Marketing 101

"Why is SA wine not better known in the UK?” was the opening and closing question of Chris Patten, chancellor of the University of Oxford and the last British governor of Hong Kong, after 10 hours spent sipping on the Simonsberg in February. Confirming that the R38 million that SA exporters spend every year on braai books and blommetjies (remember the London subway campaign that had commuters thinking SA wine was made from strelitzias and proteas?) is about as accurate as those five American JDAM smart bombs that nailed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade when Chris was EU commissioner for external affairs (sort of EU foreign minister, if you like).

That marketing of SA wine in the UK is in crisis is confirmed by the decision of exporters’ mouthpiece WOSA to boycott VinExpo this year. The largest wine show in the world, held every two years, VinExpo is a showcase for European writers, buyers and restaurateurs included among the 50 000 visitors expected to descend on Bordeaux for the 30th-anniversary show in June.

Invited to participate alongside 14 South African (out of 2 400) producers paying their own passage, WOSA spurned the invitation saying it lacked resources to participate. WOSA was asked to cough up between R20 000 and R25 000, a drop in the ocean compared to last year’s expenditure mailing 300 copies of a controversial braai book to readers of the Daily Telegraph, with postage and packaging alone costing more than the Bordeaux budget.

But, while WOSA battles bravely to promote Bonnievale in Bermondsey, I can’t help but think that SA marketers are missing a trick.

A generation ago, British food resembled a Fawlty Towers TV skit, with hot and cold running Spanish waiters. But today the UK boasts some of the finest eateries on earth. The rise and rise of British nosh has gone hand in hand with the advent of celebrity culture.

Keith Floyd was the first celebrity chef to replace bangers with boeuf bourguignon and chips with cilantro. Keith called it a day in 2009 after a blowout banquet of potted Morecambe Bay shrimp and a bottle of Côtes du Rhône and was buried in a coffin fashioned from organic banana leaves. But his toque has been picked up and raised to even greater culinary heights by luminaries such as Jamie Oliver, the naked chef, and Gordon Ramsay, the foulmouthed one. The bee-stung lips of Jamie and unruly quiff of Gordon are remembered long after the menu is forgotten.

It’s the same thing with wine. The Victorian muttonchops of Adi Badenhorst and exuberant cartwheel of Eben Sadie at the Swartland Revolution last year confirm that previously forgotten appellation as the most happening terroir in SA – an observation confirmed by La Colombe sommelier David Nel who looks disturbingly like Tackleberry in the Police Academy film franchise. Asked when the Swartland would replace Stellenbosch as the number-one appellation in the 12thbest restaurant in the world, his answer was, “It already has.”

Where would Pinotage be without the charisma of Beyers Truter and the most expensive wines in the SA cellar, auctioned annually on the Cape Winemakers’ Guild Auction, that are very much name – rather than terroir – driven?

The final proof that it is names, not nature, that sells high-priced wine came earlier this year with the establishment of Swartland Independent, an association of like-minded winemakers making cuvées in an authentic, natural style. Membership will cost a small producer around R10 000 a year and the argument that this should come out of the levy charged on exports is hard to gainsay. For who needs to buy organic milk when they own a herd of Holsteins?