Tokara’s 5th annual Wine Made Art Exhibition takes place at the SA National Gallery in Cape Town on Thursday 14th and alas, I’ll miss it, as slaves must work and I’ll be in Johannesburg, packing my surfboard for the Orange River Winemaker of the Year Competition the next day. An event I really don’t want to miss, if only to support leading Afrikaans wine writer Emile Joubert, the current target of Wosa’s dirty tricks department after calling for a management shake-up at the exporters’ mouthpiece. Not that an anti-Emile crusade will get much traction on the Groot Gariep, an appellation extravagantly ignored by the Stellenbosch-based marketing quango.

I do hope Rapport find a freelancer to cover the event after their usual prima donna stamped his tiny foot and refused to attend on account of Emile’s involvement (Emile does the PR for the Orange River Wineries and very well too, according to the sushi samurai in Kakamas).

To keep my art levels above Neanderthal, I went to Joe Berardo’s museum here in Lisbon this morning and spent a few hours watching Warhol TV. Paloma Picasso told me her dad used to insist on payment for his paintings and sculptures in gold, which he stored under his bed. I wonder if this is how Distell paid him for their Obikwa logo, which Picasso nicked from an unknown African artist, as I noticed at the Berggruen Collection in the Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin on Saturday.

African inspiration for Picasso's Obikwa

But I did notice a wonderful wooden merle by the great man for a redesigned label for Plaisir de Merle, the serially underperforming Simondium estate that is in urgent need of a makeover. Perhaps MTV could Pimp Distell’s Merle?

Plaisir de Picasso