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Wild Ferment – The Weathergirl

The numbers 082 162 rule his life. A self-confessed slave to the winemaking tribe, he finds the sultry temptations of the Weathergirl at the other end of the line frustratingly irresistible.

When you catch yourself swirling a glass of water and smelling it before taking a gulp – you’re in trouble. This is an obvious sign you are a bit too involved with wine. Take note and beware. If you haven’t become a winemaker, there is still time to save yourself.

And for heaven’s sake, in the evening never mention to your wife/hubby that the peppermint flavour in your favourite toothpaste seems to be a touch more ‘lemon grassy’ than usual. This is not romantic and you can rule out nookie after a nerd comment like that.

It actually gets worse. You will know you are a lost soul when you experience a weirdly intense, addictive craving to call 082 162 as soon as you wake up in the morning. Before you know it, these apparently innocuous numbers rule your life. You start sneaking furtively into the toilet at restaurants to dial them, because on the way to dinner you noticed the wind changing direction. You’re now a hopeless case in need of serious therapy, perhaps even drugs. You’ve become another spaced-out slave to the winemaking tribe, and there is little hope you will ever return to normality.

After all, this magic number connects you directly to the cruel, sultry temptations and teasings of The Weathergirl. Okay, sometimes it’s a bloke on the other side of the line, but we’ll ignore that technicality. The Weathergirl is pretty direct and frustratingly unemotional about the weather. However, once you’ve got to know her a bit better, you can detect the slight, half-hidden inflexions in her voice. This gives the game away.

Yes, you eventually realise she knows exactly who she’s talking to. And although she does a very good job of sounding like a pre-recorded message, she’s actually talking to you, and you’re alone. It’s true and it’s terrifying.

Hammering rain recently woke me up from a light, disturbed slumber in the middle of the night. The Weathergirl had warned me about this dreadful possibility and I couldn’t really sleep until she was proved right once again. Now I know I was probably the only person in Cape Town who felt this way about last week’s rain. I immediately felt guilty and thanked the Head Winemaker in the Sky for the precious drops. But I also asked (quietly) if it could be arranged that nothing actually fell on our vineyards – not now anyway. I think I heard a faint snigger from up above, but it could have been the cat snoring.

It’s vintage time. I haven’t read a newspaper for weeks, and my wife threw out the TV ten years ago, so I am not sure if this is true, but apparently an arc of religious people embarked on a mass prayer for rain recently. And it rained, exactly when it is going to cause the most damage to winemakers. I am sure they meant no harm. But their timing is bad news for us.

When the Weathergirl first told me about this impending doom I could just detect a slight, sharp intake of breath between the words ‘eighty percent’ and ‘chance’, as though someone was tickling the souls of her feet with a feather. It is now so green in the Overberg you’d think it was autumn.

That day it carried on raining. The soil had been so dry and the vines were so thirsty that all that excess ground water was blasted up the vine and into the berries. Sugar accumulation halted and acids dropped. Flavour was watered down and berries swelled so fast they split, or popped off tight bunches, spilling juice.

And then the angry army of rot marches in spoiling for war and pillage. You watch it growing, devouring your grapes in acrid, hairy spores. You send the tractors into the spongy rows in a pathetic attempt to halt the inevitable disaster with a sulphur spray. And if the rot doesn’t get you the mildew will. In Afrikaans we call this witroes, translated as white rust. The Latin name is Uncinula necator and it is the most awesome, destructive disease in our business.

Uncinula, you may have noticed, rhymes with Dracula. Found and feared in almost every grape growing area of the world this pathogen arranges and re-organises itself like an alien fog in a horror movie. It is somehow able to exploit any possible weakness specific to individual climatic characteristics, soil types, farming practices – even cultivar/site choices.

This psychopathic fungus wreaks havoc all over the world and was first reported by one petrified Jacob Cloete of Constantia in 1880. We have been terrified of summer rain since then. As an industry we spend more than R30 million a year spraying fungicides to kill the bastard.
One moment you’ve got a healthy looking block of Malbec, and then, suddenly, you are faced with forlorn, naked canes weighed down by scarred, distorted, splitting fruit – resulting in a wine forever unripe, flaccid and worthless. The parasitic beast can even be found spawning on pruned canes in the cold, black, dead of winter.

I called the Weathergirl a few minutes ago. She told me it might rain in Elim, right on our beautiful, fragile Sauvignon Blanc. I could imagine the corners of her luscious lips curling upwards into a malicious little smile.
That does it! I’m calling Tutu.