What I Drank Last Night

On Thursday night a tasting courtesy of the Cape Winemakers Guild to explore changes regarding the use of wood in Bordeaux as a result of the influence of über-critic Robert Parker. The take-out from a presentation by Andrei Prida, research and development manager of cooperage Sequin Moreau was that while Parker’s impact can’t be under-estimated, [...]

Google Neil Ellis CIWG Shiraz 1996 and seemingly the only reference online to it is as an item available from The Sheikh’s Palace, the Lebanese restaurant in Rivonia, Gauteng. In addition to Hubbly Bubbly and belly dancers, the restaurant features a top selection of wines, it having won a platinum award at the 2010 Diners [...]

Auctions are theoretically the best way of establishing the true market value of whatever is up for sale so what to make of turnover at the 26th annual Cape Winemakers Guild Auction completed on Saturday  coming in at R3 867 200, down 25% on 2009, which saw the highest ever sales in the auction’s history [...]

The Cape Winemakers Guild recently announced the results of blind tastings of some of this year’s auction wines by James Molesworth of Wine Spectator and Steve Tanzer of International Wine Cellar. Molesworth gave 27 of 32 wines tasted (out of a total of 39) 90 points or more on the 100-point scale, whilst Tanzer gave [...]

The Cape Wineamkers Guild deserves kudos for letting the wines selected for this year’s auction be subjected to assessment via blind tasting (see here), but what of the wines that didn’t make the cut? Andries Burger, winemaker at Paul Cluver Estate in Elgin, was made a member of the Guild this year and submitted two [...]

When wine commentators Michael Fridjhon, Tim James, Neil Pendock, Chrisitine Rudman and I convened to taste the line-up of 2010 Cape Winemakers Guild Auction wines, it was agreed to score according to the 100-point system and individual scores were captured. For interest, the arithmetic average scores of the wines involved appear below : 91.8 Tullie [...]

An assessment of the wines to be sold at this year’s Cape Winemakers Guild auction was recently completed, the first time ever that local commentators have had the opportunity to do this in a blind tasting. WINE magazine coordinated the exercise and those participating included Michael Fridjhon of Business Day, Tim James of The Mail & [...]

An assessment of the  wines to be sold at this year’s Cape Winemakers Guild auction was completed yesterday, the first time ever that local commentators have had the opportunity to do this in a blind tasting. WINE magazine coordinated the exercise and those participating included Michael Fridjhon of Business Day, Tim James of The Mail [...]

Friday saw 11 older Cape Winemakers Guild Auction Wines presented at Jordan Winery Restaurant in Stellenbosch. It was to be an investigation of the age-worthiness of South African wine, a topic that attracts its fair share of controversy. I am inclined to think that when it comes to modern South African reds in particular, these [...]