Defend Truth

Opinionista

Good competitions are to wine as freedom is to the press

Michael Fridjhon is South Africa's most highly regarded international wine judge, the country's most widely consulted liquor industry authority, and one of South Africa's leading wine writers. Chairman of the Old Mutual Trophy Wine Show since its inception, he has judged in countless wine competitions around the world. Visiting Professor of Wine Business at the University of Cape Town, he has been an advisor to the Minister of Agriculture and is a recipient of the French Chevalier de l'Ordre du Mérite Agricole. Worldwide winner of the Louis Roederer International Wine Columnist of the Year award in 2012, he is the author, co-author or contributor to over 30 books and is a regular contributor to wine publications in the UK, France, Germany and China. He is the founder of winewizard.co.za , a site which specialises in scoring South Affrican wine and guiding consumers to excellent value for money and quality.

Wine competitions – good ones, with good judges – are a little like a free press. They tell things the way they are: they are the most honest form of feedback available to a producer willing to pay attention to the message. And progress has always required a critical environment.

While we may not (yet) have the kind of censorship which totalitarian regimes consider the sine qua non of good governance, our major news sources hardly operate in an unconstrained environment. The SABC could call itself “His Master’s Voice” and surprise no one. The New Age survives entirely off ANC patronage. Independent Newspapers should be forced by the Advertising Standards Authority to frame the word “Independent” within inverted commas. Seemingly free publications are kept in check by the advertising budgets of municipalities and state departments.

Even though Johannesburg’s “World Class African City” pay-off line has been ridiculed on Talk Radio 702, Primedia blithely continues to use the term in paid-for live-reads. The Mail & Guardian feels the pressure of job vacancy advertising from state and provincial departments. When government has the spending power and isn’t accountable for the commercial usefulness of its investment, it can and does play a key role in limiting press freedom.

No one, as far as I know, is running a tally of the state’s ad spend and how it’s being used to subsidise “friends” and disadvantage “enemies.” A recent issue of The Star carried a full page advertisement from the Department of Correctional Services announcing that it had reached “new heights in making South Africa a safer place.” This appeared at roughly the same time as a number of dangerous inmates of a Vereeniging prison had managed to escape through a window, so you have to admire the brazen lack of irony which went into the copywriting. Since the Department of Correctional Services is supposed to keep people behind bars, but has no role in putting them there, it’s also difficult to see how it’s been making South Africa a safer place. On the contrary, if you’ve been following the St Alban’s prison case, you might reasonably argue that, at least for the inmates of that facility, the Department has made South Africa a far more dangerous place in which to live.

However, the real question is: why is Correctional Services spending this kind of money in the first place? Why does the Department of Labour advertise at OR Tambo International airport, if not to help ACSA? Who makes these budgetary decisions? Who negotiates the tariffs? What back-handers are involved? These would be big questions in any country not as shell-shocked by corruption and cronyism as South Africa – and would be gold dust to any journalist wishing to make a name in the field of investigative writing: except that with all that is skewing press independence, kick-backs and fraud are no longer newsworthy.

All this is obvious even before the more surreptitious examples of political interference are taken into account: the one-sided leaks which appear regularly in the Sunday Times (and which are published as the work of investigative reporting) have turned our largest print publication into the plaything of factions within the ruling party. With profits under pressure most newspapers no longer have journalists capable of uncovering the scandals and skullduggery to which power is prone, and almost no publications for whom it is worth the risk.

All this has eroded press freedom even before the ANC signs its Secrecy Bill into law – which it will certainly do when it gets round to it. It doesn’t like seeing its leaders ridiculed, it doesn’t enjoy the tone of incredulity with which the last vestiges of our free press present their shenanigans – and even if the act is thrown out at the Constitutional Court government can waste taxpayers’ money bankrupting a few impoverished but free-minded publications by running some “test cases.” This strategy is not new, by the way: that’s what Verwoerd and his cronies did to the Rand Daily Mail when Harold Strachan reported on conditions in prisons in the old South Africa.

