Relying on e- rather than voicemail has one disadvantage when traveling overseas: huge backlogs of messages, many deleted by your service provider – in my case MTN – as they exceeded their lifespans, like perishable foodstuffs in Woolies.  What fresh rubbish is this?  Buy another hard drive MTN and save them all!  After the trip to Portugal to taste wine for Anbibal Coutinho’s People’s Guide, the messages were from BMW (the Big Man of Wellington wine), relating how the WOSA dirty ops manager (sorry “communications director”) had attempted to blackmail the appellation into cutting ties with yours truly after Uncorked blew the whistle on their self-serving porky pies claiming bottled wine exports “showed a positive trend” in the first three months of 2012, when they actually continued to fall off the cliff.  Like WOSA’s credibility.

After two weeks in China, that upcountry BMW, Alan Pick, had phoned to ask if I’d be the auctioneer at a Wagu and Wine auction (with Rael Levitt as chandelier under-bidder) he was hosting at his Butcher’s Shop in August, to raise R600,000 for a study trip to France at the end of the year for 20 Elsenburg final year students.  Well this is where WOSA can really help for once, by diverting funds from their Nero-esque opening party for Cape Wine 2012 (R1 million is budgeted).  For once to think of the future of SA wine rather than their own stomachs and to do the right thing.

For it seems to this commentator that the most effective way to market SA wine overseas is to make a product the rest of the world wants.  After judging the Concours du Sauvignon in Bordeaux earlier this year and the Concours Mondial de Bruxelles last month, it’s clear to me that the world wants French elegance and flair.  Something the next generation of SA winemakers needs to find out for itself as yesterday’s failed marketing mavens shuffle off the stage in ignominy.