Beyers follows Mao with a new little red book

This life as a Boswell to the Good Value Guru is not for sissies. Yesterday saw us waiting for the tasting room to open at Beyerskloof at 8:30am and we got back to Eendracht, our oasis in Oak City, at 10:30pm after a braai of Free State lamb on Overgaauw washed down by 1975 Steen and 1978 Cabernet Sauvignon. How brilliant is that when your wines are all older than your host?

The day started off on a religious note with Faith, Beyers’s 2008 Cape Blend and the great man himself must have thought his prayers were answered to find sinners sipping with religious fervour so early in the morning, with the mercury already in the low 30s that we thought we were already in The Other Place. It was to get worse. Above you can see brother Beyers handing one of his little red devotional books over to a Pinotage Partner (15% discount) – forget about Mao and his red book, this is Beyers se Boek which will be launched on Diemersfontein tomorrow. Although of the wildly successful coffee/mocha style expression you will find few traces in the new Pinotage Guide for coffee is a heresy, cast out into the darkness where there is much wailing and gnashing of gnashers.

A bit like the VinPro info day later this morning then, if keynote speaker Dr. Johann Rupert reads from the Book of Revelations, a volume the SA wine industry is only too familiar with: apocalypse, pestilence and famine as mangey marketing chickens come home to roost and the bill for a decade of parties is presented. As the Stellenboschkloof producer told us yesterday “WOSA sent a Belgian sommelier out to the farm recently. He doesn’t buy the wine for his restaurant and has no SA wine on the winelist. But he really loved the free trip to SA paid for by the industry.” Verily Faith is the only answer.