I was depressed to see I was the only positive pundit quoted in Stafford Thomas’s Financial Mail cover story on wine this week, pessimistically entitled Down to a Drop which features a Greek chorus of doomsayers, Job’s comforters and moaners. Get over it – the glass if half full, not half empty. If you worship Mammon rather than Bacchus, you’re at the wrong address.

SA wine has some of serious plus factors that should not be overlooked. Here are ten silver linings.

1. After years of trying, SA has at last an icon wine: Kanonkop Black Label. 1000 bottles sold out in two tranches on release at R1000/bottle earlier this year.

2. It could be worse, ask an Australian wine producer. Or Michel Laroche.

3. No earthquakes destroyed wineries and storage tanks as happened in Chile earlier this year.

4. Public and industry uproar squashed a government affiliated company’s application for mineral prospecting in prime wine growing terroir, in record time.

5. San Pellegrino reckons that the SA winelands are home to two of the world’s top 50 restaurants. Tally for Jozi? Null Points, as they say at Eurovision. Ditto for New Zealand. Ditto for the rest of Africa.

6. Johann Rupert served only SA wines and sparkling wines at his recent 60th birthday bash. How many other billionaires would do that?

7. 2009 is shaping up as the best vintage in SA, ever.

8. Earlier this year, SA wine export volumes to the UK overtook those of France for the first time in over two centuries, confirming that Bafana Bafana’s victory earlier this week was no flash in the pan.

9. Prices at last year’s Cape Winemakers’ Guild Auction flew off the scale

10. We make the best South African wine in the world.

Related posts:

1. A short life, but a merry one Bookended by the controversial claim by Su Birch, WOSA CEO,...
2. The African connection: + or -? The image of the SA wine industry “hanging from the...
3. Afrikaners get Plesierig in Amsterdam When Karen Zoid sang “Afrikaners is plesierige” she wasn’t joking...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.