High tech wine 5 AUGUST 2004

Naive folk out there who still think that wine big business is about lovely wine and not about lovely big business, might ponder the recent appointment of Johan Bestbier as managing director of KWV International. He moves across from a high technology engineering company, and the press release announcing his appointment doesn't even pretend to claim that he has the slightest interest in wine as anything other than a source of profit. Not to mention the fact that his surname suggests he should be in a brewery instead.

Bullards, dullards, food and cigars

Isn’t it fortunate that we all have enough friends to ensure that we hear about it when something unkind is said or written about us? I mentioned in the last print edition of Grape that Eat Out magazine had been abandoned by the serious food writers and had been recruiting amongst some less qualified hacks (who I’m quite sure know what they like). Well, I was alerted to a bit of umbrage being taken by a columnist going under the soubriquet ‘Briefcase’, and buried in the voluminous pages of the Johannesburg Sunday Times - a newspaper best known for its tits-and-bums back page and its annual competition for the best matric dance-dress.

In keeping with dubious journalism, the umbrage was misdirected at the editor of Grape, rather than me. It wittily (I’m sure it must be witty, though it merely adopts the title of my column) accuses him of ‘sour grapes’. The implication, I suppose, being that the editor was motivated by envy or thwarted ambition in suggesting that Neil Pendock (writer on wine) and David Bullard (writer on motor-cars and other trivia) were being employed as badly paid restaurant critics while not being very obviously qualified for the job.

Unlikely, I’d say, but perhaps the ed (or I, for that matter) would, in fact, be wild to be commissioned by Eat Out - to be paid R150 for not only visiting a restaurant and paying for the meal, but also for penning some deathless judgemental prose about the experience. I wonder if those who accept will be hoping for some extra perks - freebies, fawning restaurateurs, etc? Maybe there are more possibilities than we are aware of, mouldering away unrequitedly in our obscure journal.

Actually, I suspect that ‘Briefcase’ might be David Bullard himself: it’s not clever enough to be Neil Pendock, and it evidences a self-righteous obsession with putting the boot into poor old disgraced Darrel Bristow-Bovey while he's down - probably because Darrel, despite dipping his toes into plagiarism, is the superior writer of the two. I remember mentioning David B once before in my column - after he had to obsequiously apologise for getting his facts wrong when insulting winewriter Michael Fridjhon. Does that, incidentally, indicate markedly better journalism than a bit of unacknowledged copying?

David also has a column called, appropriately, ‘Out to lunch’, featuring a photograph of himself posing smugly with a large cigar. My dear husband always said I should have pity for ageing men who constantly need to be seen in the company of phallic symbols like cigars and powerful cars. So I do. Dave himself is, however, apparently fond of making anagrams about people’s names, and it’s odd how quickly the letters of his own rearrange themselves as ‘avid dull drab’.

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