The ebullient Keith Dudula is busy with a pitch when I arrive at the Winesense store in Melville. He’s showing an inquisitive customer, Ruth, around the new shop. Designed by DHK Interior Design, it’s all brushed metal and blonde wood, with surprisingly little wine on display. It is unlike any bottle store that you’re likely to have been into lately.
How do you choose your wine? Many people tend to find something they like and stick to it. Perhaps your father used to drink Nederburg Baronne? Or (though unlikely) a friend left a bottle of Springfield behind after a party. Unless you live in the Western Cape, there are few opportunities outside of wine shows to taste and compare, unless you lash out on a different bottle every time you visit a bottle store — and the staff are not really trained to dispense expert advice. After fighting your way past the beer and Smirnoff Spin promotions, usually all there is to go on is the price and the label.
For a wine-producing country, South Africans drink surprisingly little of the stuff. According to the recently published Essential Guide to South African Wines, we consume only eight litres per capita per annum in contrast to countries like Italy and France, where the average citizen will consume about 50 litres a year. But no matter. South Africa now produces some of the finest wine in the world, and while there will always be a place for, say, a Châteauneuf-du-Pape, the country is set to become a ‘world player”.
According to the guide, ‘South Africa is one of the few New World wine countries that may have the ability to exhibit the fine qualities, elegance, balance and restraint comparable to truly great Old World wines”.
The beauty of Winesense is that you can taste the wines before you buy them, which even the most obliging of bottle store owners would be hard pressed to emulate.
It works like this: the wines are stored (the right way up, so you can read the labels) in climate-controlled, steel glass-fronted cabinets with discreet catheters snaking into the bottles. They are smart vending machines with a slot for your smart card, spouts for the wine and a digital readout showing how much credit you’ve loaded on to the card. A tot costs about R3. And in case you lose track, the card will keep a record of what you’ve tasted.
On the afternoon I visited the store, we worked our way through some of the Cape’s sauvignon blancs from Darling, then Elgin, Cape Agulhas, Hermanus, and finished up at Cape Point. They have tasting glasses, jugs of cool water, silver spittoons and little plates of biscuits.
The first wine I tasted was an unoaked 2006 Groote Post from Darling. It’s a fresh, easy drinking wine with plenty of green fruit and, as Dudula says, perfect before a game of tennis.
Then we tried the 2005 Quoin Rock, with its nose of tropical fruit, and the 206 HPF (Hermanspietersfontein), which Dudula pronounced as ‘intriguing”.
I must admit, after the third or fourth tasting, I was becoming confused. I couldn’t tell my grass from my green pepper.
Ruth, now with two pink spots on her cheeks, declared that Winesense tastings allow one to make one’s choices independently without having to ‘listen to some crap the wine seller tells you”. And even if they did have an open bottle to hand, ‘you don’t know how long the wine had been there in some dirty fridge”.
Find Winesense at the Bamboo Centre on Rustenburg Road, Melville. Winesense will be opening another four shops in Cape Town and Gauteng before the end of the year. Prices range from R35 to R460, though the average is about R80. Go to www.winesense.co.za, or call (021) 702 0128 or (011) 482 1020 for more information