Melvyn Minnaar : Potable pleasures
Tradition has been trashed. That’s the general view – not only in Matieland, Melville and Malmesbury, but also in Mozambique – of the terrible Tassenberg Tragedy.
The most famous and best-selling red wine in our country has been bastardised. Tassenberg’s label tells a new, sad truth: the contents in the bottle are a blend produced in South Africa as well as in the Argentine. (The label writer was so unnerved, he got his language screwed up, to the even greater dismay of the boere fans.)
That the heady halcyon days for South African red wine on the export market could come to this is not only a slap in the face for traditionalists, generations of students and labourers, but also for luminaries such as wine expert Dave Hughes and politico-strongman Jonas Savimbi, who adore the simple pleasure of a very well- made wine. A very well-made South African wine, that is.
Whereas the new people’s wine-of-mixed- ancestry may still be pleasantly quaffable (sadly without a trace of character to identify its provenance), the issue of this trans-Atlantic marriage is more complicated – in a cultural, and an economic sense.
Considering the latter, one may very well say that something is wrong if we export just about all our own – note! – ordinary red wine, but can import quite palatable stuff at a price which makes it all worthwhile. Surely the centre cannot hold in such wacky economics!
Far more serious to local wine-drinkers (whose numbers haven’t increased over the years – and no thanks to the wine producers for that) is the sell-out of the tradition and the little of a South African wine culture that there is (again, no thanks).
Look at it this way: With more than six million bottles sold a year, it is the country’s biggest selling red wine. With a history, name and virtually unchanged image going back more than 60 years, it is probably better known than any other wine brand-name in the land – and beyond the borders. How terrible an indictment it is then that in a dynamic wine-making country – that started making the stuff 300 years ago – the most famous of its wines comes partly from another “modern wine-making area”, thousands of kilometres away.
Tassenberg is more than a symbolic wine. It has always found resonance among ordinary people, and more than any of the fancy estate and other names speak about the enjoyment of drinking wine. Writes John Platter in his respected expert guide: “… the wine drinker’s as opposed to taster’s wine … “Usually made from the most unglamorous of the red varietals, the generous cinsaut grape, Tassenberg has for decades been the introduction to wine drinking and joy.
In geopolitical terms, it played its role in Southern Africa. Dave Hughes tells how, years ago, he convinced Stellebosch Farmers Winery to launch Tassenberg beyond the Cape, where it was already very popular. The producers didn’t believe that “blacks drank red wine” at the time. However, “Not only did it catch on with the students in Pretoria and the Portuguese in Johannesburg, but also with [those] mine labourers …” After being exported to the then South West Africa, it travelled further north – hence Jonas Savimbi’s connoisseurship of Stellenbosch’s humble, but honest and most pleasurable Tassies.
So while we’ll still slip a slim bottle of Tassenberg into the shopping trolley, let’s sip a sad toast to the trashing of a tremendous tradition.