By BARRY BEARAK


STELLENBOSCH, South Africa - Suppose the wine label said: This fruity red blend is full-bodied with tastes of sweet mulberry, spicy mocha and burnt rubber. The aroma lingers like the skid marks at an auto accident.

South Africa is the world’s ninth largest producer of wine, the winner of more than its share of accolades in international competitions. How, then, have some of its wines been linked to a stench commonly coughed up by a junkyard fire: the bouquet of burnt rubber?

Most of the answer lies within the lively prose of a British wine critic, Jane MacQuitty of The Times of London. In late 2007, she tasted a run of South Africa’s flagship reds and wrote that half were tainted by a “peculiar, savage, burnt rubber” odor. In a later column she called a selection of the country’s bestrated reds “a cruddy, stomach-heaving and palatecrippling disappointment.”

Here in the glorious wine lands of the Western Cape, where the grape vines grow against a backdrop of stunning mountains, her comments were infuriating and perplexing and even derided as crazy. No particular reds had been singled out by Ms.MacQuitty. Exactly which wines carried the scent of smoking steel-belted radials?

“All of us were slandered by a very general statement,” said Andre van Rensburg, the celebrated winemaker at the Vergelegen Wine Estate.

South Africans who dismissed the criticism were demeaned as burnt rubber deniers. Worse, they were accused of “cellar palate,” being so accustomed to tainted wine that their taste buds now welcomed it.

Exporters were particularly troubled. Many consumers do not care where a bottle originates so long as it costs about the same as a six-pack of beer. Such indiscriminate drinkers are likely to switch brands rather than risk a mouthful of charred galoshes.

“We prefer that people use the term acrid rather than burnt rubber,” said Andre Morgenthal, the spokesman for Wines of South Africa, which represents the exporters. “But whatever you call it, it has not been scientifically proven that the flavor even exists. We have committed our best people to find out.”

Indeed, for the past year vine-and-wine detectives from the department of viticulture and oenology at Stellenbosch University have been working the case. The team’s conclusions square with the theories of some of this country’s leading winemakers. Pure and simple, they blame bad winemaking for the burnt rubber taste. Specifically, they cite the occasional inattention to certain sulfide compounds that can form during fermentation.

“This is not typically a South African problem, and it annoys me when people say it is,” said Mr.Van Rensburg.

“But you don’t find an easier dog to beat up on than South Africa. Because of the past, because of apartheid, people are always willing to believe the worst.”

And do not listen to critics, he added: “At tastings, they talk each other into a frenzy. It’s like the Nuremberg rallies of Hitler. If one of them picks up the taste of apple, the other guy says, ‘Yes, yes, and I taste cinnamon too.’”

Ms.MacQuitty, one of those critics, considers such comments ostrichlike: “Unless the South Africans track down this burnt rubber taste, they will never be a real New World player in wine.”