Parow & Peroni
Parow & Peroni
The state of the nation through a brandy balloon.
Jack Parow's Cooler as Ekke should be prescribed dancing for Wine & Spirits Marketing 101 (as taught at UCT, Stellenbosch or any other Business School jumping onto the lucrative drinks education bandwagon).
For the future of wine will be decided in the marketing moshpit, where the auguries are as cloudy as a bottle of Tim George's double-distilled unfiltered Elgin Distillery Calvados selling at R650 a tot in the One&Only.
Domestic wines sales were down 6% in 2009 but it is brandy which is taking strain: down 9% - nearly as bad as the collapse of perfume in the USA where sales were down 10% last year.
To a catchy calypso beat, Afrikaans rofrap sensation Parow lists the many things that make his interlocutor think he's cool, including the riff: "I drink Klipdrif (sic), you drink Peroni/you have Swedish friends, I have friends in Benoni." This is Noël Coward from the Cape Flats.
Mail & Guardian booze blogger Sarah Britten calls Peroni Nastro Azzurro "the slick poser beer, suitable for consumption while seated at Parkhurst pavement cafés". So maybe Parow has a point.
Certainly when the Brandy Foundation approached Top Billing to film their Good Life Brandy Festival last year, producers demanded an upfront payment of R500 000.
Yet for backstage access to The Killers later in the year, it would be Top Billing getting the bill. Interestingly enough, The Killers have recently grown beards and mustaches as "part of a calculated shift towards being deep" (according to The Guardian) - a strategy embraced by SA wine writers (both men and women) for years.
If Parow is persuasive, perhaps the ritzy Sandton Towers ballroom is not the coolest venue for a brandy bash. Certainly the Teatro at Montecasino will unlikely be a concert venue for those other platteland zef-rappers, Die Antwoord, even if "the imposing glass fatade [sic] of the Teatro gives theatre-goers a perfect vantage point from which to soak up the ambience of the Piazza and enjoy the spectacular displays of the musical fountain" as the website boasts. An "imposing glass fatade" probably has little appeal to Ninja whose "next level beats" attracted over one million U-Tube downloaders mystified by the language of the rap (consensus: "South African"). A brandy festival at the KKNK or Oppikoppi will likely have more traction, especially now that the latter has teamed up with the Arezzo Wave Festival in Italy, embracing both Parow and Peroni.
Imported products have always been cool. Earlier this year, the The Saturday Star reported that the ANC is replacing Johnnie Walker Blue Label as (Luthuli) house whisky with Chivas Regal. A marketing scoop that soon turned to disaster when it emerged that president Jacob Zuma was father of yet another love child with the daughter of a friend 30 years his junior.
That Zuma is the only member of the ANC who does not drink (as he likes to joke) cut no mustard, as the Chivas deal was part of a global "Age of Chivalry" promotion.
The real reason for the switch is an ongoing purge of Mbeki influences in the ruling party. Thabo himself was famously a bottle-of-blue-a-day man (parliament voted him a case for his birthday) and when Johnnie Walker King George V was launched in Cape Town, the venue was De Tuynhuys, the president's official residence in the Mother City.
That Joseph Barry Cape Pot Still Brandy was voted best brandy in the world at the International Wine & Spirit Competition in London late last year was clearly no recommendation. It seems economy, loyalty, decorum and quality are not part of the silver service onboard the political gravy train.
