A Book and a Bottle panel discussion
Hermanus FynArts Festival
Wine consumption is declining globally despite record quality, raising urgent questions about whether the language used to sell it is failing the industry.A panel of South Africa’s most influential wine voices, including critic Christian Eedes, memoirist Bridgid Hamilton Russell, and winemaker Craig Wessels, will tackle the future of wine writing at Hermanus FynArts on 9 June.The debate centres on whether wine should remain the subject of its own story, or simply the vehicle for better ones.
No one’s ever written a storybook on wheat. Or if they have, it’s probably about gut health, heirloom grains, and homesteading, notwithstanding, of course, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat – though that centres around Kenya’s struggle for independence in the 1960s.
Wine is different. Wine has always offered itself up as subject, setting, and metaphor for romance, place, identity, and/or criticism.
Carmen Stevens once told me that the Mills & Boon romances her mother used to press on her were invariably set in a cellar. She became enamoured with the idea, intrigued by the cylinders the female protagonist used in her winemaking, the seemingly glamorous world of wine, and the natural setting. That pull remains.
What has changed is everything around it.
Despite the rise of no- and low-alcohol alternatives and a very real decline in wine consumption globally, wine and winemaking remain among the most fascinating, layered agricultural products on the market. But the way we write about it, the way we sell it through language, hasn’t kept pace with the moment.
Rating agents like Robert Parker were responsible for a literal sea of sameness in wine style (and sales) in the late 1990s and early 2000s, driven by nothing more than his own personal taste and genius for packaging it in a 100-point scale.
Wine writing in this new century has yet to figure out how to support and promote wine in a way that’s sustainable, health-conscious, and, more importantly, actually working.
What now?
That’s the question I’ll be putting to a panel of South Africa’s most influential wine voices at A Book and A Bottle, a panel discussion at the Hermanus FynArts Festival on 9 June.
My guests are Christian Eedes, Winemag’s editor-in-chief and SA’s most respected wine critic; Bridgid Hamilton Russell, who has just penned her father Tim Hamilton Russell’s memoir Red Tape; and Craig Wessels, Restless River winemaker and the Upper Hemel-en-Aarde’s foremost (only) Cabernet maverick and Burghound.
My own front-row seat to SA’s wine conversation has also given me some tangible data on what actually cuts through in this new digital age of health-conscious, hyperstimulated individuals looking for meaning, and I’ll be bringing that to the table too.
The questions I’ll be grilling them on are ones the industry tends to have quietly, if at all:
Have we overcorrected, simplifying wine to a numerical value and stripped it of the multilayered story that is its greatest asset? Do wine ratings still have real sales potential, or have they become a conversation the industry largely has with itself? Should personal taste be considered a viable marker of quality? Does social media genuinely broaden the wine conversation beyond the usual gatekept crowd, or does it just make more noise in the same room?
And then the bigger, thornier questions:
What do winemakers actually want written about them? How do we make wine history accessible and even entertaining? What does success look like in a wine memoir, and does writing from inside the family give a story more credibility or less? And for the majority of people who don’t consider themselves wine people, should we stop making wine the subject altogether, and use it as the vehicle for better stories instead, saving the geeky technical ruminations for the industry?
These aren’t rhetorical questions. They have real consequences for how South African wine gets sold, who it gets sold to, and whether the writing that surrounds it is helping or quietly getting in the way.
Come and get to the bottom of the great, gatekept wine debate, then join us for a wine and food pairing at The Wine Glass Hermanus for the real conversation.
60 seats only. Tickets are R600 and available here.
Dining and Cooking