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Bookended by the controversial claim by Su Birch, WOSA CEO, that “the history of good table wine in the Cape is less than 15 years old”, comes the opinion of wine impresario and star of a new Shoprite TV wine ad, Michael Fridjhon, in today’s Cape Times, that the SA wine industry is in decline and producers are “stuffed.” So according to at least two experts, did SA wine have a short life, but presumably a merry one?
Although Mike was surely misquoted claiming that SA exports are currently sold at a loss due to a weak Rand – surely the opposite? Likewise his observation that “SA is unique in that its exports equal or exceed its local sales” does not add up. Exports have been more than double domestic consumption in Chile for at least the last three years (2008-2010) while both the Australian and New Zealand government websites have exports far exceeding local off-take (see below).
New Zealand wine: exports vs. domestic consumption
Last day in Lisboa. Dinner last night with Trapiche winemaker Daniel Pi at Brasserie de L’Entrecôte – Headquarters restaurant on Buitengracht in Cape Town with attitude replaced by naughty children pushing past your chair and steak from Holland. As meat is the only thing on the menu, we’d brought along pasteis de nata from the suburb of Belém next door, for dessert. Two each, which we doused in cinnamon and ate with a twenty year old Fonseca tawny and a twenty year old ruby port from Taylors. Tawny was my food and wine match and Daniel tweeted photos to his 450 followers.
Daniel (holding the dessert) and Anibal last night
The whole tottering edifice of wine “qualifications” was challenged last month in the Amarula Affair when Distell’s legal team questioned the qualifications of SARS’s “expert witness” impresario Michael Fridjhon.
The Amarula Affair
Robin von Holdt, CEO of last month’s Top 100 St. Jamie Wines divertissement, is a Jamesian version of Bill Murray (with less hair) in Groundhog Day, that 1993 Hollywood comedy directed by Harold Ramis. For come 11am on a Sunday, he’s on his St. James stoep, on the pots. As fin24.com records:
St. James fauna
Brilliant story from David Gelles on the increasingly blurred divide between content and commerce in today’s Weekend Financial Times which goes some way to assuaging the double whammy of the cover price rising 8% to R40 (so much for the strong rand) and the absence of agony uncle Sir David Tang in the iconic pink pages. Perhaps he was too busy with royal wedding duties!
Sir David and the grandmother of yesterday's groom
Thanks to Carrie Adams for e-mailing Angela Lloyd’s list of Top SA Wines – alas, I’ve given up reading Gripe, so had missed the original unveiling. Great minds think alike as Carrie had suggested she and I compile such a list for Classic FM with the novel feature that we’d buy the bottles. How about that – no ripping off producers, no special show barrels/bottlings. But Angela and her gang of nine beat us to the draw. Well, sort of, as they did not actually blind taste the wines they nominated or bother with vintages.
Juliet Cullinan and Carrie Adams
Yesterday’s post on opportunities for sparkling SA Sauvignon was no doubt picked up by the Riedel glassware empire as a chance for a new glass design, especially when Business Day’s entrepreneurial wine pundit, Michael Fridjhon, is their busy local agent. Just what shape would those glassy gnomes come up with to showcase the terroir of sparkling Sauvignon? And they’d sure come in handy at Vinimark’s planned Sommelier Competition that is being widely rumoured in the spittoon.
quite interesting
The news that the International Wine & Spirit Competition is to judge SA entries locally exploded like a bomb from a Libyan Air Force Mirage on the SA spittoon this morning. Come again? Surely the only reason SA producers pay the outrageous entrance fees and shipping costs for foreign competitions is to have their wines assessed by international palates and then hopefully bought by Tesco and Waitrose? Will the mythical international palates be flown to SA or will we have to suffer yet another local panel, already damned late last year by British Master of Wine Remington Norman who called SA tasting panels “one of the biggest challenges facing SA wine.”
With the Old Mutual Trophy Wine Show and Top 100 SA Wines washing their dirty laundry in public, producers must be enjoying this behind the scenes glimpse of the show industry which makes orders of magnitude more money for show owners than making wine does for them. It is not a pretty sight.
The plot thickens. An amazing e-mail to producers this morning from the Top 100 SA Wine competition/retail opportunity/exhibition/wine guide/what-have-you claiming that the “OLD MUTUAL TROPHY SHOW ATTEMPTS TO CLOSE DOWN THE TOP 100 SA WINE CHALLENGE!” and linking to two lawyer’s letters which speak for themselves.
