Listics

Before I put the plug in the jug I was a big California wine fan. I liked French wines too, but they weren’t as affordable as the local stuff. Francis had some cabernet sauvignon vines just off Niebaum Lane near the intersection of 29 and 128 in the Napa Valley where we picked our grapes. After the crush, I spread the pomace on the little garden I’d carved in the clay behind the San Anselmo house, hoping to improve the friability of the soil. The skins and stems composted nicely over the winter, but the seeds sprouted and for the rest of the life of that garden I had to pull up the grapevines that took root there. Dan fermented and bottled the wine from the grapes we picked at Francis’ place. In truth, it wasn’t very good, but it remains the only wine I’ve had a hand in making, and it was more palatable for that.

In California, if you enjoy wine, it’s impossible not to develop some tastes and some prejudices. I was a big zin fan for a few years, cruising the Alexander Valley and laying in a few bottles of the wine I enjoyed tasting here and there. For a table wine, we enjoyed Robert Mondavi’s red, a cabernet blend. Things I “knew” about wine included the fact that Northern California wines were as good as French wines, and that no decent wines came from the southern hemisphere… not from Chile, not from South Africa, and certainly not from Australia. I had a mother-in-law from Australia.

When the Stormhoek word of mouth micro-marketing effort began, I felt an immediate resistance. Besides my NorCal wine chauvinism, I carried some concerns regarding labor practices on South African wine farms. I heard from friends in South Africa and others who were in direct contact with Graham Knox (the Stormhoek wine farm owner) that my concerns regarding labor practices were ill-founded.

I began to follow the happenings at Stormhoek. Poppy the percheron, out working in the old fields planted too narrow for mechanical equipment made me smile. My grandpa had a team of big, 17 hand, dapple gray percherons. How often do you run into a percheron these days? And I’ve been intrigued by the pictures. Stormhoek in pictures reminds me a little of the north end of the Napa Valley, up near Calistoga where the valley runs out and the mountains close in, the days are sunny and hot, but the evenings are cooled by the breezes off the mountain and the sea only twenty miles away.

Last fall, in the northern hemisphere, the Royal Bank of Scotland was looking over Jason Korman’s (Orbital Wines) books and presumably didn’t like what they saw. Korman’s company went into “administration” (which I assume is a brit code for bankruptcy), and then they were bought by Origin Wines. Part of the package that Origin bought, was a UK brand called “Stormhoek.”

But I don’t see how this could be the same brand that Hugh MacLeod built in the blogosphere. Hugh claimed that he was enabling “a small, independant [sic] winery to use the blogosphere to connect with people….” When you buy a California wine from any of the American Viticultural Areas you know what you’re getting. If you buy French wines you know what you’re getting. What distributors like Orbital and Origin appear to do is buy in bulk and decant whatever swill they happen to have on hand into reasonably clean bottles and sell the stuff at the supermarket.

Here’s how I made that leap. Stormhoek wines are either wines grown by Graham Knox on the Stormhoek vineyard and bottled for distribution under his good name, or they are wines that are sold in bulk to distributors and labeled Stormhoek Brand. If the latter, then there is really nothing to distinguish them from Thunderbird and Ripple. If the former, then the good name of the establishment, the reputation of the grower, the quality of the crop and the quality of the wine making all count. A buyer knows what she is getting.

So what’s it to be? The Stormhoek label that Origin wines owns has as much pizazz as a bottle of Ripple in a paper bag. It takes Stormhoek farms to turn that brand into Stormhoek wine. When is Macleod going to come clear on this? Why hasn’t he updated the old Stormhoek blog for over a month? The real Stormhoek blog is a living site.

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