There are now so many wine-shows that it will soon be difficult to find enough judges – more or less credible ones, anyway. The SAA competition, having lost some lustre, and contaminated by poor on-board wine service, needs someone special. So organiser Hendri Nagel has been asking around, with charming naivety, if anyone could give him Jancis Robinson’s email address. Oh, he is also seeking ‘a judge of colour’, so if you are a plausible darkie willing to be a token, or know where one can be found, do contact Hendri.

One judge that SAA managed to get, I believe, is John Platter. Less tokenism than opportunism, perhaps, as the motive is presumably the well-knownness of the name. Trouble is, John is rather out of things, and I don't think he gets to taste widely any more – and the name retains cachet largely because he sold it, along with his wine guide, some years back.

***

A new and oddly conceived competition is for another airline – Swiss, this time, which is piggybacking on the Good Food and Wine Show in Cape Town. The judges’ task should not be onerous, as entrants must be participants in the Show – not too many, if last year’s turnout is anything to go. They enticed Brit fairly-heavyweight Robert Joseph to chair it – would he have participated if he realised the event’s scale and modest level of prestige?

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Wine is not quite all show business, and I’m thrilled to congratulate Clive Torr on becoming principal of the Cape Wine Academy. It shows all you young people the reward of persistence, as this was his second shot at the job, having been pipped last time by Christine Rudman, who, er, resigned when the new owners came in. Funny, one had never thought of the CWA being ‘owned’ until last year, when Distell sold it to a bunch of accountants called PointBreak.

Who are getting a pretty fair return on the token one rand they paid Distell, I hear, taking a huge salary now for their few mornings’ admin work. But that might be just the start. Some have wondered why venture capitalists would want to get hold of the CWA. Might the attraction be the large mailing list of past students – the sort of list that might be really useful in, for example, setting up a new wine mail-order business?

Of course they might make money in other ways. Would it be within the realms of a profit-seeking imagination to conceive of no longer buying in suitable wines for tutored tastings, but rather actually charging producers for the right to have their wines tasted by students – along with a bit of advertorial thrown in?

We’ll see. I wish the CWA very well. If it is driven into the ground, or into being a moneymaking scam, it will be a shameful reflection on Distell and on a whole industry which has been unwilling to support the Academy. The fact that senior members of the CWA who are responsible for its academic standards are profit-sharers, rather than simple salary-earners, makes the whole thing moot, very moot.

 ***

Speaking of Distell – I hope they have more percipient guides to their destiny than their current ‘consumer insights manager’. He was recently being publicly insightful about planting Italian and Spanish varieties here, to help SA compete with Australia and ‘offer an opportunity to lead a new trend’. Sadly, Mr Scoble is a decade or so late. He could have gained his insight long ago by reading in Australian journals about their progress with just these grapes, at a time when Distell, the KWV, et al were all agog at their discovery of chardonnay.

 ***

Some of the Cape Town contingent of wine-hacks have resolved to liven up their dreary round of being given food, drink and other handouts by anxious producers. They ungratefully plan to institute an award for the worst-organised PR event of the year. So far, it seems, Beyerskloof is well in the lead, for the launch of its ‘Cape Blend’ Synergy. Not only because things only started happening, and the hosts only put in an appearance, an hour late. It was mostly the presentation the hacks were obliged to watch, once the computer had been persuaded to work. There onscreen, at tedious length while the standing audience shuffled about, were dear Beyers Truter (speaking in Afrikaans despite some Brits and Americans in the audience) and marketing manager Francois Naudé. They were fuzzy and almost inaudible – and they were also present in the audience watching their blush-making performance. The live Beyers did later speak (in English) and redeemed things a bit simply through the force of his personality. But at least some of the foreigners were unimpressed. Malcolm Gluck of the Guardian looked pretty grumpy, and was heard to remark that he actually understood Beyers better when he spoke Afrikaans than when he spoke English.

 ***

The press do have a hard time. Press releases are not normally provocative of much more than a yawn, and a brief giggle at the high-flown phraseology. So the news of a new MD for Swartland Winery did not really capture the imagination. Rather more fascinating (and still as unexplained as last year’s cancelled launch of Stellen-bosch Vineyards’ Shamwari range) was the follow-up a mere few days later, to beg them to ignore that announcement ... as the new appointee had resigned. He was due to start on 1 April, by the way.

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But some at least of the press bear a heavy responsibility. It’s starting to seem that some producers are only setting prices for their top wines once they see what the reaction is at the freebie luncheons they organise for the hacks. Happened twice recently, with Clos Malverne and Morgenster. No matter to me, as I can’t afford them anyway.

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I earlier mentioned Mr Gluck. He could, incidentally, give a lesson in book-reviewing to those locals who use reviews as a way of toadying up to authors. He wrote of Suzy Atkins’ book The girls’ guide to wine: ‘This is a tremendous, ground-breaking book. Nothing like it has been written before. It is the worst, most irrelevant, most witless, least informative, dumbest book on wine ever to be published.’ Gosh, imagine being so unkind in print!

 ***

This spitefulness reminds me that, sadly, I was the object of calumny when the editor of this virtually monochrome rag (which probably couldn’t get advertising even if it tried) suggested that my poor husband perhaps didn’t die, but ran away. In fact, the dear man doted on me. I was his only solace during those long years when I wasn’t even able to let him out of the house because his depression and mania were so bad that he didn’t know what he was saying. It is cruel to wound a simple widow-woman’s feelings thus.

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Enough. In a world in which there is George W Bush, I do not need other things to drive me to tears. Or to drink. Cheers.