Backsberg

Saturday night saw the Veritas Wine Awards taking place at the CTICC. I think it’s the largest awards competition, by way of entries, in SA. Apart from running a touch late, I had a chaotic start to the event.

Screeching round the corner into the CTICC driveway at 7pm (it was a 6:30 for 7pm start), I drove round to parking area 2. Driving towards the parking garage, my heart dropped on seeing that the height limit was 2,0 metres. Let’s just say that my Landy is 2,1m. I had no chance but to reverse back up the one-way. Apologies to the driver in the silver Mercedes with the CJ plates! By the time I found a parking at the back of the convention centre with the delivery vehicles and made my way to the entrance, I was praying that the Mitchum (non-scent) antiperspirant ads were true. I duly went to go get my table number: number 57 I was told. Making my way up the escalators and into the massive hall, I navigated my way to the table. I circled table 57 once, and then again- no ‘S Back’ place card in sight. Finding out the table was reserved for KWV members, confirmed my suspicion, that something wasn’t right. So, back out the hall, down the escalators to find out that I was actually seated at table 6!

Getting to my table aside, I had the pleasure of sitting next to Yvonne from Le Riche and Francois from Ridgeback, who were great company for the evening. We didn’t shoot the lights out at the awards this year, winning a silver for our Klein Babylonstoren 2005 (interestingly the 2004 won a double gold) and bronzes for our Cab 2005, Elbar 2006 and Sauvignon Blanc 2008.

The take-home-point for me didn’t have anything to do with medals, but rather in the statement that 314 wineries entered a total 1753 wines. That’s a lot of wine brands and a bucket load of wine. The challenge is to stand out. I think that quality needs to be a given. With 1753 options, if you can’t bring quality wine to the table, then you might as well quit now. In playing up medals too much, I think as a producer one runs the risk of reducing a wine to simply a product and undermining what is really important about the wine- the story and people behind it. People don’t care about products. Wanting people to buy our Sauvignon Blanc 2008, because it picked up a medal is wishful thinking. Wanting people to buy it because we got up at 3:30am to handpick the grapes to ensure that they were cool coming into the cellar*, in order to save energy in the winery* and prevent our workers from working in the heat of summer, well, that’s more realistic.

What do you think?

SB

*Getting the grapes into the winery at a lower temperature is important in retaining those fresh sauvignon blanc flavours and means that we use less energy in cooling them down to the required temperature.

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This post was written by:

Simon Back- who has written 58 posts on the Back Chat Blog. After finishing up studying economics at UCT in 2007, Simon has joined his family wine farm, Backsberg. When he is not trying to figure out what marketing wine means, he is authoring his blog, Back Chat.

Author's web site: Backsberg

Read more in Featured, Wine.

Last 3 posts by Simon Back

• The launch of Tread Lightly by Backsberg - August 5th, 2010
• Wine Club Tree Planting Event - August 1st, 2010
• 'Do Wine Writers Suffer and all that?' - July 4th, 2010