Last night Classic FM’s makhulu baas Dominic Ntsele recalled calling Julius Malema “a candle in a South Easter. He’s going to implode and implode quickly. I suggest he enrolls in Damelin and sorts out his qualifications for those that the ANC treats badly, get rewarded later.” Exhibit “A”: Tony Yengeni.

The venue was the unveiling of Classic Wine’s Top Ten Chenins in one of the temples of capitalism: the Pierneef à la Motte restaurant while the gentle breeze chimed chandeliers of china tableware, providing a sub-Japanese soundtrack to Dom’s discourse.

The impact of Julius on SA wine in substantial. In a profile on Juju in The Guardian yesterday, to make the point that South Africans are not totally in control of their own destiny, political pundit Jonny Steinberg notes “when English drinkers decide South African wines are no longer ‘cheap at the price’, for instance, South Africa must either exploit its grape-pickers even more or retrench many of them. When China starts producing T-shirts at half the price South Africans do, the country watches helplessly as an industry shrivels and dies.”

Exploiting grape-pickers even more? It’s the old “when did you stop beating your wife?” cheap shot. Sounds like Jonny’s been reading last year’s Human Rights Watch report on slavery in SA vineyards. What makes Jonny’s drive-by dissing so doubly disastrous for SA wine is that the story is brilliant and far from the usual pap that passes for political reportage in SA.