I am not a wine connoisseur by any stretch of the imagination. The extent of my knowledge is more or less choosing between red and white and then mumbling something about the “fine oaky finish”.
The other night though, a bottle of wine brought me to my knees.
STARING AT EXCESS
It was a bit of a catch-22. My wife had been given a voucher to a hotel restaurant almost a year ago and so, after three failed attempts (broken car, bad weather conditions) we finally made it there.
As we were sitting outside waiting to order, we were both a little uneasy at the wealth this place represented, especially with some of the conversations we have been having around race and restitution and money. But the money had been given as a gift and so it seemed like we could use it or simply throw it away. So we gritted our teeth and started paging through the wine list to see if there was anything reasonable.
THE EXCESS OF EXCESS
As Val read out wines in the nine hundreds, I started to get sad. But then she hit a R4 000 and a little piece of me died inside. The same page contained mention of a R6 800 and R9 000 with the words “drink for a good cause” emblazoned next to them.
A bottle of champagne for R11 000 and I’m almost finished. How is it possible that someone can sit down at a table and spend R11 000 on four glasses of drink? That is not an average person’s salary. That is way above what an average person in this country earns. Gone in sixty seconds.
But if you think that was the end of my horror story, you would be mistaken as we hadn’t yet come to the page where a R40 500 bottle of Pomerol-Bordeaux was the Good News.
Because it was the wine mentioned below the one that turned my stomach. The one described in the menu as “one of the greatest wines in the world and the most expensive of Burgundy… with a forceful bouquet of violet and a lively and profound ruby robe, a suaveness of exceptional finesse.“
Doing some research on this bottle which (in case you’re interested in acquiring one) goes by the name of 2011 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, Grand Cru, Côte de Nuits, France, I discovered that famed BFG and James the the giant peach author Roald Dahl had come across it and thought it was pretty decent:
“Sense for me this perfume! Breathe this bouquet! Taste it! Drink it! But never try to describe it! Impossible to give an account of such a delicacy with words! To drink Romanée-Conti is equivalent to experiencing an orgasm at once in the mouth and in the nose.” – Roald Dahl
How much for a bottle of such exquisite perfume? What would you pay for “one of the best” and for that “forceful bouquet of violet”?
According to this menu, you would pay R250 000. Yes, that is not a typo, it is an abomination.
If I was struggling to get my mind around an R11 000 bottle of champagne, then this tipped me over the edge.
Just in and of itself it is absolutely ridiculous. But in the context of a country where we are trying to rebuild after the ravages of apartheid and all the damage that was done from there… this is completely sickening.
HOW DID WE GET HERE?
I don’t doubt there are people, some who I know, some who I would consider reasonable decent people, who would somehow find ways to justify this. That is what is the worst part of this for me: not that it is there, but that many of us would be okay with it.
The existence of this bottle and its price on a menu for me is a loud blaring siren that acts as a lighthouse of extreme excess screaming at us all that we can do better. That we can be better. That in a country already divided by the excess of the some, we need to be drawing some lines in the sand and saying, “Enough already!”
What are your thoughts on this? Would love to see some feedback in the comments.