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WINE APPRECIATION: HOW
WINE APPRECIATION | FEATURE
Wine, Civilisation’s Lubricant
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Never too young to START TRAINING By David Biggs
The 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 sni and swirl the glass before qua ng a pint of lager or to ponti cate 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. e 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. is 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 into the world unprepared for the possible results of irresponsible drinking. Goodness knows, we read enough about that in the newspapers. e French, who have a reputation for civilised wine appreciation, o en introduce their children as young as ve years old to wine by giving them a small glass of diluted sweet wine with their food. ey grow up regarding wine as just one of life’s many pleasures. ey can recognise a good wine when they taste it, just as they can appreciate a good pâté or consommé.
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 ve or six I was o ered an occasional sip of my father’s beer and found it horribly bitter. I couldn’t understand why anyone liked it. My mother’s o -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. ey 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 rst-year students was a young man of German descent, called Rudie. Rudie’s father was a very strict school principal with a ercely disapproving attitude toward the sins of drinking and smoking. Rudie had obviously never been allowed so much as a sip or sni of the evil stu .
From his very rst 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. e 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 rst 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 11
