Tasting for Twits and other stories

Tyson is coming back to London - Hurrah!  South Africa are going to be planting GM Chardonnay vineyards soon unless the various organisations trying to stop them are successful.  Boo!  And wine from Tesco, by their own admission, is for Twits.  

Some very great news this week.  Tyson is coming back to London.  Spier have decided that they want him to represent them at the South African trade fair in October as well as at various other events, so he will be over here for about a week.  We are absolutely overjoyed.  This proves that we really did give him enough of the right kind of experience to make huge progress once he got back home. 

On the other hand, it rankles that we are having such a very hard time arranging a visa for Unathi, our next scholarship winner.  It may seem a ridiculously small contribution, to bring just one person here each year, and in the greater scheme of things I suppose it is not much.  There are hundreds of thousands of talented young people in South Africa who don’t get a shot at a life less constrained by circumstance and we can only ever give the chance to the tiniest fraction.  But a tiny fraction is better than none at all.   

Other news from South Africa is considerably less cheerful.  The South Africans have decided to allow GM grape crops to be planted, specifically, trials of a fungus- resistant Chardonnay.  These are open-air trials, so there is risk of cross contamination.   

Experts present two very stark choices when trying to convince the generally uneasy public that GM is the future, no question.  Either we keep spraying to avoid fungus (bad) or we live with vines which have been modified so that they have in-built resistance (good, apparently).  There is precious little, in this field, discussion of any alternatives to the above. 

Yet no-one can justifiably claim ignorance of the huge success organic viticulture has had and is having, particularly in regions like Champagne which is a textbook perfect example of a place where it is not easy to do so.  There are still big houses there that swear this form of viticulture is an impossibility as they continue to churn out expensive effluent while smaller houses, farming completely naturally, are making some of the finest wines in the world.  

 Could it be that the third way is one that big business won’t even begin to countenance as it is simply not a methodology which can be employed in the sort of factory farms where they reap large profit margins? Like the larger food debate, there is still not nearly enough being done in the area of viticulture to properly research the benefits of returning to the fundamentals.   

But I don’t want to end on a sombre note, so let me report that Tesco are planning a tasting tweet.  This event is so beyond parody that I will merely give you the opportunity to read the press release :-

During the Tesco Wine Club Fair in the UK this weekend, the supermarket’s product development managers, members of the team and consumers can all taste a selection of wines together using the designated Twitter account #tescowinefair . In order to encourage tasting tweeting at the fairs, Tesco will make laptops available to consumers. And, the supermarket has already been generating interest about its fairs through its designated Twitter account on which, for example, wine supplier Bibendum has posted video links to encourage an Old World versus New World debate for consumers.

To my mind, people who use Twitter (at least they got the name of the phenomenon spot on) are like those utterly revolting children who are so either off their heads on sugar and preservatives or have been so ruined by their parents (generally both) that they cannot exist for more than 5 seconds without demanding that someone, anyone PAY ATTENTION TO THEM.   

No matter how inane or pedestrian the thought or the task in hand, it  simply  must be witnessed.   

In the context of tasting wine the incongruity of it all lies in the fact that the experience of tasting, really tasting, is about surrendering, however briefly, to your senses. Insert a laptop and a live twitter feed into the mix and it begs the question:  Is one actually tasting or merely observing oneself in a tasting scenario, constantly mindful of the massed ranks of twits (or just a few solitary stragglers) mooching around cyberspace, awaiting your pronouncements? 

When I read things like that I think “Fuck it.  Let them drink genetically modified Chardonnay”.