A cynic, said the great Oscar Wilde, is “a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”.
Lacking Wildean succinctness, let me venture that the cynical wine producer sets a price so excessively above his wine’s value that he’s clearly strategising beyond mere sales.
Enter Mark Bilton, who owns the eponymous winery in Stellenbosch and has just released a 2006 cabernet for R3 000 a bottle, more than double the previously most expensive local pretender, another red, a big, ultra-ripe blend from Rust en Vrede.
Internationally many wines cost apparently silly amounts, but most acquired their prices after, rather than before (or instead of), earning some renown for quality.
Little of the Bilton is likely to be sold but this egregious example of “aspirational pricing” presumably aims mostly to add spurious lustre to a name and get it into circulation. The latter at least is working, you observe.
Very, very good
I haven’t tasted the wine and am unlikely to. The serious end of wine journalism was largely not invited to the launch, understandably. Tweeters and bloggers were there, seemingly as impressed as was expected of them. In the Platter Guide, Greg de Bruyn, more generous about some of the estate’s wines, awards it four stars and describes it as a “porty, inky, tannic leviathan”, Journalist Cathy Marston, tasting at the launch, thought it “very, very good”.
A presumed selling point — or discussion point — is that the wine was shunted five times to new oak barrels. To serious wine-lovers this indicates gross vulgarity: the purpose of “500% new oak” could have been only to add wood flavour and provide a story to wow the impressionably ignorant.
The most expensive white wine in South Africa is pitched somewhat lower — although the guiding principle in setting the price was also, I believe, to crow boastfully from the heights. But — marking a difference with Bilton — Steenberg Magna Carta was conceived with the Constantia winery’s established great reputation for its sauvignon blanc and semillon — the grape varieties of which the blend is composed.
The second bottling of the wine, 2009, was released recently at R440 (there was no 2008 as quality was deemed inadequate).
That wine was launched at a serious dinner party at Steenberg and bravely shared the table with some great wines from Champagne and Burgundy, which provided context for claims about quality. I tasted it again recently, with Steenberg’s Semillon and Sauvignon Blanc Reserve of the same vintage — also expensive wines, approaching R200 bottle.
Worth the price?
Again I was convinced of Magna Carta’s superb, subtle quality — it happily stands with the best examples of the magisterial class of South African blends in the tradition of Bordeaux (Vergelegen is the pioneer and best known). Worth the price? Well, yes, if you can afford it and are happy to leave it to its own mysterious development, somewhere cool and dark, for three or four years at least.
Incidentally, on the strength of just two vintages, Magna Carta is one of only 10 wines nominated by all the professional selectors in a poll reported on the Grape website, naming South Africa’s 100 best wines.
Also on the top 100 list is one of the Cape’s undoubted great white bargains, at about R35 — Kleine Zalze Bush Vine Chenin Blanc. Zero percent new oak. Zero cynicism.