Heaven on earth...

Well, it's been a long time since I attended a wine tasting so how nice that the first was the Pembroke Wine's showing of Hamilton Russell wines from Hemel-en-Aarde in South Africa (pictured above on the 2004 IMW trip). With both Anthony and Olive in attendance, this promised to be an excellent way to get back into the tasting game.

A good response

Today VinPro, the South African grapegrower association, released a response to the recent Human Rights Watch report on condition on South African fruit farms. I think it's a pretty good response, pointing out some anomalies in the HRW report but also promising to come down heavily on any farm which is identified as behaving improperly.

The other side of the coin?

Human Rights Watch has just published a report, Ripe with Abuse, on conditions pertaining on South African fruit farms. It's well worth reading as it outlines many of the serious issues affecting workers' conditions in South Africa. There are some aspects I would quibble with (I've never seen toilets or hand washing facilities in any vineyard, European or otherwise; South African wine farmers use very few pesticides although I don't know about the table fruit industry) but it is a pretty unsettling document.

Love of the sea

I am currently in South africa judging at the Michelangelo CCL international Wine Awards and decided to take the chance to visit Chris Williams, the current head wine maker at Meerlust. With me was one of my fellow judges, Guiseppe Rizzardi of the Guerrieri Rizzardi Estate in Verona. Meerlust means love of the sea, hence the title!

Black and white views

I am frequently told that I can be too dogmatic about things, that I see things in “black and white”. Well, here’s a tale that is black and white. On a recent visit to a wine farm near Stellenbosch we were told by the owner that his parents had been attacked on the farm. His father was in bed, his mother sleeping in front of the television when she was woken by the dogs barking. She opened the door to see what was the matter, and a number of men rushed in. They demanded to know where her husband was and, on being told, dragged him downstairs and then told him that if he did not co-operate they would kill his wife. They made off with some money and jewellery but not much more as an alarm had been triggered.

South African semillon

A while back, the very good people at Wines of South Africa (and they are good, fwiw) tweeted "Finally opinions about Pinotage are changing in a right direction" to which I replied "Ahhh, so SA winemakers finally agree it's not very good? LOL" - this is the problem with Twitter, with 140 characters a short snip can be read both ways. Having said that, while my tweet was somewhat tongue in cheek, there's no doubt that pinotage ain't all it's cracked up to be which is why I'm going to write about semillon instead! South African semillon, that is.