The last hour of yesterday’s ODI against England at Newlands was what SA does best. Glorious weather, good natured rivalry with the Barmy Army and AB de Villiers and David Wiese blasting the lights out of the visiting tourists. I’m pretty sure the majority of the 20,000 fans packed into the PPC stadium were foreign in spite of the best efforts of the government to sabotage tourism through draconian visa requirements and unabridged birth certificates for anyone younger than Dear Angela.

How times of changed from the Benson & Hedges series of my youth. Today its all Momentum Life and Investec on the hoardings in the PPC stadium. A cement company sponsoring cricket – only in SA. There were also ads for Odd Bins and the Bain’s Whisky that I sell by the case load to Indian visitors at my Pendock Wine Gallery at the Taj Hotel. “Best grain whisky in the world” is such an unbeatable USP – Protean, almost. No sign of wine, of course. Perhaps WOSA sponsors juksei.

I caught up with jolly Paul de Wet of Zandvliet fame and we laughed at how he exposed some of the biggest tasters today as charlatans when he was doing some postgrad work some years ago. Presenting 10 wines in different orders over two consecutive weekends, the big noises all had scores that differed by 20% on the same wines. The best tasters were Allan Mullins from Woolworths and Juliet Cullinan of eponymous wine show fame. Wine is a wonderfully forgiving pursuit where you can make a fool of yourself in public, as many identities do, and then everyone forgets about it. Or at least doesn’t mention it again.

The wine in suite 4 was pretty dire – Ernie Els Sauvignon Blanc that was tropical soupy and made me realize why its called Els – shorthand for try something else. The red was perhaps better but it was too warm to indulge. Funny choice that – wine from a golfer at a cricket match. Would be much better off with Nederburg Two Centuries which is my SB of the month. Come to think of it, if David wasn’t such an ace batsman, two centuries might have been the score for AB.

But then Alex Hales managed a century for the English so the match was a Two Centuries tourney indeed.