The Far East is a glittering prize for SA wine exporters. A bit like a bibulous Maneki Neko, one of those fat red plastic cats sitting next to the till, waving profits in through the door. But one that is unlikely to be won so long as we describe our offerings as “redolent of cassia and capsicum” and deploy other pompous phrasings.

A desire to wring the last bit of profit out the bottle sees the ubiquitous sighted wine guide printed in the Far East, where English is widely understood. But I doubt whether many copies linger amongst the rice steamers and woks as culturally, its lost in translation. Ditto for Soweto and Gugulethu. We printed our own blind tasted People’s Guide locally (proudly South African and all that) and some of the copies look like they were collated by a blind person. Confirming that in commerce, no good deed goes unpunished.

The Mysterious East

If the past is another country, the East is a whole new continent. As Johannesburg restaurateur (the Red Chamber in Hyde Park) Emma Chen notes in her beautiful memoir Emperor can Wait (Picador Africa, 2009) “clams taste like I imagined the Sea Dragon Princess’s tears would taste like. Subtle and concentrated, each drop carried as much sea freshness as the whole sea.”

There’s a lesson here for wine marketers, to translate metaphors and adjectives to culturally appropriate ones even though the language may remain the same. Heck Xiaoqing even calls herself Emma for the benefit of SA tonsils. When she watched Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the opening scenes moved her to tears while the gravity-defying fighting had the SA audience in fits of laughter which left Emma feeling resentful.

Metaphors do translate. For Sakkie Kotzé, winemaker at Le Bonheur on the Simonsberg, Meimaand snoek (May snoek) are the best “want hul’s die vetste” (because they’re the fattest) and they’re great with his tangy Sauvignon Blanc. If Sakkie lived in Taiwan, snoek might be replaced by red Xun crabs caught in autumn (for the same fat reason) and he might very well describe them as “smelling of heavenly fragrance” with a Malmesbury bray, but replace the Shaoxing wine with SA Sauvignon. Cultural imperialism aside, it’s simply a more harmonious match.

Sakkie and the Meimaand snoek

Emma’s effort may rub shoulders with Jamie Oliver on the bookshelf, but to call Emperor can Wait a cookbook is to miss the point, even if it does contain 22 recipes. One madelaine dunked in camomile tea was sufficient to remember things past for Marcel Proust. For Emma, it takes pawpaw milk to conjure up a disastrous date and Zhajinag noodles to recall the lying in state of Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-Shek) in April 1975. “Some people held banners with slogans in red characters, handwritten in their blood, revering the late president… My recollection of those days was so full of repeated images that I became confused about what I actually experienced.” So far better to let the stomach remember.

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