Don’t know whether to award the logo below to Franschhoek marketers for their FLF wine writers none award fiasco last week or to SA wine hacks whose response to the none award has been bizarre. A round robin polling a united response to the none award includes John Maytham, one of three judges who were reported to be “in unanimous agreement” that the entries were drek; the Department of Wine at the University of Cape Town issues pompous opinions from the Ivory Tower while one Franschhoek publisher forwarded the call to pencils to the PR company who organized the none award. Perhaps the most sensible suggestion came from Cathryn Henderson, editor of Classic Wine magazine, to approach the none award sponsors to run a wine writing course. But who would present it? SA writers are obviously too rubbish to contemplate… Loosely translated from Slovak, the sign below warns the public against shoddy poseurs.

The warning is needed when you plumb the shallowness of reports that 66% of whites at the recent Trophy Wine show showed a TCA fault. Pressed on the matter, an Amorim Big Cork explained they’d hired the assassins of JFK, Marilyn Monroe and Boris Berezovsky to collect all the TCA infected corks and supply them to wineries likely to enter the Trophy Wine Show.

Or perhaps it was the James Bond atmosphere of Bratislava in The Living Daylights with music by Norwegian popsters A-Ha rather than UK media whores Ah-Ah which got to the exasperated ABC. Let’s hope the legal department at Toasty Show sponsor Old Mutual has spare capacity as writs are expected to fly.

Our own cork taint experience at the Concours Mondial is negligible – one dodgy bottle over two days – and cork closures are by far the most popular ones, as shown below:

In SA, some leading producers like Vergelegen, Klein Constantia, Cape Point and Muratie are replacing screw caps with cork and anyone wishing to export screwed wine to China and the USA should think twice. Although in the case of Klein Constantia, now owned by a pair of Cape Argus competitors, following the lead of a cyclist from Eastern Europe is perhaps not a good idea after this pile up yesterday at the Zoya Museum outside Bratislava.