Private Edition 18

ISSUE 18

REVELATIONS

ECO-NOMICS

INTO THE LIGHT

PRESS GANG

AIR HEADS

SA DIVERSITY TO THE RESCUE

RARE ART COLLECTION UNDER THE HAMMER

BEHIND SA’S OLIVE-OIL WAVE

ESCAPING EARTH ON A CHUTE AND A PRAYER

IRELAND/DAVENPORT 70790/R

IT DoESN’T NEED a SINglE WoRD To Say IT all.

There are those who don’t strive to be noticed, their presence is simply felt. Similarly the new BMW 7 Series offers like-minded drivers the power and authority to say it all without saying a word.

For more information go to www.bmw.co.za/7

THE NEW BMW 7 SERIES.

The new BMW 7 Series is available in 730d, 740i, 750i, 750Li, 760Li and ActiveHybrid 7.

BMW 7 Series

www.bmw.co.za/7

Sheer Driving Pleasure

EITHER YOU SEE IT OR YOU DON’T

Oppor tunity. It’s not always obvious, but when you’re always looking for it, it becomes possible

MCSA/NEDBANK/PRIVATEED/4421/E

value oppor tunity and pursue it relentlessly. It’s how we find new and innovative solutions that

SOUTH AFRIC A | UNITED KINGDOM | UNITED ARAB EMIRATES | JERSEY | GUERNSEY | ISLE OF MAN

t o f i n d . At N e d b a n k P ri va t e We a l t h we our clients use to Ma ke Things Happen.

w w w.n e d b a n k p r i v a t e w e a l t h . c o.z a we are an authorised financial services and registered credit provider.

Embrace an incredible world The only Manufacture to be 100% Poinçon de Genève certified. The most demanding signature in fine watchmaking.

Visit us at rogerdubuis.com

Creative Center RD, Creative Director Alvaro Maggini

Sandton - (011) 784 0206 - info@bellagiojewellers.co.za - www.bellagiojewellers.co.za

PHOTOGRAPHY: CRAIG KOLESKY/NIKON/LEXAR

CONTENTS

Paragliding enthusiast Jeff Ayliffe in his favourite place at his favourite time of day [page 66]

18 ED’S LETTER What excites our editor and, hence, our readers: a look at those stories (and writers) that make the grade.

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STOCK PICK

We give you the heads-up on how to get good returns from your investment portfolio.

22 PSST

40 VAULT COUTURE

It’s a virtual wardrobe on call – a dream service that’s more than a woman (or man) could want.

44 ECO-NOMICS

48 BRAND ID

How classical conditioning

This publication doesn’t promote seasonal treats because any time is a good time to indulge one’s passions; these pages feature a few of them.

36 EVEN STEVENS

It’s about festive season pleasures

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à la Lilly Bollinger and suiting up with the right dress watch.

P R I V A T E E D I T I O N ISSUE 18

One of South Africa’s great thinkers says diversity is our trump card.

methods underpin the marketing strategies of some of the world’s biggest brands.

52 UNCOVERED

Wanted: very serious buyers.

A rare collection of paintings depicting the San is unearthed for private viewings in Cape Town only.

Cover shot by Kolesky/Nikon/Lexar. Styling: Suzannah Garland. Eric Caffyn is represented by Outlaws Model Management. Black windbreaker R1 299, red windbreaker R499 and paracord bracelet R40, all Cape Union Mart; T-shirt R549, Ben Sherman. Grooming: Cheryl Parker, represented by Supernova. Post-production: Blink

CONTENTS

56

SIPPING THE LIGHT FANTASTIC

An unforgettable performance in three acts at The Palace of Versailles celebrates three sterling Champagne vintages.

60

GENTLEMEN OF THE PRESS

Money and passion equals a return on investment and ego.

Producing extra-virgin olive oil is not for sissies.

76

AN MTN INITIATIVE

MTN hosted its Prestige clients in grand exotic style at the final match of the BMW International Polo series.

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66 GO FLY A KITE… …the kind that requires your feet

most loathed of natural elements.

We deliver more from Private Edition’s Starsky and Hutch.

to leave the ground and revel in the

TRAVELLER BUCKET LIST Once you’ve spent a night under an African sky, you’ll never be the same again. Conservation is part of the deal.

Louis Vuitton’s savoir-faire in the realm of luxury travel accessories puts panache into the practical. But behind every bag, there’s heritage; in every name, a story (page 34).

