Firstly, and perhaps most obviously, South Africa is a treasure trove of characterful, stylish, classy wines, often the best in their classes, that usually represent good value for money. These are the founding principles of Elitistreview; I want to review the best wines, but I have an eye for a bargain.

Secondly, the South African wine business is under existential threat. It needs support from we, its consumers, if it is to have any hope of surviving in its current, quality-driven state. We must act to #SaveSAwine!

South African wine is under assault from two fronts: prohibition of alcohol sale by the government and lack of tourism.

Prohibition in South Africa

There is currently a complete prohibition of alcohol sales in South Africa. No alcohol is allowed to be sold in South Africa to any South African or tourist. The stated aim for this is that hospitals need to keep people with alcohol-related harm out of them in order to keep beds free for COVID-19 patients.

This sounds all very well and good. However, a recent report by the World Health Organisation estimated that half the alcohol sales in South Africa are illicit. Quite clearly, that figure has now moved to 100% given the prohibition of alcohol sales – therefore reducing all state income from alcohol sales, in the forms of alcohol taxes, to zero in one foul swoop.

Putting more money into the hands of criminals and corrupt officials is not going to minimise hospital beds used by drink-related problems. Criminals are well-known for perpetrating their crimes, protecting their assets and activity zones, and dealing with any form of disloyalty using violence.

Furthermore, whilst the business of trading in illegal alcohol has health consequences, so does drinking the stuff. Detailed statistics are not kept by every country, particularly those with high rates of illegal trade in alcohol, but the WHO report quotes two studies on the health effects of illicit alcohol. One of these details that over 700 people died in Iran between February and April 2020 from methanol poisoning due to drinking moonshine. The other study reports that in July 2020, methanol in illegally distilled alcohol killed 86 people in Punjab, India.

Funding criminals via prohibition is a massive social problem and a health problem (of unknown but probably large proportions). A government outsourcing the filling of hospital beds to the illegal alcohol trade rather than the legal one is probably likely to incur more costs whilst not receiving any income from alcohol tax.

So prohibition is a net cost to the state, does not prevent problem drinking nor alcohol-related hospital admissions, and it puts money into the hands of criminals and the corrupt. Prohibition is not a sensible path to follow. There are also specific consequences for the wine trade in preventing the sale of wine in South Africa.

The burden on the South African Wine Trade

Unemployment is about 36% in South Africa, with the wine trade being the second-largest contributor to agricultural exports and currently employing some 270,000 people it would seem like monumental stupidity to add such a large number of people to South Africa’s unemployment figures.

As second-largest agricultural exporter the wine trade adds from R55 billion (US$3.6 billion) to the GDP of South Africa. Again this is not an insignificant figure to just toss on the scrap heap.

By last Autumn direct losses to the South African wine trade were already in excess of R7 billion (US$460 million). These losses include money that would have gone into the pockets, stomachs and education of deprived and financially insecure vineyard workers, their families and the local communities where vineyards are based.

The South African wine trade have reported that by the end of last year 80 wineries and nearly 140 grape growing organisations were having to undergo financial re-organisation or had basically just closed down.

Finally, just to give you some idea of the massive scale of the problem for the South African wine trade, there are currently over 650 million litres of, largely unsold, unshipped wine in storage. This is equivalent to the twice the country’s entire wine consumption, of locals and tourists, in 2019!

Not only is a huge amount of money to have tied up in waiting to sell, but also it is taking up space that will be needed for the 2021 harvest, due to start at the end of the months. There is talk of many vineyards just being left unharvested with their fruit being left to rot simply because there is nowhere to store any more wine.

Lack of tourism

The lack of tourism to South Africa and its wine regions in 2020 and moving into 2021 cannot really be helped. COVID-19 spread has to be stopped by whatever means possible and unfortunately this means closing down most countries to most visitors.

This does have repercussions for the South African wine industry. The approximately 10 million visitors annual to South Africa nationally account for 15% of wineries’ total revenue.

When looking at smaller, boutique wineries this proportion of income is much higher. Small wineries obtain just over 40% of their income from tourists. These are the wineries that have most constraints on storage space, smaller cash reserves and so on. Consequently, the larger loss in income from tourists during lockdown is disproportionately painful to them.

