Follye and weeknesse
14 March 2006
Glancing, as is my occasional wont, through the Collected
Works of Dean Swift, I came across the following in his Resolutions for
When I Come to be Old: ‘Not to be over severe with young People, but
give Allowances for their youthfull follyes, and weeknesses.’ Being already
a candidate for the follyes of antientnesse, I am minded to remember some
other advice (this time from the English journalist Katharine Whitehorn):
that is, never to say ‘I’m just a silly old woman’. Some of you young people
might be fool enough to believe me.
Product placement possibilities
Cannibalism must count
as a notable weeknesse, even a follye, in young or old. I see that there is
to be a film about that German cannibal who made the headlines and Sunday
back pages a year or two back. Will the film be high-mindedly honest, or
will they be open to offers, I wonder – product placement being a big thing
these days. You’ll remember, I’m sure, that the famous meal of freshly
sliced, er, sausage-thingy was apparently accompanied by an unspecified
‘South African Cabernet Sauvignon’. So I’m sure Wosa and all of us will be
eagerly awaiting the revelation of just which one it was. But would the
producer of the genuine article sue if it was shown? Or if it wasn’t?
Oscar the braaimeister
Talking of strange meals, the Nederburg Auction is coming up (though the
wines that accompany the luncheon tends to be less strange than tedious,
often including Nederburg stuff that hasn’t managed to sell at Auction for a
few years). The lunch usually provides a welcome break for the uncomfortably
overdressed visitors wondering why on earth they bothered to turn out again
on a hot summer Saturday in Paarl. But often the food is a matter more of
pomp and ceremony than of haute cuisine.
The organisers always keep the menu as a surprise – it helps
to lessen the blow, I think. And word is that this year it will be an even
bigger surprise than last year’s somewhat chaotic effort (when many of the
Cape’s finest chefs prepared what optimists called ‘adventurous
wine-matching dishes’, served in random and much-delayed order). I am told
(and you know how reliable my informants always are) that the sit-down do is
to be abandoned. Instead, the ladies in hats will be offered a casual,
stand-around braai (one can already hear grumblings about suburban
down-market affairs).
And guess who’s cooking the boerewors on the coals (served in
pieces on a stick with a piece of potato to dip into blatjang)? Why, our
favourite über-operator Oscar Foulkes! Oscar, sporting a frenzy of bleached
curls these days, is to lend a hand to wife Andrea, who seems to have
clinched the lucrative contract to give auction lunchers some zooped-up
boerekos.
Taint in wine and words
And the wines. I shall
be intrigued to see if De Toren Fusion V 2000 actually makes it to the
Auction podium. At the media tasting all three sample bottles were pretty
badly tainted – corked, I’m told, or some such horrible fate. No further
bottles were available, so if the tasting hacks present were in the habit of
responsible reporting (don’t laugh!), they would surely have been justified
in informing the world of high-paying potential buyers world that there
there was either incredible bad luck involved, or at least a batch of Fusion
V to be treated in very gingerly fashion. A bad situation for one of the
Cape’s most hyped and expensive wines.
Interestingly there’s also a bit of serious taint in the
official auction catalogue comment on the Fusion V 2000. It claims that the
wine ‘was never released in South Africa’ and that it ‘was rated five stars
in both the John Platter South African Wine Guide and Wine magazine’. Well,
I don’t have old copies of the mag, but my copy of Platter 2003 edition
shows the wine getting only four-and-half stars (the guide has never given
the wine five stars). There’s also the statement in Platter (presumably info given by
the producer) that all of the wine in question was ‘sold out in 5
months’. Sounds like misinformation both then and now. How did the Auction
catalogue get so much wrong? Is the rest of it to be trusted?
Meanwhile, it seems like that high tower might be catching
plenty of uncomfortable winds.
Cork-screwed
Cork taint was not an unusual occurrence at this Auction media tasting.
Despite being pre-tasted (by whom, one wonders), some bottles had to be
replaced for the wine-writing crowd; never the most outspoken and critical
of creatures these, but there was a general swoosh of enthusiasm for
screwcaps. Not that many local producers are taking the move to better
protection seriously. Apparently the recently established International
Screwcap Initiative is getting very few enquiries from the Cape. Other than
from Constantia Uitsig, Rustenburg and Hidden Valley, I believe, the silence
is deafening. Maybe if the hacks were to tell potential Auction buyers about
the tainted wines they found, producers might get the wake-up call.
Stop press
I see with sadness that advocate Mr John van den Berg (former owner of Cloof)
has just been struck off the rolls. Just because he threated to sue me once
for innocently mentioning his nickname (‘Vark’ – but he denied it
vehemently), doesn’t mean I won’t remember him most fondly for turning up at
a Wine magazine luncheon (his Pinotage had won something) and
embarrassing everyone by bringing as his special guest Jürgen Harksen, the
German fraudster now languishing in clink. (Come to think of it, Harksen is
another German baddie they’re planning to make a film about. Again I wonder
if Cloof will object to being included.... Maybe Oscar will get the catering
contract while they’re filming on the property, seeing he’s there already.)
