Tim James: The Chardonnay scandal – when top SA winemakers faced charges

Forty years ago, a number of the Cape’s leading winemakers and producers seemed, for a while, likely to be charged as criminals. In my usual look at anniversaries in my first article of the year, I neglected to mention this important one.

Now I’ve been reminded by Paul Nugent about the date of the Klopper Commission of Enquiry while I was reading his wholly welcome 2024 academic history of South African wine in, largely, the twentieth century: Race, Taste and the Grape. (I’ll have more to say about the book once I’ve digested it a little more.) In fact, I did write about the issue in the year of its thirtieth anniversary, in 2016, but it’s worth having a further look, helped by Nugent’s account, as well as by the fuller discussion by another British historian, Gavin Williams, called “Importing chardonnay: A South African political farce” (published by the American Association of Wine Economists; unfortunately the link to the article no loger works).

The full title of Judge Klopper’s document of September 1986 was “Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Cultivar Purity and Illegal Importation of Certain Vine Propagating Material”. Dull enough it sounds, but what has come to be known as the Chardonnay Scandal brought all those prominent wine producers close to being taken to court for illegally bring vines into the country – including the likes of Julius Laszlo, Peter Finlayson, Danie de Wet, Achim von Arnim, Sydney Back, Boland Coetzee, NC Krone….

In fact, Judge Klopper only held back from recommending legal action because “proceedings could on the one hand be an embarrassment to the Government and on the other hand have a negative effect on unity in the wine industry”. (A rather odd pair of reasons for not pursuing criminals, you’d have thought.)

The government had been pushed into establishing the Commission because, by the early 1980s, it had become obvious that illegal imports of vines, circumventing the quarantining and bureaucratic procedures demanded by the state and its agents, had been going on for a decade.

Certainly, by then the authorites, including the KWV which controlled the industry in most ways, had known about the smuggling for a while. It was the question of chardonnay that made it impossible for the authorities to avoid acting. Chardonnay had been the most important variety imported, because clean material was desperately wanted by ambitious grapegrowers and the KWV et al had been, it seems, culpably reluctant at worst, over-scrupulous and tardy at best, to do anything about obtaining better material than the virused stock locally available.

It came in in all sorts of ways, brought in by many people – who acquired “heroic” status for many. But then it emerged, incontrovertibly, that some of what they’d brought in, propagated and dispersed was in fact auxerrois – a decent enough white grape, but not chardonnay, and not on the list of officially allowed varieties. And so, the government appointed Justice Klopper as a one-man commission of enquiry to establish the truth.

Klopper uncovered the participation of numerous individuals, and companies like Rhodes Fruit Farms (Anglo-American) and Distillers. But he also learnt how seriously the wine industry had been held back by excessive delays and difficulties in acquiring clean, desirable planting material. And, as Nugent points out, Klopper revealed “utter confusion as to who ultimately held responsibility for the situation”. Nugent adds that “If ever there was an indictment of the KWV system, the Chardonnay fiasco was it.”

The scandal implicated many aspects of the industry. Sometimes ambiguously, as with the importers who, Gavin Williams suggests, were perhaps heroes, but certainly also foolish in importing “the wrong grapes”. A rather nice bit of embarrassing confusion concerns the importing and propagating of olasz rizling (or riesling), the Hungarian name for Welschriesling, a variety quite unconnected with riesling proper. Williams points out that several wines made from the variety had won medals (including Gold) at the Stellenbosch Wine Shows between 1883 and 1885. In the “riesling” category, of course.

And also of course, what was called “riesling” in the Cape back then was none other than crouchen blanc. Crouchen was, shockingly, allowed by the authorities to keep its usurped name until the 2010 vintage. To me that’s a scandal, but so is the failure of all those importers of olasz riesling, and apparent tolerators of the crouchen masquerader to discern this bit of the truth – despite the fact that half of them (leaving aside Europeans like Laszlo and Pongràcz) had been trained as winemakers at Geisenheim in the heart of Germany. It’s not really acceptable that for a while they were taken in by auxerrois, but they should never have got riesling wrong. Another scandal, for another time.

• Tim James is one of South Africa’s leading wine commentators, contributing to various local and international wine publications. His book Wines of South Africa – Tradition and Revolution appeared in 2013.