Review: Vivien Horler

Red Tape: The untold story of a visionary South African’s battle against bureaucracy, and the birth of a world-renowned wine region, by Brigid Hamilton Russell (Quickfox)

An international trade treaty with the unlikely name of the Crayfish Agreement was at the heart of legendary wine man Tim Hamilton Russell’s victory over bureaucracy.

The agreement was signed in Paris between the Union of South Africa and the French Republic on February 11, 1935, granting SA the right to export crayfish to France at favourable tariffs, as well as fresh and dried fruit.

In exchange, the Union government agreed SA wine and brandy makers would be barred from using any “appellations of French origin”. So not only could the local industry not call a locally produced wine a Bordeaux or Burgundy, it could not even describe it as made in the Bordeaux or Burgundy style, type or class.

Government Notice Regulation 426 of the Wine, Other Fermented Beverages and Spirits Act 25 of 1957, as the Crayfish Agreement was formally known, covered casks or barrel, cases and packaging, bottles and containers, and bottle labels as well as marketing material.

This was a major problem for Hamilton Russell, as he was producing fine French-style wines from his vineyard in the Hemel-en-Aarde Valley near Hermanus. How were buyers to know about his wines’ unique selling points if he was forbidden to tell them?

So he took on the establishment, at one point being arrested and convicted (with a wholly suspended fine and sentence) and – eventually – won.

This story of an Englishman challenging the might of a monopolistic bureaucracy, in the form the KWV, a body tied up with Afrikaner nationalism and rigid regulation, is the subject of this revealing book by Hamilton Russell’s daughter, Brigid Hamilton Russell.

Tim, the son a United Party MP, and brother of the strongly anti-apartheid Rev David Russell, was educated at Bishops and Oxford, where he studied geography. He was also keenly interested in climatology and geomorphology – why landscapes look the way they do.

As early as the late 1950s he was on the record as saying ne day he wanted to farm, but in the event he went into advertising, rising to the position of chairman of J Walter Thompson SA. His professional knowledge of how to publicise a cause was to stand him in good stead.

Tim’s family had a holiday home in Hermanus, and he grew up deeply familiar with the area. After taking advice from European-born wine experts, particularly Dr Julius Laszlo and Desiderius Pongracz, he began to wonder if wine could be grown in the Hemel-en-Aarde Valley, where midsummer heat could be mitigated by cooling sea breezes. At the time there were no vineyards in the area.

I well remember the time when KWV controlled SA’s wine industry, but had no idea of how firm its grip was.

The origins of the wine co-operative are interesting. It was formed in 1918 – the same year as the formation of the Broederbond, and many of the same people were members – to support wine farmers who, in the downturn after the end of World War 1, were facing economic ruin.

In 1924 an act of parliament, colloquially known as the KWV Act, gave the KWV the sole right to export surplus alcohol. It also “had the power to set minimm prices, impose limits on production, issue or deny planting permits for new vineyards, specify which grape varieties farmers were permitted to plant, and dictate production methods”.

By the 1980s, writes Hamilton Russell, most wine farmers grew grapes, but did not make wine. They delivered their entire crop to a co-op, knowing they would be paid. So while the KWV was there to cushion farmers from supply and demand, it led to a wine glut, as farmers planted more and more grapes, regardless of quality, knowing they would be paid.

To get around this problem, in 1957 a quota system was introduced to control where grapes could be grown, which grapes, and the tonnage any farmer could produce.

In addition, KWV controlled the importation of grape varieties, partly in a bid to avoid disease. Pino noir was unavailable and chardonnay was illegal until the early 1980s.

The epigraph at the beginning of this book is a quote from Tim: “Make wine where it wants to be made, not where you want to make it.”  And it wanted to be made in the Hemel-en-Aarde Valley, which he believed would be perfect for growing pinot noit and chardonnay grapes to make the Burgundy-style wine he favoured.

But his farm in the valley had no quota, and new quotas were virtually unobtainable. Plus you couldn’t legally import those grape varieties.

Plus again, thanks to the Crayfish Agreement, even if you solved the other problems, you couldn’t tell your customers what was in the bottle.

How Tim Hamilton Russell eventually got around these restrictions, becoming the first wine farmer in the Hemel-en-Aarde Valley as well as arguably one of South Africa’s top wine farmers, is the subject of this book.

His vindication: in July 1996 Nelson Mandela was the guest of honour at a banquet hosted by Queen Elizabeth. And one of the wines served that night was Hamilton Russell Vineyards’ chardonanny 1993.

Occasionally the storyline is repetitive, and I think the cover is hopeless in attracting potential buyers interested in wines and vines, but the book shines a compelling light on how SA went from making pretty mediocre wines to some of the best in the world. And it celebrates one of the heroes at the forefront of that struggle.