With SA wine exports to the UK in freefall, something for the highly paid imbongis at WOSA to ponder is why did sales of Portuguese wine in the UK double by value in the eleven months to end November last year while volumes rose one quarter? How can Portugal get it so right and SA get it so wrong?

The Jancis Robinson website ascribes it to “the excellent ViniPortugal UK website, which gives details of more than 1,000 Portuguese wines and where they are available, as well ‘news, videos and blogs about all things Portuguese’.” The Portuguese revolution looks set to spread to SA after Business Day re-ran an FT column by Jancis on Portugese wines on Friday in place of the traditional Michael Fridjhon World of Wine communication.

I have been taken to task by more than one producer for giving too much coverage to the export problems of SA wine, a charge I vehemently reject as I write this blog for wine lovers at either end of the supply chain. The question on the lips of most wine lovers is “where are the great deals from export shipments gone wrong and the terrific imports?”

Namaqua Wines understand economics and have started importing the value for money wines of E&J Gallo, as I reported in the Sunday Times yesterday.

The launch of Barefoot Wines at the magical Sondela Nature Reserve in the Waterberg earlier this month was geographically well judged by distributor Namaqua Wines. But then Namaqua seems to be the only major liquor company which passed Matric Geography as they located their head office in Pretoria for the simple reason that Gauteng is their largest market.

The geographically challenged competition sit in splendid bucolic isolation in Stellenbosch and Paarl, but then Namaqua produce the largest selling box wine in SA and distributes Four Cousins, the largest selling bottled wine, so perhaps having a chef in the kitchen helps. Of course given the profusion of Stop & Go road works on the 300Km from Cape Town to Vredendal, site of Namaqua’s largest production facility, having an HQ on the remote West Coast was never really a flyer even if hot and cold running crayfish are available.

In the property deal of the century, KWV values its palatial La Concorde head office mansion in Paarl at R936 000 according to minority shareholder activist Chris Logan. Logan called the company’s directors “a bunch of buffoons” in the heat of the fight for control by Pioneer Foods earlier this month and given the derisory valuation of their luxurious Lubyanka, Wendy Machaniks they clearly are not.

But the importation of E&J brandy from California by Namaqua will certainly give KWV apparatchiks something to talk about on the company squash courts. For well priced below R100 and suitable for drinking neat (by the so-called “informal market” read Black) and with Coke (the so-called “formal market” i.e. White) it is squarely aimed at their KWV 5-year-old brand.

E&J has a terrific selling proposition, jettisoning the boere baggage of the old Apartheid era when the favourite tipple of the security and traffic police was brandy and coke and replacing it with California Dreaming by the Mamas & Papas, McDonalds, Hollywood movies and Barak Obama. Heck in market tests in Cape Town, the always inventive coloured community immediately dubbed it E&J = Ek en Jy, my bra.

Producers E&J Gallo Winery even had to up the alcohol content from 40% to 43% specially for the SA market, an alcoholic excess which should be retired if the industry is serious about alcohol abuse.

The competition, in the shape of Distell’s Oude Meester brandy, are encouraged to embrace the Nigerian nickname for their spirit: Dudemeister without further ado. For when it comes to drink, the customer is always right as Namaqua are finding out in Faerie Glen.

Pretoria is ground zero for sales of Barefoot Moscato, a sweet and fruity white which Pick ‘n Pay sells by the palette load. While anoraks may turn up their retroussé noses further at the sweet and simple flavours of the Barefoot offering (Zinfandel, Merlot and Moscato), SA consumers simply can’t get enough, as the 10 000 case sales since November confirms.

Something else for Boland marketing mavens to ponder as they watch exports of their too dry and tannic offerings stagnate, strumming on their riempie harps.