Ep 276 - Ken Forrester: The King of Chenin Blanc & the Wild Side of South African Wine

EAT SLEEP WINE REPEAT: A Wine Podcast Exploring Wine Regions, Grapes & Education

In this episode, host Eunina Doyle interviews Ken Forrester, the legendary 'King of Chenin Blanc,' about his colorful life and winemaking career

Key takeaways

• Ken Forrester pioneered the planting of Mourvèdre in South Africa to complete a Mediterranean-style blend.
• The 'Sparkle Horse' sparkling wine was created as a solution to poor drainage in a specific vineyard section.

Main topics

• Chenin Blanc versatility
• South African wine history

Notable quotes

Wine is about... people. It's about stories.

Conclusion

A vibrant exploration of how passion, resilience, and a sense of fun c

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:05) Welcome to Eat, Sleep, Wine Repeat, a podcast for all you wine lovers who, if you're like me, just cannot get enough of the good stuff. I'm Eunina Doyle, your host, wine presenter, educator and consultant. So stick with me as we dive deeper into this ever-evolving, wonderful world of wine. And wherever you are listening to this, cheers to you. Well, we are back. Season seven of the podcast is officially here. And I have to say, I think we have started this season in rather spectacular fashion. Because if you are going to come back after a little break, you might as well come back with one of the biggest personalities in the wine world, right? My first guest of season seven is none other than Ken. Forrester and if you do not know Ken yet well by the end of this episode I can pretty much guarantee that you will feel like you do. Ken is one of those people who walks into a room and the room becomes immediately more interesting. He is funny, opinionated, energetic, mischievous. Completely unafraid to say what he thinks. And he has the rather wonderful ability to tell a wine story that starts somewhere completely sensible and then ends, well... Speaker 1 (1:31) Somewhere you absolutely did not expect it to go. He is also known quite deservedly as the King of Chenin Blanc. You'll learn all about this in this episode, but also on other grapes. He in fact has been the first to plant in South Africa. But more than that, this conversation reminded me of something I think we sometimes forget when we get a little too serious about wine. Wine is about... people. It's about stories. It's about history, places, ridiculous decisions, brilliant ideas, failures, lucky breaks, and quite frankly, quite a lot of complete madness. And Ken. Oh, does Ken have stories? So as we start season seven, I couldn't think of a better person to remind us that wine doesn't have to be intimidating. It doesn't have to be overly serious. Wine can be clever. and joyful. It can be serious and completely ridiculous. And sometimes the best way to learn about a place, a grape or a wine is simply to sit down with someone who has spent decades living it and listen to them tell you the stories. So pour yourself something good. A Ken Forrester wine is normally quite easy to find and settle in because season seven is officially underway. Speaker 1 (2:57) Ken, question number one. If I told you that you had to tell me the most outrageous story of your entire wine career, and I feel like you're not going to let me down here. I really believe in you. And this one is, I want an answer that you probably shouldn't give anyone. Speaker 1 (3:15) What would you tell me? Speaker 2 (3:17) I make a wine called The Dirty Little Secret. Oh, yes, you do. If you understand the definition of a secret, it's something you can only ever tell one person at a time. Speaker 1 (3:27) So what does that mean, though? Because there's going to be a few more people than me when this goes out. I know. Where does this leave us? Speaker 2 (3:35) So I can't possibly tell you how I virtually nearly ended my life. What? Early one morning. Okay. Speaker 1 (3:43) After Speaker 2 (3:44) being out. all night and all day, or rather all day and all night. And going home, you know, managing to tear my trousers athletically over my head at five in the morning to get into bed, at which point, as I got onto the bed, I thought perhaps I should go to the bathroom. And I leapt out of bed. with the curtains open, slid the sliding door open, which was a window, and stepped out the window, which normally wouldn't be too much of a problem, but it was on the seventh floor of an apartment building. Speaker 1 (4:20) No. And Speaker 2 (4:22) there was this entire building had one apartment, the owner who was the caretaker, the owner's apartment that had a balcony. On the fifth floor below me, and I landed on that balcony. Speaker 1 (4:35) Oh my gosh. Wow. So did you break anything or were you just seriously bruised? No, I didn't break anything at all. I mean, apart from my pride Speaker 2 (4:46) somewhat. I