The white wine of Winnie Bowman’s birthday party in wind-free Camps Bay last night was a 2010 Botanica Chenin Blanc from Clan William while the red was a 1982 Uitkyk Carlonet, a dinkum first growth if ever I tasted one. Where are those elegant Cabernets of yore and will the Wine Lizard and those other shameful sirens ever get their just desserts for offloading an over-alcoholized, over-extracted and over-priced antipodean benchmark style on Stellenbosch? The Lizard’s SAA Shield wine test match between SA and Australia did way more damage than Phyloxera.

So hats off to Cape Legends who market successors to Carlonet, although they won’t be happy with the Lizard’s assessment of the last Sauvignon Blanc Sakkie Kotze made at Le Bonheur, a legend now waning, having previously made wine on Uitkyk. “One of the worst wines I’ve tasted this year. Even compared to the pool acid foisted upon South African consumers in the 1990s, this delivers a bone-chilling, teeth-whitening corrosive punch entirely uncontaminated by flavour — natural or fake. Every bottle should come with a health warning: ‘Do not put in mouth (DNPIM).'” Why kick a man when he’s down? Surely not recommending speaks volumes and why spend more words dissing a wine than praising alternatives? Is this another example of the bully boy tactics the Lizard deployed against Etienne le Riche, setting back Rustenberg a generation in the process.

And how do SA Sauvignon producers feel about the libel that they add illict water to their wine? What has the Sauvignon Blanc Interest Group to say about this? My blog on inappropriate coaching of judges at the FNB Top Ten tasting, vouchsafed to me by a judge and common knowledge among producers, generated furious letters of complaint to the editor of the Sunday Times and essentially killed my TimesLive blog which I could not access until the Press Omdudsman had ruled.  I’m still waiting… Has there been any reaction from SBIG at all with regards to this doozy in Business Day last week:

“If the inspectors have some time on their hands, they might ponder the latest miracle from South Africa’s winelands, or at least from some producers’ cellars. In an age when the pursuit of phenolic ripeness coupled with long-term climate change has seen alcohol levels rising inexorably, the increasing volumes of low-priced, low-alcohol Sauvignons are almost fantastical. True, technology now makes alcohol removal easy, but technology comes at a price. So when the very cheapest of South Africa’s popular brands come to market at around 12%, it occurs to me that the judicious but illicit addition of water to the wine offers the dual benefit of lowering both the alcohol and the input cost.” This is a reputational attack on Sauvignon Blanc producers. Let’s see if anyone even notices…