#SaveSAwine – all of us outside South Africa can help

Whilst prohibition is in place, and the government follows such a neoprohibitionist agenda, the key to #SaveSAwine can only be pursued by exporting wine. Those of us who live outside South Africa must buy South African wine to #SaveSAwine.

South Africa produces a wide range of styles at all price points that will satisfy any drinker. So when you go shopping for a bottle at the supermarket or a case at a specialist whilst merchant, ask for South African wine.

The South African wines can be bought for prices we are unlikely to see again, so if your supermarket or wine merchant does not have South African wine, ask them to get some! We can all act to #SaveSAwine, but it may take more action than plucking a bottle from a shelf. But that action is so easy! Ask for a bottle to be there to be plucked!

Elitistreview will attempt to do its bit by largely reviewing South African wines for the foreseeable future. I love South African wines, and I am happy to guide you to the best of those I try.

Keep watching the website, follow me on Twitter (@elitistreview) or follow me on Facebook and you will see when I post new articles. They will all be sure-fire winners, the cream of the South African crop; I will try to serve you all well as we involved in a noble endeavour!

South Africa is quite nascent on the international fine wine scene, but the wines are excellent and worthy of effort to save. I am only one writer, writing about the best wines I try. Buy those wines I recommend, or just buy any South African wine; together we can #SaveSAwine!

The post #SaveSAwine – Save South African wine appeared first on Elitistreview.

When I am at home in Winchester and open a wine that ends up going down the sink, I find it hard to open a second bottle. I feel offended, I feel hurt, I feel let down – maybe another winemaker will treat me badly again; I am sure my psychiatrist would say it is something to do with my childhood.

So, wine is out! Luckily, I have something up my sleeve. The Editor and I have been trying some variations on our original margarita recipe. After The Horror Rathfinny we leapt to our cocktail shaker to perfect a new drink. So allow me to present:

The Elitistreview Citrus Boosted Margarita

You will need the following ingredients to construct this fabulous margarita of mind-altering heroism:

• Limes and lemons – in the ratio 3:1. Ripe, juicy, ideally unwaxed; basically the usual cocktail fruit requirements.
• Ice – you know? Frozen dihydrogen oxide.
• Tequila of passable quality – no need to use anything overly flash, a hint of roughness adds to the margarita’s bite. We had Sauza Hornitos to hand and it was perfectly adequate.
• Cointreau Blood Orange – the secret ingredient! Not that it is terribly secret now, of course, but you do not have to tell your guests that this is why your margaritas have the fruitiness of the blood orange flesh and the bitterness of its zest.

Strangely, for an Elitistreview cocktail, the spirit ingredients are so lacking in alcohol (do not worry, the ECBM’s will not) that they will freeze if you keep them in the freezer. Therefore, keep the spirits in the fridge and, an hour before you mix Elitistreview Citrus Boosted Margaritas, transfer them to the freezer. After you have mixed put them back in the fridge – they will remain cold enough for you to mix more within an hour or two.

Method

For two ECBM’s take the juice of three limes and one lemon, squeezed with vigour to extract zesty oils, and place them in a cocktail shaker. Add 100ml tequila and 100ml Cointreau Blood Orange. Add ice then shake briefly but briskly and strain the margarita into two martini glasses. No salty rim on the glass, this is anathema.

If your limes and lemon are as big and juicy as ours, and your hand as shaky whilst measuring the spirits over the cocktail shaker, you may well find yourself asking, “Davy said this was for two! Is there no way this margarita will fit into two Riedel martini glasses?”

The answer is: Yes! There is no way! The idea is that you bring the shaker to the table with the chilled glasses, pour two cocktails and, as soon as your love has drank a large enough slug from their glass, you lean over and fill their vessel with a big delivery from your tube (see picture below).

The Elitistreview Citrus Boosted Margarita is my favourite expression of the margarita, displaying all the characteristics of that cocktail in pleasingly expressive form. Please feel free to try mixing your own ECBM and if you have any modifications to the recipe, particularly lowering the quantity of spirits, let The Editor’s sudden desire for a kip and my headache assure you that you are wrong.

