Country singer Kellie Pickler jives to 'Dancing With the Stars' victory
 
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Pendock Uncorked

South Africa's leading independent drinks commentator…
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Cinsaut for Climate Change

By Neil Pendock | 2013-05-22 12:07:04

Commissioned to write 1500 words on “global warming and the SA wine industry. How rising temperatures have affected wines and farming methods locally and what will it bring further” my thoughts have been somewhat focussed of late.

Although writing from a cold and rainy Cape Town, it’s hard to believe in global warming – especially when Peter Lilley writes in the Spectator that global temperatures are not increasing. “There is a legitimate argument that the world should phase out fossil fuels to minimise global warming. The power of that argument has weakened recently. Global temperatures have failed to rise for 16 years.”

Marketing meltdowns in Franschhoek and science aside, there is certainly a perception that the mercury is climbing. Jancis Robinson, to wine what Nana Mouskouri is to Greek music, opined on the weekend that “wine is one of the most sensitive measures of climate change” and that change is up when you read about increasing quality of English wine and those from Canada.

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Franschhoek loses Faith

By Neil Pendock | 2013-05-21 10:28:20

Perhaps the saddest thing (in a vale of mirthful tears) about the ongoing Franschhoek Fiasco of the non-award of the Franschhoek Wine Writer’s Prize is the admission by Franschhoek Literary Festival strongly silent director Jenny Hobbs that when it comes to judges “no payment is involved. The judges are thanked for their work with the offer of a case of South African wine.” Which goes a long way to explaining the fiasco with bananas and monkeys in the frame.

That the FLF felafel reward with SA rather than Franschhoek wines confirms just how detached from reality this event has become for ordinary producers who may want to ask the Wine Valley what they are paying for. With the future of the competition currently under discussion, a list of drinkable terroir wines from the valley may come in useful. These were the ones Anibal Coutinho and I liked last year after a mammoth blind tasting – an algorithm which seemingly and amazingly did not apply to wine writing entries this year, according to an incendiary explanatory email from one of the judges currently doing the rounds of entrants.

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Triangulating Terroir

By Neil Pendock | 2013-05-20 12:06:30

One of the best Dad’s Army wheezes of the British home guard in the phoney war which later went postal, was to jumble up the sign posts on country lanes in England so that when the panzers rolled up the road to London, they’d end up in Middle Wallop. SA vinous terroir is very Mom’s Army with style sign posts jumbled up and confusion the result. SA wine needs a map.

The Douro, first formally demarcated wine appellation in the world, showed the way when Baron Joseph James Forrester produced one in the 1830s. A cartographic enterprise which has been brought into the 21st century by David Eley whose Douro Map (below) will be auctioned at Christie’s in London in June, along with a vertical tasting of 12 vintages of Quinta do Noval from 1937 to 2003.

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Can Design Save SA Wine?

By Neil Pendock | 2013-05-19 08:59:37

The average IQ of pole dancing palace with dancing Poles Mavericks, on Buitenkant Street, shot off the scale at breakfast yesterday as the 39 curators for Cape Town World Design Capital 2014 met next door at Truth Coffee with an International Advisory Committee of designers from Lagos, San Francisco and the Wilderness who had flown into town to check up on progress on vetting the nearly 600 proposals for next year’s design jamboree. Truth is owned by David Donde (below, left) and is now managed by James Borland, recently of the parish of the Taj.

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Brandhouse 1 Porcupine Ridge 0

By Neil Pendock | 2013-05-17 17:17:08

For a case study on how to run a drinks writing competition, the Franschhoek Literary Festival should climb down from their wooden rocking horses and consult with Brandhouse who run the Responsible Drinking Media Awards.

For starters, prize money is nearly quadruple the R25,000.00 offered by the prickly rodent. An amount which has not increased in five years, even if it is such a lavish sum for John Maytham he was unable to find anything worthy to lavish it upon. After all, 25K must be the equivalent of a couple of voice overs. Silence from Canuck Chris and the French Hope as the prize does not sound quite so grand in dollars or euros.

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Franschhoek Literary Festival to be sued for R500,000?

By Neil Pendock | 2013-05-17 10:43:04

The non-award of the “5TH ANNUAL SOUTH AFRICAN WINE WRITERS AWARD” is a scandal with more legs than Oscar Pistorius. In spite of twenty entries received, including one from the 2012 Louis Roederer Wine Columnist of the Year – a prize presumably judged at least in part on his entry in this competition and not because he imports Louis Roderer bubbles into SA as some cynics maintain (thank heavens for blind judging!) – Solomons see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil (below) reached a “unanimous decision this year that not one of the entries lived up to the expected literary and technical qualities of wine writing” according to Franschhoek Literary Festival Director Jenny Hobbs. Up to a point, Lord Copper, up to a point.

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SA wine set to reap the Franschhoek whirlwind

By Neil Pendock | 2013-05-16 17:42:01

Now that the Franschhoek Literary Festival has put the RM Williams into the goolies of SA wine writing by wastepaperbasketing the 20 entries for the annual Franschhoek Wine Writers Prize this year, it looks like SA wine will increasingly have to rely on the likes of Guy Collins who writes on SA wine for Bloomberg from London. Picked up yesterday by Business Day in a major spread “SA wine industry set to beat export record” his numbers are more of a joke than the stats of corked wines at the recent Old Mutual Trophy Wine Show.

The sub-headline crows “growers raise a glass to another good year with exports rising 496 million litres” except the total volume was 460.9 million litres so the previous figure must have been -35.1 million litres. Perhaps consumers returning corked bottles?

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Franschhoek Loves Lenin

By Neil Pendock | 2013-05-16 09:38:24

Lenin’s tomb reopened on Red Square yesterday after refurbishment due to water seeping into the foundations. Which was quite appropriate as towards the end of his life, Lenin became a mushroom due to overconsumption of fly agaric according to Russian musician Sergey Sholokhov. Could this be the reason behind the irrational behaviour of the trio of judges at the controversial Franschhoek Wine Writers’ Prize this year? They had transformed from mammal to fruit (below) as painted by Guiseppe Archemboldo.

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Pinotage Perks Up

By Neil Pendock | 2013-05-14 11:39:38

Is the worm about to turn? Fiona McDonald, SA’s leading international taster with berths at the IWC, IWSC and Concours Mondial, reports that some of the UK’s fiercest Pinotage sceptics are having to eat humble pie washed down with Pinotage. As proof of this, a story on Aaldering Pinotage: straight, white and unwooded called Lady M in today’s De Telegraaf, the leading Dutch dead-tree newspaper (below), edited by the brilliantly named mnr. J.J.M Paradijs:

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Party @ Palugyayov Palác

By Neil Pendock | 2013-05-13 10:04:05

Esporão winemaker David Baverstock was trying to conscript me into the Hava Nagila conga line being belted out by Bratislava superstar CC Slonska last night at the Palugyayov Palác when the music stopped, mid-lunge.  CC was a vision in a long green dress slit from ankles to waist.  She had impressed queuing for the Slav Corner buffet of suckling pig and gammon steaks (but alas, no potatoes as spud-addict Liam Campbell noted sadly) and the daggers glared at her by every other female in the room added a medieval menace to the banquet to round off the Concours Mondial. 

She was so good (sort of a cross between Nana Mouskouri and Nina Hagen) and her choice of song so camp (I Will Survive) many thought she was a Slovakian ladyboy although Timo Jokinen, who lived for many years in Thailand, denies it on the evidence of her hands.  What is it with this crazy idea if a woman does well, she must be a man in drag? That many UK lady wine writers look like men is no argument at all.

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