Speculation at breakfast yesterday revolved on how well the William Kentridge labels for Eben Sadie’s Old Vine Series wines would go down in the USA on Californian cuvées. I see some jokers have started referring to Eben as Eben $adie. My thoughts on the labels from the Sunday Times this past Sunday.

The Mail & Guardian called the launch last month of Eben Sadie’s Old Vines Series of six wines “one of the more significant releases in modern Cape winemaking” while Business Day claimed the launch “is hardly an event to cause even a ripple on South Africa’s wine lake.” For the confused bystander, the wines have two things that make them unusual: high price (R3504.82 for 5½ bottles of wine made from grapes grown on old vines) and labels by William Kentridge. Of course these two factors are related, as one PR practitioner who bought a case planned to have lunch with Kentridge and intended to ask him to sign each bottle.

Having famous artists make wine labels is nothing new: Château Mouton has been doing it for years and closer to home Tinus van Niekerk arranged for renowned wildlife artist Gordon Vorster to paint labels back in 1982. Nor is it a new thing for Kentridge, whose Magic Flute designs graced half a dozen pricey SA cuvées a few years back.

Strange then that the equally famous SA artist Marlene Dumas has so far resisted making labels for her brother’s Jacobsdal wine estate in Stellenbosch in spite of being born on the farm and enjoying the odd bottle herself. When I visited her at home in Amsterdam a few years back, she opened a bottle of French Champagne given to her by her dealer.

Dumas was recently embroiled in a messy court case brought by a Miami property developer Craig Robbins after she added him to her blacklist of patrons who “flip” art – buy it and quickly sell it on for a tidy profit. At issue was the controversial principle of droit-de-suite which entitles artists to a share of prices fetched for their work on the secondary art market. Which would open up a nest of hornets if the Kentridge bottles were to later reappear. The judge found for Dumas but was “disgusted by what the proceedings had revealed about the international fine art milieu, ‘a world of self-proclaimed royalty full of ‘blacklists’, ‘greylists’ and astonishing chicanery’” as Germaine Greer put it in The Guardian. A bit like the world of fine wine, then.

Of course if and when the bottles are resold, the question will be how much of the price depends on the quality of the contents, made by Eben Sadie, a winemaker last year hailed as Producer of the Year by an influential sighted wine guide, and how much on the value of the label. The services of Solomon might be required.

The Kentridge images themselves are curiously conservative, being mostly landscapes with a couple of anthropomorphism. A far cry from the radical labels of the towering modernist sculptor Joseph Beuys which consists of the artist’s signature, the abbreviation F.I.U. (Free Intellectual University) and the slogan Difesa della Natura (defense of nature).”

As a follower of the father of biodynamic agriculture, Rudolph Steiner, Beuys authenticates the contents of the bottle and transforms it into art. As the Virtual Museum of Modernism notes “F.I.U. is thus again a certificate of quality but also a political confession. The exhilarating effect of wine as physical nourishment is juxtaposed to the intellectual nourishment F.I.U.”

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