Seeing is believing
Seeing is believing
How much do you need to know about an author before he can be trusted?
Boeing orders are down 70% year-on-year, so it's amazing that BA-Comair flies not one, but two in-flight magazines around the country: locally produced Horizons and High Life, which sounds like one of those marijuana magazines you pick up in the bruine kroegen of A'dam. Thank heavens for Horizons, for as dead-tree wine columns disappear faster than friends of Thabo in an ANC caucus meeting, any window on wine for tourists trapped for a couple of hours in an aluminum tube, is a window to be kept clean.
Alas, the national flag carrier seems to have embraced undeclared advertorial which sees Sawubona focused exclusively on Robertson and Stellenbosch producers with deep pockets and predatory PR agencies. Either that, or SAA wine hacks have taken a lazy pill that transforms wine reportage into choosing a press release from the extravagant bouquet available and then hassling the farm for canned photos. Rather than tracking down a brilliant Pinot Noir for R28 (take a bow, Two Oceans) or an idiosyncratic producer on the wrong side of the mountain (ditto, Windfall).
The First Word column on the third page of Horizons gives a potted biography of contributors and the June edition kicked off with the splendidly named Tudor Caradoc-Davies. With such a name, a career as travel writer is inevitable. After all, the best one in the recent business was Robert Tewdwr Moss who wrote the incomparable Cleopatra's Wedding Present: travels through Syria (Duckworth, 2001). Check it out on Google Books for an unbelievably poignant story involving stolen laptops, antique shirts, terrorist sex and murder - and then read the travelogue.
I liked the title so much, when Eikendal's Henry Kotzé asked me to baptise his barrel fermented Sémillon in 2007, I called it Cleopatra's Wedding Present. The name would have been more appropriate for an MCC as that great African queen invented Champagne, as research for a book on MCC has turned up. Back with Tudor C-D, he moved to Dar es Salaam and wrote - among other things - Tanzania's first restaurant reviews under the pseudonym Shadrack Malimbo for the local English-language newspaper, The Citizen." Louis Luyt and Eschel Rhoodie sure got around.
Of course writing under a pseudonym is no new thing - I suspect most SA travel writing and restaurant reviews are penned by Graham Howe - but to assume an obvious black identity when you're not, is clearly not cricket. The weekly wine page of the Sunday Times features a Reader's Recommendation and an e-mail from a black-sounding person was recently received, noting "the list has marginalised a lot of black people. Does it mean that we don't drink wine at all? I have not seen a single black person who has won for recommending." Winner Bathobaile Ntsoeng aside, how can you determine the ethnicity of a person from their name? How black does OJ Simpson sound, or O Winfrey? Heck, Steve McQueen, the artist representing Britain at the Venice Biennial this year looks like Forrest Whittaker.
"The black sheep of contemporary SA art" Wayne Barker (pace Sunday Independent) famously had work accepted for the Standard Bank National Drawing Competition when he called himself Andrew Moletsi while his own was rejected. An identity swapping exercise reprised a few years later by Beezy Bailey trading as Joyce Ntobi. Has the sighted wine assessment lobby scored a goal when such things as ethnicity (of winemaker, shareholder, Sunday Times reader) are exclusively visual?
Pendock's Plonk: Two Oceans Pinot Noir 2008 (approximate retail price R28) - vivid, red strawberries with crushed black pepper and sour cherries.
