A sip of jerepigo with your new rhino 24 June 2008

Tulbagh Winery targets Wildlife

As Wine magazine editor Christian Eedes notes in his latest edition, rating South Africa’s lush fortified sweeties highly and admiring them is all good and well – but when to drink them? Clever marketing manager of Tulbagh Wine Cellars, Quintus Basson, says they have found the perfect audience and ambience for a range of these unctuous dessert and port-style wines – at one of the country’s most unusual seasonal festivals.

Wondering when to sip a jerepigo? How about when you’ve just acquired a big, hunky, live rhinoceros? Perhaps a kudu? But then, as many hunters know, a swigger of ‘port’ is a great warmer upper in the hunting season this time of the year. And those in the know, say muscadel, red or white, makes a fine wine match of venison.

All this leads to the annual Kirkwood Wildlife Festival taking place in the Eastern Cape from June 27 to 29, when the Tulbagh (and Porterville) winery will treat the expected 35 000 visitors (they had that many in 2007!) to labels like Director’s Port, Brulpadda Port and Klein Tulbagh Reserve Port. A special ‘festival bottling’ is Disa Jerepigo ‘Sopkoppie’. (Meaning ‘soup head’, the hunter’s term refers to a wrongly-targeted small buck.)