Talk about bad timing. You don’t make desert wine for centuries and the month you launch your authentic recreation of the sweet wines loved by Baudelaire, Jane Austen and Napoleon, you’re upstaged by the dumb and dumber Brett Kebble “assisted suicide” farce.

While the desperately down-market Oribi Hotel in Troyeville was HQ for the truly evil CCB assassination squad that murdered Wits academic David Webster, the Kebble killers would meet at The Grand strip club in Rivonia, a suburb with a reputation for plotting. Over lunch at La Campagnola in Bryanston, champagne importer Sam Hackney from Boutique Wines told me that the Grand has the best food in Johannesburg, as Glen Agliotti lumbered past, confirming that the Johannesburg underworld is populated by gun-toting gastronomers.

The Grand is owned by Andrew Phillips, who made his name in pole dancing circles at that infamous “gentlemen’s club” The Ranch. The Grand is probably the largest retailer of Louis Roederer Cristal champagne in SA, which could explain why it is first stop on the itinerary of so many Champagne salesmen visiting Johannesburg. So calling your natural sweet stunner Grand Constance, as Groot Constantia does, sends mixed messages to Cape Town’s hedonist hit men and may attract an unsavory clientele to one of the Cape’s finest wine tourism attractions.

If Groot has the UK export market in its sights, then Big Constantia would have been on the button. For Britain loves Big: it watches Big Brother, eats Big Macs, reads the Big Issue, has a new prime minister Big Dave obsessed with the Big Society, tells the time by Big Ben and drinks… Big Constantia (hopefully). In this Age of Austerity, Grand sounds very Louis XIV.

Certainly Constantia accountants have taken austerity on board in pricing this 2008 late harvest Muscat de Frontignan at R295, with dry goods (handmade wooden box, firebox red wax seal from Jack’s Wax in Johannesburg, replica antique Consol glass bottle) alone costing over R200.

The bottle was inspired by a fragment of 18th century glass embossed “Constantia wyn” which washed up at Roosevelt Inlet on the shores of Delaware Bay in 2004. The box is fashioned from old barrels and the bottle nestles in a bed of wood shavings from the same source. A nice local-is-lekker touch in these days when Fifa’s goodie bags in those World Cup hospitality suites favoured by bankrupt parastatals, featured garish synthetic blankets made in China and other imported authentic South African curios.

The wine was made by Groot cellarmaster Boela Gerber who reports that there are two ways to make the sticky icon: in the style of a white wine, as is done at neighbour Klein Constantia, or as a red wine – fermented on the skins in old barrels, racked off the lees and matured in other barrels for two years, or 24 months in cellarspeak (it sounds longer) as in this case. “All those bright ideas we were taught at University didn’t work out” he reports.

So what does it taste like? Rich rooibos tea with apricot jam, the kind of tipple you’d offer a connoisseur like Mr. Agliotti, if he stopped by for tea and scones.