Hi 22C° Low 6C° | 
Pendock Uncorked
3 weeks, 6 days ago
The Wheel Deal
15 hours, 45 minutes ago
GabiVille
4 days, 18 hours ago
The Wanderer
6 days, 15 hours agoView all Times LIVE Blogs
While the world watched #1 Military Hospital at Voortrekkerhoogte for news of Nelson Mandela, we tasted 94 Rosés over the past two days: one for each year of the former president’s life. In a break with tired old tradition, we assembled a daring Pienk PanelTM to perform the task. The first day’s line-up is shown below.
Today’s Weekend Argus claims “Cape wine farms fight to survive” in a front page feature quoting producer representative VinPro which singles out Simonsig, Delheim and Kanonkop as three producers “in a serious predicament.” But rather than the financial squeeze occasioned by economic conditions, the serious predicament faced by producers is the amazingly incompetent PR skills of bodies such as VinPro, judged by pronouncements such as these, if they are correctly quoted.
Octogenarian Spatz Sperling of Delheim calls the current state of SA wine the worst he’s seen in 60 years of farming in the Cape. Producers are being squeezed until their pips squeak as exports tank and whisky whacks bragging brands in bars and nightclubs. One man’s meat etc. means this is music to the ears of canny consumers as quality has never been better. Last month I vouchsafed my summer drinking options for both hedonist and hoarder to the readers of the Financial Mail.
Kevin Joseph and Peter Finlayson
The Stellenbosch Wine Week kicked off on a spiritual note last night with a performance of Misa Criolla, an amazing folk Argentinean mass, sung by the SA Youth Choir in a most unusual cathedral – the barrel cellar of the Delheim Winery. The street music of Buenos Aires was given a distinct township twist with curio Zulu drums and a boere trekklavier and sufficient ethnic diversity to drive WOSA (the exporter’s association with motto ‘variety is in our nature’) into religious ecstasy.
Cellar becomes Cathedral
I was slumming it in the Alentejo when the Franschhoek Book Festival went down and so missed the launch of Grape by Jeanne Viall, Wilmot James & Jakes Gerwel. But thank heavens I was uitstedig and so also missed the annual Franschhoek Sighted Wine Hacks Reward, which hit a fresh low this year. Prolific blogger Chris von Ulmenstein was at the peeling of Grape and reports that the slim volume “is certain to cause discomfort to the wine and table grape industry.”
Off to Muratie at lunchtime to plant trees in honour of octogenarian Spatz Sperling, of Delheim fame. As a warm up, Kim and Rijk Melck (pictured below, together with Hans-Peter Schröder from Oude Nektar) treated the tree huggers to oysters from Sue Baker and a glass of Muratie MCC 1763. A blend of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay (60:40), the bubbly has a yeasty nose and rich red berries on the palate – a convincing argument for a New World alternative to Champagne, fruit forward but with finesse retained.
Kim, Rijk and Hans-Peter
Monday’s terrific vertical Le Bonheur tasting set me thinking about the great vertical tastings a company like Distell can command. Perhaps the best I ever attended was a vertical tasting of Edelkeur in the Namibian desert as the sun was setting. Another great was three decades of Nederburg Auction Cabernets held to mark the 30th Nederburg Auction in 2004. I wrote something on it for the Financial Mail but now can’t remember if it ever appeared. With this year’s pre-Auction public tastings to be held in Cape Town on July 15 and Johannesburg on July 21, its perhaps worth reproducing:
Nederburg cellar master Razvan Macici
Angela Llloyd, Grande Dame of SA wine writing, despaired earlier this month of choosing 200 wineries “worthy of representing the best of South Africa.” WOSA, Wines of SA, the exporters’ mouthpiece, face a similar challenge all the time. In February they are flying three New York PR luvvies from the Dunn Robbins Group out to the Cape for an educational tour and introduction to the South African Winelands. This is the first of several trips. The agency has been appointed to handle consumer PR in New York and to assist with New York tastings at a WOSA event in the Big Apple scheduled for May. Hopefully some of the Fundi 2010 sommeliers trained by Let’s Sell Lobster will do the actual pouring!
The highlight of Saturday night’s Veritas Awards was the induction of the first batch of Living Legends of Wine into the National Cellar of Fame at the Cape Town Convention Centre.
Living Legends waiting to be Immortalized
