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While we wait for Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine: How Creativity Works (Canongate Books 2012) to be discounted by Abebooks.com, the bibliophile’s version of Johan Wegner’s GetWine vinous remainderer, some teasing extracts appeared in The Guardian last week. In particular, I was seized by the analogy of how the left and right brain reproduces a house.
SA wine needs more right-brain tasters
Here’s the unexpurgated version of yesterday’s story in the Sunday Times Food Weekly on bubblies for breakfast. Red Marauder may have been the slowest horse in 118 years to win the Grand National when he romped home in 2001. But his owner was so chuffed, the following morning a Champagne breakfast was served to the victor in his stall. So what Champagne do you serve a horse for breakfast? Or indeed a friend who wears open sandals with socks and eats raw oats in the form of Bircher Müsli from an unglazed bowl, rather than a morral (the pretentious name for a feedbag)?
Red Marauder wins the Grand National at 33-1
“One good thing about this recession” said architect Robert Silke last night, enjoying his annual month long builders’ holiday, “is that it opens up great buildings, like this one, at realistic rentals. In the boom, this would have been a Pam Golding office” indicating the Wildean fin de siècle interior of the Alexander Bar on the corner of Strand and Loop Street, Cape Town.
Alexander Bar
As expected, one SA sticky features in the last laundry list of SA’s most influential wine scribe, Jancis Robinson, who pens for the Weekend Financial Times. Mathematically trained Mrs. R divided her 100 festive picks into four categories: bubbles, red, white and soetes and rewarded SA with one in each: Graham Beck, Wendy Appelbaum trading as DMZ – not demilitarized zone but De Morgenzon, although the Cape’s mafia auctioneers (by their own admission at the start of last week’s Quoin Rock-‘n-Roll) might find military acronyms suddenly appropriate – Bellingham and now a bumptious Rustenberg straw wine 2010.
Well the 100 ladies have spoken and here are 100 wines they chose for ten occasions. A fascinating mixture of big brands and boutique labels – a people’s Platter, if you will.
WINE magazine was born in October 1993 to the sound of popping Cap Classique corks with a youthful Pieter “bubbles” Ferreira from Graham Beck on the cover and the final September edition features the results of the Amorim Cap Classique Challenge, so a nice symmetry is maintained. At the awards lunch of upscale KFC at the Grande Roche today, MCC maestro Jeff Grier from Villiera reported that Sunday’s Side Bar in the Sunday Times had sold him an extra fifty cases of Sauvignon Blanc 2010. “We had a Superquaffer of the Year Award for the 2009 vintage in the 2010 Platter guide which had nowhere near this effect” said Jeff “which just confirms the power of the press. I also got two marriage proposals on my smart phone from the picture you used.” If we’d only had the February 1999 WINE magazine cover (below) the proposals would have been off the scale.
Jeff Grier and duck
Last week I again wrote about the shock sale of Klein Constantia in the Sunday Times, a story that shot up on the charts on winenews as well.
In the cellars of KC: winemakers Adam Mason and Anibal Coutinho
The news that France is to unban Absinthe after nearly a century of prohibition is good news indeed for Roger Jorgensen who makes a most excellent Field of Dreams Absinthe from “small batches of home grown organic herbs, especially Versailles wormwood (Artemisia absinthium) together with anise, fennel and angelica in the finest traditions of the French masters – to an 1871 recipe. The colouring herbs used to create the vibrant green hue and complete the complex flavour profile feature hyssop, melissa and roman wormwood” in Wellington.
Roger @ Food|Wine|Design
After a torrid time of late in the corporate tumble drier, KWV MD Thys Loubser looked relaxed in his slacks yesterday in his La Concorde palace-cum-corporate HQ in Paarl. “We’re now 65% black owned and this is no BEE deal. The purchase by HCI was a regular corporate transaction and our empowerment trust KEET has just bought a further 2% of the company.”
Thys Loubser and Jeff Gradwell
A friend of mine was offered a column on Tyler Brûlé’s organ Monocle but turned it down after hearing the pay. A bad mistake I thought until I browsed the March edition. Colonel Gaddafi is upgraded to General and we’re told that “sales to China of Argentine wines costing more than €160 a bottle” are up 233.6%.
