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An invitation to El Burro to taste Mescal with Rui Esteves of &Union fame is not a date to be dodged. Especially when the other tasters are a brace of blonde beauties from House & Leisure – surely the best lifestyle magazine in the country? Why do design magazines have a monopoly on goddesses while wine and food get the Sipping Moms, Boozy Bores, Special Needs Nerds and Beardy Weirdies comme moi? I’m hoping I’m not pre-empting any scoops when I divulge that indoor plants are a trend H&L has identified for 2012. And artisanal spirits, like the Tequila and now Mescal that Rui distils in Oaxaca. And if you can’t pronounce that, you’re square this season.
Elementary my dear (SA minister of tourism) Mathinus “shortpants” van Schalkwyk. Take a nine year old attempted kidnapping of nonentity actor Benedict Cumberbatch in St. Lucia, transpose it to glamorous Santa Lucia when star becomes famous as Sherlock Holmes and it’s a headline scoop in The Telegraph “Sherlock star Benedict Cumberbatch survived kidnap attempt in South Africa.”
Decanter, simply the best wine magazine in the world by their own admission, have done it again. “Results from the annual study by The International Wine & Spirit Research (IWSR) show that between 2009 and 2010 consumption of still, light and sparkling wines grew by 33.4% in China (and Hong Kong included), leading to a total of 156.19m 9-litre bottles being consumed in 2011, knocking the UK into sixth position in the world-wine consumption market.” Who’d have thought that the Chinese drink their wine out of Salmanazars while the rest of us buy 750ml bottles?
Cape Times journo Quinton Mtyala sure has a way with words. On Monday he started his report on the ANC centenary celebrations with a doozie “Bloemfontein might have been hot and dry for most of this weekend, but it was dripping in gravy, the sort dished out by a generous sugardaddy who turned 100 on Sunday.”
British retailing habits have infiltrated Cape Town this tourist season and BOGOFs – Buy One, Get One Free – now apply to Miss Molly wines (bubbly, Kitchen Thief and In My Bed) at the Alexander Bar in Strand Street. Made by glamorous Diners Club Young Winemaker of the Year Clayton Reabow (shown below with his gorgeous wife), barflies must be wondering where Clayton got the inspiration for Miss Molly in My Bed. Historians will note how closely Clayton resembles Hephaestion, the bosom friend of Alexander the Great, an Alexander the bar is not named after.
The Reabows
WOSA attempts to defend the decision to ban the public from the last day of three day Cape Wine 2012 on their website. The claim is made that “we are not legally able to spend our money on marketing to local consumers” so how do they explain marketing and selling their controversial braii boek in SA? This is a fig leaf WOSA are draping over a stupid decision. It’s King Canute time in Dorp Street as WOSA ignores common sense.
A window dresser for Barneys in New York, Simon Doonan, has written a surprise best seller entitled Gay Men Don’t Get Fat. He divides food by sexual preference: straight and gay. Sushi is gay because it’s “swishy” while “Mexican food is unbelievably macho. As delicious as a burrito is, it is basically just a cross between a turd and a penis.” Now what do you say to that, Nic Haarhoff at El Burro? So what do you drink with gay food?
The media-created battle between Britain’s two greatest living artists, David Hockney and Damien Hirst, has an interesting analogue in wine competitions. Of course that the two Hs both have solo exhibitions coming up is the reason for the controversy in the same way that many of my “tiffs” with my colleagues over on the Grape communal bog are a transparent attempt to drive traffic to this site and we’re really the best of friends. Honest, Guv!
Auctions are flavour of the month in SA wine with Rael Levitt from Auction Alliance a major force. As he mentioned before knocking down Quoin Rock to Wendy Appelbaum late last year “I want no funny business. You’re dealing with the Cape Town mafia.” And as one interested party noted wryly “he wasn’t joking.” Another auctioneer well acquainted with the wine business is Stephan Welz who knocked down the Nederburg Auction a couple of times.
While the Champenois ditch fiddly flutes for their fizz in favour of white wine glasses, the ANC has an alternative. Toasting the centenary of the ANC in Bloem yesterday, the deputy president (and future one, if Juju has his way) Kgalema Motlanthe told the crowd “we also toast that the ANC in the next 100 years have the ability to feeling [sic] very deeply [for] the suffering of our people” according to The New Age (one country, one paper) who continued “Motlanthe told the crowd that those who did not have glasses should use their clenched fists in the toast.”