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pa n e r a i . c o m

Mediterranean Sea, 1940s. “Gamma� men in training.

The diver emerging from the water is wearing a Panerai compass on his wrist.

history a n d heroes.

radiomir - 42mm

Available exclusively at Panerai boutiques and select authorized watch specialists.

Toll Free: 0800 600 035

CONTENTS

84

THERMAL DYNAMICS

88

TONE DEFT

Flying like a bird at the mercy of the wind holds an allure that has been the stuff of dreams since early man. Gliding is as close as you’re going to get to making it a reality.

Master luthier Marc Maingard’s musical skill is so superior that reproductions of his premier guitars simply don’t cut it.

87

HIGH SOCIETY

Private Edition and Elizabeth Arden entertain in style and take in the view from the top at one of the most exceptional homes on the market in Johannesburg.

PHOTOGRAPHY: SUPPLIED

The words ‘leaps and bounds’ come to mind when taking a closer look at the iconic new Mercedes-Benz SL 65 AMG from all angles (page 32).

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IRELAND/DAVENPORT 70099

Wealth & Investment

Wealth & 1nvestment Ranked #1 by PricewaterhouseCoopers in Wealth Management Ranked #1 in the Business Day Investors Monthly Stockbroker Awards for Sophisticated Investors Our #1 rankings are testament to our select investment services for discerning clients. Backed by our seamless global investment offering, we cater for your individual investment objectives. www.investec.co.za/wi Contact us: 011 291 3747

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In the 2011 PricewaterhouseCoopers Banking Survey in Wealth Management.

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Cape Town 021 416 3000 Durban 031 575 4000 Pietermaritzburg 033 264 5800 Port Elizabeth 041 396 6700 Pretoria 012 427 8300 Sandton 011 286 4500 Investec Securities Limited Reg. No 1972/008905/06. A member of the Investec Group. A member of the JSE Limited South Africa. An authorised financial service provider. A registered credit provider Reg. No. NCRCP262.

CONTRIBUTORS

DEBBIE HATHWAY As managing editor, Debbie delights in applying her full set of journalistic and management skills across the magazine. Above all, she loves being offered the opportunity to craft a good story and her visit to Shamwari Game Reserve near Port Elizabeth was one of this year’s highlights.

Debbie’s also been invited to taste the creations of some of the country’s top chefs and winemakers, and has met visiting ambassadors of some of the world’s great brands.

It’s been a fascinating, stimulating year with the Private Edition team.

NIC MORKEL In addition to managing several titles and a dynamic sales team that gets the nuances of the international luxury market, Nic is hands-on, targetdriven and excited about building long-term relationships with clients who own their brands. He studied marketing and cut his management teeth in retail before joining The Publishing Partnership in 2008.

JUSTIN LYONS As the newest member of the team, Justin has a retail management and marketing background. He brings a decade of experience working on niche titles in the publishing industry.

Justin’s friendly disposition, passion for people and strong work ethic translates into long-standing relationships with clients. He enjoys a good practical joke and creating a bit of laughter in the office.

SAMEEGHA WOLHUTER Shy and introverted until she discovered the sales environment 10 years ago, Sam’s career has spanned the medical field, industrial psychology, retail and media sales. Adept at combining artistry and drive with an understanding of finance, marketing and the needs of the public, she’s made inroads into growing the Private Edition client base since she joined the team almost two years ago. She’s had a surname change too after getting married earlier this year.

JANICE MCLEAN After studying media and communications, Janice joined an advertising agency and, later, a community radio station.

Her move early this year to Cape Town from Port Elizabeth allowed her to realise her dream of entering the publishing industry.

Her role as advertising sales coordinator fuels her obsession with list-making, especially at work, which paves the way for meeting her production deliverables. Janice is fascinated by current affairs, so relaxes by reading the news.

PHOTOGRAPHY: JANICE MCLEAN

SUZANNAH GARLAND Her artistic flair, keen eye and inspired ability to breathe life into the carefully edited words on these pages have helped establish Private Edition as one of the most admired magazines in publishing. She’s worked on cult magazine Planet in New York, managed the creative launch of Glamour in South Africa and was style contributor on Rolling Stone South Africa. After five years as creative and fashion director at Private Edition, Suzannah’s moving into the world of retail fashion and we wish her every success.

