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Well the 100 ladies have spoken and here are 100 wines they chose for ten occasions. A fascinating mixture of big brands and boutique labels – a people’s Platter, if you will.
A wonderful vignette of the late Princess Margaret dining at Bang Between the Pitons restaurant on St. Lucia in the Caribbean while Led Zeppelin ate banana and Mars Bar sandwiches a few tables along. But what to drink with such an exotic sandwich is the kind of question to exercise sandwich savant Emile Joubert whose Sandwich Showcase was the culinary highlight of the recent Stellenbosch Wine Festival.
Great with coffee/mocha Pinotage
The news that the Sauvignon Blanc Interest Group [SBIG] has secured sponsorship from First National Bank for a continuation of the controversial Sauvigon Blanc Challenge from defunct WINE magazine, confirms that wine marketing abhors a vacuum. But has the market moved on? Consumers buy wine for occasions: a Sunday braai, wedding anniversary, book club and not by varietal. Most punters think that rosé is a cultivar.
This is the seminal idea behind Clare Mack’s revolutionary 100 Women, 100 Wines event that went down at the V&A hotel at the Waterfront yesterday. And rather than pointy headed “professional” pundits from Pinelands, Clare brought ordinary women together from Pretoria, Porterville and Putsonderwater to choose them, courtesy of 1Time Airlines. Ladies were selected by a competition run in Destiny magazine, the most popular competition Destiny has ever run.
100 women choose 100 wines
“No matter what Simon Barlow [seigneur of top-draw Stellenbosch estate Rustenberg] may say, we’re upper Ida’s Valley and he’s lower Ida’s Valley. [Banker and owner of Tokara] GT Ferreira lives in those trees over there – he’s on Ida’s Ridge” said Hans-Peter Schröder, surveying the valley from the stoep of the new all singing, all dancing wine cellar of Neil Ellis Wines where he is a partner. It’s a sort of Hemel en Aarde for Old Cape Money.
Hans-Peter
All you needed was a cow euthanizer to transform today’s ABSA Top Ten Pinotage lunch into a Bacchanalian remake of the Coen brothers classic No Country for Old Men. For the average age of the Top Ten winemakers was surely under 30 and Meerkat maker Jacques Wentzel (below) was pure Javier Bardem in his buttoned up black coat. At R35 a bottle, his 2009 Meerkat must be one of the cheapest wines to make the top ten in the 15 years the competition has been running. With 70% of winners less than three years old (three 2010s and four 2009s), Pinotage is a young wine made by young men and statuesque Debbie Thompson, whose Simonsig Redhill 2008 was a tour de force.
Jacques Wentzel
Master and Commander: the far side of the world is the Hollywood blockbuster staring Russell Crowe that came second to Lord of the Rings: the return of the king in the 76th Academy Awards. Set in the Napoleonic wars, it recounts the fictional tale of how an outclassed, outgunned ship of the line Surprise, is ordered to “sink, burn, or take as a prize” French privateer Acheron, to protect the British whaling fleet. Wine has now replaced whale meat in the UK larder and a French remake premiered last night at La Motte in Franschhoek.
So, not only do UK newspapers hack cell phones, they also ride roughshod over embargos. The Human Rights Watch report “South Africa: Farmworkers’ Dismal, Dangerous Lives” on alleged slave labour conditions on SA wine farms that I saw came with the rider:
“Embargoed for Release
Not for Publication Until
07:30 GMT, Tuesday, August 23, 2011
09:30 in Cape Town, Tuesday August 23, 2011” from Eleanor Blatchley, a “communications and advocates associate” at HRW.
The rickety wheel of history has come full circle. The 352 year old SA wine industry started by Huguenot refugees from France with heavy lifting supplied by slaves from Africa and Asia is again using slaves to make wine, or at least workers treated like slaves, according to The Telegraph. Reporting on a controversial report by Human Rights Watch which claims workers “are being forced to live in shipping containers and pig sties and operate without proper safety equipment” the sensational report will hammer yet another nail into the coffin of SA wine sales in Blighty. Are the allegations of HRW true? Probably. Do they represent the status quo on SA wine farms? Certainly not.
From today’s Travel & Food supplement of The Sunday Times. Admen are not joking when they say Red Bull has wiiings, as three billion cans of the stuff are sold each year. Amy Winehouse, the torch song diva who flew to close to the flame, was a big fan. UK tabloid The Sun claimed she downed “gallons” of gin and Red Bull the day before her death. The secret of success for the energy drink is caffeine, a powerful stimulant whose usual delivery vehicle is coffee, a libation so addictive and fashionable, the coffee shops of 17th century Europe have now spread across the planet.
Was Amy Winehouse a coffee/mocha Pinotage poppie?
Move over dueling banjos, SA has dueling wine auctions. And this year is shaping up into a mother of all struggles. Nederburg goes down in the middle of September (16-17th) while the CWG Auction takes place a fortnight later, on 1 October. So how do the Auctions stack up?
