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A winemaking position in the Constantia Valley has long been seen as one of the cushiest berths in Cape Wine. Yet in one month, two winemakers have jumped ship – supple Karl Lambour from Constantia Glen is off to Franschhoek and the wine estate/fine dining restaurant/art gallery cum yoga and meditation retreat Holden-Manz (the former Klein Genot) while Adam Mason is leaving Klein Constantia for Mulderbosch in Stellenbosch. His escape up a big oak tree is shown below.
Adam Mason leaves Klein Constantia
Geneva-based financial gnome Adrian Van der Spuy was born on the farm Rainbow’s End in the Banghoek Valley between Stellenbosch and Pniel. Fairy tales locate a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, which would put one on Oldenburg, Adrian’s farm below Rainbow’s End. He opened his new tasting room today with a blow-out lunch catered by Eat Out’s Chef of the Year, Luke Dale Roberts (below).
Blow-out lunch at Oldenburg today
Culture is breaking out all over Stellenbosch. Last week at the launch of Jean Engelbrecht’s toothsome Stellenbosch Ridge 2009 Bordeaux-style blend at Stellenbosch (the restaurant) in Windhoek, the back label proclaimed “Stellenbosch is unique in that it is the centre of fine wine, academia and culture in South Africa” with the only controversial point the qualification of Africa by South. For after the announcement of the winner of the 2011 African Art Prize at Tokara in Stellenbosch last night, who can doubt that Oak City is not the cultural capital of the continent?
The People's Choice, Barbara Wildenboer
While Cape Town bloggers high-fived and tweeted themselves into a frenzy at today’s Great Wine Capitals blow-out lunch at La Motte to celebrate that estate’s impeccable wine tourism offering, a six pack of the top food, wine and tourist journalists from Buenos Aires flown to Cape Town by South African Airways yesterday, were today dodging baboons at Cape Point.
Argentinean food, wine and tourism journo's not invited to Great Wine Capitals blow-out
While SA wine apparatchiks run around the country briefing on Vindaba, next year’s all singing, all dancing wine tourism conference at the Cape Town International Conference Centre, wine tourism itself continues apace. All this “busy, busy” activity reminds me of the Roman general who wrote to Caesar over two millennia ago “If we don’t stop having all these meetings, we’ll lose the empire.” Landbouweekblad yesterday quoted Prof. Nick Vink, chairman of the department of agricultural economics at the University of Stellenbosch, that exports to England, Sweden and Germany are down 44%, 15% and 20% respectively. Quick, let’s have a meeting.
Last night, I met a six pack of Argentinean tourism journalists in the Michelle Obama suite of the Table Bay Hotel at the Waterfront. Flown to SA by the national airline, I accidentally briefed them on the Rainbow’s End Cabernet Franc 2009, Iona Sauvignon Blanc 2011 and the Krone Rosé, three wines chosen by the Table Bay to showcase SA wine.
Argentinean journalists at the Table Bay last night
Well the Wine Spectator’s Top 100: their “annual roundup of the year’s most exciting wines”, is out and it’s party time at ViniPortugal and glum faces for SA wine marketers. For Quinta do Vallado storms in at #7, two other Douro Boys are picked (Crasto and Vale Meão) while most importantly in the current financial climes, Quinta de Cabriz is placed at #42. At $9, it is the cheapest in the whole hot 100.
De Morgenzon Chenin Blanc 2009 sneaks in at #93, confirmation of the hard work Wendy and Hylton Appelbaum have expended on their brand in the USA and also confirmation of the almost total failure of SA wine marketing in the richest wine market in the world. The Portuguese and SA wine industries are approximately the same size and the question facing SA wine marketers is why is Portugal doing so much better in the USA?
Carlos Lucas
It certainly looks like it, as the Top Four in Abi’s national Top Ten eateries are all built environment: greenHOUSE, testKITCHEN, tastingROOM and roundHOUSE. She may come over all Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and claim that 2011 is the year of the egg and the wild sorrel, but bricks and mortar are a better call. And she’s not the only one.
The Fleur du Cap Top Ten Cape Town dining destinations of little Irish devil Clare Mack includes the foodBARN and hemelHUIJS, confirming that Clare is with the foodie architectural zeitgeist. Real Belly of an Architect stuff by Peter Greenaway which explains why Abi’s #1 eatery is the greenHOUSE! No surprise she chose TABLE@demeye as the best country style kombuis, either.
A shot of reality returns to the fluffy Cape Town foodie scene on Thursday after the excesses of last night’s Eat Out Awards with Spit or Swallow’s annual Box Wine Awards at the Penthouse on Long, which confusingly has an entrance at 115 Loop Street. A case of Drink In rather than Eat Out, which is what most people seem to be doing at the minute.
A R50 cover charge gives you a chance to dress up like Magnum PI, a sub-Riedel wine glass specially designed for wine box spigots, snacks and a chance to be a wine judge for an evening. No Tasting Academy Competency Certificate required, or even a bowtie. Be there at 6pm, or be square (like a box wine)! I wrote about Box Wine in Food Weekly yesterday.
At dinner last night in the garden of a hotel clinging to the rocks above the crashing Atlantic Ocean – real Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil stuff – I wondered where it all went wrong for SA brandy. We’d ordered a round of Boplaas CWG brandies and they arrived in crystal sherry copitas. Beautiful but inappropriate. When we requested snifters, the waitron explained that those were for Cognac. Indeed we had some trouble even ordering brandy, while of Cognacs and Armagnacs there were plenty to be had.
France has a stranglehold on Champagne and fine brandy and no matter how hard SA producers try, little progress seems to be made. The Fundi Project to train 2010 sommeliers in time for the World Cup seems to have failed utterly, with much marketing moolah squandered. So where should hoteliers send their staff for training? Next weekend’s Fine Brandy Festival at the Roundhouse is as good a place as any to start. After all, the place is home to Joakim Hansi Blackadder, SA’s top sommelier, who would never serve brandy in a sherry copita, even if it was made by Riedel.
Weekend Financial Times agony uncle Sir David Tang has been dumped into the furore swirling around the recent comments of Su Birch, CEO of SA Wine Export marketers WOSA, that China, an important SA wine export destination, is not a country she would like to visit on holiday. Sir David had some pithy things to say about the affair earlier this month. A follow-up letter to Sir David in this weekend’s FT starts off by questioning if the original communication was a real one or a plant:
Sir David Tang