CLAIRE JOOSTE A sales executive with foreign-language skills? A rather unusual, yet apt, combination for this specialist in global luxury. Claire topped her majors in psychology and French with an honours degree in the latter and went on to complete a diploma in translation. After nine years in the media industry, Claire uses exercise to unwind. She’s a qualified personal trainer who loves the outdoors, surfing, rock climbing and trail running.

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to the man who changed the world.

Albert Einstein Limited Edition 3000. Einstein’s influence on the world is immortalized in our history, science and culture. Montblanc celebrates his genius with this Limited Edition, featuring uniquely crafted details, such as the space-time continuum, symbolized by a grid on the cap, and his most famous formulas, engraved on the barrel and cone. 750 rhodium-plated gold nib, platinum-plated barrel and dark blue lacquer cap.

AVAILABLE AT MONTBLANC BOUTIQUES IN SANDTON, V& A WATERFRONT, GATEWAY DURBAN AND SELECTED OUTLETS. FOR MORE INFORMATION PLEASE CALL

011 317 2600 OR VISIT WWW. MONTBLANC.COM

Nelson Mandela Square, Sandton • Tel +27 11 784 0203 ww.worldsfinest.co.za World’s Finest Watches is situated on the prestigious Nelson Mandela Square to cater for the exclusive watch clientele of well-heeled locals and international tourists and is the only specialist prestige watch store in Sandton today.

Because the boutique specialises in watches, Worlds Finest Watches has become an established watch destination for enthusiasts and collectors and has earned a reputation for presenting the finest watches from the premier Swiss brands.

The World’s Finest philosophy is to focus on the most recognizable watch brands in the world and to offer a full selection within these brands. Clients can always expect to see the latest releases from premium marques like Rolex, Hublot, Breitling, Omega and Tag Heuer and to receive the professional service from the store team to match the pedigree of the watches on offer.

The look of the store is unique, aspirational and nontraditional, just like its clients. The World’s Finest Watches client base tends to be more dynamic than the average traditional jewellery and watch consumer in the market; the environment attracts successful entrepreneurs and upwardly mobile executives who want to be seen enjoying their well-deserved success. The only concession to tradition is the thorough staff training and excellent service on offer to watch enthusiasts. With a watch technician and brand specialists on-site, World’s Finest Watches has become a watch institution in the Johannesburg retail marketplace.

The World’s Finest Watches philosophy is to find out what is important to the individual watch consumer, so that they can give the correct advice and ensure that the client is happy with their purchase in the long run. The client may be a pilot or a businessperson who travels, someone with an active lifestyle or high profile social engagements; or it could be that they are a collector and that retaining value is important, or that they would prefer a watch that looks impressive around a boardroom table or sparkles in a coffee shop. Or they could be all of these - there is a World’s Finest watch for each scenario.

OPINION

Quality at any Price

Prof Brian Kantor, Investec Wealth & Investment chief economist and strategist, takes a look at the quest for the best in the share market amid slow global growth.

Words PROF BRIAN KANTOR

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more exposed to the business cycle, like the commodity price plays, have their day again?

The state of the global economy and expectations for global growth do not appear to have improved much. While the risks of a financial collapse in Europe have diminished, the prospects of faster growth in Europe, Asia or emerging economies generally have not improved. In fact, slower rather than faster global growth is being predicted. Better economic news from the US is being balanced by fears of a ‘fiscal cliff’, over which the economy may fall unless Congress and the President can agree on a mixture of expenditure reductions or tax increases before automatic cuts and increases are imposed on a fragile economy.

Neither a strong recovery in commodity prices nor any upward pressure on global interest rates is to be expected any time soon.

Accordingly, dividends yields and strong balance sheets are likely to continue to command investor attention. The time for a switch to cyclical stocks may not yet be at hand.

Other things being equal, this would also apply to commodity plays listed on the JSE. However, other things have not been equal. The rand has weakened significantly

(for SA-specific reasons). The rand is about 10 percent weaker than it might have been expected to be, were it not for the damaging recent strike action. This rand weakness for SA-specific reasons would ordinarily be expected to improve the case for JSE-listed Resource companies. They benefit from higher dollar-denominated revenues when rand costs lag behind higher rand revenues.

However, they can’t take advantage of the weaker rand because production has fallen as a result of industrial action that has so damaged confidence in SA economic policy.

