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Yesterday’s Su shock scoop crashed the Uncorked site. Rosebank nerds are on the case and are confident of fingering the hackers, more to follow. But back to the scoop of Su waving sayonara into a Kalk Bay sunset on April 1.
If the industry decides to continue with WOSA, (after all, can SA wine in reduced circumstances afford plush new Paarl offices for both Vinpro and WOSA as one billionaire asked?), there are ten things (at least) that need to be got right to recover from the current condition of expensive irrelevance.
This week’s Winery Owner of the Week [WOW] is Nathaniel Rothschild (below) whose stake in French First Growth and perennial Chinese favourite Château Lafite was valued at £400m in 2011 by the Sunday Times in their annual Rich List briefing for tax inspectors, kidnappers and the envious. Nat is in the news a lot these days as his battle against the beastly Bakries for control of Indonesian coal miner Bumi (a headline that could have been penned by that alliterating alimentarian Mr. Min) reaches a crescendo in London today.
when Fons Aaldering launched his eponymous wine brand on an unsuspecting SA in May 2010, shortly before the soccer World Cup, he chose La Colombe as launch pad. Alas, lunch left much to the imagination, featuring as it did, homepathic truffles and foie gras. “If you ever come to the Netherlands” offered Fons “I’ll take you to a decent restaurant.” So on Thursday I was treated to the meal of my life at De Librije in Zwolle, home town of Herman Brood. Here is Fons and our chef, Jonnie Boer.
Prompted by @bohoparadox to write about WIETA (Agricultural Ethical Trading Initiative which somehow anagrams down to WIETA) I made some calls. With the fabulous Olympic Fairtrade Stellenrust wines of Tertius Boshoff making the front page of the Sunday Times, I wondered why the 35 registered Fairtrade producers (representing 40-50 growers) should pay twice to be ethical.
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