There are a surprising number of intelligent South Africans who are not overly fazed by the decline of an independent press. Partly, they argue, the international press and the internet will more than adequately compensate for what has been lost in our print, radio and TV media environment. They are wrong – but for reasons that aren’t necessarily as obvious as the traditional “only the well-to-do can afford access to the truth.” Firstly, there are plans afoot to impose draconian restrictions on internet publishing. The draft paper aims to empower the ANC’s version of the Apartheid-era publications control board with the authority to vet in advance anything destined to appear on the internet – from a news story to a blog, a report commissioned by an NGO to a Facebook post.

Secondly, we forget that truth is not a relative concept. Truth can be partial – in other words incomplete – without being diluted: if you know the gist of what happened but not all the details, you are still in possession of the unadulterated truth. But this means that its dissemination must be linked to a commitment to communicate what is true, to the best ability of the journalist. When there is no longer any incentive to do so, and in fact when there is a strong disincentive (commercial or political) not to do so, deceit will flourish. Arising from this is a less evident feature about press freedom: truth can really only be communicated when there is competition for it. It is only when ideas are freely exchanged (the theory of academia) that we get closer to filling in the gaps and refining the nuances. Telling the truth requires a forum: separating the truth-teller from the audience (and the audience from the truth-teller) opens the door to fiction.

I’ve been made to think about this for the least obvious of reasons. I had been pondering why South African wine has improved so dramatically in the past decade or two. It’s easy to talk about new generation winemakers, a greater respect for terroir and origin and the influence of international markets – but these factors have been around to a lesser or greater extent since the 1970s (with the impact of international markets notably absent only for a period between the 1980s and the early 1990s.) Fruit quality and a better sense of where the best vines flourish is always a factor, and what people buy helps to determine what winemakers make. However, our wines have improved to a point where they over-deliver significantly at their price points – so we could actually support a decline in quality without frightening off the international buyers.

Wine competitions – good ones, with good judges – are a little like a free press. They tell things the way they are: they are the most honest form of feedback available to a producer willing to pay attention to the message. At the dawn of democracy in South Africa the country had only one wine competition for bottled wine. Judging was erratic and, like the SABC or Die Vaderland of the Apartheid era, it served a particular constituency. Those who heard its message came to believe it represented a God-given truth. In November 1995 I staged a competitive “test match” between South African and Australian wines – primarily to illustrate to the faithful that they spent too long believing false priests. Australia won 78-21 – which served to persuade those willing to listen that their comfortable fictions, their smug worldview, might actually be erroneous.

In 2002 I launched a new wine competition, and a few years later a wine judging academy. The role of the former was to communicate a different appraisal of what the wine industry was achieving, and the latter, like a school of journalism, to ensure that this was done with discernment. It was not the only new competition to appear on the South African scene at the time, or more recently. There are now probably a dozen or so local and international wine shows with a reasonable level of support/subscription from the Cape wine industry.

Producers can now no longer plead ignorance, they cannot say (as Gunther Brozel from Nederburg did in the 1980s) “South Africa produces the best South African wines in the world” and believe that this is both an observation and a vision & mission statement. There are any number of forums which provide feedback and it is impossible to proceed ostrich-like about your business and pretend that if you are not, at least, the author of Truth on tablets of stone, you are the keeper of the gospel.

Recognising the importance of professionally arrived at judgements and making a commitment to obtaining this feedback represents an extraordinary step on the path to maturity. You can only really consider yourself out of adolescence when you can confront criticism and deal with it on its merits. Those who enjoy an unchallenged status within a community – medieval royalty, Stalin’s Politburo, Zuma/Mantashe, and Old World wine producers – are heavy-handed in their response to negative comment. In time all are toppled from their pedestal. The 1976 “Judgement of Paris” tasting in which Californian wines defeated the very best of the top French appellations was greeted with silence by the French press and disbelief by the French wine establishment. Only when the leading French producers saw the inroads being made by the New World in their traditional markets did they start paying attention to the critics (most notably Robert Parker whose views influenced Californian winemakers and American consumers).

Stagnation – intellectual, commercial and economic – is the inevitable result of an unchallenged sense of supremacy. The corollary – that to make progress requires a critical environment – is evident to all except those whose desire for power or whose sense of inadequacy overwhelms their feelings of civic responsibility. The Cape wine industry is getting this right. Unsurprisingly, the ANC has been less successful. DM

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