Therefore the search for quality is likely to remain as influential on the JSE as on global equity markets. Strong balance sheets and dividend growth, combined with low interest rates, may well continue to dominate investor sentiment.

Prof Brian Kantor is Investec Wealth & Investment chief economist and strategist. For more details, go to investec.co.za/wi.

B R O U G H T T O Y O U B Y I N V E S T E C W E A L T H & I N V E S T M E N T www . investec . co . z a / wi

PHOTOGRAPHY: SUPPLIED

Good returns from the JSE over the last 12 months hide large differences in sector performance. Resources were a distinct underperformer. R100 invested in the Resources Index would have grown to R103 over the period, while R100 invested in the Financial Index would have been worth R135, and R138 if invested in the Industrial Index.

Picking the right sectors of the share market, much more so than picking the right stocks, would have made all the difference to the performance of equity portfolios.

These outcomes fully reflect global trends. The search in equity markets could be described as a search for quality at almost any price. Quality is demonstrated by strong balance sheets, good returns on capital invested and the ability to offer good dividend yields, especially when compared to low interest rates. It is also demonstrated by a capability for a company to increase dividend payments or to deliver cash to shareholders by way of share buy-backs.

The more important issue for investors is whether or not considerations of quality will continue to dominate the outcomes in the equity markets. Or, in other words, will stocks

A Daimler Brand

You’ve played golf at Carnoustie, dined on Beluga Caviar and have a namesake yacht.

The highly anticipated CLS Shooting Brake has arrived and demands your attention.

This fastback coupe boasts handcrafted design and an unprecedented elegance reserved only for the select few. Coupled with the technological hallmarks you’ve come to expect from a Mercedes-Benz, there’s no questioning the measure of its resolve.

Visit www.mercedes-benz.co.za/clsshootingbrake Vehicle specification may vary for the South African market.

Psst

BIRTH OF A LEGEND Giving life to the earth’s dark stars There is something powerful, mysterious, even magical about the transformation of material billions of years old into a stone that is the epitome of fire and light, scintillation and brilliance. Then, in the hands of worldclass diamond cutters, the stone takes shape and form. But even then it has not reached its full potential. The creative team at Arthur Kaplan Jewellers designs and sets these exclusive engagement rings that form part of its Designer Collection. Set in a platinum band, the top ring holds a 3.07ct cushion-cut diamond encircled by 0.36ct round, brilliant-cut diamonds (R211 249). The bottom ring, also set in platinum, has a 2.02ct Asschercut diamond in the centre, surrounded by 0.51ct round, brilliant-cut diamonds, on a split shank (R207 999). The result is dazzling. All that remains is for her to say yes. For further information, visit www.arthurkaplan.co.za.

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TEXT: DEBBIE HATHWAY. PHOTOGRAPHY: SUPPLIED

Utterly random and occasionally tactical trivia

Make your home Italian, choose Chateau d’Ax.

Spike A contemporary Italian designed suite, upholstered in a combination of fabric and leather.

CDX1012_011

From Italy to Spain, France and America, Chateau d’Ax Italia has studied, created and built quality sofas for those who appreciate beautiful items.

BRYANSTON 011 463 7993

CAPE TOWN 021 418 4708

SPRINGFIELD 031 263 0610/2

NOW OPEN: Parkview Shopping Centre, Moreleta Park, Pretoria

WOODMEAD 011 656 9661

MANUFACTURER SINCE 1948 Trading in more than 350 stores worldwide. www.chateau-dax.co.za

psst NEWS

book before you leap Swiss service for business and leisure Edelweiss Air, winner of The Golden Travel Star Award for the 11th consecutive year, is a subsidiary of Swiss International Air Lines and part of the Lufthansa Group.

It’s not only the ‘leading leisure airline’ but also now flies nonstop from Cape Town to Zurich twice a week and connects to 45 onward destinations. Edelweiss Air follows the sun, flying to popular destinations in the southern hemisphere during the European winter. These include Tampa in Florida, Maldives, Phuket, Mauritius, Kilimanjaro, Mombasa, Punta Cana, Varadero and Cancún. During the European summer it serves Vancouver, Calgary, Tampa, Maldives, Kilimanjaro, the Dominican Republic, Varadero and Cancún – the airline’s long-haul destinations. The service on the plane is Swiss-efficient and friendly, and the food is excellent. You’re on holiday the moment you board the aircraft… For more details, visit edelweissair.ch/en/.

