Wine Investment in South Africa - Cape Wine Academy

‘It would be depressing indeed to imagine that the Trophy Wine Show judges have
awarded gold medals to red wines representing the best the Cape has to offer’
( James, 2009 ).
Platter’s Wine Guide best wines have not been without their critics abroad also;
‘A recent London tasting of wines rated 4½ and 5 stars by the Platter’s Wine Guide was
described by Times pundit… Jane MacQuitty as a car wreck. “Of the 63 wines I tasted,
only 13 came through as winners… South Africa’s tell-tale dirty, rubbery red wine pong
was there in abundance” ‘ ( Pendock, 2008 ).
Comments like these, despite being made years ago, take a long time to fade in the memory
of international investors.
Domestic palates, after years of isolation, few top foreign wines on domestic shelves and
such a short period of fine wine production, may be at odds with international tastes – and
investment considerations. Neil Pendock is perplexed by blatant variations;
‘That there is a disconnect between international and local palates was demonstrated in
January at the Chenin Challenge when another MW, Cathy van Zyl, correlated at an
impressive -0.77 with panel chair Michael Fridjhon. Sure two judges can disagree on the
odd wine, but when there is such disagreement over all the top wines, confusion reigns
worse than in the Tripoli town council ( Pendock, 2011 ).
Perhaps some reservation should be held over locally judged domestic wines, especially
when compared with top foreign wines by a home jury. Perhaps though, it is just too difficult
to believe for some when comments are published such as those emanating from Jörg
Pfȕtzner’s ‘Big Five’ tasting held recently in Cape Town. Pfȕtzner pitted five SA wines
against five top French wines over five vintages of each and the attendees agreed that the
1995 Kanonkop Paul Sauer ‘totally outperformed the Mouton-Rothschild 1995’, which was
‘so much more youthful and more intricate than the latter’ ( Eedes, 2011 ). In the same
magazine review, Eedes concludes that the Paul Sauer is ‘more than capable of matching
up to a French great.’ Remington Norman’s comments above seem applicable here too
when one considers that there were fewer than 20 local people in attendance and that the
cost of attending all elements of the tasting was R5,000 each ( Wine Magazine and the
author of the above comments were invited free as, one suspects, were the winemakers of
judged wines who were also in attendance ), hardly an unbiased or random sample.
Similar concerns can be raised about the ‘SA Top 100 Wines’ challenge, announced in May
2011. Critics might challenge the concept of the ‘top’ 100 wines in SA ( as the general public
would interpret the results ) knowing that in total only 390 wines were judged. Indeed of the
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