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Amazing what you learn from the Weekend Financial Times. Sunday’s interview with avant garde film director John Waters produced “balloonies, or people with a sexual interest in balloons.” “I really don’t get it” opined John “but maybe I’m being stuffy. It’s safe. We should encourage that kind of behaviour. No one gets pregnant at a balloony party.”
Reading the summer smalls laundry list of Ma Nolte (AKA Mr. Min) in the Sunday Times Food Weekly on Sunday, one brand in particular rang a bell (as Quasimodo might have said) – Franschhoek Cellar Statue de Femme 2011. Although the cost direct from the cellar (R40) is 20% cheaper than Ma’s published price (R49).
I’d made a note to sample the statue as I was intrigued by descriptions of “green and yellow apple” from the recent FNB blind tasting Ma referred to, and wondered what had happened to those juicy small red ones they sell in Woolies. Amazing buds these tasters have, that they can divine the colour of the fruit in the bottle, blind. Next they’ll be saying the apples are imported from China, or grown hydroponically in Israel – perhaps upside down like the plants stuck to the ceiling of my latest favourite restaurant, Dear Me, in Longmarket Street, Cape Town.
Members of the Académie Française, that shady body which decides on neologisms to be incorporated into French, are called immortals. Does Afrikaans have anything similar? Oompies who decide whether “zef” is ware Afrikaans? If not, they should sign some up chop-chop, as they come in useful. The Guardian reports on the runner-up for new French bon mot of the year: aigriculteur. Which is an “i” added to agriculteur (farmer) with aigri meaning embittered and aie translated as ouch! So the new word denotes a fed-up farmer and there are surely many of those in SA. Especially if they make wine.
Adrian Vanderspuy
Just as well Pierre-Emmanuel Taittinger (pet for short) is president of grande marque champagne house Taittinger or his “perfect weekend” interview in this Weekend FT’s outrageously inappropriate (in current economic climes) How to Spend it supplement may have got him into hot water. “In the early evening, I pour myself a whisky or make a Mauresque with a good Pastis, orgeat syrup and some ice. We might have some champagne with dinner, or old-fashioned claret such as Château Poujeaux. I don’t like the new-style Bordeaux – the wines are too ripe and lack a sense of place. I prefer subtle wines that speak of terroir.”
Pierre-Emmanuel Taittinger
While the Groot Koppe (big cops) at the University of Stellenbosch nut out the shape and form of an SA Wine Institute, they should remember that the Diners Club Winemaker of the Year for 2011, Johan Jordaan from Spier and Young Winemaker of the Year, Matthew van Heerden of Uva Mira, were both trained at Elsenburg. An inconvenient truth as Al Gore might say.
Diners Club Winemaker of the Year 2011 Johan Jordaan
Great Domaines must be the largest importer of European wines into SA by value and if Eben Sadie maintains that only 800 people spend more than R400 on a bottle of wine, a goodly percentage of the 800 were in Melrose this afternoon at the opening of Wayne Visser’s new cellar. Including at least three winos from Kwa-Zulu Natal, led by Yegas Naidoo, shown below, who had overdressed a tad for the Highveld heatwave in black leather, claiming a nip in the air in Durban this morning.
Yegas dressed for a Durban nip
Has Ross Douglas, the Joseph Duveen of Jozi de nos jours, sold out? Two spirit stands at his spirited Food|Wine|Design Fair on the roof of the Hyde Park Shopping Centre bring the titanic struggle between artisan and corporate behemoth into stark focus.
In the grey corner, international super brand Grey Goose vodka are paying Ross R20K for a spot of brand activation. Mixologists whip up sexy cocktails while around the corner in delightful domestic confusion, Roger Jorgenson is punting his Primitiv vodka made from a Bronze Age wheat called spelt while rhapsodizing on the necessity of horseradish in a Bloody Mary made with heirloom organic tomatoes grown by Magic Steve in Porterville.
The Jorgensons
The design brain behind the Swartland Revolution, Anton Espost, seems to have embraced a new symbology for this year’s Food|Wine|Design Fair that opened on the roof of the Hyde Park Corner Shopping Centre last night – Ashanti Kente cloth (see below). Which makes a lot of sense as the old Soviet imagery was starting to look very Tashkent.
New African branding for the Swartland
Positive Pinotage article in the Wine Enthusiast this month. Which makes the Platter guide’s failure to award even one of the 8 or 9 wines nominated sighted for five stars the full monty, even more curious. Some Sherlock Holmes-style sleuthing reveals that it was probably an unlucky assignment of Pinotage to one of two Platter five star panels which did for the Pinotage prospects. My deep throat reports that so many wines were nominated for five star glory this year, the pawpaw yellow Platter pips were divided into two teams of 8. A most auspicious number in Chinese numerology.
Yesterday’s biggest surprise was seeing three of the movers and shakers in SA wine exports (Cape Classics CEO André Shearer in a fabulously dashing designer blazer, WOSA CEO Su Birch and her helper André Morgenthal) at the opening on a new tasting room at Oldenburg in the Banghoek Valley. But then Oldenburg owner Adrian Vanderspuy did admit he needs 80% exports to make his brave venture wash its own face. If he can get the message out there that his Cabernet Franc 2008, made from second crop grapes grown on the Rondekop vines (below), is a game changer, his export effort should be a dream rather than the nightmare SA wine exporter’s are enduring at the minute.
The Cape's Hill of Grace for Cabernet Franc
