Wine

Wine has been made in South Africa since the first harvest in 1659, after Jan van Riebeeck started a trade post in what is today known as Cape Town. He must have planted his vines almost when he got here in 1652. Good for him and his insight. Today South Africa has a good wine industry, with top class wines being exported all over the world. We do have a local grape variety, called Pinotage, which was developed here by Professor Perold in 1925 by crossing Hermitage and Pinot Noir. It takes a special person to make a good red wine from Pinotage.

Why this lesson in history? Maybe because we have several hundred wine farms and other producers of wine in South Africa today and I feel that also in this area of expertise South Africa had achieved acclaim. As the shortages of electricity, lack of government skills and management issues start to take their toll, I wonder if the wine industry will also suffer the fate of other areas in South Africa that had gone pear shaped recently. We used to produce the finest doctors (Chris Barnard springs to mind), scientists and even the classiest of social reformers, but because of crime and lack of education (to name a few factors), we are slipping fast down the ranks of the nations to the bottomless pit where other African nations wallow in their self-pity and destructive behavioural patterns.

More reason to stock up on wine while it is still good and cheap, it seems. There was a time when I thought we would be making some of the best Sauvignon Blanc known to man, but today, sipping away at a Cloudy Bay from New Zealand, and reading about the political interference and affirmative action idiocy that seems to threaten our industry, it became clear to me that we might also be on the verge of missing this milestone. So join me if you may and let us drink to what we have and what might be gone tomorrow, for there are few leaders left in the world, and we seem set on choosing the worst of them to rule in Africa. (By the way, the photo up top is of a great Australian red, as it was being quaffed by me on a long, reflective afternoon in Melbourne.)