Greenpepper Gideon
23 September 2005

We got mail, as they say in some circles. Someone applying for a job as my roving scout sent the following excited report, as a follow-up to the news that Gideon Theron, one of the published and vaguely punished villains of the additives-in-sauvignon saga, had made the bubbly that somehow came top in a recent competition.

I thought (says my scout) that you might be interested to know that I recently saw Gideon ‘Greenpepper’ Theron at a function given by Cyber Cellar at the Pearl Valley Golfing estate in Paarl, a place I can report as surpassed in vulgarity only by the suburb of Dainfern in Johannesburg.

I can tell you that Mr T is looking very well, and generously nourished to boot. He was exhibiting no sign of contrition or shame and in fact joined several other jolly winemakers and owners in a round of golf. I can’t say how well Gideon did in the game, as I am not a participant in this ‘good walk, wasted’ activity. But I’m pretty sure that his fellow-players kept a close look at his tactics – after all, if you can use, er, unconventional methods to improve your wine, you can be expected, surely, to try out some equivalent tricks in something as frivolous as golf, especially if a little wager is involved.

If it was me (my anonymous scout adds self-righteously, inadvertently hinting at his/her own day-job), I would spend the rest of my career in some backwater making de-flavoured wine base for Hunters Gold – my first job offer in the industry, some years back – not prancing around at marketing events at vulgarly luxurious security-fenced golf courses.

Opportunism again

There was also a little feedback to my shocking story about dear Christian Eedes dabbling in plagiarism – sorry, ‘opportunism’. The first mysterious letter ran thus:‘Dear Widow, I’d be prepared to forgive Christian and Wine mag, if they promise to do another photo shoot of Eedes junior. Who knows, they may even manage to get him to look as unassertive and modest as he really is!’

Another informant (why are they all anonymous, these people? Are they ashamed to be seen associated with me even in print?), suggested that Christian might not have realised that he was plagiarising the Platter Guide; he might have thought he was just recycling his own phrases. Because, in fact, he’d already used the ‘borrowed’ sentence before – in a September 2004 South Africa supplement to the British trade magazine Harpers, where he was listing his Top Ten SA wines. He characterised Crescendo in the same words as used first in Platter and most recently in his Gulp! column: ‘Never obvious, few Cape wines demand patience like this classically oriented wine.’

There’s a reward (a bottle of Crescendo, of course) for anyone who can find some other place in Christian’s oeuvre where the sentence crops up.

Puffery gone wrong

Some winery PR people rather unfortunately do their own writing. Very reasonably proud of their Platter double five-star achievement, Steenberg trumpeted the fact, with splendid insouciance as to accuracy – as well as grammar and typographical consistency – in their newsletter. Thus: ‘Newest accolade is that in the next Platters Guide, 2005/6 the 156 wine masters that judge the thousands of wines made in South Africa, selected 72 superior wines which they thought worthy of 5 star status. These had to be further refined to 10 – that is the usual number of 5* wines acknowledged in Platter’s Guide each year.’ (Note that this quality of public relations output is coming from one of the most expensive hotels and wineries in the Cape!)

As someone close to the Guide commented curtly: ‘The only true word in the description is “in”.’ Another person’s horrified remark was: ‘156 wine masters? – God forbid!’

Big secret