The Big Wine Debate: Pendock Vs Platter

Pistols at dawn: Wine critic Neil Pendock, above, and Philip van Zyl, editor of the Platter wine guide, below, are at loggerheads about the way the popular wine guide 
 
Tim James, associate editor of the Platter wine guide, calls Sunday Times wine columnist Neil Pendock “a self-styled ‘rich fatty’” in the October edition of Noseweek and accuses him of waging “a relentless onslaught” against the guide over the past few years — to the point of madness even.

November is wine guide month. Although most winemakers head off to Gonnemanskraal and few wines are actually released in the run-up to Christmas, wine guides are popular stocking fillers. And the first priority of wine guides is selling books, not wine.

The largest (sales north of 60 000 copies) and most successful (costs covered by ads for guesthouses and restaurants) is Platter, with a maiden vintage dating back to 1980. The 2009 edition will be launched on November 13. Platter is an SA interpretation of a format pioneered by UK wino Hugh Johnson with his Pocket Wine Book, first published in 1977.

The eponymously elegant John Platter, father of SA wine writing, retired over a decade ago, when the guide was sold to publisher Andrew McDowell. Platter’s polished palate was replaced by an oral rugby team of insiders including winemakers, PR luvvies, retailers and highly paid consultants tasked with assessing and scoring wines. Even the chairman of Backsberg signed up.

Wines are rated sighted, which is where the trouble starts. With a consultant to Checkers on the panel, is it any wonder that Spar refuses to submit its wines for sighted tastings? Individual producers, such as Kobus Deetlefs in the unfashionable Breedekloof appellation, refuse to play until the playing fields are levelled and issue press releases explaining their stand — which translates to a boycott until tastings are conducted blind or stars are abandoned in favour of descriptions.

Some top-end producers such as Steenberg and Boekenhoutskloof refuse to have specific wines rated; while others, such as Nederburg cellar master Razvan Macici, would dearly like to pull their brands from the guide but are repeatedly overruled by marketing departments, who have noticed that many star-struck restaurants include Platter ratings on wine lists while retailers use them to advertise wine.

When Macici was told that Nederburg would never get a five-star stunner (“You’re too big and too unsexy,” he was told) his frustration was understandable. But that may be about to change, as Nederburg was the best-performing cellar at the Old Mutual Trophy Wine Show this year. Although the show is owned by a Platter pundit, assessments were done blind.

Sighted tasting is clearly in trouble when vinous superstars such as Adi Badenhorst (who made Rustenberg wines for a decade and now owns Kalmoesfontein on the Paardeberg) refuse to submit wines for sighted assessment.

While Platter may protest that it is a guide, not a wine show, bottle stickers have now appeared, raising (or perhaps lowering) the guide to the same level as competitions. But there is a difference. With the exception of some tastings run by WINE magazine (in which entrants are controversially seeded beforehand on reputation), the overwhelming majority of SA and international competitions assess submissions blind. That is the only fair way to do it, as the editor of US magazine Wine Spectator will tell you.

The whole furore over sighted versus blind tasting would be hilarious if it wasn’t so commercially desperate, as the depressing tale of Peter de Wet and his Excelsior Cabernet 2006 (reported by Sally Evans in The Times in August) confirms. Sighted, the wine rates 1½ stars ; but when De Wet challenged the guide to repeat the test blind, it got 3½ — an amazing reversal of fortune with huge financial implications.

The Excelsior example is by no means the only one. Brought to my attention by the producer himself, I wrote about it as it has implications for consumers and those who hate snobs stamping on the tail of the underdog.

If this is “vindictive monomania” as Noseweek’s Platter pundit alleges, he’ll get the whole righteous asylum when my new book, Sour Grapes, is launched by Tafelberg on Guy Fawkes Day.