SA wine and 2010
Is SA wine making the most of the 2010 World Cup opportunity?
If rugby is a game for louts played by gentlemen, and soccer is the sport of gentlemen played by louts, where does that leave footy? It seems Aussie Rules Football was a Scottish missionary adaptation of an Aboriginal game that started off with two teams kicking a dead kangaroo between two rivers as a means of settling tribal disputes - a benchmark in social evolution Down Under, with sport superseding the tradition of spearing your disputant in the leg.
I learnt this fact while sucking on a bottle of Groot Constantia Gouverneurs Reserve 2005, waiting for a medium-rare sirloin with oyster mushroom sauce in the courtyard of the Jonkershuis, as a guest of the Aussie Footy League, which sponsored the opening dinner of the Mining Indaba conference at Groot Constantia. The AFL was in town to publicise FootyWild, an initiative designed to bring the robust charms of footy to township youth.
A representative of Collingwood, the famous "Catholic" (i.e. working class) club in Melbourne, related how in the depression of the last century, footy was social and sartorial salvation for generations of little Aussie battlers born on the wrong side of the tracks with sleeveless vests (along with Ugg boots, Australia's contribution to the catwalk).
Footy stars draw around R1.2-million a year in salaries, so let's hope that Footy- Wild can repeat the Melbourne miracle in Khayelitsha. The glorious vision of an AFL World Cup - Victoria, Tassie, South and West Australia and now the Western Cape - was held up like the Chas Brownlow Trophy, affectionately known as Charlie. Dinner at Groot Constantia was starting to look like a personal Groundhog Day, as exactly a week previously I'd had the same steak, mushrooms and big red at the 350th birthday party for SA wine. But it was always going to be a big ask to repeat the spectacular dessert tipple - a solera Muscadel Nagmaalwyn dating back to 1860 that was judged "definitely fortified" by assorted wine identities until someone noticed the 11.5% alcohol declaration on the label, confirming once again the superiority of sighted tastings.
Of course Constantia had a fair bit of historical chutzpah in hosting the party, as grapes for the first wine - "mostly Muscadel, and other white round grapes, very fragrant and tasty" - were grown by that most appropriately named chief gardener, Hendrik Boom, in the Company Gardens. At that stage Constantia was woeste veld (bush) and, with the Gardens too small, Commander Van Riebeeck tried his luck on Green Point Common, site of the new 2010 World Cup stadium.
This was the first connection between soccer and wine, a link resurrected by WOSA (Wines of South Africa, the exporters' association) through their Fundi project, a brave attempt to train 2 010 sommeliers in time for the kick-off by selling Fundi-branded wine.
Support for the initiative is not universal, with one commentator noting that the idea of training sommeliers "can't do any harm" as "the soccer louts [who] arrive in 2010... would prefer their beer without too much of a ‘head'." No support either from the New York Times which in January quoted food critic François Simon, "the most feared and most read figure in France's culinary world", on the subject of sommeliers: "We should drown them, to allow us to drink as we please." The AFL can rightly claim to have possession of the ball, with enthusiasm for footy careers an easier sell than sommelier school. But then, as any cardiologist worth his Lipitor will tell you, it's not so much the game that you play that counts, but rather that you get out and exercise.
Neil Pendock is wine writer for the Sunday
Times and Financial Mail.
