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Jumbo is one of the big three supermarket chains in Portugal. Owned by French chain Auchan, every large town has one. Next month Jumbo will run a BOGOF special: buy one bottle of Astronaut Touriga Nacional (not a bad choice as the Portuguese Wine magazine hailed it as best value red last year) and get one bottle of Astronaut Swartland Pinotage free. Distributed by Miguel Grijo of iVin and made by Anibal Coutinho (shown below) this is the wine that should put Pinotage sales in Portugal into orbit.
The “Chinese tourists” with cameras at the Barrels & Beards oesaf in Bot River on Saturday turned out to be South Korean wine buyers and they bought 6900 bottles of Wildekrans Pinotage.
The most embarrassing thing about parties is clearing up afterwards and carting the cases of dead bottles to the bottle bank. But not for long. The Guardian reports on edible bottles, made from a grape flavoured membrane. “The Dumbledore of food technology [is] Harvard wizard Dr David Edwards whose previous innovations include an [sic] “breathable” chocolate delightfully called Le Whif. He has now turned his attention to WikiCells – an edible membrane made from a biodegradable polymer and food particles – that can imitate ‘bottles’ found in nature, such as grape skins.”
WOSA's 10 green bottles for Cape Wine 2012
The damages: R200 a bottle – but then only 230 were made and the label alone is worth the price.
Available from: bertus@zarevelation.com Tel. 083 400 2999.
WOSA, the wine industry’s embattled marketing quango, are like a Western Leopard Toad on the R45 from Malmesbury to Wellington in the path of a tractor-trailer full of Pinotage grapes. In January, the largest investor in SA wine, Johann Rupert rubbished WOSA’s much vaunted biodiversity focus. “Mense koop nie wyn as gevolg van biodiversiteit nie. Ons moet ’n eenvoudige, opregte, herhalende boodskap kry, en dit is nie biodiversiteit nie.” People don’t buy wine because of biodiversity. We need a simple, righteous, repeatable message and it isn’t biodiversity.
Endangered wine marketer
The manne of the Groot Gariep are woedend (pissed off). As Stromtrooper, a dyslexic member of 4x4community.co.za, posted yesterday, the bridge over the Orange at Kakamas is stukkend (broken, see below). It has been closed, necessitating a 41Km diversion on a bad gravel road for denizens of Keimoes to get to the Kalahari Sushi Bar.
Kakamas Krak
This life as a Boswell to the Good Value Guru is not for sissies. Yesterday saw us waiting for the tasting room to open at Beyerskloof at 8:30am and we got back to Eendracht, our oasis in Oak City, at 10:30pm after a braai of Free State lamb on Overgaauw washed down by 1975 Steen and 1978 Cabernet Sauvignon. How brilliant is that when your wines are all older than your host?
After reading the last 2011 edition of NewsNow, the latest news aggregator magazine rip-off of The Week by Media24, I’ve decided to suspend my latest entrepreneurial project: the manufacture of hygienic disposable iPad covers in China. I figured that toilet reading material would inevitably go digital and fastidious hostesses would soon be buying iPads for their loos and so provide a captive market for my iPad covers. Certainly iPads have done for lunch party conversation. After a New Year’s day braai in Oaklands, guests adjourned to the couch and fired up Grinder on their iPads, a free app that locates sexual partners within a specified radius. Or maybe randy people without cars, as one Standard banker pointed out.
It was 9 minutes past 9pm on the 29th of September 1969 and Nicky Krone was preparing for bed on Twee Jonge Gezellen estate in Tulbagh, when all hell broke loose in the original three room clay brick homestead built by the famous pair of bachelors in 1710. When you start work at 4:30am, you’re pooped by 9 but thoughts of sleep disappeared when the floor started heaving like a doberman with distemper.
Nicky jumped out the window and watched huge boulders crash down the mountain in torrents of sparks while a blue flash ran down the rocks from one end of the valley to the other. For the Tulbagh valley sits on the Worcester fault which had given a 6.9 magnitude shrug. Nicky thought the Russians had nuked Cape Town and fried his fiancée, Mary. “I never bet on the number 9″ says Nicky.
Amazing what you learn from the Weekend Financial Times. Sunday’s interview with avant garde film director John Waters produced “balloonies, or people with a sexual interest in balloons.” “I really don’t get it” opined John “but maybe I’m being stuffy. It’s safe. We should encourage that kind of behaviour. No one gets pregnant at a balloony party.”
