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A glorious double rainbow arched over the roof of the Tops at Spar Gugulethu Wine Festival as the sun set over the smoky township yesterday evening. A good omen for the future of SA wine and on Africa Day, nogal. Show co-owner Mzoli Ngcawuzele (below, with a fan) took time out from braaing sausages to thank each producer for fronting up.
The smell of rotting snoek is making the UCT Top 20 Wineries poll more fragrant than the pier at Kalk Bay. White, lower middle-class, upper middle-aged voters are scurrying to post their own private Top 20 lists on the net to distance themselves from the debacle. Those revealed to date on the Grape communal blog all contain Nederburg, Platter Winery of the Year in 2011 that couldn’t make the Top 20 this. Mr. Min (so presumably Ma Nolte too) and even self-appointed pollster Tim James all claim to have voted for Nederburg, so perhaps the auditors could comment on the curious omission from the final list or were there election monitors who can attest to the veracity of the poll. Or was it all a scam? Elections are never easy in Africa!
Tallying the vote
At first I thought it was a Distell allergy thing that saw the pips from the Grape communal blog AWOL from the Nederburg Auction two weeks ago. Not a bowtie in sight; no Mr. Min aerosols; no sparkling gnashers and gnarly toes and even the Queen of Woolies Takeaways was absent. But the great disappearing trick was repeated today at the CWG Auction with not a pip in sight and the only Platter potentate I saw a sober and soberly dressed Christian Eedes, looking more like a Nedbank Brackenfell branch manager than a former enfant terrible of SA wine writing. O tempora! O mores!
CWG Auction this morning - a shortage of pips
With all the financial trials and tribulations faced by SA wine farmers, the answer supplied by “wine historian” Diko van Zyl in that palimpsest of vineyard tales Grape (Tafelberg, 2011) being launched in Longmarket Street at lunchtime today to the question “why wine?” is sobering. “With the Cape’s wet winters, poor soils and gale-force winds, vines thrive here and, as the early farmers found, many other crops do not.”
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.”
The publication on May 1 of a new non-glossy, non-braai book called Grape – stories of the vineyards in SA by DA member of parliament Wilmot James, Chancellor of Rhodes University Jakes Gerwel and journalist Jeanne Viall will be a welcome addition to the national wine library.
What a way to spend a Saturday morning, tasting 2007 white Bordeaux and 2004 reds on the Groot Gariep while three fish eagles wheel overhead, passing comments in eaglese. One of the judges’ perks at the annual Orange River Winemaker of the Year Competition is an international tasting sponsored by Ray Edwards from supermarket chain Spar. This year an extensive media contingent was imported to cover the competition. The media were taken on a magic mystery bus tour to the Augrabies Falls followed by a lunch at a sushi bar in Kakamas, while we sniffed and sipped.
What a pity Welsh windbag Roald Dahl is dead or Hannes Myburgh could invite him to celebrate 30 years of Rubicon at Art on Main, William Kentridge’s Jozi factory on Monday 8th November. Terrific letter to the editor of The Spectator from Virgina Ash: “In his review of Donald Sturrock’s Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl, Sam Leith refers to a South African guest who brought Roald Dahl two bottles of wine, upon which Dahl ‘ostentatiously declared that they were piss, and poured them down the sink without tasting them’. I was that guest, and I brought him two bottles of Meerlust (I forget which particular wine it was, probably their Rubicon).”
Emile Joubert, banned by Pip's PR friends for being too sensational. Shurley shome mishtake?
No fewer than four reports on the launch of the pricey Baby Jesus Juice on Grape last week by our latter day Witches of Macbeth Mr. Min, Tim, Angela and Cathy, reminded me of WB Yeats and his Second Coming, in particular the line “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” Heck, Cathy couldn’t even get the name of the wine right, calling Skurfberg, “Skurfbery”; Mr. Min is incoherent as usual “New casts, mostly, 24 months of it, originally” while Tim continues as the Uriah Heep of hedonism: “I have been interested and involved in his project, although with no commercial connections.” Admitting that all this pro-bono imbongi work for the Swartland has no commercial value at all.
The words of Yeats ring true when you hear that after 31 years in harness, the Cape Argus is to retire the weekly wine column of Dave Biggs, noble successor to Lawrence Green, chronicler of the Cape. If the Argus gives up on wine, what hope the rest of SA?
Dave Biggs
Good news for Constantia Glen on page 6 of the Sunday Times today. “At the trendy Jardine Restaurant in Central Cape Town, manager Johan Terblanche said the eatery was especially popular with Dutch tourists this week, with one table of eight orange fans running up a R6000 bill – which included six bottles of Constantia Glen red blends at R800 each.”
George Jardine
