MICHAEL FRIDJHON: What Leeu Passants mean for Cape wine-making traditions
While they still have to prove themselves, their pedigree buys them a lot of credibility
There is no easy way to determine the value of wine. If you like what is in the glass, and you are happy with what you paid for it, the value is as good as it gets. Arguably, if someone provided the glass of wine without saying what it cost and asked how much you would pay for it, you would be able to correlate tolerance of price with pleasure on the palate. This is what blind tasting is all about. By the same token, if someone revealed the wine came from a R30,000 bottle (yes, there are quite a few of these about, more since the rand was Zuma-ed) the expectation would be different. There would probably be a sense of disappointment — it is quite hard for any beverage (or any meal, for that matter) to live up to that kind of ticket. Wine pricing is a moving target precisely because there is no real agreement on what taste elements justify the additional expenditure. There was a time when it was obvious what to do to make a wine taste expensive: dollops of new oak were a key component...
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