was fully equipped for bed, entirely naked. And I Speaker 1 (4:52) landed Speaker 2 (4:53) on this mountain. Oh, Speaker 1 (4:54) paint us a picture. Speaker 2 (4:56) In my birthday suit. I have to tell you, the caretaker's never worn curlers in her hair when she goes to bed again. Never. Speaker 1 (5:03) I hope that you gave the landlord a bottle of your wine afterwards to say thank you for saving my life. I Speaker 2 (5:12) bought her a big Speaker 1 (5:12) box of Speaker 2 (5:12) chocolates and I apologized that I sleepwalk occasionally. Speaker 1 (5:19) Right. Well, everybody listening, definitely continue drinking delicious wines, but drink with moderation. I think that's the message here. We do tours Speaker 2 (5:28) on Saturday mornings out in Greenpoint where we mark the appropriate building with a red cross and you can see the balcony on Doreley Court. So it's still there. Speaker 1 (5:37) Wow. Well, I was going to ask you as well, what's the most outrageous thing that's ever happened to you because of wine? But I feel like actually you just did that. You did it in one. Okay. The Speaker 2 (5:45) other one possibly was... back in the day of Oddbins, Speaker 1 (5:49) was Speaker 2 (5:50) arriving on a Saturday morning and literally knowing, kind of got all your details, got your stuff, go straight to the Oddbins Fair at Park Lane, at the Park Lane Hotel in the ballroom, meet all your old friends from last year, have a chat, get busy, work all day, go out and have a big party that night. And then which hotel was I booked in? Oh gosh, I can't remember. And my kit is all locked in the Park Lane ballroom. And no, they're not letting anybody in. And I need to find a hotel for the night. I booked a hotel, paid for a hotel. I got to go find another because no idea which hotel I was booked at. Things happen like that. Speaker 1 (6:27) Things Speaker 2 (6:27) happen like that. Speaker 1 (6:28) Do you know what, though? Things like that happen to you a lot, Ken. When we met at the last wine tasting, the amount of stories you told me in five minutes, I mean, I did. I'm saying out here, everyone, I did fall a little bit in love with you. You live a remarkable life. Speaker 2 (6:46) Without a doubt. It's Speaker 1 (6:47) true. Speaker 2 (6:48) No, no, without a doubt. Speaker 1 (6:49) Yeah. Speaker 2 (6:49) You know what? Speaker 1 (6:50) Let's toast to that. Let us toast to that. Can we open up a Sparkle Horse? Speaker 2 (6:55) Yeah. Can Speaker 1 (6:55) we toast to your remarkable life whilst you tell me and everyone listening some of the craziest things? Okay, whilst I pour some Sparkle Horse, you have been around. out for a little while. South Africa has so many amazing people in it. You're definitely one of them. Who do you think, apart from yourself, is the wildest character in South Africa? Oh, no, no. I Speaker 2 (7:18) don't qualify for wild. Not at all. I'm relatively tame. I mean, this is Africa. We go on safari. Speaker 1 (7:25) There's some real wild animals out here. Yes, there is. Speaker 2 (7:28) Back in the day when I started out, Charles Beck of Fairview, there's a man. Ah. He... He was absolutely unstoppable, unplayable, and unpredictable. Charles Beck could get up to virtually anything at all. Anything at all. I mean, honestly, smuggling ladies out of a wine show in the boot of his car, well, Charles Beck. Anything, I mean, he really was phenomenal. He was a legend. And the other ones, there were plenty. There were plenty. We were littered with them. Achim van Arnhem, who sadly is no longer with us. Akhil from Clark Cabrera. And he was just... Speaker 2 (8:10) There's no way of predicting, no way of knowing where that could go. There were so many wonderful, wonderful characters. There still are, I'm sure. But one kind of perhaps you lose sight. But there were so many great characters that you couldn't be wild enough to be noticed. Speaker 1 (8:31) You just fit into the landscape. So of any of these people you've already mentioned, has there been any specific character that... actually really shaped things for you or inspired you? Do you have someone who was an inspiration? Speaker 2 (8:45) You know, the wine industry, I think in South Africa, you know, we talk about an industry that's 350 years old. The reality is obviously it only really woke up after apartheid and after the independence. So it's a young industry. It's only 30 years old. And you go back, who was at the forefront? It was the big institutions. It was like the Stellenbosch Farmers Winery. Characters like Dainpy Bailey. Dainpy is no longer with us now, but he was an absolute character. Dainpy in Afrikaans means thumb. And he was called Dainpy because of a thumb gesture, which he was rather famous for. Okay. Speaker 1 (9:22) Should I ask? Maybe not. Speaker 2 (9:24) No, you shouldn't. Speaker 1 (9:26) Okay. Okay. I'll leave that