Andy Hadfield, of Real Time Wine fame and Brett Garner of Winelands lifestyle freezine The Month, have a lot in common. They’re both preppie thirty-somethings with a compellingly simple idea [CSI] and they’re both married to GPs. Andy’s CSI was to let ordinary wine drinkers submit reviews in plain English to a trio of social media platforms: a blog, Facebook and Twitter, dethroning the groaning superstructure of self-appointed pundits with hideous gnashers and calloused feet who control the current crop of wine guides. Lord Beaverbrooks of the Bottle, if you like.
Brett Garner and Elunda Basson
Brett’s CSI was to take the winelands good news message out to the suburbs of Cape Town and Durbanville in the shape of a 20 000 print run knock and drop freezine, a more humble, but also more readable realization of Monika Elias’s brave Wine Tourism News monthly newspaper, which crashed and burned a couple of years ago.
Brett’s St. Paul moment came under a spreading oak tree at the Col’cacchio pizzeria in Franschhoek back in October 2008 with the billboards for the Paarl Post reporting the latest decapitation on the main road into town. The Pauline message is now carried by a freezine with rose-tinted glasses called The Month, which has been profitable from day one. Ads cost R932 for 1/16th of a page and with a 40% advertizing complement, everyone can promote themselves (a vital to have in fashionable Franschhoek) on a budget. When circulation jumped from 12 500 copies to 20 000, rates remained unchanged.
The Month is a slower version of The Week, a UK news aggregation magazine, and it wafts Good News Lite on scented gossamer wings through the Winelands and out to the commuter suburbs of Cape Town, where the paying punters live. Don’t look for in-depth reportage of how Marcel Golding outwitted Jannie Mouton to lift KWV out of a farmer’s broeksak (pocket) but with Ginko now available at L’Ermitage, who really gives a damn?
One of the best features of Wine Tourism News was ordinary people reviewing ordinary wines and a scandalous gossip column that read like it was written by Greg Landman, for a while leading black wine-writer in SA. A feature Real Time Wine can easily supply to The Month. The wine reviews, that is. Greg is irreplaceable.
As to the future, Brett is moving into publishing, with cookbooks “after the Bible, the best sellers in SA” high on his publisher’s list. While the Bible is an undisputed best seller, the message changes little each year, unlike wine guides, so could a profitable publishing partnership between Brett and Andy, to be called The Year, be on the cards? SA wine lovers and advertisers will be hoping so.
