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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.”
The design brain behind the Swartland Revolution, Anton Espost, seems to have embraced a new symbology for this year’s Food|Wine|Design Fair that opened on the roof of the Hyde Park Corner Shopping Centre last night – Ashanti Kente cloth (see below). Which makes a lot of sense as the old Soviet imagery was starting to look very Tashkent.
New African branding for the Swartland
Positive Pinotage article in the Wine Enthusiast this month. Which makes the Platter guide’s failure to award even one of the 8 or 9 wines nominated sighted for five stars the full monty, even more curious. Some Sherlock Holmes-style sleuthing reveals that it was probably an unlucky assignment of Pinotage to one of two Platter five star panels which did for the Pinotage prospects. My deep throat reports that so many wines were nominated for five star glory this year, the pawpaw yellow Platter pips were divided into two teams of 8. A most auspicious number in Chinese numerology.
“Forget about the ABC (anything but chardonnay) club” says “world renowned” Schalk Burger “we have to deal with the ABP club.” Wellington winemakers have adopted the polite custom of referring to each other as “world renowned” in a semi-ironic style, but his point is not a polite one: prejudice against Pinotage is wide spread and both Schalk and David Sonnenberg from Diemersfontein develop stories which start with visitors telling them “I don’t like Pinotage, but this one…” Although Frank Meaker, from Bovlei Winery, reports that he sells a lot of the stuff to the Middle Kingdom as they don’t read English language wine writers. In fact, does anyone still?
Schalk in his Pinotage vineyard this morning
The Swartland Winery stole the thunder from tomorrow’s Swartland Revolution when their Idelia 2009 Cape Blend was one of three winners of the inaugural Perold ABSA Cape Blend competition, announced at KWV in Paarl this evening. Together with Corlea Fourie from Bosman Family Vineyards in Wellington and William Wilkinson from Wildekrans in Bot River, Swartland winemaker Andries Blake will be heading for France on an ABSA sponsored winemaking tour next year. Each winning winemaker was also given an iPad to blog about their trip in real time.
Beyers Truter addresses Perold guests at KWV
Anoraks experienced a wobble in their woggles this week over accusations that tasters for the 2012 Platter sighted guide do not have enough exposure to international wines. This surely does not apply to one high profile Platter pundit Michael Fridjhon who is one of SA’s leading wine importers and he presumably tastes what he buys. Of course his claim in yesterday’s Business Day that “The Platter Guide… reviews all the South African wines likely to be available for sale in the year ahead” is simply not true as the country’s largest wine retailer, Tops at Spar, does not allow its Olive Brook, Country Cellars and Carnival brands to be rated sighted by Platter while quite recently Dana Buys from Vrede en Lust threw the circus out of town. And there are many others like Aaldering and Deetlefs who have no confidence in luvvies looking at labels.
That said, there was surely something wrong this year with three Pinot Noirs getting high fives (two 2010 babies, barely out of nappies) while not a single Pinotage, Sémillon, [fill in your favourite brand here] got a mention. Isn’t it amazing how brands which do not enter competitions do so very well in Platter? Smells fishy to this Piscean.
judges' competence questioned
