Wine Speccie Speaks: 29, 63, 82

SA exports to the land of the free and the home of the brave may be down 2/3 in the year to end October after WOSA targeted the USA for a big marketing push, opening a New York office in 2012, but the Wine Spectator still rates 3 SA wines in their annual Top 100.

Top of the SA pops is that Hemel en Aarde hero Anthony Hamilton Russell whose 2012 Pinot storms in at #29. In second place is Bayten Sauvignon Blanc 2013 at #63 and bringing up the rear Charles Banks and his Mulderbosch Faithful Hound 2011 at #82. None of the wines was a Platter five star stunna this year and heck, the First National Blanc panel of the Sauvignon Bank Interest Group couldn’t even find a single Constantia wine for their controversial Top Ten while the only SA Sauvvie the Speccie found was from Constantia. Bacchus sure has a sense of humour as you couldn’t invent this material.

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SA exports to the USA are down from 32.5 million litres to 11.7 million and the US is the worst performing export destination after Italy (down from 21m to 0.3) and Spain which dropped from 16 million to 16 thousand litres. A dizzy three orders of magnitude fall. Did WOSA perhaps open an office in Madrid? Meanwhile WOSA’s New York marketing maven Annette Badenhorst is so busy, she has had to hire Jim Clarke to assist. Presumably to answer all the queries from SA producers who see their North American export orders evaporate.

It’s coming up for the anniversary for the death of the most famous South African and with a black president in the White House, the omens have never been so favourable for an SA export push nor the wines so reasonable for US consumers. So what went wrong?