Having been brought up in Boksburg, my taal was not up to snuff enuff to understand all the proceedings of Veritas on Saturday night. The Ollo white blend from Altydgedacht didn’t help, either. And not many other people at my table new exactly what “ervaar uitnemendheid” projected Big Brother style on the walls meant either. Not even RJ Botha who looked pretty uitnemend himself. It’s a bit like guessing what Sauvignon Blanc tastes like – the Veritas Bronzes of the FNB Top Ten, the ones made by well-hung winemakers that sighted Platter lonely hearts with dodgy teeth prefer or the Double Golds of Veritas themselves.
For there is precious little overlap, in fact downright contradiction rather. So which wines will the Big Man of SBIG, Pieter de Waal, be pouring for the international Somms, no doubt in his personal capacity, at 3pm on Tuesday at Uitkyk? Obviously FNB faves as he is the very Ask Pieter the tasting chair would quiz whether the panel had missed anything during the “blind tasting.”
So this is why WOSA did not ask the party of visiting sommeliers to the Veritas Awards dinner or the CWG Auction in case they tasted the “wrong” wines. This censorship of non-conformist brands is a scandal and obviously the reason my own Lemoenfontein Pinotage was frozen out of tomorrow morning’s Swartland Producer Tasting featuring “Adi Badenhorst, Sadie Family Wines, Lammershoek, Mount Abora, Kloovenburg, Mullineux Wines, Porseleinberg, Babylons Peak, David Sadie, Riebeek Cellars, Swartland Winery.” As lunch is at the Royal Hotel they can always nip across the road and buy a bottle from Anton Espost and send WOSA the bill. A tank sample of Dora and Beulah, my upcoming brace of Gay Wines, can also be arranged if Krige Visser is on hand.
This is the real tragedy of the latest Sauvignon Scandal – no one knows what the FNB Faves, the Veritas Veritables or the Platter Positives taste like. If Veritas really wants to bring some uitnemendheid to the game as National Wine show chair Charles Hopkins (above) declared, next time they taste 1800 SA wines, in addition to scoring out of 20, they should ask their esteemed judges to rate them out of five in terms of sweetness, ripeness v. greenness, body, texture, ageability for the Shop-A-Google app I’m developing for Smart Phones. WhiskyGPS is already being beta-tested and this is the wine application. Called “Ask MJ” it will blast the current ridiculous dead-end to kingdom come and do for wine guides what GPS did to books of maps. What a pity Diners Club invested heavily in the Platter dinosaur as a branded smart phone app would have been far sexier. Still there’s always VISA or MasterCard to ask.
For the time has come to set the consumer free and let her discover that the fresh and fruity Sauvignon with a creamy palate under R100 is the Bartinney 2013 on the third shelf from the bottom in aisle C of the Tops at Spar in Ida’s Valley, next to the Glenryk Pilchards. A bit like how I eventually found out the meaning of uitnemendheid (above). Terroir Through TechnologyTM. Has a nicely MJ ring to it. How about it, MJ?
