(Michael Green)
The Veritas Awards, established by the South African
National Wine Show, celebrate their 25th anniversary this year. They have
become the best-known yardstick for measuring the quality of South African
wines and brandies.
This year a total of 1,763 entries were submitted to a panel
of international and local judges. Overall 57 double gold, 157 gold, 473 silver
and 662 bronze medals were awarded.
Sauvignon blanc scored the highest number of double gold
medals, followed by cabernet sauvignon and shiraz.
Shiraz was the top-scorer in gold medals, followed by chenin
blanc.
A tasting of many of these splendid wines was presented
recently at Umhlanga, and a very large crowd, many of them people in the liquor
trade, attended.
Your faithful scribe was briefly the centre of attention.
Every year Veritas honours a handful of people who have contributed in one way
or another to the wine industry. This year I was among those chosen and was
presented with an imposing scroll.
The citation said I had been a wine writer for more than 40
years and that, as a newspaper editor, I had been instrumental in having wine
columns regularly published.
I am of course greatly honoured and flattered by all this. I
have never thought of myself as being a particularly distinguished or
significant wine writer, but I have been around for a long time and perhaps the
award is an acknowledgment of long service.
I have always been an enthusiastic consumer of wine, and I
began writing about wine when I came to Durban 47 years ago. I think it fair to
say that in those days there was less interest in wine in this part of the
world than there is now. The KwaZulu/Natalians were the banana boys, not the
grape boys.
Now it is a very different scene. We have wine producers at
Abingdon and Highgate, in the Howick area. And I read recently about a wine
shop in Rosetta in the Natal Midlands. Apparently it keeps a stock of 2,500
different wines.
The official population of Rosetta is 557 men, women and
children, which means that the shop has five different wines for each person.
And some of them probably don’t even drink wine.
My roots are in the Western Cape, and I am happy that as a
wine columnist I have often been invited there. I attended and reported on more
than 20 Nederburg wine auctions. I became friendly with Patrick Grubb, the
celebrated Nederburg auctioneer, and I greatly admired his mastery of the
gentle art of euphemism. When tastings became a little noisy and unruly he
would refer to “palate fatigue”.
Among my friends there are Bennie Howard and Duimpie Bayly,
the first two Cape Wine Masters. We all know the difficulties and perils of
blind tastings of wines. In conversation with me years ago Duimpie Bayly summed
it up neatly. He said: A glance at the label is worth 25 years’ tasting
experience.
Since my retirement from the newspaper world I have written
nearly 300 articles about wine for the artSMart website (http://news.artsmart.co.za)
For the Veritas tasting at Umhlanga I wore a tie with a
badge that says Veritas. The word is of course Latin for Truth, and this is the
motto of Harvard University, where I was a student long, long ago. This is
their tie.
Veritas, Truth, is surely a good watchword for the venerable
Cape wine industry, for a famous American university, and for a humble
journalist as well. – Michael Green
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