MICHAEL FRIDJHON: How wine industry’s Springboks fared

In many ways the Cape Winemakers Guild is the closest thing the wine industry has to the Springbok rugby team. It’s packed with individuals who are stars in their own right, each able to draw a crowd, each capable of entertaining of room full of wine buffs.

Several times every year the members get together to share knowledge or compare benchmark wines from around the world. They also rate and rank their own wines in blind tastings. It is from a process such as this that the line-up for the annual auction is selected.

The guild has been in existence since 1982. The auctions have been held every year since the mid-1980s, initially in Johannesburg then, after Nedbank took over the sponsorship in the 1990s, in the Cape. As part of the bank’s commitment to the guild a trust was established in 1999. It oversees a bursary programme and invests funds raised by the guild (and supplemented by the bank) in a number of initiatives that have made a real difference to the whole wine industry.

The most important and certainly the most successful in terms of achieving real transformation has been the guild’s Protégé programme. Since its inception in 2006 it has taken 36 participants through a three-year internship and mentorship programme in the wine cellars of the guild’s members. All former protégés are now in full-time employment, making this comfortably the most successful of all the training initiatives implemented within the wine industry in the past three decades.

I have had protégés at my annual Wine Judging Academy for the past 10 years. The first groups struggled, never having had the exposure to a wide range of international wine from which to develop a sense of context. Performance improved with every new group; the latest students pretty much topped the class, displaying a breadth and depth of knowledge that was, at least in part, the result of the mentoring they received from their guild cellarmasters.

For many years the guild’s auction wines were simply a barrel selection of their commercial cuvées. To try to enhance the sense of difference, the winemakers typically threw more oak at the juice; on occasion they overdid hang-time on the vine. The net result was wines that were often over-bold, excessively alcoholic, showy and clumsy.

This year they seem to have taken criticism of this style a little too much to heart. While the wines are certainly finer, less brash and lower in alcohol, I sensed that perhaps several had erred on the flimsier side of the spectrum. My scores are certainly on average lower than in the past few years, though they are still very much in the 90+ territory.

I enjoy the privilege of tasting a full set of the guild wines blind. (Most, if not all, of the other published reviews of this year’s wines emerge from sighted tastings, where the circumstances and the producer’s reputation inevitably skew the scores upwards.) Though I taste blind, I certainly know broadly whose wines are in the line-up — but I don’t know whose wines are whose. Arguably I may incline to slightly higher ratings, given the context, though I don’t think so: I have been subjected to a number of double-blind taste tests over the years and my scoring error averages less than 2%.

For this occasion I also invited a couple of skilled palates to share the tasting room with me. One, Miguel Chan, the chief sommelier/buyer for Southern Sun, produced scores that on average were slightly more generous than mine. Carrie Adams, formerly of Norman Goodfellow’s, thought more highly of the whites than I did. Another colleague pretty much tracked my ratings, with a few scores lower than mine. While none of this comes with papal infallibility, consider my tasting notes and scores a useful guideline. They can be found at: winewizard.co.za.

• The Cape Winemakers’ Guild Auction will be conducted by Strauss and Company on October 4 and 5.