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 [...]

Tim James has been up to his usual wine competition bashing efforts over on Grape.co.za (see here, here and here), his issue not only that any one competition will produce a set of results that are “mix of valid and rubbish” but also that there is “extraordinary disparity” between the results of different competitions. I’m [...]

In the March issue of Vanity Fair, actor Michael Douglas, famous for his role as Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, answers the Proust Questionnaire. In response to the question “What do you consider the most over-rated virtue?”, he replies “Wine tasting”. Robert Mugabe is the “living person he most despises” so we don’t completely disagree [...]

A funny day. Before the onset of the annual Sauvignon Blanc Interest Group seminar, fellow local wine writer Angela Lloyd asked me in front of visiting high-profile UK critic Jamie Goode if I read high-brow journal The World of Fine Wine. I had to confess I didn’t and somehow felt inadequate. The publication is hugely [...]

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 [...]

We all know Spain won the World Cup this time around, and Italy won it in Germany four years ago. But who were the runners up? Holland will be remembered as 2010 losers and I can just about recall that Germany and Uruguay were in the play-off for third place this year but I have [...]

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 [...]

Wine writer Neil Pendock has once again posed some provocative questions concerning the state of the South African wine criticism  in two of his recent columns (see “Are SA wines really getting better?” and “Is wine appreciation generationally dependent?”). Pendock seems to be advancing a postmodernist perspective by rejecting the notion of progress (specifically he [...]