2oceans Vibe

This is the first in what I hope to be a fairly regular column that offers you a guide to a day or two out in the wine lands. I, your strong livered, hard-of-constitution wine reporter will plan a weekend trip for you; giving all the directions, the best places to eat and sleep, and, of course, the best wine farms to stop at. I thought I would start with the Swartland.

Over 150 competition winners representing 22 countries arrived in Cape Town over the weekend to experience the Heineken Star Final. The Star Final is a competition held annually, where winners are flown off to watch the Champions League Final in an awesome city. Previous cities have included Hong Kong and Rio de Janeiro. Cape Town – even with some sketchy weather – showed why it deserved to be included, for a second time, nogal. Winners were overheard murmuring in awed tones, “Magnifico!”, “What a vibe!”, and “Take me to an estate agent!”

Heineken italicized, underlined, and slapped on a couple exclamation marks on to an already incredibe experience. Winners permanently had a cold Heineken in hand and were shown the city in style. Up the mountain, a helicopter flip around the peninsula, and hey, why the hell not, a game of soccer on the field of Cape Town Stadium – only the best Fifa regulation pitches for the Star Final winners.

City Hall was the venue for the viewing of the final between Chelsea and Bayern Munich. Its auditorium converted into a swinging, Heineken bachelor pad, with burgers and pizza on demand, an orchestra playing the Champions League theme tune, and walls of cold beer.

Watching from the comfort of leather sofas, the winners supped and drank merrily as Drogba – to the delight of the African contingent – score the late equaliser and then the winning penalty. The party continued with 250 extra local guests until the early hours.

Sunday morning saw the winners slowly making their way to the airport. Smiling through their hangovers the various winners high-fived, recalling how they had slotted their penalty shot at Cape Town Stadium into the net so similarly to Drogba.

This is going to be one of those columns that is more useful if you get involved. That’s why I’m telling you now, right at the start, that it would be fantastic, absolutely bloody marvelous in fact, as wonderful as a ham sandwich and a cup of tea on a bright spring day, if you add your two cents once you have finished reading. I’ll try to keep it short, so you have more time to type your comments. This column is about tasting notes.

Making predictions is a fools game, but I feel as though I can see a corner in the distance. It’s a corner that local wine producers are turning, or at least preparing to turn. The big, overworked and oaked wines are on their way out. We present a few wines that demonstrate this turning point, and most importantly, you can afford them.

I recently attended a vertical tasting of Bouchard Finlayson Pinot Noirs, with a couple international examples thrown in. It got me thinking about Pinot Noir, and then about language, and then whether it is just better to get drunk. I decided it actually is better to think, so here are my thoughts.

Do you ever get frustrated tasting the same wines over and over again? Even if the labels are different, what’s inside never really changes all that much. I can understand this frustration, it happens to me every now and again. Wine is about difference, it’s about different areas, different varieties, different winemakers; at its core wine is about exploration. Wait, that’s not true, at its core wine is fermented grape juice, but you know what I mean. So to aid you in refreshing your palate, this will be the first of two posts listing young winemaker/winemaking teams making exciting personality filled wines from around the country.

Wine is drunk a lot. But what else can we do with the contents of Bachus’s juice bottle? Does wine have to be confined to the glass and stew? Does wine have a life outside sipping and slurping? Surely this most miraculous of beverages has other uses. It does friends, it does. And these uses have got me out of a few scrapes in my lifetime let me tell you about a few.

For the last column or two I have been rather negative, telling you not to drink this, and what not to do. It weighs on a man’s soul to be so negative so often. Today I am going to tell you about a few things that are awesome in the world of wine, things that I am happy to recommend – ideas and wines that will hopefully make your week.

It’s getting to that time when people are saying, “enough with the coffee pinotage already.” I don’t mean they are tired of drinking the stuff, rather that they are fed-up with my rants and raves on the subject. “We get it,” I hear them crying, “you don’t like the stuff. Move on.” I have tried, dear readers, I have tried so hard to seal my lips on the subject. I have tried to make the blasphemy a blasphemy itself. I have kept mum. I have kept it inside. That is, until I came across this: Coffee Pinotage, with bubbles.

