The number of serious wine commentators who believe in the value of blind tasting is in inverse proportion to the number of producers willing to entrust their brands to the process.
Winemakers would rather you bought their marketing message than the opinions of wine experts for whom what is in the glass is vastly more important.
Above-the-line spend adds margin to most products, from dog food and canned pilchards to Hermès and Patek Philippe. If you’re buying an instrument to wear on your wrist to help you to get to your appointments on time, there are any number of no-name quartz watches that can rival the time-keeping claims of the world’s most expensive timepieces. Likewise, I’m told (since this is not in my firsthand experience), the only reason a woman can tell she’s wearing La Perla underwear is because she constantly reminds herself.
There’s nothing wrong with this: we are creatures mired in self-deception. We like opinions that reinforce our own and object to those that make us question our certainties. Even people who claim not to be egotistical find themselves gratified when an event, an opinion or a product reinforces their self-perception. That’s how brand marketing works: if you’re a cigarette smoker, you’re either identifying with the St Moritz lifestyle (Stuyvesant), the frontiersman (Marlboro) or the London West End aristo (Dunhill).
Unsurprisingly, there are very few occasions anywhere in the world when the quality of high-end wines is put to the blind taste test. Producers themselves have sound reasons to avoid what they see as an unacceptable downside risk. Besides, the most successful of them often have no samples to spare; several sell out their entire production on allocation. This is not a uniquely South African arrangement: it’s been common in the US for more than a generation, and it’s become the pattern for fine Burgundy for at least a few decades.
I decided (with the co-operation of Eben Sadie, it’s important to add) to put his latest releases to unsighted scrutiny. To make sure the wines were not going to be pre-emptively advantaged (if you know you’re tasting wines from a top cellar you’re more inclined to be liberal in your scoring), I added an array of other wines. Some were from less well-known but equally fashionable rock star producers, others were quite arbitrary. The idea was to give every bottle an equal chance to perform, without the risk of prejudgment.
My ratings are generally less generous than Tim Atkin’s and the Platter Guide’s — the former scoring sighted, the latter using a hybrid system. As a result, it’s unusual for me to have more than one, perhaps two, gold medal scores (95 or more) in a line-up of 20 wines. The reveal begins with a spoiler alert: I don’t think I’ve ever had a higher percentage of gold medal wines at a single tasting. Within a range of mid-bronze (88) to 98, the centre of gravity was around 93.
Sadie’s wines largely took the scrutiny in their stride. Only one of the 12 wines scored below 90 (the 2024 Soldaat, made from grenache, not a variety famed for yielding wines of great complexity). Several topped the ratings: Skerpioen 2024, Kokerboom 2024, Skurfberg 2024, Palladius 2023. There was only one other gold medal score for the same style of wine in the tasting – The City on a Hill “Song of Ascents” cinsaut 2022 – no surprise to anyone who knows André Bruyns’s wines – especially his Sk’windjiesvlei Tinta Barocca.
Curiously some of my not-quite-gold scores were for wines I’ve never been completely persuaded about when I’ve sampled them sighted (Columella, Pofadder, Treinspoor and Adi Badenhorst’s Raaigras). The one wine I expected myself to rate 95 (it landed up on 94) was the usually fabulous Mev Kirsten. Is this a case (when I taste the wine sighted) of my being taken in by the story of this extraordinary vineyard or was it a slightly shy bottle? Scores aren’t absolutes — and wine is performance art.
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