Since this variation on the margarita was perfected in wonderful, wonderful Winchester, I trust all true Wintonian cocktail bars will start serving ECBM’s immediately. Please remember, bartenders in Winchester and beyond, this is a cocktail that is mixed for two people. Two people who do not necessarily have to see all that well after a couple of drinks in your bar.

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It gets on my sodding tits. It is all part of the neo-prohibitionist, anti-alcohol lobby’s never-welcome attempt to denormalise alcohol. They’re trying make us and our children think it is some special and dangerous substance that is being forced upon us by ‘Big Alcohol’ and we must take every break possible from it so we don’t spontaneously combust.

That it is dangerous for the overwhelming majority of us is bollocks for a start. It has been shown in study after study, controlling for every factor and confounding problem that moderate drinking actually extends one’s lifespan.

It’s purest horseshit to say that “There is no safe level of alcohol intake.” Utter crap. A few units a day and you’ll live for years longer. It also protects against dementia in later life. Indeed there’s a long list of benefits one can have from moderate drinking. So if anyone virtue-signals to you that they are having a dry January, either ask them, in all seriousness, whether they have considered the negative effects this will have on their health or point at them and laugh uncontrollably.

Even if moderate drinking were not as healthy as it is, taking a month off the sauce would not make a blind bit of difference if you then go on to drink two bottles of wine a night and pass out on the toilet as soon as February comes along. People who say they are having a dry January ‘for the good of their health’ are hypocrites and liars who are only bending to the will of the fun police who would confiscate everyone’s cellars full of wine given half a chance.

If you are a moderate drinker, good for you! You’ll live a longer, happier, more enjoyable life and your friends will find you less tiresome when you go out for the night – if you would rather irk your friends I think becoming a vegan would be more appropriate than stopping drinking for a single month of the year! A dry January will just mean you are missing out on the benefits that moderate drinking confers for 1/12 of the year. I trained at Oxford University to be an epidemiologist, you won’t catch me stopping drinking once a year so I could lose some desperately needed health benefits all so that I could feel repulsively pleased with myself and (counter-intuitively) superior to moderate drinkers who are going to live for longer.

You will note that all through this rant over referred to moderate drinking. It is undoubtedly true that excessive drinking is not good for you. This is where the fun police show they don’t really care about saving, or even simply improving, people’s lives – all they want to be are meddlesome-ratbags.

Problem drinkers have a multitude of reasons they drink to excess, their work and home lives are usually packed with problems. Solving such an array of difficulties, and so actually targeting problem drinking is difficult and expensive (although this strategy has been tried and it works with great success). The sanctimonious shits who lie and and say your two glasses of wine with dinner is ‘hazardous drinking’ don’t want to get their hands dirty and solve the myriad problems that problem drinkers have. They do the cheap and easy ‘method’ of denormalising alcohol for most healthy drinkers with no alcohol problem at all.

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Sadly, soon after lunch I had to retire to bed with aching guts. The food was entirely innocent in causing me this problem. Rather the blame rests entirely with Peter and the potentially lethal beverages he considers reasonable to inflict on his friends.

Whilst Peter was dodging shells on either side of the Russian invasion frontline in Ukraine he developed a taste for the local homemade hooch. It is made from fermented then distilled horseradish, and Peter thought it a good idea to bring a bottle of this moonshine along to jolly up lunch. He is pictured with it below:

Now, as I trained as a scientist I have a rich and broad experience distilling alcohol containing mixtures – entirely for scientific purposes, you understand, especially the mind-buggering absinthe I had a knack for making. Given this experience, I know full well when distillates are of low quality.

Whoever distilled Peter’s horseradish hooch could only manage an inefficient distillation that only got the final product up to about 30% alcohol. That was not the problem. I could swear I detected more than a shade of methanol and a dash of fusil oils in the beige brew. These are extremely toxic and, whilst they did not make us blind or kill us (yet), they fouled up my guts and gave me the most pounding headache I have had since I last pounded my head against the wall whilst detained in the nut house.

That being said, the horseradish moonshine was a reasonable approximation of nice. It had a good fiery, nose clearing flavour and it was quite nice with pork pies.