Cape Town is one beautiful-ass city. The mountain, the beaches, the women, the wines, the song. Come on. But living in the city can, without you even knowing, start to ever so slowly drag you down. The constant noise, the sirens, the lack of stars, the complete lack of silence. So as your attorney, I advise you to head out to the country for a few nights. All right, I’m not Benicio Del Toro, but it’s the best advice you’ll get this year. Not only that, I am going to tell you how to take that advice, go all in, and take the pot, because there is one place you need to go for your bush getaway, and that’s Kagga-Kamma.

Wine tastings. To state the bleeding amputated and mangled obvious, wine tastings are generally the best places to learn about wine if you don’t have an overflowing bank account, or an incredibly well stocked cellar. I can’t recommend going to tastings strongly enough if you are keen to broaden your vinous horizons. That being said, I thought I would give you a little guide of what not to do when you are there. For the most part, the parameters extend to everyday life, and can be summed up neatly as “don’t be a douche”.

The rough and ready salt-of-the earth winemakers of South Africa have been known to, at times, give me kak for being a soft handed, soutie poofta who spends all his time drinking, and none of it working. And despite the fact that they are not entirely incorrect with this assessment, I readily took Adi Badenhorst (possibly the saltiest and earthiest of the lot) up on an offer to stay on his farm for a few days during the harvest, and help out.

When I first moved to Cape Town and thought about Constantia, my mind was filled with images of botoxed ladies who lunch, old money and a nest of well to-dos in a leafy green valley. I was aware of the historic importance of the valley, but details were scant. Today botoxed ladies who lunch still wonder about in my imagined view of the valley, but they are all sipping on excellent Sauvignon Blancs. Don’t miss the competition at the end of this column!

A reader sent in this clipping a week ago, and with a glint in his eye questioned whether wine “experts” are as useful as snake-oil salesmen. The man has a point. When people start advising on matters that largely concern taste, you need to be extra careful for bullshitters. Not as careful as for a bullshitting anesthesiologist I’ll admit – a blagging doctor can kill you. But be careful, because there will be more half-arsed winos than there will be doctors.

The next time you are sitting at your favourite after work spot – sipping on something as the day ends while stress and worry take a backseat for the evening – let your gaze wonder to the other customers and observe how they sip their wines. As I am a frequent visitor to a number of bars/restaurants/pubs/wine-bars/shebeens/picnics/holes-in-the-walls/sidewalks/gutters/parks/etc I have observed how people drink my favourite tipple. And when stress and worry get out from the backseat entirely, kicked out by the third bottle, I find myself thinking about stereotypical wine drinkers based on how the wine gets from glass to belly. I present you with a few of my favourites and most observed.

Wine competitions. Born from the union of Satan and Lady Luck, I loathe them. And there a lot of them too. Just in SA there’s the Old Mutual Wine Awards, Michelangelo, Veritas, Top 100 wines, Young Wine Show, Classic Wine Awards, Diner’s Club Winemaker of the year, the various Top 10s, Nedbank Green Wine Awards, Terroir Awards, and more. There are also, of course, the plethora of international competitions. What are these providing other than extra weight to the competition owners’ wallets? Sod all if you ask me.

It is summer, and here in the Cape the long evenings nudge one in the direction of that most South African past time: the braai. Growing up, however, it was always beer around the braai and wine (white, nondescript, loaded with ice) in the kitchen. There was, of course, the exception in my French uncle for whom a glass of red wine is never far away. But beer was the norm. Beer dominates the braai. Is it some form of magnetic alliteration? Is beer that much better designed for smoke and charred meat? Do we still hold some outmoded idea that wine is for girls and beer is for boys? Or, possibly, is there some emasculation going on when a can is taken from the chief steak flipper and an elegant riedel glass subbed in?

This week I’ll be pairing some wines to three albums that have been occupying my earballs lately. It’s a tad facile. But then it has been shown that music can affect the way we taste wine. Drink, listen, be told a story.

Durban, the sweaty sticky place of my birth. Salty, thick air, slops, shorts, bananas and spice. If Capetonians are laid-back, it is because they’re stoned. In Durban people are simply mellow. It’s built in, climatic. It takes longer to walk through the weighty, humid air. As I was buffeted by this wall of jungle breath, and a filmy layer of sweat – that would remain with me for the next 10 days – formed, I wondered what wines would suit such a climate. And, more importantly, where could I get them?