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It’s become a mega cliché to point out that the times, they are a changing. But it’s no less true for all that. This year saw exports of bulk wine overtake bottled shipments for the first time in over a century, taking us back to the days when SA vino left Table Bay in barrels, very often fortified with spirit for the voyage to Europe. The latest export figures confirm that bulk is on a roll, up 36% year to year end October while bottle departures tanked 11%. It’s a weird statistical anomaly that SA now also exports 36% more bulk than bottled.
A wonderful vignette of the late Princess Margaret dining at Bang Between the Pitons restaurant on St. Lucia in the Caribbean while Led Zeppelin ate banana and Mars Bar sandwiches a few tables along. But what to drink with such an exotic sandwich is the kind of question to exercise sandwich savant Emile Joubert whose Sandwich Showcase was the culinary highlight of the recent Stellenbosch Wine Festival.
Great with coffee/mocha Pinotage
For a brief, shining moment yesterday afternoon, #100Women beat #emigrate into second place as a trending tweet in the Cape. Well it was Women’s Day and 30 of the Cape’s most garrulous food and wine bloggers were at the V&A Hotel on the Waterfront, screening 150-odd wines for presentation to 100 women who will jet into the Mother City on the 27th for the main event, 100 Women 100 Wines. On the other hand, perhaps the emigration theme was from UK tourists seeking to escape the nihilism of Notting Hill and the carnage of Camden.
Sorority sippers
On Friday, the eight judges of the ABSA Top Ten Pinotage Competition were faced with 29 wines being the best rated of the wines tasted the previous two days. Our task was to choose a Top Ten – or top dozen actually, as the wines were to be sent to a lab to test for bacterial faults and the possible presence of coffee beans. Of course, choosing a Top Ten is not the same as ranking the wines from “best” to “worst” and then cutting and pasting a personal top ten – the whole point of a Top Ten is to showcase the diversity of styles available. After all, wasn’t the most sensible thing WOSA every said “variety is in our nature?”
And anyway, how do you compare a soft Pinot Noir style to a tight tannic terroir-driven titan to a Bordeaux-style berry blaster? It depends on the dish, the desire and the wallet. This point was most eloquently made by Malcolm Gladwell in What the Dog Saw (Little, Brown, 2010). Considering the ketchup conundrum (how come mustard is offered in dozens of varieties but ketchup has but a single style) he interviews “a lineal descendent of the legendary 18th century Hassidic rabbi known as the Seer of Lublin” Howard Moskowitz. Not to spoil Howard’s punch line, suffice to say that when it comes to food and drink, there are no universals. The Platonic ideal does not exist.
If there is no single Pepsi, how can there be a best Pinotage? There is not even an ideal spaghetti sauce – there are 36 varieties of Ragú in six classes: Old World, Chunky Garden, Robusto, Light, Cheese and Rich & Meaty. As Malcolm concludes “there is very nearly an optimal spaghetti sauce for every man, woman and child in America.” And using the same reasoning, at least as many “best Pinotages” as there are consumers to buy the brands.
Which gives producers a way forward – let consumers choose the wines they’d buy. Which is precisely what lifestyle blogger Clare Mack will do in August when she invites 100 women down to the luxury V&A Hotel at the Cape Town Waterfront for the weekend to do exactly that – choose 100 wines. (Note to anoraks, the V and A in V&A is not Volatile Acidity!) Never mind the Seer of Lublin, Clare is the Seer of Dublin! Instead of asking nebulous questions like “should Merlot have mint?”, Clare asks which wines would you serve if the boss was coming to dinner? Which wine to kiss and make up after a contretemps? Which wine for the monthly book club? She might be on to something, as women buy 80% of wine sold in SA.
Clare and Clayton Reabow, Diners Club Young Winemaker of the Year for 2009
Ray Edwards has the biggest bar bill in SA; the man clearly has a drinking problem. But then he is, until the end of the month, head of the liquor division of Tops at Spar, the largest drinks retailer in SA with 485 stores around the country. His early retirement (he is 56) comes at a challenging time, with Walmart rumoured to be considering large scale importation of Argentinean Malbec for its recently acquired Game and Makro outlets and sales of brandy, the traditional spirit of SA, on the skids.
Ray in Upington