for everyone's imagination. Speaker 2 (9:29) Dainpy, Dainpy, Thumbs Bailey. And, you know, with him in that. kind of set was Benny Howard, who's still around today. He was very formative. Dave Hughes. Dave Hughes was a master of spirits. He still tasted, right up to when he was 80 years old, he was tasting spirits at the London competitions. Dave Hughes, a real character, dry as a bone, as crispy as a fried crisp. And he was just a character. A big white beard, a Father Christmas beard. And a very deep, deep, deep voice. There was a Dr. Julius Laszlo, who was kind of really instrumental in technical know-how, new technical know-how in the industry. A lot of our winemakers studied in Germany in Geisenheim. The vet, Dani de Vet, was from Geisenheim. And so it's a real mixture. You know, the Cape, when people say, what is the food of the Cape? You go, well, it doesn't really have its own cuisine, but it's a melting pot of cuisine because… The Dutch came here. The Dutch went from here to Indonesia. In Indonesia, they picked up people, a lot of university graduates, university students who, I mean, universities have always been at the forefront of political unrest. There are people leaving the country and they'd bring these people down here. And those Malay people came with their culture and with their cuisine. And then the French arrived, the French Huguenots. And then the Germans arrived. And then the Portuguese arrived. So it's been a wonderful melting pot of cuisines, the Italians. You know, I mean, I really, I'm so jealous. If I could be any wine in the world, I'd want to be an Italian wine. Because every single city, every restaurant in the world has Italian restaurants. I bet you get them in Tokyo, you know. Then you've got a natural platform just waiting for you. So, yeah, there's been so much added to our industry, so many characters. And those people, I think, were all formative, but there were hundreds of others, hundreds. Speaker 1 (11:28) Well, now, I know you mentioned that if you could be any wine, you'd be an Italian wine. No, no, you should be a Chenin Blanc wine. You should be. You have literally created, I think it's fair to say, cult-like status with the FMC Chenin Blanc. So I'm glad you are not an Italian wine. Just put it out there. We Speaker 2 (11:51) are what we are, and we are the sum of our choices, as they'll tell you. But without a doubt, I'm absolutely still excited by Cheninblanc, by what Cheninblanc can do. The variability of the variety, the absolute kind of pliability of the variety. In the right hands, it's plasticine, and you could do anything from Michelangelo's David. to building Wilbur and Orwell's flying machine. I mean, it's anything at all. Yard & Blanc really is wonderfully malleable, wonderfully, you know, you can work with it. From crunchy green apple sparkling wine, that sparkles in my mind, is Granny Smith green apples in a bottle. It's just, you can almost, when that apple crunches as you bite into it, that's the flavor, that's the taste that you get. And yet... You take Chedin and you go all the way to Noble Laid Harvest and you're sitting with a wine which is the essence of Chedin Blanc, which is absolutely desiccated, dried out by the botrytis, golden in color, unctuously sweet with enough acid to balance it. Heaven on earth. That's a little bit of foie gras. Speaker 1 (13:04) Ah, Speaker 2 (13:04) perfect. Speaker 1 (13:06) You're selling this great variety. I mean, what do you think? Having worked with Chenin for decades, you've just explained, yeah, you can have it as a still drier, sparkling, as a decadently sweet wine. Do you think there is still things that people don't understand about Chenin? You Speaker 2 (13:26) know, it's so variable, it doesn't quite share the Speaker 1 (13:31) identity crisis of Sangiovese. Speaker 2 (13:33) When is it Chianti? Speaker 1 (13:34) When is it Nobili? When is it Rosso? Speaker 2 (13:38) And what about the three different clones? Now we're talking, we've got three split personalities, not just a split personality, but we're talking Sybil, he has 16 personalities. So you kind of got all sorts of options. Shannon has just about as many choices. We have different clones. Fortunately, our forefathers and the earlier guys who, KWV, weren't so hell bent on offering a variety of clones. They'd kind of got to the point where they decided we've got the right clone. And they'd read. reproduce that and propagate that. So that's quite interesting from a point of view that it limited the variety, but there's still a choice. There's still many options. And Shannon thrives with cool sunshine. There already is part of the kind of drama in its character. Cool sunshine is almost an oxymoron. You know, you'd expect cool sunshine. Maybe you're thinking warm sunshine. No, I'm thinking cool sunshine. Specifically because here where we are, We're