Michael Fridjhon: Has SA wine forgotten the lessons of the SAA Shield?

This month sees the 30^th anniversary of the SAA Shield, the wine test match sponsored by an altogether more outward looking and innovative version of our national carrier than anything a younger generation of South Africans could ever imagine. It was hosted in Cape Town with judges from Australia and South Africa as well as so-called neutral nations (the UK, the USA and France, amongst others). The South African selection was arrived at largely by consensus, and with most of the major official bodies involved in the process. (This is material: in the aftermath of the result – about which more in a moment – there was a bloodfest of recrimination, with many who had consented to the process seeking to blame everyone and anyone else for South Africa’s poor showing).

Wines were entered by both countries across a number of classes. The end result saw Australia thump the South Africa by 78 points to 21, a drubbing which no one except myself and John Platter had even contemplated. Perhaps we were the only ones for whom the loss was no surprise: we knew, possibly better than most of the producers, how far the Cape had fallen behind in the world of international wine through the years of isolation. Unlike the others who had participated in the selection, management and judging process, we hoped to shock the industry out of the complacency into which the boom export years which followed Mandela’s release had lulled it.

Lessons in humility

It’s worth trying to imagine how this felt. The Springboks, equally compromised by over a decade of isolation, had somehow managed to secure victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup. The wine industry was deeply imbued with rugby culture and fondly (in fact naively) imagined that the same commitment and team spirit would somehow transform clumsily-made wines from appalling virused vineyards into world-beaters.

The SAA Shield was (as it was intended to be – at least by us) the wake-up call we needed. Just because the world markets were thirsty for wines from the Rainbow Nation didn’t mean that they were worthy of the hype: demand was a function of their relative exoticism. Their newfound international availability didn’t make them exceptional any more than the Publication Control Board’s unbanning of Playboy turned it into a literary journal.

In the years which followed the 1995 Shield the country’s wine producers were forced to open their eyes to the reality of how much had been lost as the walls of the laager closed in on South Africa. The first and most important stirrings of the new consciousness came from the new generation in the cellars, many of whom had landed their jobs just as South Africa was again welcomed in the outside world. Within a few years the largest non-Antipodean contingent at the Australian technical conference came from South Africa. Oz Clarke, who had been one of the Shield judges, subsequently argued that it was this new generation who truly learned the lessons of the Shield and drove the process which saw the Cape assume its rightful place on the world stage.

The changes took time – though South Africa’s resounding success at the Tri-Nations Chardonnay Challenge hosted at Cowra in 1998 showed that where we had decent virus-free vineyards we could be competition-ready quite quickly. In the longer term it required a restructuring of the industry (to ensure sufficient availability of suitable planting material) as well as a new generation in charge of the wineries for the country to become – in the words of several overseas critics – “the most exciting wine industry in the world.”

Avoiding complacency – again

What the Shield did achieve was to deny the industry the comfort-zone of its own echo- chamber. We were uncompetitive in part because we chose not to compete. Former Nederburg cellarmaster Günter Brözel once said to me (with some seriousness I should add) that “South Africa makes the best South African wines in the world.” In the aftermath of the Shield – and years ahead of my even thinking of an alternative competition to Veritas – I went to senior officials of the national wine show and proposed changes in the way wines were judged. Included in my suggestions were smaller panels (three judges only) as well as discussion between the panellists to achieve a consensus-driven result. I also suggested that more rigorous training of panellists was essential. These proposals fell on deaf ears, and this in turn lead to my engaging with the late Harold Eedes to create the Trophy Wine Show.

I believe that a properly managed rigorous judging environment is essential for the health and future of the industry. Wine judging in the New World is largely based on the agricultural show system where the rationale has always been that an independent judiciary contributes to “improving the breed.” This has certainly been true of Australia – which is why the show system there is so robust and why even the best known and most strongly branded wines enter the major shows. Wines like Grange and the Penfold’s Show bins (the legendary Bin 60A, for example) established themselves through their competition successes.

Fearfully I think the same smugness which characterised the industry at the tail-end of the isolation era is again upon us. Fewer and fewer producers are prepared to expose their wines to unsighted tastings. This cannot be because of the judging (though it has to be said that some competitions seem more concerned about the optics of the panels than their tried-and tested judging-competence. There is a pool of judging talent deeper than at any time in our history. But if you look around you will see that most of the big name producers would rather trumpet Tim Atkins’s sighted scores than submit their wines to an environment in which the contents of the bottle, rather than the label, are what gets assessed.

I’m not suggesting that blind tastings are above criticism: even the best panels make mistakes. In addition, wine is performance art and some wines simply don’t do well on the day. Is this disastrous for producers? I don’t think so (perhaps for their egos but not for their brands). Strongly established wines won’t lose sales because of a poor competition showing; they will certainly gain credibility and a following from solid results delivered by a credible panel. But without a willingness to be exposed to honest commentary/criticism (and blind tasting is the only guaranteed honest feedback a producer can hope for) we are at risk of slipping back into the echo chamber from which the 1995 SAA Shield rescued us just in time.

• Michael Fridjhon has over thirty-five years’ experience in the liquor industry. He is the founder of Winewizard.co.za and holds various positions including Visiting Professor of Wine Business at the University of Cape Town; founder and director of WineX – the largest consumer wine show in the Southern Hemisphere and chairman of The Trophy Wine Show.