At dinner the other night I was paging through a rather limpid looking wine list. Safe wines, boring wines; not one of which inspired in me even a trace of “Wahoo!” I saw one from a producer I have enjoyed before – a Shiraz that I thought may offer something of interest. Boy, was I wrong. It was as interesting as watching paint dry on a black and white television, showing curling.

The reason for it’s complete drabness was that it had fallen into the trap that many South African reds are succumbing to. The wine maker was forcing the wine to strongly exhibit flavours and aromas of coffee and chocolate.

It started with the Diemersfontein Pinotage, the grand daddy of the choccy mochy bullshit brigade. It sold spectacularly well. The public loves it. Wine farms, excited by its success, have quickly released all manner of similar wines. The most absurd being the Chocochinopinotage. Copy writing brilliance, I must say.

More often than I should, I find myself loudly and belligerently (pointing with my cigarette and half full glass of something and banging my fist) saying “Damnit! I really hope these overtly chocolaty coffee wines join the Panda on its road to extinction. Both are evolutionary dead-ends if you ask me. Waste of good glass and bamboo. Pass me that bottle…” Someone will inevitably respond with, “Lot’s of people like it.” That’s fine, I agree. You can like whatever you want, it doesn’t make the wine any better. Witnessing how Paulo Coelho has become a best selling author, The Notebook a successful film, and Justin Bieber, well, Justin Bieber, proves this.

It is then quickly followed by – especially if I am in the company of wine people –  “But surely these wines are a good thing if they are creating new wine drinkers, what with our per capita wine consumption dropping by the year?”

I don’t buy this, but I’ll get to my reply in a bit.

These beloved coffee and chocolate flavours are made by exposing the wine to heavily toasted oak staves during fermentation, and in some cases specific yeasts are employed to enhance these aromas and flavours. More often than not, very ripe grapes are used, resulting in a sort of jamminess and higher levels of residual sugar. In short, they are made wines. Wines that are not trying to express fruit, climate, area, or soil, but simply the taste of burnt oak. They are wines made dumb – all the joy having been sucked out of them and replaced with a vacuous, simple and immediate pleasure: a quick wank as opposed to a long night of wild and passionate love-making.

Wine people love to swirl and sniff wines, rattling off what they smell as if dictating a shopping list to Fruit and Veg City. Many people believe that is what wine appreciation is: being able to name as many descriptors as possible.

They are wrong.

We all have different palates and noses, some people may have a more acute sense of smell and be able to pick out more things – make a longer list. But does this give them a better appreciation of wine more than others? Hardly. It’s about flavour and aromas, sure, but also about texture, balance, lightness weight and place; it is about how all these things work together. But, sadly, our world loves lists just as it loves medals and scores. I can taste more things so I am better than you. This 92-point wine is better than this 89 point one. Such silliness. Would you score a work of art? A novel? “Let’s see, I’m 94 points on this Picasso.” Terribly silly.

So when a new wine drinker can immediately experience and name coffee or chocolate in a red wine, they think, “By Jove I think I got this wine malarkey thing.” But sadly they have only learnt one small thing: the smell of highly toasted oak, and its effect on red wine.

And it tastes pretty good. I mean, coffee and chocolate – how can you go wrong? The problem is instead of getting people more interested in wine, it is dumbing them down. It is the lowest common denominator of red wines. It is the Harry Potter of red wines: it’s accessible to everyone, palatable for most, and easily understood.

But this is not Wine. It may be a small part of it (one hopes it grows smaller), but it really is a freakish sideshow to the greater, and infinitely more interesting world of wine out there. So when people tell me these wines are creating more wine drinkers, I say that’s fine, but what kind of wine drinkers? For argument’s sake, if I wanted there to be more food eaters, would I try to start them off with well aged steak, a good béarnaise sauce, fresh vegetables and roast potatoes, or a Big Mac Meal? If I tried to introduce them to the wonders of literature would I start them off with a Mills and Boon, or The Hobbit?

There are wines that can be drunk young but still offer freshness, complexity, and sheer drinkability. These mocha choca posers are creating wine drinkers, sure, but wine drinkers who will not trade up because even a hint of tannin or acidity will scare them off after bottles and bottles of soft, squishy wines beaten to within an inch of their lives by merciless pieces of toasty oak.

It would be fine if it were limited to a single wine, or even a handful of Pinotages. But I fear it is spreading. In the attempt to satisfy a misguided market, I taste this heavily toasted effect in more and more wines. For fuck’s sake, there is even a Chardonnay marketed as tasting like vanilla. It is alluring, maybe, but oh so very simple. Wine is a wondrous thing, and I fear that so many people may miss out on it because they get stuck on the first attempt and are left believing good wines are ripe, sweet, and chocolaty.

Again, I don’t judge you – and I hope even if I did you wouldn’t give a shit – for enjoying these wines. I really don’t care what you drink. I do care that people may start to think this is what wine is supposed to taste like. It’s not. It’s about complexity, balance, litheness, elegance, freshness, power, depth, savoury, sweet, racy, majestic. Wine can be all these things, but the chocolaty wines so many love will never be any of them.