10 February 2005

Jean dines out

Of course, I heartily disapprove of idle gossip, but duty is duty and I must keep my few readers informed of the serious topics discussed in the corridors of wine power. Such as the consolations wine marketers find when obliged to forsake the Calvinist comforts of home for the fleshpots of the wide world.

Poor Jean Engelbrecht has been in need of non-home compensation, given the squalid mess in the ancestral hall at Rust en Vrede. So picture the scene sympathetically: last November it was, in a snazzy Washington restaurant with a remarkable wine list – extensive and expensive enough for US lawmakers dining out at lobbyists’ expense. Enter a top-notch South African delegation, over there to walk the corridors of diplomatic power and influence.

Our Jean was among them – a man who knows the highways and byways of the high-social circuit of Americans-that-matter. He’s an old hand at the wine and food of California, for example: he and winemaker Louis Strydom once talked themselves into an unbooked meal at the exclusive and desperately expensive French Laundry restaurant in Napa, where people wait months for a table. So here he was in Washington, the epicurean scoutmaster for the likes of Danie de Wet (chair of the KWV), and Johann van Rooyen (CEO of the SA Wine and Brandy Company).

On their trip, while Jean showed the way, the others (of course, like the gentlemen they are) each took a turn to pay for a meal at a different restaurant on the dining-out nights. And, while expense account credit cards held out, it was great fun for all.

Until the night that Mr Engelbrecht decided to lead the company through the best (and priciest) that California’s vineyards and a fancy restaurant could offer, and the noughts started multiplying alarmingly on the bill. Rumour has it that Professor van Rooyen slipped out halfway through the meal to SMS home to check on the credit status of the company credit card.

In the end, I believe, the guys closed their perhaps befuddled eyes, sipped the last of the old Napa cabernet, and forked out the dollars….

A Cape Legend in its own lunchtime

Back home, rather lesser food and wine are the norm for the poor hacks on the wine circuit. Some of them were recently reminded of the idea of nominating the worst PR event of the year that they must drag themselves to. The ghastly reminder was a lunch for something calling itself ‘Cape Legends’, a group of properties all somehow, but differentially, aligned with Distell – exactly how was never properly explained. (You could tell this was a Distell function, though, because they’d flown Neil Pendock down from Johannesburg to sit next to the chief host and dutifully record an interview.)

The lunch was held at the lovely Uitkyk estate in Stellenbosch. It wasn’t the organisers’ fault that it was raining that day, so that the lunch had to be shunted indoors. But it was their fault that guests were invited for 11.30 and kept hanging about, waiting for something vaguely significant to happen, till about one o’clock. It wasn’t the organisers’ fault that the main speaker didn’t arrive till the event was nearly over because her plane was late – but, then, one shouldn’t organise events depending on SAA keeping to its schedules, should one?

It most grievously was their fault that Distell’s MD, Jan Scannell, was allowed to deliver (read, rather, and pretty badly too) a speech of mind-numbing banality. And certainly their fault, and most culpably from the hacks’ point of view, that the wines served with lunch were mostly served warm – including the only one that rose above the ordinary, Stellenzicht’s Noble Late Harvest Riesling.