The hidden story of this weekend’s Nederburg Auction (that arose phoenix-like out of the ashes of predictions of disaster published in the dead tree media used to start the braais at Plaisir de Merle on Friday night) was the arrival of New Media at the annual institution, reconfirmed as the most important date on the SA wine calendar.

And while animals boarded Noah’s Ark two-by-two, New Media arrived at the Auction in threes: “beautiful girl who tweets” Melissa Chetty, “cosmopolitan blogger from Spill” Clare Mack and “editor with a million impressions a month and a dose of ‘flu” Cathy Marston who was inexplicably omitted from Thursday’s unveiling of Absa’s Top Ten Pinotages, an institution whose media list needs serious modernization. Heck Cathy even has a column in the Cape Times.

Melissa Chetty

This trio of vivacious Auction virgins stormed the media centre, tweeting, posting and outraging the modesty of lifestyle luvvies, financial magazine mutterers and scribblers from Sunday scandal sheets whose intellectual TCA taint and billowing balloons of Brett was refreshingly absent from the Nederburg spittoon this year. Magazine mavens and newsprint nabobs have been replaced by social media celebrities who transmitted more electrons out of Paarl than a Large Hadron Collider. As one Distell director told me “send our best wishes to your media friends Up North and tell them we had a great party without them!”

Clare Mack interviews Terrific Tertius Boshoff who is reading an interesting book

New Media provides an exciting direct channel to market for producers too long prisoners to manipulation, interpretation and editing by a generation of pundits with press accreditation and hidden agendas. If Distell’s communications czar installs a couple of webcams next year, turns up the volume on his WiFi and sorts out internet bidding, the 41% increase in turnover this year will look like the baby steps of Susan Boyle.

Bonhams Auctioneers wine director Anthony Barne agreed in the merits of a pre-auction tasting in London next year and the virtual embrace of the internet opens up Singapore and San Francisco as sources of potential bidders. That 30% of auctioned wines will be heading to Tesco’s Wine Club, Nigeria and India (“you don’t know how important India is to us” whispered Nederburg Nawab Razvan Macici) confirms that the world has suddenly become Nederburg’s oyster: a plump and succulent aphrodisiac in the buffet of SA wine.

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