DESIGNS FOR THE TIMES Luxury Italian design comes to Cape Town On the back of the successful Johannesburg flagship store, Chateau d’Ax has opened in Hamilton House in Green Point, Cape Town. Given the South of France, Italian Riviera feel of the Atlantic Seaboard, this range of contemporary Italian sofas and bedroom, kitchen and wall furniture will be right at home.

Clients may choose from a selection of more than 300 designs upholstered in any fabric, microfibre or leather. Thinking up the sofa of your dreams is a little like creating your own Ferrari from the chassis upwards. For further information, visit chateau-dax.co.za.

You can’t argue that Santa Maria Novella jumped onto the fragrance bandwagon because of a modern trend towards all things natural. They’ve been trading to the public for 400 years. The family-owned business dates back to the 13th century when recipes for medications, balms and ointments were in high demand. Naturally the royals got a whiff of the products and the patronage of Catherine de Medici, wife of Henry II of France, jollied things along for the brand. Now the perfumes, pomades, essences, balms, soaps, lotions, body rubs, candles and hair products – made using herbs and flowers from the Tuscan Hills – are available from its flagship store in the Cape Quarter.

Beware, the product list is a full A3 page in four columns. You’ll be incapable of resisting. There are even smelling salts, should you faint momentarily at the cost. For further information, visit smnovella.com, visit Shop 68 at Cape Town’s Cape Quarter Piazza, 72 Waterkant Street or call 021 425 8181.

Selected items will also be available at Plumbago, 50 Florida Road, Durban, and the Deon Viljoen Gallery at 14b Bird Street, Stellenbosch.

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TEXT: LES AUPIAIS AND KATHY MALHERBE. PHOTOGRAPHY: supplied

In fragrante delicio Santa Maria Novella seduces the Cape

psst NEWS

Marriage of two lines When pen and ‘sword’ share the power Montblanc writing instruments are mastery of the miniature, exquisite in detail and ‘writability’ – a word that should describe how these pens seem to give handwriting an elegant style.

For the Montblanc Masters for Meisterstuck L’Aubrac fountain pen edition, the company has turned its attention to the craftsmen of Forge de Laguiole knives originally produced in 1829 and used by cattle farmers and herders. The knife became an icon and talisman, and ultimately a fitting inspiration for a series of limited- and special-edition pens. They’re handcrafted in precious woods, with 18ct gold nibs and a diamond in the cap, depending on the collection – but every pen carries the lineage and artistry of generations of master craftsmen. For further information, visit montblanc.com.

In 1790, the French Revolution had started but Louis XVI, like much of Parisian society, was fascinated by young French naturalist François Le Vaillant’s account of his travels in Southern Africa. A large, lavishly illustrated map was commissioned. It went into a naval archive in Paris after Louis’ execution, until the city came under German fire in World War I. It was then sent to Brest until World War II, when it went to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Now, 222 years later, the map will be exhibited for the first time since Louis XVI saw it, as part of the FrenchSouth African cultural season. The Iziko South African Museum will also exhibit other rarely seen works by Le Vaillant. For more information, call 021 481 3800.

MAKE IT MELROSE On her majesty’s secret service Promising five-star service is not the same as delivering it. African Pride Melrose Arch Hotel does a standout job: free Gautrain shuttle service on weekdays, doormen who whisk away your car for parking and young women at reception who are gorgeous and friendly – at 6am, mind you. Private Edition’s editor stayed there (in a room filled with fresh flowers and treats), but left her laptop connector behind. It was rushed to reception for collection just in time for an important presentation.

When the same editor had to meet with majestic head of Opera SA, HRH Unathi Phathuxolo Mtirara, grandson of Nelson Mandela, she chose African Pride Melrose Arch Hotel. Some things are so important, you don’t take chances. For details, call 0861 50 50 50.

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FIRST AMONG EQUALS SA wines join an exclusive club A non-profit private club, The White Club was created for people with a passion for very special wine. Exclusive benefits include invitations to international wine and Champagne events where members are taken on an exploration of some of the finest wines in the world. SA missed out largely because of its reputation for ‘good value for money’ wines, but this year a series of blind tastings of 300 wines changed all that. Six made the grade and will form part of the club’s World First Growth Series. These will be introduced to wine tasters and wine lovers worldwide and will share the cellar-light with other rare and prestigious wines. To ensure that the tasting experiences are nothing less than perfect, venues have to measure up – from dining location and set-up to menu and service.

