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A curious comment from Tim Atkin, wine writer and blogger, quoted in OLN as he picked up an award from Wine Intelligence. WI seems to be a marketing/PR company that recently gave one to embattled WOSA CEO Su Birch (cynics may wish to count how many Wine Intelligencers crack a freebee to Cape Wine 2012 as Su has long used WOSA largesse to market her own career). “Wine journalism is under threat from bloggers and declining interest in wine.”
The script for the WOSA MCC themed tasting at next week’s VinExpo in Hong Kong was written by the Graham Beck marketing department.
Method Cap Classic – the life through bubbles
“With the likes of James Bond 007, Barack Obama and of course Nelson Mandela enjoying exceptional South African bubbles to celebrate their finest moments, you can also taste the wines these celebrities enjoy.”
Is SA wine serious about China? The list of 27 exhibitors at next week’s VinExpo in Hong Kong – or Hong Kok as my dyslexic friend Pinky calls it (with Bang Kong presumably the capital of Thailand) concentrates very much on terroir by truck wines. Commercial wines sold mainly on price.
Where are the terroir treasures, the Kanonkops, Vergelegens and Meerlusts? Not a single one of the controversial UCT Top Twenty wineries are attending, although UCT’s self-appointed professor of wine, Tim James, has at last done the decent thing and signed up for a non-UCT e-mail with which to communicate with the industry. Perhaps the Platter guide will send Professor Tim east to present this year’s 5* stunners in the next chapter of the unseemly commercial luv-in between the guide and WOSA, the exporters’ mouthpiece.
“He walks like he’s kakked in his pants and has a face that can smell it” was the sotto voce comment passed by one of Thursday’s Chateau Libertas celebrants on a particularly preposterous Cape Town winewriting colleague. Confirming SA wine hacks are amongst the most bitchy in the business. Still The Big Easy is the place to drop such bon mots, as it was one-time home to William Charles Winshaw, inventor of Chateau and the first winewriter in SA, according to Duimpie Bayly, who led the discussion on the 1940 vintage in an eight decade vertical tasting.
Even if the “easy” in Big Easy does not refer to the conveniences, which boasts the highest and hardest toilets in SA, as one hackette memorably tweeted at the 80th birthday party on Thursday. Uncannily predicting the lacklustre stock market listing of Facebook the following day. Sometimes social media is soooo overrated.
Greg Landman, Peter Veldsman and Duimpie Bayly
OK, so SAB-Miller and their Castle Lager are a bunch of Charlie’s with their Charles Glass appreciation society. Well Distell also have a Charlie in the closet. William Charles Winshaw (in the frame below), who founded the company and invented Chateau Libertas, a red blend for wine drinkers (as opposed to poseurs) that celebrated it’s 80th birthday yesterday, in fine style, at the Big Easy eatery in Dorp Street, Stellenbosch.
On a 6am BA flight to Cape Town to wish an icon “happy birthday.”. For Chateau Libertas turns 80 and proud offspring Distell are holding the birthday party at The Big Easy in Stellenbosch, former home of Charles Winshaw, the American medical doctor who founded the company.
I’m looking forward to tasting the 1940 vintage and wonder in WOSA have been invited for their offices are just across the road and they sure love to party with R1 million budgeted for the Cape Wine 2012 launch do. After the recent insults tossed at SA farmers by CEO Su Birch, WOSA can look forward to a warm reception.
Rico Basson is CEO of VinPro, the producers’ association. After bloging the opinion of WOSA monkey Su Birch yesterday, I thought it best to ask the organ grinder himself about WIETA. His comments below, which I interpret as a gentle slap on the monkey’s wrist. Whether this will keep indignant and ignorant farmers happy remains to be seen. SA Wine is the big loser in this whole fiasco which is entirely of WOSA’s making, with inflation of a golden handshake for the CEO one lugh
Su Birch, CEO of exporters’ mouthpiece WOSA for well over a decade, launched an extraordinary attack on her constituency earlier this month on the WOSA blog. Announcing a push for WIETA, the Wine Industry Ethical Trade Association, she claimed:
“We have over 3600 primary producers, many enlightened, others still trapped in the old ways of thinking. Some producers are ignorant, some are useless at paperwork so have no systems, others are fearful, many of them are barely surviving financially. But because South Africa has a shameful past, not just as recent as apartheid, but dating back to colonial exploitation and slavery, we have to acknowledge that we cannot say we are leaders in production integrity when there are still farmers who do not treat their workers fairly.”
An excerpt from yesterday’s lunch chat with Jorge Monteiro, CEO of ViniPortugal (like WOSA, but with more testosterone) and Pedro Soares, head of the Bairrada wine region (below, on the right). “How is the wine business in South Africa?” “Could be worse.” “Ah, you’re clearly not Portuguese. For us we’d say it could be better.” In restaurants and pastelarias around the Portuguese Winelands, urgent conversations take place (in Portuguese) about how to market wine over platters groaning with suckling pig and salted cod.
Jorge Monteiro has been head of ViniPortugal for less than a year and in that time has seriously shaken up the marketing of Portuguese wine. Perhaps the most visible change was the scrapping of the protection racket by which three UK supermarket chains were paid to list Portuguese wines. One of them, Majestic, then had the cheek to demand a marketing discount from the producers of the Portuguese brands they stocked. Jorge called their bluff and offered to present in-store tastings and promotions at his expense, but was turned down. Confirming it was all about making easy money rather than marketing a category.
