Looking forward to the opening of Neil Ellis’s winery in Ida’s Valley later on today with lunch prepared by a brace of Michelin starred chefs from the Netherlands, Jef Schuur and Onno Kokmeijer. Which reminded me of the late Lannice Snyman, captured below at the launch of the People’s Guide late last year.
Lannice in black
Her colleague Victor Strugo wrote a wonderful obituary in the Saturday Star, which set me off thinking about her legacy. This then from the Sunday Times:
The obituary for the foodies foodie, Lannice Snyman, by GastroGnome Victor Strugo, seemed to end with an obituary for the entire food and wine writing industry as we know it. Under siege from editors killing print columns in an attempt to cut costs and the rise of bloggers who have seized the initiative and imagination in reporting lifestyle issues, the departure of the leading SA food author/publisher brings down the curtain on a whole Potemkin village of cottage industries.
That New York designer Marc Jacobs named a handbag after fashion blogger BryanBoy, confirms the power of blogs in aesthetic affairs. In SA, the food writer making the most waves at the minute is Clare Mack whose Spill blog is an irreverent blast of reality to the cozy world of SA restaurants. From the fiasco of the Gordon Ramsay R1500-a-head dinner at the One&Only to her “No Way, Nobu” review of the wannabe most fashionable sushi joint in (Cape) Town, Clare pulls no punches and spills lots of beans. Mack the knife would be a good alternative name for her site, as fans of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, would agree.
I met Clare when she burst into a cross between an Irish Jig and a Toyi-Toyi when a wine industry PR gave me a hard time for blogging about a less than spectacular meal at one of the Wineland’s sacred cows of cuisine recently. “Don’t muscle Pendock,” she sang, fists pumping the air “I’ve eaten there and he’s not wrong.”
Wine blogs, too, have a bad habit of telling it like it is with Winetimes comparing a visit to the tasting room at Groot Constantia to “booking yourself into Pollsmoor Prison for a gang rape session… It’s a vulgar place where the useless wine staff’s total lack of interest contaminant the wine until it taste like vinegar.”
Blogs provide a convenient mouthpiece for a younger generation of wine lovers with traditional outlets blocked by aging aesthetes. Under the Influence often challenge conventional wisdom, championing wines like Samantha O’Keefe’s brave Lismore Viognier 2008, a radical departure from the fat, alcoholic peach juice which is often the common expression of the varietal in SA, yet overlooked by tasting juries of senior sippers. It’s déjà vu all over again as her maiden vintage Chardonny was likewise ignored until championed by younger generation retailers like Roland Peens from the Wine Cellar in Observatory and Lisa Griggs, after which it quickly sold out.
Even the whole national obsession with the arithmetic of pleasure is under fire from bloggers like Harry Reginald Haddon whose day job is managing Mama Afrika restaurant in Long Street, Cape Town. HRH (great initials for a wannabe wine commentator as snobbishness seems to be an essential qualification) fires a shot across the bows of wine enumerators on his wineandi blog: “I don’t like scores, and ratings and competitions – they cheapen the wine world (metaphorically that is, obviously they actually make it far more expensive). This is why I love wine: Sharing bottles that are as full of character as the people I share them with.”
