Avenue Vine

Fine wine and cars have not always been a happy marriage and we're not talking drink driving here. Christo Wiese for one won't forget in a hurry the mauling the UK's petrolhead-in-chief Jeremy Clarkson handed out to Lanzerac wines tasted after a Jaguar launch in Stellenbosch a couple of years ago. And the local experience is shaping up to be as equally fraught.

In poll position on the local grid is BMW with their Great Wine Series launched earlier this year at the Local Grill in Sandton. A tasting of the top ten South African reds over the past decade as chosen by restaurant owner Owen McDonald and Hennops River wine diva Junel Vermeulen, the point was made that not all South African reds smell like the pits at Kyalami, in spite of what UK gurus Jane MacQuitty and Tim Atkin report.

Next up is Lexus who have taken over the sponsorship of the annual Shiraz Challenge run by WINE magazine. Reading the tasting write-up on the Wine website, the Audi slogan Vorsprung durch Technik (advancement through technology) springs to mind. For this was a tasting by numbers if ever there was one. But does South African wine "leap ahead" through such activities? Let's look at the numbers.

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114 wines entered, 25 given a free pass to the second round of tasting, with 5 (including presumably the ultimate winner) chosen from the remaining 89 via a blind tasting. I'll leave it to producers to decide whether such a system is fair but for the punter in the wine bar a bit of Brett may be detected.

Five judges presided. Let's call them Mr. Blonde, Mr. Blue, Mr. Brown, Mr. Orange and Mr. Pink following Quentin Tarantino's lead in Reservoir Dogs, in an attempt to play the ball and not the man. In fact three of the gentlemen are actually ladies.

Mr. Blonde's orneriness may be quantified using Spearman's Rank Correlation Coefficient. In plain language, if we assume WINE's ranking (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) is "the truth" a fair judge will have a Spearman RCC of +1, while a totally perverse one will rank the wines (7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1) with a Spearman RCC of -1.

The Spearman RCCs of our Reservoir Dogs is (-0.21, 0.50, 0.64, 0.79, 0.46) confirming that Mr. Orange was the "best" taster (Spearman RCC 0.79) while Mr. Blonde was the "worst" (Spearman RCC -0.21). Perversely, it is the comments of Mr. Blonde that are most frequently quoted in the accompanying write up, even though he's at odds with all other tasters. Mr. Blonde also runs a tasting academy on the side, so perhaps his long term plan is to convert all the other judges along the lines of the holdout juror in Sydney Lumet's 12 Angry Men.

Tim James, associate editor of the Platter guide, makes a telling point on his autobiographical blog describing his experiences during the annual sighted tasting marathon. "One of the problems that we Platter tasters have to cope with when taking over responsibility for a winery from another taster is to deal with the situation where one disagrees with the assessment of the previous taster." Since Messrs Blonde and Orange are both Platter pundits, their discordance means that the whole Platter planetarium needs calibrating relative to taster (at least for Shiraz).

The Lexus Challenge implies that a highly rated Orange Shiraz will not find favour with Mr. Blonde, and vice-versa. Perhaps tasting in pairs is one way forward or in panels where maverick opinions may be discarded as outliers. Although averaging scores does have a habit of advancing mediocrity.

Whatever the ultimate resolution, Lexus should be thanked for once again confirming that quality/beauty/luxury is a point of view and not an absolute. As Mr. Blue noted in a letter to WINE in August, success in wine shows "is part of a journey to quality, rather than a destination". A journey best taken in a Lexus, perhaps.

Source: “Lexus Shiraz Challenge,” Neil Pendock, WineCoZa, July 25, 2008