Not into wine? Try water tasting, the Cape’s latest hit

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JEREMY MAGGS: Now in the Cape Winelands there is, I read, a new luxury experience and it’s not wine. A Stellenbosch estate is offering water tastings at R295 per person, where guests, as I understand it, compare still and sparkling mineral waters from around the world, all created by a certified water sommelier.

It’s part of a growing trend in high-end tourism, where purity, terroir and provenance are applied to water just as they are to wine.

I want to explore this in a little more detail. I’m in conversation now with Nico Pieterse, international water sommelier, to explain why people are paying to taste water and what they think they’re getting. Nico, a very warm welcome to you and be patient with me, for listeners who haven’t heard of water tasting before, what exactly are they experiencing and why is it worth it?

NICO PIETERSE: Hi, Jeremy. I’ll tell you all of those things. Thank you for having me on the show. Water is not just water and water from all sources around the world tastes differently because of the minerals in the soil.

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You can get very unique waters from around the world. Some of it may be from volcanic origin, or basically water that rained on or around a volcano, then siphons through into an aquifer, and you get loads and loads of minerals in that water.

Where the other one, the opposite, would be water from a glacier in Svalbard or in Lofoten Islands in Norway, where you get a glacier that’s maybe been around for 200 000 years. The glacier is now melting, and before that water can run into the ocean and become salt water, they will bottle that.

It’s quite an emotional experience to have a glass of water that fell as rain about 200 000 years ago.

As a sommelier, what I then do is I take the taste of that water, and I pair that with a wine, a whiskey, a brandy or with some food, and it actually complements the wine, the brandy, the whiskey or the food, which is really interesting and it’s not something you’d expect water to do.

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But from all the waters in the world and there are loads and loads of sources all around the world, and in South Africa, we look at the minerals inside that water and the more minerals, the more taste the water would have.

JEREMY MAGGS: How does our South African water stack up then?

NICO PIETERSE: South Africa’s got quite low… So we measure the minerals in TDS or total dissolved solids. Now, in the tasting room, I have a local water that I use with a TDS of 345, which is milligrams per litre and that would be the highest one in South Africa that’s commercially available.

In the tasting also, I go up to about a TDS of 4700. It’s a water from Armenia with very high mineral content and it’s a very interesting tasting water. So the TDS is 4700 on the Armenian one.

That also has a very interesting story because with still water, I love pairing still water with wine, because once we carbonate water, carbonation or the CO? is acidic and it lowers the pH [potential of Hydrogen] of the water. So I don’t like pairing carbonated water with wine necessarily.

I love pairing it with food or sparkling wine, whereas the still water I love pairing that with a red or white wine and it just goes better with that.

JEREMY MAGGS: Nico, South Africans, I think it’s fair to say, are wine literate. Do you think that makes us more open to the idea that water can be tasted, differentiated and enjoyed as well?

NICO PIETERSE: I absolutely think so. In the tasting, which takes about an hour, half an hour of that is purely educational.

I tell the taster everything I can about water and how important water is. I’m a water steward. I’m a supporter of water, and I protect water. But I also want to educate.

There’s a lot that people don’t know about water, and water really is the most important thing on earth for human beings. There really isn’t anything else for health and for survival, except maybe the sun.

I think South Africans have a lot to learn about water.

I think the whole world has a lot to learn about water and, on my own, at my little tasting room, I try and change the world. One tasting at a time.

JEREMY MAGGS: What’s been the reaction from guests so far? Is it curiosity, excitement? Or maybe, as I started this conversation with you, a degree of scepticism?

NICO PIETERSE: One hundred percent scepticism. But that is changed in the first 15 minutes of the tasting. I’ve yet to have a person who wasn’t able to taste the differences in the water and appreciate the tasting. It’s an important bit of education that people really need to have.

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On a social media platform, on an article, I get very interesting comments because people think water is just water, but it really isn’t. The fact that I have so many comments on social media about “I’d rather buy a whiskey or a brandy and Coke” or “I’d rather drink water from the hose”.

Those myths all get fixed up in the tasting.

Once we know a little bit about water, you either love me or you hate me because I get you to read your mineral bottle labels, and I get you to understand what really is in tap water. So tap water is 100% necessary because we need water, but it’s also the most processed water in the world.

So you just need to know what to look for in tap water and what to possibly take out if you can.

JEREMY MAGGS: Can I push you a little bit on taste? You talk about the terroir in water. Can you give me a practical example of how water from one region tastes different from another? But maybe if you can verbalise or articulate the actual taste itself.

NICO PIETERSE: Ooh, it’s not a difficult question. The minerals basically are salts and the salts are electrolytes, and that’s what we need for survival.

There’s a product that you add to a glass of water – I don’t want to say the name necessarily – but it’s a hydration product, it’s in a little packet. So without the sweetness that would be a higher TDS water.

So if you think about that, without the sugar in it or the sweetness in it, it’s salty. Sometimes it’s very smooth, depending on whether you have magnesium in there, magnesium and calcium and silica make the water smooth, and that goes really well with the red wine.

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Whereas water without that goes really well with a white wine. If you want a coffee that’s a nicer brew coffee, you use a water with a high magnesium content because the magnesium extracts more sugar out of the coffee bean, and it also makes your coffee smoother.

So it’s a mouthfeel. It’s definitely salty because the minerals are salts. Alkalinity can affect the taste on the sweetness side. If the water is more alkaline, it will taste a little bit sweeter. Also, the texture might be a little bit more soapy. But yeah, you get wonderful waters out there and it’s a conversation that needs hours to discuss this [chuckle].

JEREMY MAGGS: Nico Pieterse, I’m going to leave it there, thank you so much for talking to me today, international water sommelier. I do appreciate your time.

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