Unpenetrating predictions 18 December 2007

Looking back to the foresight of last January shows what DIDN’T happen in 2007….

Predictions are a notoriously tricky business. But as with prophetic dreams, it is often only when something is proved right that it gets noticed. The long run of failed prophecies just slithers unnoticed into the dustbin of history. Few are brave enough to venture a prediction about the South African wine industry, let alone thirteen of them in one go; so we must congratulate winewriter Neil Pendock on his attempt to play at being Mystic Meg. But not at the acuteness of what he foresaw: one out of thirteen [sorry, fourteen, which makes it worse...] unequivocally correct is not an impressive achievement. Better luck next time…. (Note that we at Grape are unlikely to be as brave in venturing our predictions – only the Widow might be foolhardy enough.)

The following annotated list is slightly abbreviated, as indicated. The full text is available on the winecoza website.

COMMENT

From Neil Pendock:
Not the way I scored it at all. See my blog for my first 7, the last 7 before the weekend making 14, not 13 as your correspondent would have it.
 

From the ed:
Neil seems to increasingly regard our comments facility as a way of advertising his blog! If people don't want to go there, they can be assured that indeed Neil (he doesn't mention there being prodded by Grape into this re-look, but still) does see things differently. His interpretations involve the following:

1. Suggesting that Danie de Wet having trouble being re-elected is equivalent to an attempt to dismantle KWV....

2. He cites figures from an April edition of a magazine (ie, probably figures relating to the previous year) to somehow invalidate the more recent statistics which made his prediction totally inaccurate.

3, 4. He doesn't admit he was wrong, but just 'too soon off the mark'.

5. He slithers around, claiming Spar as the 'large buyer' he predicted would boycott Platter, and for some reason also adduces a private producer. A large buyer is a large buyer: it is not a supermarket or a wine farm.

6. He claims to be spot on, seeming to think that one wine is equivalent to the 'crop' of unknowns he had foreseen.

7. He seems to think that the sale of a winery that once was a co-op is the same as a 'major co-operative cellar' going to the wall....

Can't wait to see how he tries to extricate himself from the other seven (and thank heaven Neil's arithmetic is better than his predictive abilities!).

From ed:
Please don't get peevish in print, Neil; it's most un-eaglish. Actually, your blog appears to have been posted a few hours after this feeble submission was (at a time when the Grape webmaster had guiltily put up the stuff dated for the next day and was joyously sipping a youthful Chave Hermitage 1998 in Paarl). But let's put it all down to coincidence, if you like. Another strange coincidence is the use in two disparaging comments of this bizarre remark about eagles not chasing flies (the other, rendered in English, was in a comment to the Widow; given that that note was rather more elegantly phrased than Neil's, common authorship is unlikely, so it just goes to show ... something or other.) Subucula tua apparet.