was billeted in the luxurious Lanzerac Hotel in Stellenbosch, and an evening tour of the estate cellar was laid on for him and his wife. The result: a PR pile-up, when Clarkson described the all-singing, all-dancing Lanzerac cellar as:
‘Full of huge steel vats and pressure gauges. It was like being in a nuclear power station’ with the end result ‘pretty much like the stuff that comes from the outlet pipe at Sellafield [a nuclear power station in the northwest of England]. I doubt the French would put it in their windscreen-washer bottles.’
Lanzerac becomes a symbol for South African wine and Jezzer develops his antipathy into a theme running right through the story. On the evidence of one evening’s tasting, South African wine is given the flick: ‘You certainly don’t go to South Africa for the viniculture.’
We shouldn’t be too surprised; after all, Clarkson is no stranger to xenophobic controversy. As Wikipedia records, at the Birmingham Motor Show, he claimed the people working on the Hyundai stand had eaten a dog and that the designer of the Hyundai XG had probably had a spaniel for his lunch. German fan belts last 1,000 years (a reference to Hitler and his 1,000-year Reich), while his reaction to the slow response in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was: ‘Most Americans barely have the brains to walk on their back legs.’
And yet, by his own admission, Clarkson is no wine expert. He once noted in a review:
‘When you’re out for dinner, why does the waiter invite you to taste the wine? Why doesn’t he do it himself? He’s the expert and as a general rule most customers would struggle to tell the difference between a 1945 Château Petrus and a glass of Ribena. I certainly fall into this category. I know nothing about viniculture and, having smoked half a million Marlboros, have no taste buds either. You could pee in a glass and if it were chilled enough I’d be happy.’
Which, nonetheless, didn’t stop him trashing Lanzerac and, by extension, South African wine. His smoking habit rings true. He was expelled from his English public school, Repton (founded in 1557), ‘for drinking and smoking’, before going on to sell Paddington Bear toys for his parents and, from there, to journalism.
Not that he’s by any stretch a gastronomic ignoramus, having claimed to have eaten seal flipper, which tasted ‘exactly like licking a hot Turkish urinal’. He’s also tried whale, which ‘tastes like steak, but with an iron tang’.
‘The waiter asked if I wanted some grated puffin on my whale and how do you say no to something like that?’ Which all sounds a bit like a Monty Python sketch.
However, Clarkson draws the line at turtle: ‘I’ve eaten snakes, dogs, small, whole birds in France and crocodiles, but Tommy Turtle is my line in the sand. I don’t care if turtles turn out to be the antidote for cancer, I’m not eating even a small part of one and that’s that.’
When it comes to buying wine, Jezzer offers a few tips: ‘For home consumption I have two very simple rules designed to make sure my guests don’t spend the night driving the porcelain bus. I never spend less than £10 on a bottle, and I only buy stuff that’s French.’ Which rules out South African on both counts, with most Cape cuvées languishing at the £3.99 level in the UK.
South Africa, though, is not the only wine producer to get the Clarkson treatment:
‘I’m told the Bulgarians make a decent drop these days, but I imagine that they also make a lot of rubbish. And how are you supposed to know which is which? Which will take you out with the immediacy of a poisoned umbrella and which will be like angels copulating on your tongue? Maybe wine should come with press cuttings on the label, such as you find outside a West-End theatre: “An absolute corker” (Oz Clarke). “I’d rather lick a monkey’s nostril” (Jilly Goolden).’
That said, pundits are not the complete solution, since they:
‘ … talk in a language that nobody understands. You think torque and scuttle-shake are a dark art? I once heard Goolden say that one wine tasted like “hot handbags in a Bovril factory”. Is that a good thing? Anyway, because of this wine minefield, I always breeze past the offerings from Uruguay and Tibet and buy only French. In the same way that people who know nothing about cars only buy BMWs. There’s a sense you can’t go too far wrong.’
Recent developments, however, might spoil his love affair with le vin français:
‘Now, though, it seems like my simple and rather brilliant plan is to be wrecked, because Australia recently overtook France as the biggest wine supplier to Britain and the French have decided to fight back by making Aussie-style, easy-on-the-palate, industrialised global plonk.’
An observation confirmed by the news that French authorities are to permit the use of oak chips as a wine-flavouring additive and sanction the use of the Australian spinning cone to reduce alcohol levels. In addition, the names of grape cultivars are to be permitted on the labels of wines classified as vin de pays and above.
Clarkson, who is something of an old fogey at heart, is not well pleased:
‘This move has traditionalists in France in a state of high dudgeon, and I’m not surprised. For them it’s the thin end of the wedge, an Anglo-Saxon free-market hammer blow to their subsidised villagey way of life. For these people, with their berets and their pre-war tractors, wine should speak of its origins and taste of the soil in which it was grown. And who cares if no one actually buys it. I have no idea what they’re talking about, of course. If I tried a wine that tasted of soil I’d send it back straight away. But I know what they mean and they’re right.’
British Sunday newspapers have a habit of sending inappropriate celebrities to South Africa to report on wine. The Sunday Telegraph did it a couple of years ago when they packed former England cricket captain David Gower off on a wine tour with their wine pundit, Robert Joseph. Tasting at Meerlust, Gower opined: ‘If anyone catches me trying to buy this wine, will they please shoot me?’ of his host’s Chardonnay 1999, a wine rated four stars (out of five) in Platter’s, with John Platter himself on hand as part of the Gower tasting.
John Platter is a victim of collateral damage in the many and messy fights involving the eponymous wine guide, which he sold a decade ago. Which is perhaps to be expected as Platter is an old and venerable brand. Historian Peter Ackroyd reports in London (Chatto & Windus, 2001) that in the early 17th century, Thomas Platter described ‘endless inns … beer and wine shops for every imaginable growth, alicant, canary, muscatels, clarets, Spanish, Renish’. One wonders whether the ‘endless inns’ paid to be included in that ancient Platter guide, as is the case with the contemporary one.
Editors love it when inappropriate connoisseurs like Clarkson and Gower pronounce on wine. But the big difference between Clarkson on cars and Platter on wine is that British motoring journalism is consumer-driven, with Clarkson credited with single-handedly destroying both the Vectra and the Vauxhall reputation, for example. Indeed, Clarkson’s annual Sunday Times ‘Car of the Year’ feature highlights the worst as well as the best. By way of contrast, a cynical summary of South African wine commentary as increasing degrees of fabulousness would not be too far off the mark, paid for as it often is by the wine producers themselves.
While indisputably useful, a list of the worst wines available to consumers is unlikely, however, to gain much traction in the producer-driven world of South African winespeak. With Clarkson’s main aim to entertain, his comments on cars, wines and life in general are hugely entertaining and a breath of fresh air – the kind you get driving a Jaguar XK with the hood down at 130mph.
Sometimes, the fickle finger of fate conspires to thrust connoisseurship into your lap.
