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A curious comment from Tim Atkin, wine writer and blogger, quoted in OLN as he picked up an award from Wine Intelligence. WI seems to be a marketing/PR company that recently gave one to embattled WOSA CEO Su Birch (cynics may wish to count how many Wine Intelligencers crack a freebee to Cape Wine 2012 as Su has long used WOSA largesse to market her own career). “Wine journalism is under threat from bloggers and declining interest in wine.”
A disastrous Friday night dinner at Keenwä, the Peruvian restaurant on Buitengracht, was saved by a brace of Burgundian stunners from Hoopenburg, a Stellenbosch estate that has flown under my personal radar for way too long.
Hoopenburg: Burgundy in the Boland
The script for the WOSA MCC themed tasting at next week’s VinExpo in Hong Kong was written by the Graham Beck marketing department.
Method Cap Classic – the life through bubbles
“With the likes of James Bond 007, Barack Obama and of course Nelson Mandela enjoying exceptional South African bubbles to celebrate their finest moments, you can also taste the wines these celebrities enjoy.”
Is SA wine serious about China? The list of 27 exhibitors at next week’s VinExpo in Hong Kong – or Hong Kok as my dyslexic friend Pinky calls it (with Bang Kong presumably the capital of Thailand) concentrates very much on terroir by truck wines. Commercial wines sold mainly on price.
Where are the terroir treasures, the Kanonkops, Vergelegens and Meerlusts? Not a single one of the controversial UCT Top Twenty wineries are attending, although UCT’s self-appointed professor of wine, Tim James, has at last done the decent thing and signed up for a non-UCT e-mail with which to communicate with the industry. Perhaps the Platter guide will send Professor Tim east to present this year’s 5* stunners in the next chapter of the unseemly commercial luv-in between the guide and WOSA, the exporters’ mouthpiece.
“He walks like he’s kakked in his pants and has a face that can smell it” was the sotto voce comment passed by one of Thursday’s Chateau Libertas celebrants on a particularly preposterous Cape Town winewriting colleague. Confirming SA wine hacks are amongst the most bitchy in the business. Still The Big Easy is the place to drop such bon mots, as it was one-time home to William Charles Winshaw, inventor of Chateau and the first winewriter in SA, according to Duimpie Bayly, who led the discussion on the 1940 vintage in an eight decade vertical tasting.
Even if the “easy” in Big Easy does not refer to the conveniences, which boasts the highest and hardest toilets in SA, as one hackette memorably tweeted at the 80th birthday party on Thursday. Uncannily predicting the lacklustre stock market listing of Facebook the following day. Sometimes social media is soooo overrated.
Greg Landman, Peter Veldsman and Duimpie Bayly
OK, so SAB-Miller and their Castle Lager are a bunch of Charlie’s with their Charles Glass appreciation society. Well Distell also have a Charlie in the closet. William Charles Winshaw (in the frame below), who founded the company and invented Chateau Libertas, a red blend for wine drinkers (as opposed to poseurs) that celebrated it’s 80th birthday yesterday, in fine style, at the Big Easy eatery in Dorp Street, Stellenbosch.
On a 6am BA flight to Cape Town to wish an icon “happy birthday.”. For Chateau Libertas turns 80 and proud offspring Distell are holding the birthday party at The Big Easy in Stellenbosch, former home of Charles Winshaw, the American medical doctor who founded the company.
I’m looking forward to tasting the 1940 vintage and wonder in WOSA have been invited for their offices are just across the road and they sure love to party with R1 million budgeted for the Cape Wine 2012 launch do. After the recent insults tossed at SA farmers by CEO Su Birch, WOSA can look forward to a warm reception.
While Greece, the birthplace of democracy, is looking increasingly like becoming the graveyard of capitalism, hard pressed Greek consumers can console themselves with having the best rosé and sweet wines in the world as the results from the Concours Mondial de Bruxelles, judged earlier this month, confirm:
Today’s twitter hoax announcing the death of Colombia’s greatest novelist Gabriel García Márquez came as a shock for less than a week ago, Juan-Carlos Rincon, the Colombian wine writer living in London and I were discussing magic realism in the drive from Tras-os-Montes to Porto. “He was born in Aracataca, a town famous for its large beach towels and three sleeping policemen. One at the entrance to the town, one in the middle and one at the end” said JC. Which sounded like a piece of magic realism.
Gabriel García Márquez
Rico Basson is CEO of VinPro, the producers’ association. After bloging the opinion of WOSA monkey Su Birch yesterday, I thought it best to ask the organ grinder himself about WIETA. His comments below, which I interpret as a gentle slap on the monkey’s wrist. Whether this will keep indignant and ignorant farmers happy remains to be seen. SA Wine is the big loser in this whole fiasco which is entirely of WOSA’s making, with inflation of a golden handshake for the CEO one lugh
