Things were a little more surreal than usual this Sunday at Truth! David Donde’s cross between an Apple hi-tech show room, lycra cycling pants catwalk, after party for Narcotics Anonymous, ossuary and coffee bar serving the best Joe in Cape Town in the Prestwich Memorial corner of Buitengracht and Somerset Road.

Quite where all the psychic energy comes from is an open question, but it’s built up worse than static on a nylon carpet. Perhaps it’s the proximity to a Victorian Greek temple now trading as St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church; intersecting Ley Lines; popper pollution from the leather bars in De Waterkant or a calcium overdose from all those slave bones interned somewhere in the building.

Popular Coffee Pinotage in the USA

The satellite radio was tuned to Amsterdam, perhaps being relayed from the Dutch Consulate a block up Buitengracht that runs a nice little cottage industry selling Schengen visas to footloose S’effricans. Ubuntu phenomenon Sonja Kruse “from KZN” who recently walked around the country with R100 in her pocket, staying with 150 different people along the way, bought African Speakers Bureau boss Jörg Nawrocki and I a couple of flat whites. No sign of Aiden, who’s given up money and now lives on pure energy.

Truth! is a most appropriate moniker for a provider of coffee given the letter printed on page four of today’s Travel & Food supplement of the Sunday Times. Reacting to my report on testing of finalists in this year’s ABSA Top Ten Pinotage Competition for the presence of illegal additives like coffee beans, an academic from an upcountry university reports finding caffeine off the scale using her mass spectrometer. Which is just as well, as ABSA’s lab is still busy calibrating for caffeine and no test for coffee was possible.

Could this be the smoking gun the Western Cape Department of Agriculture has been looking for? The Starbucks character in Coffee Pinotage had been attributed to an overdose of toasted oak chips added during the fermentation and maturation process. A lucky (and lucrative) mistake for Diemersfontein winemaker Bertus Fourie.

But this latest caffeine peak looks like it came from beans as a couple of other Coffee Pinotage samples were caffeine free. If beans were indeed added, it would explain the popularity of Coffee Pinotage at raves, for this is Red Bull with an alcoholic kick in addition to wiiings of caffeine and being illegal makes it twice as kif.

Officials promise a statement on the matter tomorrow and more information. SA winelovers, stand by for The Truth!