MICHAEL FRIDJHON: A chance to sample the best of Investec wine show

Wine may not be the most profitable field of human endeavour, but it could be among the most rewarding: if you’re a viticulturist, optimising the quality of your grapes is a perpetual and intriguing challenge. If you’re a creative winemaker, every year is different and your task is to select and assemble the fruit in such a way that you produce the best and most interesting artefact of the vintage.

If you’re in marketing and sales, your working environment is in a constant state of flux. For critics and commentators the nuances are endless, while consumers are presented with an infinite and ever-growing number of choices.

While wealth is probably not what brings people to wine, there are obviously highly profitable ventures — though most are a clever combination of strategic skill and the cynical exploitation of the gap that it opens up. There’s nothing wrong with that. However, if the producers of these sometimes extraordinary brands were relieved of the need to make them from grapes, they could continue to offer a passable alternative using alcohol, water and carefully assembled flavourants.

Professional wine judges are few in number: none are in it for the money (which typically is an honorarium rather than a payment that wouldn’t cover the rent). Wine judging is also not a particularly pleasurable activity: you assault your palate with wave upon wave of a fluid steeped in acid and tannin. At the same time you are obliged to focus on numberless intricacies and details to arrive at a qualitative assessment of what is in the glass. The fact that wine contains alcohol is a further complication. Even if you spit out every drop, you inhale enough to make distraction (rather than inebriation) an added burden. Maintaining focus and applying the same qualitative calibrations you used earlier on becomes a real challenge. At the end of a day of sampling and assessing about 100 wines, the last thing you feel like with your dinner is a glass of cabernet.

The joy of judging wine is the information that finally emerges — not just in the results of an extended blind tasting, but in the overall impression, the snapshot of an industry, a particular variety, or a style of wine at a moment in time. I have been show chairperson of the Trophy Wine Show since 2002. My role allows me to see the best, the average and sometimes the worst wines entered in every class. At the end of four days I’m always invigorated rather than exhausted by the experience.

In the interaction with the panellists, the local judges of extraordinary skill and experience, and the three internationals who bring a different aesthetic vision, I have many of the most productive intellectual engagements of my working year. Michel Bettane, France’s most famous wine critic, who has judged at the competition three times over the 20+ years, brings an Old World sensibility to the discussion. Tom Carson, pretty much Bettane’s equivalent in Australia (and past chair of its National Wine Show), has also judged here three times: his approach is much more technical. Tamlyn Currin, as a member of the team at JancisRobinson.com, sees a far wider spread of styles than any commentator rooted in a single country of production. I know people who would pay good money just to be around when the discussions (and disagreements) go down to the wire.

The results of the 2025 Investec Trophy Wine Show were released on Monday. Producers who were seen emerging from the shadows a few years back are now properly in the limelight, sharing the podium with (in the great line from Casablanca) “the usual suspects”. The Cape wine industry may be under threat, its margins pared to near nothing and its trade with the US in deep danger, but it is indisputably the source of the most creative, exciting and engaging wines being made anywhere in the world.

The results of the 2025 Trophy Wine Show are available here.

Business Day.