What I Drank Last Night

The first National Bottled Wine Show in South Africa was introduced by the South African National Wine Show Association in 1990 and renamed the Veritas Awards from 1991 making it the longest running wine competition in South Africa. I participated as a judge for the first time this year and while it was generally a [...]

As featured in the last issue of Longevity: The French Paradox is the observation that the French suffer a relatively low incidence of coronary heart disease, despite having a diet relatively rich in saturated fats. When a description of this paradox was aired in the United States on the CBS network news programme 60 Minutes [...]

Publication of my ratings of the wines to be sold on the Cape Winemakers Guild auction (see here) has caused some controversy. Teddy Hall said he was initially “devastated” when his Hendrik Biebouw Auction Reserve Chenin Blanc 2010 received a score of only 85 on the 100-point scale in light of the fact that prominent [...]

As featured in the last issue of Longevity: It is easy to obsess about wine as an art form, an unconventional art form in that it has to be consumed in order to be appreciated, but an art form even so. Thus, us wine lovers will ponder the impact of factors such as climate, and [...]

As featured in the last issue of Longevity: The recommended daily allowance of alcohol is two to three units for woman and three to four units for men, a unit in the case of wine defined as 100ml (a small glass). Which isn’t very much. If we presume a couple share a bottle over a [...]

As featured in the June issue of Decanter: Though lighthouses as aids to navigation are all but redundant due to GPS, the one at Cape Agulhas will surely not fall into complete disrepair, it being the southern tip of Africa’s distinguishing landmark. Built in 1848, it is South Africa’s second oldest and is today a [...]

As featured in the May issue of Longevity: Consider, if you will, two prominent South African wines, the first being Chateau Libertas, selling for approximately R30 a bottle and  the second Waterford The Jem 2006 for R680 a bottle. As wines, they are at least similar if not interchangeable in intrinsic terms, both being red [...]

Five classic albums. Five great contemporary South African wines under R200. It could just fry your brain. Most of us have experience of wines showing differently according to context, so it’s not completely crazy to think that music would affect the perception of wine. Scientists put it down to “cognitive priming theory”, where the music [...]

Colleague Angela Lloyd wrote an article for the April issue of WineLand magazine on what makes a good wine judge. Towards this, she put a set of questions to various local and international judges. Here are my answers: 1) Why do you act as a judge? Having stumbled into wine writing, I quickly realised that [...]

As featured in the April issue of Longevity: Organic wine. It’s attractive in terms of food safety (no harmful residues or additives) while also appealing to your conscience (good for the planet). Unfortunately, organic wine is necessarily a tiny category, if not an entirely empty concept. At stake is a subtle but important distinction between [...]