Dubious Diners, heirs and parochial patriots
19 July 2005

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Nice to know that Diners Club are bringing back their winelist awards. It might encourage fancy restaurateurs to think about more than their markups, or about how much they could charge wineries for being represented on their winelists. Or encourage less fancy restaurants to add at least a few wines not produced by the persuasively and pervasively generous Distell.

But my trembling soul is not entirely recharged with hope after reading the latest press release from the organisers. It’s not just the illiterate suggestion that wine should ‘compliment the cuisine being served’ (and surely one doesn’t serve cuisine, which means ‘kitchen’ and is generally used in English in the abstract sense – one serves food, even when being pretentious). But are we really to be excited by the insight of a judge whose example of appropriateness is semi-sweet wine (gewürztraminer, to be precise) to go with curry?

That wisdom comes from one Catherine Boutell-Coackley (well, we can’t entirely help our names), described as a ‘Senior Wine Judge and Wine Trainer’. What makes a judge a senior one, I’m not quite sure – and in fact, as I’d never heard of this particular one, so I searched for her credentials on the internet and couldn’t find any. Though I did find a reference to what I think must be her in a previous incarnation as ‘Boutell-Bryson’ (looks like she can indeed help at least part of her name) being quoted as finding Cordoba Crescendo 1995 ‘utterly orgasmic!’ And she’s a Wine Trainer too! My dear husband tried rather in vain to train a dog or two in his time (though without capital letters); I hope Ms B-C is more successful with Wine.

Heir now less apparent
Hannes Myburgh of Meerlust Estate has not shown much inclination, shall we say, to provide fruit of his loins to inherit this grand and historic property. So he’s looked around at his immediate family, and in recent years the heir-apparent seemed to be handsome nephew George van Reenen, who’d been brought onto the farm to learn all about it. But George has left – turfed out, rumour has it. If so, he must surely be most irritated at blowing his chances of inheriting fifty or a hundred or whatever million rand’s worth of property. What did he do, I wonder?

Love, and wine drinking, in a cottage
Typically, the oh-so-sensitive people out there in the winelands who kindly open their cellar doors to buyers and tourists kicked up an awful fuss when a ‘specialist’, hired to utter words of wisdom at a Wines of South Africa (Wosa) seminar, dared to suggest that local wine tourism is a mere ‘cottage industry’.

After he was quoted saying this in a whip-up-support press release issued by Wosa’s PR company, expense account lunches were cancelled and deeply principled support for the Cape’s biodiversity calmed down, as the Wosa office lines hummed hotly with enraged calls from, well, lots of people: ranging from Wosa’s boss – the still-oddly-named SA Wine and Brandy Company, the Stellenbosch Wine Route, and a number of those willing to open their cellar doors to allow us to taste (at a price) and to buy (but never on a Sunday).

A press release was hastily issued by a ‘winelands tourism subcommittee’ of the SAWB (of which no-one had heard until that time), to huff and puff officially. Wosa had to make all kinds of cutesy moves to calm the needlessly nervous crowd, and persuade the ‘specialist’ to explain that, well, he meant something more complex than some readings of his first formulation suggested.

A curious related aspect is the behaviour of the chair of the Stellenbosch Wines Route, and a deeply patriotic wine personality. Johann Krige of Kanonkop is apparently making it very clear that he is not supporting Stellenbosch restaurants that do have not a proper supply of Stellenbosch wines on their lists. I’m told that the moment he sees all those (cheaper) Robertson whites and reds mentioned, he gets up and walks out.

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