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Makro, home of the “biggest wine deal in Africa”, dropped a small bombshell of sorts this morning when their glossy wine catalogue dropped out of my Business Day and scared the cat. But as Claude Cockburn said of the “small earthquake in Chile” – urban legend’s dullest headline ever: “not many dead.”
The 2009 edition of Platter is scheduled for launch on Thursday November 13 at the Devon Valley Hotel at 17h00 for 17h30 (dress: smart casual, refreshments: five-star wines and light snacks) but eager winemakers can save the trip to the Shire and pop along to Makro from 19 October to check out their new ratings. Charles, your De Grendel Sauvignon Blanc 2008 got four stars. Well done!
I realized my source giving last Friday as the date for the Platter High Five tasting was somewhat off the mark when Pieter du Toit asked me to drop off two Cederberg High Five contenders at the Vineyard Connection in Stellenbosch on Tuesday. Either that or it was a rerun of last year’s High Five Fiasco when several Waterford wines were omitted from the High Five Finale because of slow Somerset West electrons snarling up e-mail messages between taster and editor. The charming VC ladies were, well charming, even if they were hoping for four bottles, the extras presumably for own consumption. Read More…
The Platter wine guide is a bit like Bill Clinton: a cheerful face that has been around for ages but not someone you’d consider hiring as a babysitter. On the very day the Platter Pundits assembled for their annual game of Five Star Russian Roulette, the Times runs a story Wine makers sour over stars. Platter publisher, avuncular Andrew McDowell, attempts to defend the indefensible with the comment “blind tasting is essential for competitions, but the Platter guide is exactly that, a guide — not a competition.” Read More…
The debate about the merits or otherwise of blind versus sighted tastings currently stirring up strings of saliva and crumbs of cracker in the SA wine spittoon reminds of rearranging the deckchairs on RMS Titanic. Or that modern analogy, swapping seats in economy class on flight SAA 280 to Perth, taking another load of wine drinkers into emigration exile to join the “850 000 whites” Rapport reported emigrated between 1995 and 2005 on Sunday. With the floodtide undimmed and ceremonies of innocence drowned on a daily basis, a significant proportion of the traditional wine drinking population is AWOL, replaced by palm wine drinkers from West Africa and vodka sipping mail-order brides from Russia. Read More…
I’ve been bombarded with requests for digital copies of my story Head on a Platter in the Ferbruary edition of Wine Tourism News. The original story was in two parts and was expertly trimmed and merged in a reverse conjoined-twin operation by editor Donald Paul. Here is part I. Part II on the weekend. Read More…
An unseemly public spat has erupted around Platter’s SA Wines, the premier SA wine guide. Leading producer Kobus Deetlefs released a carefully reasoned press release setting out his reasons for withdrawing from the guide and was immediately savaged by an associate Platter’s editor in an intemperate attack on the Grape blog which is edited by a triumvirate of Platter pundits. Playing the man rather than the ball, the scientific fact that the brain is a wine snob I reported on in last week’s Financial Mail would seem to argue against the current practice of sighted tastings for the guide which leads to so much unhappiness among producers. Read More…
Last night’s Carte Blanche (pronounced karty-blarnchy) program on M-Net was Battle of the Brains: a BBC special on how seven genii in their respective fields were given a set of tasks to perform in an attempt to discover the cleverest. One of the tasks set was to create a picture in 10 minutes with theme “the creative process.” And to assess the result, rather than asking a panel of art experts to rate the works, the producers asked the public for their views, noting that when it comes to aesthetic judgments, public opinion is by far the most reliable measure. So why is public opinion so disregarded for wine assessments? Read More…
“Platter’s is not a bad idea” says Kobus Deetlefs “but it is not fair to producers and it is not fair to wine consumers. If I do not believe in a thing, I can’t go for it.” Detleefs was commenting on his decision to join the growing ranks of the salon de refusés – producers who refuse to submit wines for the annual Platter’s wine guide. Read More…
Fully three weeks after Platter’s SA Wines 2008 (author John Platter [sic] according to www.kalahari.net) was launched in an orgy of five star wines (Waterford’s The Jem and Country Cellars Quintette called in sick), little red riding book has yet to arrive at Exclusive Books in Hyde Park. Did the publisher award the distribution contract to Nationwide Airlines, perchance? No wonder the cover is red this year – the guide is the Scarlet Pimpernel of the book world! Read More…