So now you know what drink to find maintain sanity but reduce your lifespan if you happen to be monitoring a ceasefire in Eastern Ukraine. I will get on and tell you about two of the most arrestingly good wines we drank:

Champagne Mesnil Sur Oger 2010, Champagne Marguet

This is 100% Chardonnay from the famed Grand Cru Village of Mesnil, and the class of that village triumphantly announces itself on the nose. It is very vinous and about as far from a cheap, characterless Blanc des Blancs as it is possible to get – it smells so deep, so profound, so complex, so appealing!

I do not think I am good enough to nail individual villages of origin with Champagne, but the nose of this throbs with a stony nuttiness that says “Serious vineyard” in much the same way as, and not unreminiscent of, Chablis Grand Cru vineyards. It had layer upon layer of these intricate, absorbing aromas in addition to a lemon zest vibrancy which made the nose more lively, complex and compelling than any Salon I have had in years.

I will underline this. Every bottle of the famed and very expensive Champagne Salon Le Mesnil, from the same village as this, I have had in the past decade or so has been oxidised and flat – all that money we have just poured down the sink… oh dear… This Marguet is nothing like that, it is fresh, vivacious, taut but with an impressive degree of power behind its elegant facade.

The palate bursts with life and detailed, compelling flavours – it does your taste buds over with vigour and style. The lemon zest and ripe juice flavours are intertwined with a hint of Bramley apple juice all fizzing with the very finest of mousses. This tastes like an exceedingly fine wine.

This fruit, combined with impossibly deep stony, nutty flavours, are delivered with bottom bitingly impressive finesse – taste this and you find time stopping as you are consumed by its effulgent beauty and poise. Acidity is perfect: throbbingly full of life but perfectly balanced. This stuff is just the cat’s arse!

Will it age? I would guess so, as it is quite reductive in style. But my sweaty tests I am not going to take the risk. This Champagne is so good I will buy it whenever I see it and drink it with other members of the wine illuminati as soon as their presence can be arranged. Salon is a flawed wine, so that is no competition, but this is very obviously one of the most joyfully pleasurable and intellectually stimulating Champagnes I have ever tasted. I have tasted an incalculably staggeringly epic quantity of Champagne.

Hermitage 1996, J-L Chave

I cannot count the number of times I have had this wine. I even purchased a couple of cases myself, but they are long since quenched so I eagerly anticipated tasting this. It is one of the more elegant Hermitages produced during the golden age of both Chave and Jaboulet that ran from about 1985 to 1997. Wines like those just are not made anymore.

Now that smells like the Chave I loved so much. The fruit is more soft and mature than when I last had this about five years ago, but it has energy to match the finesse you do not find on more recent Hermitages. This is far from tired.

This has a nose you just want to climb inside of and let engulf you and your senses. Wonderfully complex Syrah at a viscerally satisfying stage of development. Lovely fruit and sophisticated earth aromas that you just have to love, Love, LOVE!!

The palate is one you have to love as well. A lot, most indeed, 1996 Rhones are marked by unpleasantly high acid levels, this is totally harmonious and tickles your aesthetic sensibilities with an assured sang-froid.

The fruit is deliciously complex, softly mature and, again, in complete equilibrium with all the other characters of the wine. It has a soignee structure of well-groomed tannins which have just the right degree of tautness to add to its vivacity and life.

A truly lovely bottle of Hermitage. If you have any left it will continue to mature but, my, how well this showed now!

We finished off with one of the greatest wines on the market today:

And that cost £29 from The Wine Society. They are giving away greatness!

The post Mordacious moonshine and transcendent tipples appeared first on Elitistreview.

Caffeine-Fix.co.uk will now be the home of my coffee pod reviews and I intend to post one review per week – until I run out of coffee!

One difference between Elitistreview and Caffeine-Fix is that I will score the coffee pods on Caffeine-Fix, whereas no scores will ever appear on Elitistreview. This is purely a commercial decision.

I have put all of Elitistreview’s old coffee reviews on Caffeine-Fix and right about now my first new review will be appearing of the excellent Sumatra Gayo Mountain. So head over there now to get your first taste of Caffeine-Fix.

One further note. Elitistreview is now part of Lomster Media (as is Caffeine-Fix). This will have no impact on the running of the site, but if you like the efforts of The Editor, he is available for hire in a freelance capacity.

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