ones
Sommeliers, or rather the lack of them, are one of the main differences between a South African fine-dining experience and the equivalent in France or Germany.
The approach run to the hamlet of Hattenheim, coming down from Kloster Eberbach, the medieval monastery where Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose was filmed, was a bit of a challenge. An early March blizzard had dumped eight inches of snow onto the Rheingau. Here, in winter, if the snow tyres lose their grip on the cobbled street, either the suitably named ICE (Inter-City Express) or the medieval German masonry gets you. If you make the bend, you come to a half-timbered Weinhaus called Zum Krug. Most German restaurants seem to be called zum something or other and this one translates as ‘zum jug’. Or zum very expensive French champagne.
Battling the blizzard from Frankfurt, we had stopped only once for a tasting at Weingut Künstler at Hochheim am Main. Of all the Rheingau Rieslings, like Rüdesheim, Johannisberg and Hochheim, Queen Victoria preferred the last, hence the generic term Hoch for a fine Rhine wine. Or, as Basil Fawlty might have put it, Vic certainly knew her Bordeaux from her claret.
The wines of Hochheim, and those of Gunter Künstler in particular, were assured of renewed British interest, with the winery displaying the FIFA logo on its Riesling labels in the run-up to the World Cup that summer. As the man pouring the wine in the Weingut put it, the aim was to offer an alternative to beer-swilling soccer hooligans (Riesling rioters, perhaps?). Quite how English supporters pronounced names like Kirchenstück, Stielweg and Domdechaney was not reported.
There are differences between a Rheingau tasting and one in Rawsonville: the German affair was free and we were offered multiple vintages of two wines – a white (the inevitable Riesling) and a red, Spätburgunder (Pinot Noir to the rest of the world). At a Cape tasting, by contrast, every possible style is available, from sparkling to racy Sauvignon Blanc, woody Chardonnay, crackerjack Shiraz, a Boere-Bordeaux blend, rustic Pinotage, the odd sticky and perhaps a port.
Faced with an interminable crawl back to Frankfurt, a pit stop at ‘zum jug’ sounded like a good idea. Did it matter that we had no reservation, that unbeknown to us this was the second day of the Rheingau Gourmet and Wine Festival or even that we were wearing jeans from Mr Price? Not at all.
The youngest diners in the restaurant by a generation or two (and undoubtedly the poorest by an even larger margin), we were ushered into a wooden-clad inner sanctum complete with quasi-religious statues of St Vincent bearing a bunch of grapes by a band of waitress Valkyries. We were clearly in for some serious business if the heft of the wine list and the number of adjectives attached to each menu option was any indication.
With all the wines grown within spitting distance, the services of a good sommelier were not just nice to have, but essential. And this one certainly knew her Hock from her Riesling. She even had a favourable opinion of South African wine, having sampled an elegant Mont du Toit red blend on the island of Sylt in the North Sea. We started with a 2002 from Georg Breuer with a delicious concentration to match the home-cured Lachs and then moved on to something a touch sweeter from Winckelmann for the calf’s liver.
The gift of a place like Zum Krug is making accidental connoisseurs out of refugees from a storm. In this age of pretentious gastronomic twaddle, with every jus now a foam and different shaped Riedels for sparkling and still water, this is the best kind of connoisseur to be.
Genuine ones
‘But the bitch keeps bitching snitcher keeps snitching dropping names and telephone numbers and all … ’
(M. Jagger and K. Richards, Little T&A)
As I had already written a story for the Sunday Times throwing some question marks at the inaugural Tasting Academy announced by WINE magazine in 2007, which offered ‘certificates of competency’ to successful punters, it would have been hypocritical of me to refuse when invited to attend. Although the bill for R3,990 that followed confirmed that this academy was no laughing matter.
The highlight turned out to be the UK wine identity imported first class to give the affair some mega gravitas. Robert Parker described Bristol wine merchant Bill Baker as ‘a small and jealous person who should consider selling refrigerators’. Rick Stein’s popular BBC food programme, ‘Food Heroes’, was bombarded with hate mail aimed at Bill after he suggested Rick add some wheels and a motor to Chalky when his beloved dog died.
Baker was a wine merchant from Bristol and consultant to Terence Conran’s international stable of restaurants one of the sharpest palates in the business. Bill put together the first wine list for Bibendum and the Conran stable has grown like Topsy and now consists of 23 restaurants in London, three in Copenhagen and one in New York.
This Conran connection saves Bill from being regarded as a country hick wine merchant and he is shown (translation: gets to taste) all the important imports into the UK, the largest market for imported wine in the world.
A larger-than-life Falstaffian character with an infectious laugh, Bill was star instructor at the Tasting Academy. Most of the time, his opinion agreed with perceived South African wisdom, with the embarrassing exception of a Chenin Blanc, awarded five stars by the magazine two days before. Bill left it out of the medals, commenting, ‘the acidity is all over the place. It won’t keep’. But then his benchmark was the Loire. Which perhaps explains why Chenin is such a hard sell in Blighty, with different criteria clearly in play.
The Baker passion for food and wine was kindled at Peterhouse, Cambridge, while he was studying history of art:
‘The dean of my college, a priest, had done someone a favour and had been given “a special bottle” of wine – which turned out to be a Château Latour ’61. He invited a couple of us to taste it after dinner and I was blown away. I couldn’t believe that something could be that powerful and that complex.’
A career as wine merchant at Reid Wines in the West Country followed, a fortunate choice, as UK wine consumption was on the brink of a hedonistic explosion, rather like that bottle of Latour thirty years ago. Explains Bill:
‘There’s been a huge change of lifestyle in the UK and dining out in restaurants has replaced drinking in pubs. Many pubs are turning into gastro-pubs and people are going out more and spending more money. There has been a huge rise in awareness around good food and wine.
‘Twenty years ago the food was crap, but now you can find good food at every price level and the natural bev for food is wine. The rise and rise of rosé is a good example. Drinking rosé is seen as being sophisticated and the Bridget Jones’s Diary thing had a huge effect on Chardonnay sales.’
While 85 per cent of the UK wine retail market is covered by supermarkets and bottle store chains, Bill notes that independent merchants offering something special are on the rise. Indeed, the only way to survive, he says, ‘is to offer things the supermarkets don’t have’.
Bill was surprised to hear that South African sales to the UK had fallen sharply, down 18 per cent on the previous year:
‘Out in the countryside, people are very well disposed towards South Africa. In fact they’d much rather order a bottle of South African wine than French because they hate the French so much. At the entry level, prices of South African wines are slightly too high – the favourable rand/pound exchange rate often doesn’t get translated into value in the bottle. You need the quality of Jacob’s Creek at a similar price point to get people started buying South African on the quality ladder. But in the £5–£11 category, which we concentrate on, the quality of South African wine is extremely
