With wine — as with most ephemeral objects of taste — there are no absolutes. When there is unanimity about the features of a particular sample on the tasting bench, there will be different levels of appreciation about its qualities.
This doesn’t mean that judging can safely be left to the barflies at a gentleman’s club, but it does suggest that anyone who wishes to pontificate about a set of professionally arrived at results should be circumspect in finding fault with it.
The 2018 Platter Guide is out and with it the list of its top ratings, the coveted five-star awards. The guide is not the buyer’s bible it once used to be: fewer copies are sold as print-based publications succumb to the ready immediacy of the online environment. However, the effort that goes into identifying SA’s top wines helps to position it as an important arbiter of what is good in the Cape wine industry.
It’s worth understanding how the final five-star wines are selected.
Platter guide tasters rate, in a sighted tasting, pretty much everything available (or likely to be available) over the judging period. Anything they deem to be of sufficient quality (their cut-off is 4.5 stars or 90 points, which indicates a wine of potential and complexity) is then sent to a blind tasting where the final scores are determined by panels of their peers. If there’s consensus that the wine merits five stars (95 points), the coveted imprimatur is granted.
Critics who complain that the Platter ratings are sighted can only be referring to the primary selection. The five-star awards are arrived at in as anonymous a judging environment as the best-run competition. However, this doesn’t mean that the guide’s opinions are more absolute than any other well-run selection process. Wine is performance art, panels have their own dynamic, a laureate today is (sometimes literally) an also-ran tomorrow.
This helps to explain why 2016’s most successful producer may have very few wines on this year’s podium, or why an unlikely producer suddenly — and only in one year — comes to the fore.
AS Byatt once said of the Booker Prize (a much narrower judging environment): "I’ve won it and judged it and it’s a lottery." That said, like the Booker, the Platter short list comprises a high percentage of the best of what’s on offer (within the boundaries of the aesthetic comfort zone of those who made the determination).
Whatever has reached this final spin of the roulette wheel is unlikely to be bad and even less likely to con its way past the final hurdle of the five-star panel. In short, the five-star winners may not be the country’s absolutely best wines, but there will be very few bottles to offend the sensibilities of a wine-literate audience.
So which wines, and which producers, are 2017’s high flyers? Raats Family Winery emerged as SA’s top cellar, with five five-star laureates under its name and a further three through associate brands.
A pioneer with the now fashionable cultivars of chenin blanc and cabernet franc, Bruwer Raats deserves the recognition vouched safe by this extraordinary run at the five-star tasting.
Chris Williams, whose day job is cellarmaster at Meerlust, took home the award for Platter’s best white wine: his Foundry Grenache Blanc 2015.
Nederburg (2016’s winner of the country’s top producer award) was the source of SA’s best red: the Two Centuries Cabernet 2014. Incidentally, the 2013 vintage has just walked off with the International Wine and Spirit Competition’s Warren Winiarski Trophy for the show’s best cabernet.
In all, 111 wines — out of more than 6,200 judged — finished on five stars, with a fair spread between white and red, boutique and commercial, well-priced and oligarch’s fantasy.
For the full list go to https://winewizard.co.za/article/452
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