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The Sunday Times annual Rich List is undoubtedly one of the most vulgar exercise in journalism, but fascinating for all that. SA wine lovers will be intrigued to read that the proprietor of Delaire-Graff Estate in Banghoek, jeweller Laurence Graff, has a fortune now estimated at £3.3 billion or $5.3 billion, handily eclipsing the $5.1 billion Anglo American will be paying the Oppenheimer family for their 40% stake in De Beers.
What a pity Jay Rayner will not be judging this year’s Eat Out Awards. He’s been my favourite UK food writer since Adrian Gill disappeared behind Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times pay-to-view wall. Especially after that memorable full body wax back in 2009, below. I was so moved, I completely forgot to file a review of his 2008 opus The Man Who Ate The World. Re-reading my review three years later, it’s clear he would have been just the man for the Eat Out gig. Pity!
Jay would have taken the Eat Out Awards to the next level
It’s been an amazing week of women taking ownership of wine. It kicked off with 100 women choosing 100 wines in Cape Town with Clare Mack and then I met Libby Pietersen at the Soweto Wine Festival last night. As it says on her banner “as a black South African WOMAN I offer… Elegance, Style and a Truly Unique Taste.” Coming a week after SA wine farmers were tarred and feathered by Human Rights Watch and labeled as slave drivers, as MD of her own company, Libby is the contradiction that’s worth 1000 press releases from wine industry quangos. As was Chris Barron’s evisceration of the HRW report in the Sunday Times. The man is an expert in writing obituaries, which he did for the HRW report.
Libby does Soweto
From today’s Travel & Food supplement of The Sunday Times. Admen are not joking when they say Red Bull has wiiings, as three billion cans of the stuff are sold each year. Amy Winehouse, the torch song diva who flew to close to the flame, was a big fan. UK tabloid The Sun claimed she downed “gallons” of gin and Red Bull the day before her death. The secret of success for the energy drink is caffeine, a powerful stimulant whose usual delivery vehicle is coffee, a libation so addictive and fashionable, the coffee shops of 17th century Europe have now spread across the planet.
Was Amy Winehouse a coffee/mocha Pinotage poppie?
WINE magazine was born in October 1993 to the sound of popping Cap Classique corks with a youthful Pieter “bubbles” Ferreira from Graham Beck on the cover and the final September edition features the results of the Amorim Cap Classique Challenge, so a nice symmetry is maintained. At the awards lunch of upscale KFC at the Grande Roche today, MCC maestro Jeff Grier from Villiera reported that Sunday’s Side Bar in the Sunday Times had sold him an extra fifty cases of Sauvignon Blanc 2010. “We had a Superquaffer of the Year Award for the 2009 vintage in the 2010 Platter guide which had nowhere near this effect” said Jeff “which just confirms the power of the press. I also got two marriage proposals on my smart phone from the picture you used.” If we’d only had the February 1999 WINE magazine cover (below) the proposals would have been off the scale.
Jeff Grier and duck
Frisco used to sell itself on “the fresh roast flavour every coffee lover wants”. Pinotage drinkers could say the same thing but the question is where do the roasted flavours come from? The Department of Agriculture says wood while the University of Pretoria implied illegal coffee beans in a letter published in the Sunday Times on Sunday. “While busy analysing a number of mocha/coffee Pinotage wines I idly wondered but what if the coffee perception was not from wood products etc. alone, but was instead from a little help of the real thing. Lo and behold we detected caffeine in one of the wines…”
Harry Haddon's take on the issue
Things were a little more surreal than usual this Sunday at Truth! David Donde’s cross between an Apple hi-tech show room, lycra cycling pants catwalk, after party for Narcotics Anonymous, ossuary and coffee bar serving the best Joe in Cape Town in the Prestwich Memorial corner of Buitengracht and Somerset Road.
Quite where all the psychic energy comes from is an open question, but it’s built up worse than static on a nylon carpet. Perhaps it’s the proximity to a Victorian Greek temple now trading as St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church; intersecting Ley Lines; popper pollution from the leather bars in De Waterkant or a calcium overdose from all those slave bones interned somewhere in the building.
Popular Coffee Pinotage in the USA
The celebrity perp walk at next month’s Nederburg Auction could be taken to the next level if Mothers2Mothers co-founder, gynecologist with salt and pepper hair Mitch Besser, brings his lady friend Scottish songstress Annie Lennox along to Paarl. The Aids NGO M2M was a beneficiary of the Nederburg Charity Auction in 2008 and 2009 and this year a 10 year vertical of Eben Sadie’s iconic Columella red blend will feature in the annual charity auction.
Annie for Nederburg?
While my friends in the Douro fry eggs on their bald pates, in steamy Hong Kong its not clear how much more climate change can be tolerated without a mass migration to the poles. First Lady of HK wine, Debra Meiburg MW was at VinExpo last week and attended the latest climate change presentation “the current effects of climate change in California’s Napa Valley.” Like many things in France, it started an hour late. By way of coincidence, I wrote about the issues in the Sunday Times yesterday.
Debra and Cape Town artist Luan Nel at the China Club on Saturday
Last week I again wrote about the shock sale of Klein Constantia in the Sunday Times, a story that shot up on the charts on winenews as well.
In the cellars of KC: winemakers Adam Mason and Anibal Coutinho
