Editorial from the final Grape magazine

This is the final issue of Grape in this form – although we plan to survive and thrive on the internet. The first issue appeared almost exactly six years ago, offering ‘a publication with more editorial content than advertising, no advertorials, written by knowledgeable people without hidden links to the industry, and independent of big wine-business interests’. A friend of the magazine, on hearing that we were to cease producing the print edition, pointed out that the project was always ‘quixotic and ingenuous’.

What Grape had grown to be, he added, was ‘an internationally respected commercial disaster’. Yes, well, there are worse things to be, and we hope the flattering part of that judgement is as true as the downside bit certainly is.

In that first issue, a little sceptical and modest, we pointed out that it was up to the readership if the magazine was to ‘survive and improve’. We’re grateful to the loyal supporters we have gained and kept over the years (although we didn’t manage to gain and keep enough of them). We’re grateful to the few outlets that have sold the magazine with no financial reward. And we’re immensely grateful to those who have written for us and tasted on our panels: the former, for example, include just about all of the best (independent) winewriting talent in the country; all gave their services without even a hint that they’d have tried harder if they were getting paid!

The larger part of the ‘official’, executive wine industry in South Africa is perhaps deserving of less warm feelings. For it was not supportive of us, and generally needs to do much, much more to build ‘a critical wine culture’ (as Michael Fridjhon refers to it in his article in this edition). The demise of Grape magazine, while of course partly the fault of our editorial and commercial inadequacies, also reflects the failure of the industry to foster that culture – we can see the same short-sighted, narrowly producer-centred conservatism also threatening the Cape Wine Academy, for example.

It must be acknowledged that there has even been downright hostility to Grape. (There will certainly be some pleasure at the disappearance of the magazine.) Again, while not claiming that we never made mistakes of judgement or tone, the hostility mainly came from those who don’t accept anything less than praise, and who believe that it is the job of wine journalists to directly help producers sell wine – rather than to help consumers get more pleasure and interest out of wine.

There are no doubt many and complex reasons why Grape magazine did not succeed in building the circulation that would have made it more viable.

But there was support over those six years, and I think we improved as we hoped we would, and we are proud of much of what we have done. At the core of our intentions was to point out to winelovers some of the problems inherent in winewriting when it depends on the goodwill of advertisers and/or big wine business; even more when it lowers itself to using advertorials – surely a malign cancer in modern journalism. The industry figure quoted above (and it was a genuinely unsolicited testimonial!) suggested that Grape had ‘put principles and accountability on the winewriting agenda for the first time since the Platter era’. We hope that the matter of integrity is indeed on the agenda, partly thanks to our vigilance.

And we hope that we have helped to strengthen the forces that love wine not only for the money to be made out of it, but because it is a wonderful thing that we should try to save from bland brand-mindedness, and save from being something where scores and prices are all that really matter, and rather build as a vital part of a genuine human culture.

The Grape website is prospering since we started putting effort into it a year or so back – recognising that perhaps our future lay in cyberspace, given the huge and increasing cost of printing and posting the magazine. Our resources of (donated) time and energy are insufficient for the website and the magazine, and, hugely reluctantly, we are abandoning those who, for whatever reason, are not yet seduced by the wonders of the internet and electronic reading. We’re genuinely sorry, because we too prefer ink on paper.

But if you have internet access, please try to continue your relationship with Grape there. Much of what you find here you will find there, and plenty more. You will still find us to be sometimes informative, stimulating and challenging (we hope), occasionally irritating (we fear) or boring (we fear even more). But always independent – if we had to give up that, we would go altogether.

– Tim James