All human life is here: Women,
winemakers, lawyers and Zulu dancers
31 May 2005
I confess I felt tempted to welcome the
silly ‘Woman winemaker of the year’ competition when I looked at the latest
PR photograph of the Cape Winemakers Guild members, with its mass of pale
male faces smiling out brawnily at me. But the temptation lasted only a
short while, while I also flirted with the idea of a Gay/ Lesbian/ Bisexual/
Transsexual/ Intersexed Winemaker of the Year – the uncertainty how many
entries there’d be is surely sufficient indication that there’s a lot of
empowering needed in that direction?
Apart from anything else, we have a
another sad case of mismatch here: the Guild apparently doesn’t want the
likes of Ronél Wiid and Cathy Marshall, and
they have been quoted as amongst those with little but contempt for
gender-focused competitions.
This award does throw, however, an interesting (and quite
ungendered) light on one aspect of winemaking, in the same way that the CWG
does, with its membership containing quite a few people who are not the actual getting-your-hands-dirty winemakers.
Take this year’s winning woman, Debbie Burden. The Award
press release (nearly as endearingly incompetent as last year's, it talks of
Debbie’s degree in something alarming called ‘Viticvulture’) says that she has been ‘responsible for
the production of red wines at Simonsig Estate for the past six vintages’.
Oh! well, then why is Johan Malan the member of the CWG, and Debbie isn’t
even mentioned on the winery’s website? And why does Johan go up to collect
the silverware and the cheques when a Simonsig wine triumphs in anything
other than a woman winemaker competition?
Interestingly, Simonsig's own press release claims,
rather, that Debbie ‘works in close partnership with acclaimed winemaker
Johan Malan’. So is she the winemaker or not? If she is, she should get the
credit from SImonsig. If she’s not – she shouldn’t get prizes for being one.
Simonsig does, however, nicely illustrate one of the problems with an award
for women winemakers: the very first sentence of its press release finds it
useful to point out that she is ‘blond [sic] and strikingly beautiful’....
Talking
of winemaking minorities: The May edition of
the Drinks Business magazine in the UK had a piece by the charmingly
named Paul Bastard of the Co-op supermarket chain, which apparently prides
itself on its ethical trading manners. He referred to the tricky business of
ethical policies vis à vis our own dear land: Quote: ‘There were mistakes
made early on. Even before Fairtrade, we were selling a wine that we had
been told was from the first black-controlled winery in SA, which was
something we were very excited about. When I went out there though, it
became patently obvious that this was not the case, the place was run by a
white lawyer with just one black employee who would say “Yeah, I like that
wine…”. I felt like an idiot…’
Lawyer? Couldn’t be the eponymous Nelson of Nelson’s Creek
could it?
On another
issue not unrelated to ethics, not to mention cynical exploitation of blacks
by the winemaking industry. I’m told that the recent London Wine Trade Fair
saw another horribly fake and clichéd African launch by another horribly
fake African brand – called ‘Makulu’. There really should be a ban on
producers getting a bunch of so-called Zulu dancers to irritate and
embarrass virtually everyone in sight and earshot. Apparently, the six wines
(awful stuff in awful packaging, I’m told) is bulk bottled in Germany.
Authentic, huh? Not many Zulu dancers there.…
