WINE APPRECIATION | FEATURE
Wine, vilisation’s
Ci Lubricant Never too young to START TRAINING By David Biggs
T
he enjoyment of wine is regarded internationally as a “civilised” activity, along with the enjoyment of other civilised activities like music and literature. Beer and spirits also play a pleasant role in modern life, it’s true, but they are accepted without much fuss or debate as being unremarkable sidelines to everyday life. Nobody bothers to sniff and swirl the glass before quaffing a pint of lager or to pontificate over the colour or aroma of a glass of brandy and ginger ale. Not much is written about the subtleties of beer enjoyment, but billions of words and thousands of books and magazines are published every year on the subject of wine. The iconic annual Platter’s Guide to South African Wines runs to over 600 pages and more than a million copies are sold annually. Like any cultural activity, wine appreciation deserves study, and training. (Need I remind readers that this is one of the reasons why the Wine-of-the Month Club is so wellliked.) Some years ago an exclusive Cape private boarding school introduced a wine tasting club for its pupils. This was greeted with shock and horror by many people, including some of the parents. It was irresponsible in the extreme, they cried, to allow children as young as 13 or 14 to drink alcohol. What was the decadent school thinking, for goodness sake? But the school sensibly pointed out that the purpose of the wine club was to introduce young people, under careful supervision, to the responsible enjoyment of wine rather than release them
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into the world unprepared for the possible results of irresponsible drinking. Goodness knows, we read enough about that in the newspapers. The French, who have a reputation for civilised wine appreciation, often introduce their children as young as five years old to wine by giving them a small glass of diluted sweet wine with their food. They grow up regarding wine as just one of life’s many pleasures. They can recognise a good wine when they taste it, just as they can appreciate a good pâté or consommé.
‘A connoisseur’s palate needs training, just like an athlete’s muscles’ My parents, who lived in a rather strict Calvinistic farming community in the Karoo, were sometimes criticised for letting me taste the drinks they were enjoying. From the age of about five or six I was offered an occasional sip of my father’s beer and found it horribly bitter. I couldn’t understand why anyone liked it. My mother’s off-dry wine wasn’t as bad, but frankly at that age I preferred the nonalcoholic lemon cordial my grandmother made. As I grew older I learned to appreciate “adult” drinks, but in moderation, as my parents did. I never regarded alcoholic drinks as anything wicked or forbidden. They were just a part of life’s rich enjoyment, like sweet music, good art and good food. When I arrived at university many years later, one of my fellow first-year students
was a young man of German descent, called Rudie. Rudie’s father was a very strict school principal with a fiercely disapproving attitude toward the sins of drinking and smoking. Rudie had obviously never been allowed so much as a sip or sniff of the evil stuff. From his very first week in residence Rudie chain-smoked and chain-drank and was regularly carried back to his room from various pubs in a wide-ranging area, paralytically drunk. The lucky students who owned cars became quite irritated by the amount of petrol they wasted ferrying Rudie’s inert body back to the campus. Poor Rudie didn’t survive his first university term. He fell to his death from the balcony of a tall building late one night. I like to believe he was mercifully completely unconscious before he hit the ground. Uncontrolled abstinence can obviously be a dangerous thing. Maybe more educational institutions in this troubled country of ours should consider introducing courses in wine appreciation as part of the drive toward producing a more enlightened population. SOUTH AFRICAN CONNOISSEUR
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2021/09/01 10:03
