I’m far too superior a person to ever say ‘I told you so’. However (don’t you just love that word!), a reader reminded me (on my word of widowish honour) that I’d been rather sceptical about the future of the Cape WIne Academy when it was taken over by a bunch of venture capitalists called PointBreak who cared approximately zip about wine. In a splendid deal for them a few years back, they bought it from Distell for a token R1. In Grape 18 I suggested that if the CWA was ‘driven into the ground, or into being a moneymaking scam, it will be shameful reflection on Distell and on a whole industry’.

Well. They’ve done their best. The million rands that was part of what was bought for that princely R1 dried up, helped along by them paying themselves R25K per month for ‘administrative fees’ (nice work if you can get it). Then, without letting the minor shareholders know, Point-Break started the process of putting the Academy into voluntary liquidation…. Why keep it on, after all, seeing their ‘administration’ hadn’t brought in more cash? Fortunately, what they were doing was noticed and fought against by people who cared, and it looks likely the CWA might survive, with new ownership and management, for at least a little longer.

Let’s hope they find some students. Numbers have plummeted, no doubt largely because of greatly risen fees – but, frankly, jettisoning some of their better Cape lecturers and replacing them with some rather dubious ones can’t have helped much either….

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One casualty of a liquidated Academy might have been the Cape Wine Master programme – not that many would have really noticed its demise. In what appeared to some as another derogation from responsibility a few years back, Distell and the KWV stopped funding the programme, and the Cape Wine and Spirits Education Trust, under the doughty Prof Joel van Wyk, chose to hand over the CWM ‘brand’ to the now profit-oriented Academy.

This was actually a massive betrayal of the CWM Association (the body of CWM graduates), which wanted to be in charge of the qualifi-cation, and keep it a non-profit affair. Admittedly one can understand a touch of suspicion about the dynamism of the august Association. At its last AGM, for example, the Deputy Chairman (a woman, but they stick to old-fashioned terminology there) had to point out that she, and the position, existed. She had to apologetically raise the subject as she wanted to relinquish the portfolio – though it can’t been very onerous, seeing the Executive hadn’t ever met.

Incidentally, our very own editor resigned from the Association, largely in protest at the way it so spinelessly accepted the handover and had knuckled under to the bunch who controlled, and have now abandoned in its financially denuned state, the Cape Wine Academy. But, a trifle hurt perhaps, he seems ruefully unsure they even noticed his resignation – they haven’t acknowledged his letter announcing it…. I notice, though, that he hasn’t renounced the right to use the letters after his name on the admitedly rare occasions when it suits him to do so. Does no one have integrity any more?

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Well, maybe André van Rensburg does. Even though he got cross with me recently for what I wrote about him on the Grape website about rumours that he was to abandon Vergelegen, I insist that ever-quotable André is not only a major bonus for wine-writers, he’s also someone the whole industry must be grateful for having – not only for his winemaking. He disclosed in the latest Cape Winemakers Guild (CWG) Newsletter that it was nearly the veterinary profession that got him, not us: but the awful prospect of five years in Gauteng swung things and the ‘need to increase the average IQ in the wine industry was then deemed more important’. You gotta chuckle along!

Another delightful trait is his bucking of unwritten rules, such as the one that wine-makers don’t publicly criticise a local colleague’s wines: so a frisson of embarrassment ran round the last CWG Seminar at his microphoned dismissal of the just-tasted Rustenberg Peter Barlow with the contemptuous remark that it got its terroir from oak barrels….

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It’s been the season for new wine guides and other books recently, and therefore also the time when rival wine-writers sharpen their quills in order to kindly help the authors by pointing out where they might’ve gone a bit astray. A few who were less than fulsome in their praise for the clutch of material from the Wine mag stable (including the Pocket Guide and Icons), were a little startled, I believe, at the barrage of argument they (privately and/or publicly) received in return.

Why such ultra-sensitivity? Perhaps things aren’t going quite as planned with the abovementioned guides. I’m told authoritatively, in fact, that print runs this year are quite a bit down on last year’s, and even so they’ve already been dishing out the Pocket Guide as a ‘bonus’ with some of the wine they sell on the side (retailers are unsurprisingly still a bit sore at that aspect of the mag’s activities, I believe).

Given the overwhelming weight (figurative and increasingly literal) of the Platter Guide, is no room for these others? Was Wine mag propelled into something not too sensible because proprietor Harold Eedes was piqued when his bid to buy Platter some years back was thwarted?

Thank heavens, really, he didn’t get hold of Platter – there are already too many advertorials in it. Yes, all those little stories of ‘eat-out’ and ‘stay-over’ places are all duly paid for by their owners – and are written by them, as Platter points out in a coyly minimalistic way of announcing that judgement in these instances has been a litle less than independent.... I confess I hadn’t quite realised this plethora of disguised advertisement, in fact – but that’s the scary beauty of the best advertorials for you, huh?

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I always take pleasure in sharing the latest bit of appalling PR kitsch I’ve noticed on a back label. Try this one, with some fine mixed metaphors too, on Stellenzicht Rhapsody: ‘An exhilarating concert of great harmony, backbone and complexity, this full-bodied Cape blend is elegant with a muscular pres-ence. It has been composed with a strong artistic flair, blending the intensely captivating aromas’, etc, etc.

It’s depressing to think of someone paid to write this silly and cynical nonsense. Even more so to think there might be consumers who’ll pay the silly amount asked for the stuff because the back label says it’s ‘a rhapsody to remember’.