It is probable that many of the bureaucrats employed by the KWV had little or no inkling of the international wine scene. At the time, the dominant force in the South African wine industry was the KWV- the national wine cooperative-an organization imbued with statutory powers and charged with the management of the industry and its surpluses. Simultaneously, the paucity of international varieties available to South African grape growers became an acknowledged issue, and steps were taken to address the problem.
#Radio silence cabernet verification#
It brought a host of requirements pertaining to site, minimum percentages of specified varieties, and a framework designed to make verification of any claims on the label a simple enough procedure.
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Wine of Origin legislation-with strict enough controls to enforce pretty general compliance-became law in 1973. While the regulations that drove at least part of the process were imperfect-if not downright flawed-they provided a blueprint from which those charged with managing the infrastructure could at least navigate. The South African wine industry stumbled into modernity ahead of many of its New World counterparts. Why this should be the case is far harder to explain than to describe. Cape wine consumers could well parody the much-quoted line from Laurence Binyon’s elegy for the war dead: “They shall not grow old…”
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So effectively has this been achieved that the assumptions that apply to wines produced in the modern era-which really began in the late 1970s-have automatically been transferred to this earlier age.Ĭhief among these is the lack of ageworthiness of the red wines. An industry, which in 2009 will celebrate its 350th anniversary, has all but obliterated the artifacts of an existence that is comfortably within living memory.
![radio silence cabernet radio silence cabernet](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/GrL7MSXOtQs/maxresdefault.jpg)
For many people-including a significant proportion of its domestic consumers-South African wine has no history preceding the era of isolation.