Why don’t Americans drink more South African wine? It’s a question that I have been asking myself, and any American wine drinker who will listen, for some time. The world’s biggest wine market was only the sixth biggest importer of bottled South African wine last year, taking fewer than a third as many bottles as the UK, and under two-thirds the number of the relatively tiny Netherlands.
I’m such a fan of South African wine that I’d like everyone to appreciate it. And producers and growers there really do need every bit of financial encouragement to keep vines, many of them venerable, in the ground.
Peter-Allan Finlayson who, along with his brother Andrew, makes the stunning Crystallum wines, was in London recently. He warned that, although grape prices have at last been going up, farmers have found it more financially appealing to grow citrus on the west-coast land that has been increasingly prospected by quality-conscious wine producers and that “even rooibos is more profitable than wine”.