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Over on Grape, that “fiercely independent… project” run by three Platter-paid pundits, dissent has embarrassingly broken out once again as to the merits (or not) of a high profile wine. The latest recycled Weekender column of Michael Fridjhon lifted from the Business Day website, “enjoins” readers to “safely pursue the Constantia Glen Sauvignon Blanc 2005” at this year’s Nederburg Auction. Which should be an easy catch as fellow Platter palate Angela Lloyd noted the wine has “seen better days” in an altogether less upbeat report on the auction entitled “South Africa’s finest? Let’s hope not…” Read More…
Sources tell me that Wine & Spirit magazine are not best pleased with the claim first aired by Business Day pundit Michael Fridjhon in that organ (and subsequently carried on the Grape website that specializes in recycled stories) that Wine (UK) magazine “folded.” Read More…
Refreshing to see that Michael Fridjhon’s contention in The Weekender that “the results of the annual WINE Magazine Lexus Shiraz Challenge reveal, a greater sense of coherence is beginning to emerge” is being challenged on the Grape website. Questions of a coherent style for SA Shiraz can hardly be answered at a competition in which over 80% of second round contestants got there by dint of being declared “seeded players” – presumably at least partly on the basis of performance at the Trophy Wine Show, a competition co-owned by Mike. On the contrary if you look at the judges’ scores, with chairman Mike negatively correlated with the result. But my main objection is to the whole concept of seeded players which makes a mockery of vintage variation and change of winemakers, a point I tried to make in a Sunday Times story on Meerlust that is being deliberately misrepresented in some anoraque circles. Read More…
Whistling in the dark perhaps, but when I wrote this wine survey for the Financial Mail last month, I opined that with exports and local sales up and quality never better, wine is one bright spot in a gloomy retail landscape. Read More…
Alas my letter to the editor of the Weekender in response to Michael Fridjhon’s article last week on smelly wine never appeared. Perhaps the letters page was too full of responses to the xenophobia that shook the country to have space for xenophobia of the vinous variety. Ironically, burning tyres feature in both manifestations. Here is the letter:
Last weekend Michael Fridjhon (A drubbing about dirty wines leaves a bad odour) accused Jane MacQuitty of running “a personal vendetta” against SA wine for her article South Africa is struggling which appeared in the London Times of April 19.
MacQuitty’s comments could hardly have come “as something of a shock to the nation’s producers” as she made her point even more forcefully in Burly South Africans: SA has yet to tame its red wine’s peculiar burnt rubber and dirt odour on October 27 last year.
The personal vendetta argument (advanced since MacQuitty slated wines Jancis Robinson MW had enthused about) can safely be discounted by noting that the day after JR heaped praise on the “Platter laureates” in the Financial Times, another MW, Tim Atkin, noted in the Observer “I find too many Cape reds simultaneously green, rubbery and jammy, a combination that is unique in the world of wine.” Views he claims are “shared, I should add, by most UK wine writers.”
Perhaps rather than playing the lady, SA commentators should play the (rubber) ball.
The departure lounge at Frankfurt airport is not the most luxurious location in Germany if you are flying poverty class on SA Airways as I was on May Day, returning from a week tasting wine in Alsace and before that, a week judging the stuff at the Concours Mondial in Bordeaux. Especially when you read an outrageous personal attack on the Grape website. A quick e-mail to Philip van Zyl, editor of Platter’s wine guide, confirmed I was NOT fired as a taster for the guide – a misunderstanding that could have arisen from an unfortunate letter to the editor of the Financial Mail by Business Day wine pundit Michael Fridjhon last year and which is now repeated in The Widow’s occasional column on Grape which also hosts Fridjhon’s Business Day columns. Of course an apology was always going to be a bit of an ask, but The Widow responded in her usual cowardly fashion by pulling the page – she did this once before after making a libelous allegation that I had received a free case of wine from David Brice’s Wine Cellar when I’d actually paid full price for it. But thanks to the miracle of Google, the latest Widow column can still be found here. Read More…
Tasting academies are like buses – nothing for hours and then along come two in quick succession. Hot on the heels of the Michael Fridjhon/WINE magazine Wine Judging Academy which has some unspecified connection to the UCT Graduate School of Business, along comes a 10-week distance learning course under the auspices of the Department of Viticulture and Oenology at the University of Stellenbosch. Both courses cost the same – R3990 with the former offering “graduates” tasting berths on the controversial tasting panels of WINE magazine plus the chance at free samples galore as a Platter pundit. The Stellenbosch version dangles the carrot of tasting for the SA Wine & Spirits Board plus service at Veritas, the largest SA wine show. Read More…
With the R4000-a-berth Wine Judging Academy, previously known as the Tasting Academy, casting off in Cape Town this weekend, some parallels to Don Quixote tilting at windmills are evident. Founded last year by Michael Fridjhon, visiting professor at the UCT Graduate School of Business, this year’s Academy “involves” that prestigious institution. The lofty aim is to try “to teach an aesthetic based on drinkability, refinement, complexity, integrity and persistence” rather than reward “massive wines” with high alcohols, big extract and forests of new wood – like the one that won last week’s Chenin Challenge, perhaps, where Professor Fridjhon was chairman of judges. Read More…
Noseweek is a most appropriately named organ to host a wine column as the nose is queen of the senses, at least when it comes to wine. A Cape Town fifty-something former picture framer Tim James is Noseweek wine correspondent and you don’t even need to subscribe to read his acerbic opinions. For like the bi-weekly newspaper columns of that all stops wine shop Michael Fridjhon, their hardcopy is posted on the Grape website, sometimes even before it appears in print. An odd occurrence admittedly, but one which does justify clogging up the fiberoptic cable with mouldy old copy from ages past. The practice also saves on subscription charges with the next step perhaps a purple leaf out of Financial Times pundit Jancis Robinson’s book – to charge punters for access. Read More…
