Everything to do with South African fine wine. Wine magazine was published from October 1993 until September 2011 and now lives on in digital form as winemag.co.za
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There’s a well-worn but good joke that’s relevant to my theme – but a joke is anyway surely nice to have early in the year. It’s set in rural Ireland, though there are versions I know of from Scotland and France, and there might even be a Van der Merwe version (what happened to Van der Merwe jokes? I haven’t heard one for a decade or two – did we suddenly realise they were a touch racist? Or not as funny as we thought?). So – to keep it at its brief essence: The lost foreigner asks a local greybeard how to get to Dublin (or is it Galway?) After some headscratching, the slow answer comes back: “Well, to get to Dublin, you wouldn’t really want to be starting from here….”
When I mentioned last December some stuff about Van Loveren and their ambitions and latest moves – and alluded in not altogether reverential tones to the Four Cousins range – there were a couple of indignant responses that invoked the concept of the “wine ladder”. This was well expressed by the statement that “Four Cousins is perhaps not everyone’s cup of tea, but many a novice was introduced to appreciating wine, by exposure to precisely those products”.
Really? Many? I doubt it. Hence my recalling that joke, as Four Cousins seems to me a really bad place to find oneself on the road to even a modestly “proper” wine appreciation. (I’m taking that brand – and could have used, for example, Heineken’s 4th Street – to represent the sweet or semi-sweet rosé, white and red that accounts for two-thirds of wine sold in South Africa.) The ladder theorist would have it that it doesn’t really matter where you start to drink wine – there’s such an inherent logic to it that many drinkers (no-one claims all) of appalling wine will gradually clamber upwards to some point where they are drinking, well, non-appalling stuff.
Leave aside for a moment the crucial question of cost per bottle. What was ingratiating once, the theory goes, with experience becomes offensive (egregious sweetness, no real structure or balance, vapid lack of character, etc). To an extent, the ladder idea does clearly hold, if only in retrospect: I’m sure we readers of this website have all “advanced”. But I’d bet a lot (fortunately, perhaps, it’s not easily verifiable) that most of us at some early stage of adult wine-drinking started off with the likes of such decent wines as Tassenberg or Boland Co-op Chenin or Dutoitskloof Sauvignon Blanc. Very few of us (mostly as privileged, fairly comfortably off whites to whose culture wine was not foreign, even if not our parents’ everyday tipple) started our heavy-drinking careers with sweet rosé I’d guess.
Once caught, how anyone escapes the clutches of sweet rosé except perhaps in the direction of brandy and Coke or sweet cocktails is not clear to me, though I hope some do. But it’s not the place to start if Dublin’s shimmering silhouette is the final destination. I’d even suggest it’s the very worst place to start – being more in a quagmire than on a road to anywhere at all. Those who say, well, at least those people are drinking wine, get it wrong. (Unless you’re one of the four cousins, I suppose, and more than content with the masses getting fat in the sticky quagmire of sweet rosé. As an aside, I would support our temperance-leaning government’s including wine in any sugar tax designed to cut down the consumption of over-sweetened junk products, alongside fizzy drinks.)
Another version of the ladder theory uses an architectural metaphor: the “entry-level” wine – where the idea is that you’re on the ground floor of the edifice and will resolutely climb to the top. It’s a much more frequently used metaphor and that’s probably why it irritates me. It’s fine and good for a producer to have an “entry-level” range, especially insofar as it offers cheaper versions of the higher-level, premium wines. But more often than not the real attraction for the wine lover, especially in these days of greedy and aspirational pricing, is the comparative affordability of the wine.
That wine lover is certainly not always buying the entry-level version because it is “easier-going”, an “earlier-drinking” wine – though sometimes, certainly yes, and that’s fair enough. Part of the reason the wine is cheaper could be that, say, the vines are younger; it’s made from higher-cropping or less favourably sited vines; less expensive oaking and maturation are used; cheaper packaging, etc. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, the wine is located thus partly because it hasn’t made it through the selection process for the grand vin. Then the chances are the wines will be closer in style and quality to the smarter stuff. (Think, as superior and not exactly cheap examples, of Buitenverwachting Meifort or Meerlust Red; or of the way that wines rejected as not up to the standard of Chocolate Block trickle down to other Boekenhoutskloof ranges – Porcupine Ridge or even Wolftrap.)
What I find offensive is when the “entry-level wines” are made in a totally different style to the senior ones – too often they’re sweeter, and with little structure (moving in the direction of sweet rosé, that is). That’s why I occasionally have a little campaign to try to find cheaper wines that are drinkable by serious winelovers without vast amounts of money (see here for a recent such search).
Usually, with the mass of second- or third-level wines, it’s not a question of the more abstract elements of quality like complexity, fine balance and ageability being absent. That would be absolutely fine and expected. Rather, though, the wines are, quite simply, deliberately dumbed down, incidentally showing contempt for the customer. Perhaps, sadly, that is what many undemanding wine lovers want from less-expensive wines. But there’s a large market out there for moderately serious-minded, lower-level wines at affordable prices.
My simple point is that too many producers regard “entry-level” drinkers as wanting vulgarly easy wines. Very often not true. They – we – are not floundering around on the lower rungs of a ladder, but just wanting halfway decent wine at a comparatively reasonable price. I must go and look for some more (suggestions welcome).
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