat-back into my personal space. This meant I was no longer able to sit straight in my chair – so I intruded, legs akimbo, into the space of the person on my right (the guy to my left had legs eleven feet long and problems all of his own). She in turn put her seat back down to get more room, which intruded into the space of the rather large chap behind her…and so it went on, domino style, all the way to the back.

Flight BA 059 to Cape Town

As it turned out, the grizzly British Airways flight out was the low point of the wine-tasting marathon organised by Wines of South Africa, the marketing arm of the wine producers in that extraordinary place. We tasted morning, noon and night for a week – total immersion.

There were twenty battle-hardened pro’s on the trip from different branches of the business, which made for illuminating exchanges. We had hoteliers, a brewery chain, a brace of wine consultants, restaurant groups, pub groups, Master Sommeliers from the Dorchester and Gordon Ramsey Group, a wine journalist, and a Master of Wine who was also a hotelier with a small pub group – loads of different bases were covered, and nobody was exactly shy.

The group at 9.30am.

After a couple of substantial tastings....with two more to go.

All work, no play. "I have a feeling I'm going to regret this...", said Paul.

We tasted wines from some 130 producers and were able to speak to the growers and blenders in person. It was plain, from the off, that the trip hadn’t been set up as a wine-buying tour – many of the wines we tasted weren’t available in the UK, or had already sold out, or were experimental tank samples, or the producers didn’t have UK agents at all. Frequently it was a struggle getting UK prices – many hadn’t considered the question, and the nearest indication we could get was the cellar door price in SA.

Rather, the aim of the trip was to give us insights into what was happening with SA wine. They are painfully aware that, in the UK anyway (and we are their largest market), people generally associate South Africa with Pinotage and Chenin Blanc, and that in the past the Pinotage we’ve been getting hasn't been brilliant. As Jason, the Diamond Geezer Master Sommelier from the Dorchester put it, “Life’s too short to drink Pinotage”. Chenin Blanc and Pinotage are, at best, niche wines, but South Africa produces some 50% of the world's Chenin Blanc and just about 100% of the world’s Pinotage, making them big fish in a somewhat shallow and stony pond.

A large Pinotage fish in the shallows, being
loved-up by a Chenin Blanc

On the evidence of the various wines we tasted, it was clear that producers were keen to introduce us to a wider landscape - we were shown 18 Chenins and 20 Pinotages, but were shown 47 Sauvignon Blancs, 30 Chardonnays, 37 Shirazs and over 50 blended wines in the style of Bordeaux or Rhone, which offered a tempting European route away from the New World single varietal thing.

What came across strongly was that South African producers were searching for their own personal hook on which to hang their pyjamas – although their vineyards go back over 300 years, they have only been operating as fully-fledged international wine exporters for some twelve years, since the arrival of democracy. And as they themselves explained, they're busy determining their identity and exploring how they can differentiate themselves from other New World countries. On the evidence of the wine in the glass, there are loads of interesting things happening.

But more of that later....