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Dinner upstairs at Eric Fologwe’s in Higgovale last night with Luan and artist Jan du Toit and strangely, no Yazoo was played and no Alison Moyet, either. Jan was wearing flip-flops and Christo Coetzee’s Salvador Dalí gold ring – two lips around a diamond. Jewellery aside, the painting which caught my eye was a sub-Edward Hopper white-car-with-café number by John Kramer, brother of David. So no surprise then to be invited to David’s Kalahari Karoo Blues show at the Baxter on Wednesday by Paula Wilson.
Lady Astor
“Will I see you at the Titanic dinner next month?” enquired Richard Astor, partner with Mark Solms in the most progressive winery in Franschhoek, if not the entire SA, yesterday. The occasion was their annual oesfees, which brings the kief , kool and kleurvol to a former fruit farm of Cecil John Rhodes in the shadow of the Drakenstein Mountain. We were sheltering from the pitiless sun under a spreading oak on Solms-Delta farm while Richard and Mark were looking for something to eat. A time consuming task as the lunch queues were of British dimensions – many and long.
Artist Joa Schonfeldt, Richard Astor and Mark Solms
It’s a slow day sitting on the spittoon, so what follows is offered with a pinch of salt.
Dawid de Villiers and Mathilda Slabbert are two lecturers in the English Department at the University of Stellenbosch, surely an oxymoron these days as ivory towers reorganize themselves into schools. Let’s hope they both have tenure, for if the Chancellor, Dr. Johann Rupert, reads their recent biography of National Treasure David Kramer, they might be looking for alternative employment if his reaction to Wallpaper* magazine’s low opinion of Afrikaans is any guide.
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.
The rickety wheel of history has come full circle. The 352 year old SA wine industry started by Huguenot refugees from France with heavy lifting supplied by slaves from Africa and Asia is again using slaves to make wine, or at least workers treated like slaves, according to The Telegraph. Reporting on a controversial report by Human Rights Watch which claims workers “are being forced to live in shipping containers and pig sties and operate without proper safety equipment” the sensational report will hammer yet another nail into the coffin of SA wine sales in Blighty. Are the allegations of HRW true? Probably. Do they represent the status quo on SA wine farms? Certainly not.
Solms-Delta supplied the drinks at the preview of the Bonham’s SA fine art auction in March and now Rustenberg are following their lead and pouring their wines at the preview of Dylan Lewis’s Christie’s cat auction in Sarf Ken.
This afternoon the Sanhedrin of Afrikanerdom, the ATKV (Afrikaans language and culture association), grasped the revolutionary Franschhoek Oesfees to its ample crimpolene bosom. The 80-year old cultural movement had swooped down on the four year old harvest festival in a bont bussie (multicoloured minibus taxi) and planted some multicoloured flags outside the port-a-loo village. The president, Oom Japie Gouws, welcomed the brown Afrikaners and their indigenous music into the broader familie. The anthem of the newcomers stamp daai boude lam (bump that bum numb) soon had paunches pulsating and bollas bouncing.
Afrikaans culture bus
“At its best” says neuropsychologist Mark Solms with an Albert Einstein soft afro “wine-making is just another art form” by way of background to the decision to showcase the wines of his Solms Delta farm in Franschhoek at the Bonhams South African Art Sale preview in London later this month.
But is it wine, Professor Solms?
The seventies foyer of the Baxter Theatre was crawling last night with new media and social situationalists. Franschhoek phenomenon Solms-Delta, always first with the goodies, had arranged a tasting of lifestyle wines (Cape Jazz Shiraz, Vastrap and Langarm) and tickets for David Kramer’s tour-de-flats called Breyani. Until the UCT wireless went down, the frenzy of tweets was displayed on a large screen above the milling foyer throng, confirming that broadband in Africa still has a few miles to walk in existing velskoene.
David Kramer last night
When Christian Eedes proposed, I should have said yes. It was in the honeymoon period of his brief but merry career as editor of WINE magazine and hysteria about the pronouncements of the blind tasting panels at WINE was reaching a cyclical fever pitch. The occasion was towards the end of a boozy lunch at Magica Roma in Pinelands and the offer was to join him on a tasting panel with a leveled headed person like Christine Rudman as referee. A panel of three makes arithmetic easy and as Christian and I have a habit of disagreeing on the merits of particular wines, there are sure to be at least two options for punters who rely on tasting panels to beat a path through the overgrown forest of brands.
Christian, Roland and Jeanri-Tine
