MICHAEL FRIDJHON: Why comparing wines is not a waste of time

It’s become something of a recurrent theme (some might call it the monotonous beating of a drum) to say that the best Cape chardonnays compare comfortably with their infinitely more expensive international counterparts. Those predisposed to believe don’t need any persuasion; those who are prone to doubt think this is all just hype.

Most of the time Cape chardonnay competes against itself — at wine shows, at presentations and over dinner tables. This may be useful in terms of ranking the key players, even pleasurable for those doing it, but it’s no more valuable as an exercise than US President Donald Trump announcing that he has had the most successful first few weeks of any president ever.

In Paris in 1976 — and with little more in mind than organising an event as part of the American Bicentenary celebrations — the late Steven Spurrier hosted what has come to be known as the Judgment of Paris tasting. He assembled a line-up of the top French and Napa wines across a number of classes. He invited high-profile French wine experts and some visiting US winemakers to be the judges.

To everyone’s astonishment, the Napa wines defeated their French counterparts in several of the classes. The highest-scoring chardonnay was the 1973 Chateau Montelena; three of the five top chardonnays were Californian. Almost as an afterthought, Spurrier had suggested to Time magazine’s George Taber that it would be worth attending. As a result, what had started out as a fun occasion became the biggest international wine news of the second half of the 20th century.

The element of shock and surprise that followed the Paris tasting would never be repeated. The Australians defeated the Californians twice, but the news only mattered to the Aussie press. SA’s drubbing in the 1995 Shield meant a great deal of hurt and soul-searching in the Cape, but it passed almost unnoticed abroad. Even our victory against New Zealand and Australia at Cowra in 1998 made less noise than a wave lapping on a distant shoreline. The whole idea seemed passé.

But this does not mean that the exercise of tasting comparable examples of chardonnay from different parts of the world is a waste of time. It’s not likely to produce a vast number of column inches, but it can still serve to make a point. This certainly is what Iona’s Andrew Gunn decided to do as part of the promotional festivities around the launch of his 2023 chardonnays (the more generic Elgin Highlands cuvée as well as the single site Fynbos and Kloof bottlings). It turned out to be suitably instructive.

The 2021 and 2022 vintages of the Elgin Highlands wines were served blind alongside important international benchmarks from France and New Zealand of the same vintage. We were asked to rate and guess the wines. I was less interested in guessing (to do so would be to allow my assumptions about origin to influence my score), but did so after I had recorded my ranking.

With the 2021s, I rated the Iona well ahead of the William Fevre Premier Cru Chablis (which sells at four times the price of the Iona) and just one percentage point lower than the 2021 Cloudy Bay, which I actually thought was the Iona. Both southern hemisphere wines were significantly better than the more famous Chablis. When it came to the 2022s, I put the Iona one point ahead of the Drouhin Grand Cru Chablis, and a country mile ahead of the Côte Chalonnaise Montagny Premier Cru.

Both vintages of the Iona Elgin Highlands cuvées were world class; they showed precision and concentration, beautifully (almost invisibly) managed oaking and great purity. They certainly embodied the cool climate for which Elgin is rightly famous. Those who purchase the about-to-be released 2023s will need some patience before they provide the same drinking pleasure. Cool climate wines take longer to evolve: right now the 2023 Iona chardonnays offer the lineaments of what they are destined to become, together with the guarantee of their pedigree.

This column originally appeared in Business Day.