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Alcohol gets a lot of bad press. Last year, Aaron Motsoaledi, SA Minister of Health, was quoted as saying “what is being done to smoking is going to be done to alcohol.” Yet is the demon drink really as bad as a cancer stick? Is Riesling on a par with Rothmans? Cabernet with Chesterfield? To paraphrase William Boot when wishing to contradict his boss Lord Copper in Evelyn Waugh’s magisterial Abyssinian novel Scoop, “up to a point, Minister Motsoaledi, up to a point.”
Following hot on the news that Anglo American is to take the Oppenheimers out of De Beers comes another cultural bombshell. Lord Sebastian Flyte, the debauched hero of the first half of Evelyn Waugh’s masterpiece Brideshead Revisited had a niece in Pretoria – Snor City (mustache city as it is fondly known in SA musical circles).
Lord Sebastian Flyte
Malcolm Gladwell’s tipping point has arrived between local and international wine competitions with the news that the Decanter World Wine Awards awarded 31 gold medals to SA wines this week while the Old Mutual Trophy Wine Show could do no better than 25, on presumably more entries. Since the Decanter judges included more than one fifth of the world crop of Masters of Wine, the most reasonable conclusion would be that the “best” SA wines no longer enter Old Mutual.
OM judge Neal Martin in action
Listening to Wosa (Wines of SA, the exporters’ mouthpiece) CEO Su Birch on Cape Talk this evening, I was reminded of Evelyn Waugh’s comedic masterpiece Scoop in which intrepid wannabe foreign correspondent William Boot dared not contradict his boss, editor of the Daily Beast, Lord Copper. So when he wished to say “no” he euphemistically replied “up to a point, Lord Copper.” Not that Su is a beast (far from it) but I heard she did call in Messrs. Su, Grabbit and Runne (no relation) after industry commentator Emile Joubert blogged that Wosa needed a management shakeup.
Spent the morning searching Google for the bon mot just along the lines of “anyone seen travelling on a bus past the age of 30 can safely be deemed to be a social failure.”
Ngwenya Express
Reading The Photographer and The Philosopher, Pico Iyer’s comparison of two of the endmembers of international travel writing, Jan Morris and VS Naipaul, it struck me just how similar wine writing is to travel writing. I use the chemical term endmember as Pico postulates that travel writers can be described as a linear combination of these two extreme manifestations. Bruce Chatwin is my favourite, so I’d unmix him as
Bruce Chatwin = 50% Jan + 20% VS + 30% sex
I was forced to use a third endmember, sex, that hardly ever pops up in the travel writing of Jan or VS. Given that James had a sex-change to become Jan (Pico brings it up for the n’th time) and after revelations of serial rumpy-pumpy in Patrick French’s biography of VS, sex is probably not an endmember for them.
Radical British journalist Claud Cockburn was a cousin of Evelyn Waugh. So it’s not surprising he won the apocryphal Times competition for most boring headline in the 1930s. His winning entry: “Small Earthquake in Chile: not many dead.” David Humphries at the Sydney Morning Herald has a strong contender for most insensitive headline with “Wine export gap after Chile quake” pointing out that Australia has 100 million surplus cases of wine to shift into the chasm which opened up after last week’s 8.8 magnitude quake swallowed 125m litres of Chilean wine.
Tulbagh
Poor old Robert Parker. From hero to zero (out of 100). Labeled “big loser of the decade” by The Telegraph’s wine correspondent Jonathan Ray “everyone has a points system these days and everyone’s an online critic” in a thought provoking story on wine trends of the noughties. I gave up on Bob after reading Elin Mccoy’s masterful biography of America’s über-taster The Emperor of Wine (Ecco, 2005) about the time he went to Japan and rated sake on his infamous 100 point scale. The cultural conceitedness beggars belief. Which is why when invited to an omakase lunch at Nobu at the Cape Town One&Only, I left my scoring boots behind.
Omakase means “from the heart”, which is what we should call the Coup de Coeur selections of our blind tasted wine guide next year, Japan being in much better vinous shape than France at the moment.
Andrew Milne
One of the first casualties of the current economic depression was fair-trade wine with giant UK supermarket chains like Tesco telling suppliers wine would be bought on the basis of price, going forward. Another casualty is organic produce as consumers are less willing to pay a premium for organically farmed produce with sales down 20% last year in the UK. So perhaps the time has come for organic wineries like Avondale in Paarl to consider a change of marketing strategy: out with the curvaceously photogenic naked vineyard workers and in with… Spiderman!
BIO-logic vineyard at Avondale on Friday
The Grape communal blog is divided into eight panels like a Japanese Bento Box full of goodies. Panel #2 contains Haikus penned against the recent Helderberg fires (conventional photos being unavailable as someone nicked the panelist’s “fancy” cell-phone and camera) while Panel #4 reproduces Michael Fridjhon’s informative Business Day and Weekender columns cut and pasted from the Business Day website. A bit of an overkill as a simple link to the mother ship would suffice, like Kevin does over on www.winenews.co.za.
