It’s an idea that’s been a long time coming. It dates back to Saartjie Baartman and her amazing boude. Big is Beautiful. The three fabulous wines below – two Chenins and a Chardonnay – come from collective wineries you’ve never heard of processing over 100,000 tons of grapes a year. This is exactly the kind of product for our August Big is Beautiful B2B Fair aimed at hooking up restaurateurs and hoteliers with producers. Time to cut out the middlemen and save 30% for starters.
Its a match made in heaven: Breedekloof house wine and private labels for Piet’s Pizzeria in Pongola. For the Grahamstown Golf Club. For the Mitchell’s Plain Mountain Bike Fraternity. We’re talking a shidduch for Sauvignon, matchmaking for Merlot. A Grindr for Gastronomy.
Breedekloof should ignore those failed marketers now trying to flog them DNA visions. When those Medusas ran SA generic marketing, they ran straight past Slanghoek as if they’d seen a snake, breaking their necks to get to the fleshpots of Robertson. Yesterday’s people with yesterday’s slogans.
SA Wine tried their bankrupt ideas for a decade and the chickens are coming home to roost with a vengeance: booming bulk exports, stagnant sales of bottled wine and a complete lack of identity for SA, let alone Breedekloof. As even Vinpro noticed at their Open Day last week. The children on the wrong side of the mountain have been sold into slavery: hostages to the vagaries of exchange control with the big bucks made from the sweat of their brows by dodgy middlemen in Manchester, Moscow and Marseilles.
At the Cullinan Hotel last night, fifteen wines you’ve never heard of made an eloquent point. The potentially Naked Chef of SA wine, Neill Anthony (above, looking in profile like a young Luke Dale-Roberts flicking a jaunty flip-flop to the camera) played a blinder. His pork neck paired with the quartet of wines below – one even a Platter five star stunna – raised the Platteland to the Next Level in the same way that Die Antwoord made Steve Hofmeyr look like Germiston talent night. Not Bruce Springsteen, at all.
The biggest missed opportunity of the evening was the absence of brandy from proceedings. Last year, KWV won Best Brandy in the World for their 15 year old made in Rawsonville. Yet by the time the excellent Ankerman fortified Colombard from Dasbosch was served, Cape Town wine writers had deserted the field in droves – see below. What happened to gees?
Time for the next generation of wine and brandy commentators to step up to the bar as the current crop rush to collect their tickets for complimentary parking in the hotel basement. Whatever happened to irresponsible drinking? If the fourth estate can’t lead from the front, we’re all doomed.
