Although my girlfriend Poppie lives 10 000 Km from Big Ben, thanks to technology and sympathetic lighting, she has never looked more like a Little Englander than she does now. She finds SA TV so bad she watches Sky News or BBC most mornings and something from the bouquet of BBC lifestyle channels on DSTV at night. Midsomer murders are always popular and her highlight for 2011 will be the royal wedding.

She says SA newspapers are so hopeless, she’s one of the six million plus daily e-readers of the Guardian and gets the Weekend Financial Times delivered on Sundays (when they can). Besides, most of the stories that appeal to her – Romanian witches upset at having to pay tax – are lifted from international organs, anyway.

The challenge for SA marketers with something to sell is to reverse this asymmetric cultural hosepipe and get information back to Blighty. Before the Age of Austerity, SA wine used to fly UK hacks down to the Cape for rounds of golf and shark cage diving encounters. Tasting the terroir, they called it. But with UK dead-tree wine reportage in the bin, that shop window has blown off its hinges. Heck, the industry’s most favoured hack misplaced his column last year and has not been replaced.

Technology makes those expensive junkets largely unnecessary as local bloggers are as close as those in Billericay and better informed. This humble blog attracted 300 000 page downloads last year with 10% of them from the UK.

One in three bottles of exported SA wine is sold in Blighty, so if I had the industry’s R38 million marketing budget, how would I spend it? Since the money is skimmed off exports, the argument that one third should be spent in the UK has merit. Many years ago, I asked retail mogul Christo Wiese how to sell wine in the UK and he said open a shop in central London, call it SA Wine and let people taste the stuff: restaurateurs, supermarket buyers and ordinary punters. This was before Shoprite/Checkers became the largest retailer in Africa.

Could you do this on £100K a month? You could certainly suck it and see.