In vino veritas?

One of the guilty bottles had picked up a double gold at the veritas wine awards, which in  South Africa is about as good as it gets

AS PR disasters go, South Africa’s latest seems, at first sight, to be about as bad as it gets. Okay, so maybe the discovery that KWV winemakers have been adding fruit flavourings to their Sauvignon Blancs is less emotive than the famous Austrian glycol scandal, where the press latched onto the word anti-freeze to destroy the country’s wine exports for a decade.

But the idea of Cape winemakers fiddling with their tanks is still not going to do much to boost the country’s reputation abroad.  Ever since the whistle was blown by wine critic Michael Fridjhon 12 plus months ago that producers were adding a few "extras" to their wine, the industry has gone into damage limitation overdrive.

It was almost certainly a few unscrupulous small producers, we were told, people who only sold their wine in the domestic market and at very low prices.  So for the international markets, we were told, it was business as usual.

This is why the news is so shocking. KWV is not some tin-pot producer making masses of cheap rubbish for the South African bag-in-box market.  It’s one of the country’s biggest wine producers, and highly active on the export front.

The discovery that not one, but two of its winemakers were bending the rules is, in the short term, damaging for the company and the country alike.  At issue isn’t the flavour of the wines themselves – one of the guilty bottles had picked up a double gold at the Veritas wine awards, which in South Africa is about as good as it gets.

And, of course, none of the wines is dangerous to health.  No, what’s under the spotlight is the soul of wine itself – that it should be an expression of the place it comes from and the year it was harvested, not something cobbled together in a scientist’s lab.

In an age where it’s possible simply to tip orange juice and vodka into a bottle, give it a jazzy label and sell it for huge profits, this might seem oddly esoteric, but such purity is what wine has always been about.

Lose that, and the whole product loses its aspirational attraction, its romantic purity, if you like. Which is why, viewed another way, the whole episode is actually something of a triumph, not just for wine in general but for South Africa in particular.

It proves that the self-policing measures the industry introduced a year ago are working, and that rather than brush the matter under the carpet as they would have almost certainly done 10 years back, the men from the Cape are hell-bent on cleaning up their industry.

As one South African told me darkly, "We’re not the only country who has trouble with this issue – it’s just that we’re the only ones who are facing up to it and doing something about it."  All of which puts the whole event in a rather different perspective.

Green for go

Different perspectives for Diageo, too, who, after a year of negative headlines for its Scotch division over the Cardhu debacle, is back in print for the right reasons.

The launch of Johnnie Walker Green might, essentially, be a rebranding of the company’s Pure Malt (a category soon to be relabelled as blended malt at the request of the Scotch Whisky Association), but it’s a good one, and proof that this category is starting to get some serious weight behind it.

For starters, the whisky itself is great and, at 18 years old, neatly plugs the gap between Johnnies Black and Gold.  Initial sales have seen it flying off the shelves in Taiwan, and it will be interesting to see if it can, as planned, get up to a third of a million cases by 2006.

Certainly, it will if the packaging is anything to go by, because it looks terrific, right down to the dreamy black and white pictures of moody Scottish scenes from some of the distilleries used in the blend.

But, for all that, these shots of Islay, Skye and Speyside look marvellous, theirs is the one rather jarring presence in an otherwise impressive product.  Partly this is because Green is a blend of 16 malts, not four, and partly  because it suggests a slightly unfocused idea of who the whisky is aimed at.

As a trade up from Black (surely the majority of Green’s future consumers), it doesn’t need the mini-profiles of the distilleries – and might even confuse confirmed blended drinkers who are clearly more interested in taste and conferred prestige than they are in geography.

But nor am I convinced that sticking a few distillery names on the pack will, as Diageo clearly hopes, hook in single malt drinkers of, say, Talisker.  Single malts have succeeded not because they’re better whiskies but because they have a unique sense of place.

By definition, blends can never have that, so it is actually counter-productive to take on malts in the area where they are strongest.  What Green has is not provenance, but freshness and balance, and to my mind Diageo would have been better off concentrating on that.