The Widow’s sour grapes

If KWV or some other dinosaur wants to transform its dull and dour image, I’d suggest they look at a bit of PR from Rosemount  (the awfully successful producer of lots of awful Australian wine), which has become the ‘exclusive wine sponsor’ of the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Pride festivities in Washington DC, San Francisco and London. One promotion will be a male model dressed in trousers made out of grapes.... Just think if KWV were to dish out dinkies of rosé, and persuade some dark-suited executive like MD Willem Barnard or Chairman Lourens Jonker to appear at a local Gay Pride event wearing trousers made out of pinotage – what wonders it could do for Cape wine, for KWV – perhaps even for Willem or Lourens.

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Talking of dinkies – I saw that dear Queen Liz  had chosen Nederburg ones to pop into the picnic baskets at her Jubilee garden party. It seems her taste in wine is on a par with her Mum’s taste in hats. Oh dear, my lamented husband wouldn’t have liked my sneering (at the Queen that is – not Nederburg). His radicalism was always tempered by a tinge of royalism. I remember him being very irritated once at the Worcester Young Wine Show when I remarked on the similarity between one of the more vacuous wyn-poppies and Princess Di. He would have been pleased to learn that Prince Charles is deeply au fait with current debates over wine closures. ‘Quayte why anyone should want to encounter a nasty, plastic plug in the neck of a wayne bottle is beyond me’, his Royal Highness pronounced recently. I wonder what he thought of the screwtops on the little Nederburg bottles.

The Portuguese cork industry was popping with pleasure about Charlie’s pronouncement, of course. No-one else has had much good to say recently for the quaint practice of stoppering bottles with a wodge of bark. And they didn’t even have to pay Charlie to be kind about them, which must make a nice change for them! Watch our local press, though – I believe that three of our wine hacks have agreed (agreed!) to go on a freebie to Portugal to look at the lovely cork forests and be generally persuaded that other closures are silly. Extraordinarily, one of the original invitees, the charming Jean-Pierre Rossouw (who last graced my column after being accused by one of our more, er, senior wine-writers of being named Jean-Jacques and other such ignorances) had the integrity to spurn the blandishments of the cork moguls. The trouble is, J-P is getting a reputation – he had also turned down an invitation to the Nederburg Auction. Let’s hope that all our journalists don’t start acquiring principles or good taste – where would the PR people be then? But do look out for sensible appraisals of the cork industry – in Wine-land, Sunday Times Lifestyle, and Wine mag I’d suggest.

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The editor has instructed me not to say nothing about the new Trophy Wine Show. Apparently he has been quite nasty enough about it in this issue of Grape, without any help from me. So I’ll just mention one Important Person’s muttering when it became clear that there was to be no ‘Best Wine of Show’ – although the pre-publicity had suggested there would be. Could it be that the scoring showed the best wine to be Monis Muscadel, but the powers-that-be decided it wasn’t suitable for Distell to win such a prestigious award .... so resolved that no-one would get it? An alternative explanation, from another Important Person, is that making the award to Monis would echo the 1995 SAA Shield match against Australia, when it rankled some that the top SA wine was KWV’s 1953 Muscadel.

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I’m such a featherbrained little thing (definitely blonde before the grey supervened), and miss my husband terribly when it comes to matters of high finance – as it often does in the noble world of wine. I’m sure there’s something important to say about the Distell merger, or KWV’s A and B shares and what the Board’s current manoeuvring is all about, and whether Dave King’s multi-million-rand struggles with the taxman will reveal that he isn’t, after all, the owner of the plush new winery called Glenhurst (I gather that he’s actually very poor and doesn’t own anything).

And there’s the ongoing saga of Jürgen Harksen – I’ve been waiting for ages for something to emerge about his dealings with owner of Groene Cloof, John ‘Vark’ van den Berg. You might remember me telling you about them turning up together at the presentation of a pinotage award to Cloof a few years back (apparently van den Berg had insisted that Harksen must be invited, to the embarrassment of the hosts). Well, something duly turned up at the Desai Commission: Harksen was cross that some DP politician hadn’t paid him on time for some Groen Cloof wine, and there was also a (to me) tangled story of many putative millions involved in a share deal around the wine farm. Or something. The rich German fugitive did once have a direct interest in Groene Cloof, he apparently said, but no longer has. What it all means, I have no idea.

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How amusing to see a letter to Wine mag criticising the pretentiousness of the back-label of Stellenbosch Vineyards’ Genesis range (coyly disguised as ‘Nemesis’ in the letter). ‘A revelation in red’ runs the horribly memorable conclusion of the label. As ghastly meaninglessness it’s hard to beat, but PR people keep on trying. I suppose asking why they can’t write straightforward, lively, informative prose is like asking why wineries plump up their wines with additives so that it is hard to find an honest expression of the soil and the grape any more.

Here’s a recent example of nonsensical, pretentious PR-speak: ‘Take natural potential, raw beauty, a dynamic team with a passion for winemaking, and an owner with huge vision – where a quest for achieving the extraordinary is a dynamic and ever-changing living entity...’ (it is rare, of course, to hear of winemakers who are other than dynamic and passionate). That’s the start; it finishes: ‘limitless boundaries is [sic] a way of life at Asara Wine Estate!’ Their exclamation mark, not mine. Does it mean anything beyond, I suspect, over-priced wines? In fact the whole tedious tract is rather ungrammatical, as well as making one expect hollow showiness from the cellar too.

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Perhaps it’s because I’ve reached an age when I have little chance of undoing the effects of a self-indulgent youth, but I get a touch depressed each time I read of some other obscure body part whose functioning has been discovered to be helped by moderate red wine drinking. Should we drink for health, then, rather than downing a glass dedicated to someone else’s? Actually, people can avoid the tedium of drink and still get the goodness: my chemist is advertising a tablet based on the compound resveratol, most associated with the benefits of wine. How depressing to think that some sad people out there would choose this means of getting their share. I’m reminded of a story about Rossini, who had been sent a present of Château Lafite grapes by whichever of the Rothschilds owned the property. Rather tartly and ungratefully, he remarked that he preferred not to take his wine in capsule form. Oh, I do agree, Gioachino. Cheers!