What I Drank Last Night

With the second annual Swartland Revolution set to take place on 11.11.11 plus the following day, expect saturation social media coverage of the wines from Adi Badenhorst, Andrea and Chris Mullineux and Eben Sadie as well as host of other indie winemakers during that period. It is, for instance, remarkable that Grape.co.za editor Tim James [...]

Earlier today the Cape Winemakers Guild facilitated a blind tasting of the wines to be sold at this year’s auction by a group of local wine journalist, the venue being Nitida Cellars in Durbanville. Those participating included Tim James of The Mail & Guardian and Grape.co.za, Angela Lloyd of Grape.co.za, Cathy Marston of Food24.com, Neil Pendock [...]

If you believe in indy rock ‘n roll, then last year’s Wine magazine Cap Classique Challenge results must have really sucked: best Non-Vintage to evil empire Distell (Pongrácz), best Rosé to evil empire Distell (Pongrácz), best Vintage to wanna-be evil empire The Comapny of Wine People (Kumkani Infiniti Brut 2004). That the title of best [...]

Who says Old Media is dead? Whisky is South Africa’s latest niche title magazine, to be edited by Fiona McDonald, who used to head up Wine magazine. She will be supported by celebrity chef Mike Bassett as food editor, the experienced Stuart Johnston as motoring editor and contributors will include the likes of Graham Howe, [...]

Pictured alongside are Conrad and Suzan Vlok of Elim property Strandveld, who have  two wines in Wine magazine’s 2010 Sauvignon Blanc, namely First Sighting 2009 (from multiple vineyards and including 9% Semillon) and Strandveld 2010 (single vineyard). Neil Pendock got it nearly right when he wrote in his blog prior to the announcement of the [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Last night’s guilty pleasure: Butler’s home-delivery pizza with a glass of dry red while watching ‘Dancing with the Stars’ on the telly. Earlier in the day I’d read Neil Pendock’s column in the Travel & Food section of the Sunday Times entitled “A who-cares contest”, his take on the recent Global Trader Shiraz Challenge convened [...]

The 36th Nederburg Auction takes place on 3 and 4 September and organisers Distell are apparently confident that they can reverse the negative trends that the event has shown in recent years: despite a decline in total auction sales every year since 2005, there will be more wine on offer in 2010 than there has [...]

With the prospect of a long, lazy Saturday lunch holding more appeal than watching the Springboks inevitably dispense with Italy, I decided to open the 2002 vintage of Christine, the Bordeaux-style red blend from Constantia property Buitenverwachting. This is generally a wine that I would place among the top examples in the category, age worthy [...]