The basics? 52 bottles of superb wines, 3 400 pieces of the thinnest Zalto glassware from Austria and 60 litres of Gize water, flown in for the occasion. Acclaimed Indian chef Harpreet Longani took care of the rest at Taj Cape Town’s Bombay Brasserie event with a gastronomic feast to match. For more details, visit thewhiteclub.com.

TEXT: LES AUPIAIS AND DEBBIE HATHWAY. PHOTOGRAPHY: supplied

THE KING’S MAP A museum in Cape Town exhibits an unseen masterpiece

A distinct lifestyle deserves a distinct insurance solution The series of extraordinary Easter eggs created by Peter Carl Fabergé for the Russian Imperial family is regarded as his greatest and most enduring achievement. You may define your success differently, but it deserves the same protection as a rare Fabergé creation.

Aon Household and Motor Insurance brings you Aon Private Insurance Broking, where we realise that your material success allows you to enjoy a particular lifestyle based on the values you hold dear. Therefore you need a bespoke insurance solution that empowers you with the freedom to pursue the things that you value most. Protect your personal assets with our specialist knowledge, expert advice and incomparable service – all the requirements demanded by a discerning client.

Call us today on 0800 400 400 for a quotation or email quoterequest@aon.co.za.

Alternatively, SMS “Insure” to 31762 and we will call you back or visit www.aon.co.za for more information.

Distinct. Inspired. Bespoke.

Aon South Africa (Pty) Ltd is an Authorised Financial Services Provider (FSP #20555).

Aon is the Principal Sponsor of Manchester United.

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psst WATCHES

LIQUID ASSET Historic models are reinvented Professional divers demand particular specifications from a watch, not the least of which is maximum legibility even in poor light. The Radiomir prototype designed by Officine Panerai for the Royal Italian Navy in 1936 has been reinvented for today’s connoisseurs. Both the Radiomir California 3 Days (47mm) and Radiomir SLC 3 Days (47mm) maintain a minimalist approach for the dial, with bar- and dot-shaped hour markers on the SLC (for Siluro a Lento Corsa, the slow-speed torpedo on which the commandos rode during their brave underwater missions). The California, closest to the original, features markers and both Arabic and Roman numerals. The design of the two watches is based on the original cushion case, slender wire strap attachments and conical crown. Visit the Panerai exhibition at Elegance Jewellers, Melrose Arch, where pieces are also for sale, or call 011 684 1380.

FORESIGHT Swiss watchmaker Omega joins the fight against preventable blindness

Besides being a great fan of the brand, Real Madrid striker Cristiano Ronaldo says he has a lot in common with Genevan watchmaker Franck Muller. It’s faith in their capabilities and potential. So Franck Muller’s new masterpiece created in Ronaldo’s honour, the Perpetual Calendar Bi-Retro Chronograph CR7 limited edition, salutes world-class talent and skill. The exclusive high-horology timepiece features two complications: the perpetual calendar, symbolising the striker’s historical status, and the bi-retrograde chronograph, which scores on sporty prowess. The watch is housed in a red-gold, oversized Cintrée Curvex case with a black-and-white dial, and the number 7, Ronaldo’s trademark shirt number, is set with diamonds. Engraved on the case back are his silhouette and signature. The 27-year-old fashion-conscious star says his taste has turned from bling watches to more classic timepieces, but his selection on the day is determined by what he’s wearing and his mood. If you’re thinking of adding this beauty to your collection, you’re likely to be disappointed. The series – of only seven watches, of course – has been sold to collectors at an undisclosed price.

For more information, call Franck Muller SA on 011 372 6000.

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TEXT: DEBBIE HATHWAY. PHOTOGRAPHY: supplied

THE STRIKE OF MIDNIGHT On and off the field, Cristiano Ronaldo takes time seriously

When it comes to breaking boundaries, Swiss watchmaking brand Omega is streaks ahead. From having the first watch (the Speedmaster) worn on the moon to being official Olympic timekeeper 25 times, Omega’s pioneering spirit stands firmly behind the Orbis Flying Eye Hospital. The innovative mobile ophthalmic training hospital on board a DC-10 airplane is vital to the organisation’s quest to eliminate avoidable blindness in developing countries. Orbis states that sub-Saharan Africa has the highest prevalence of childhood blindness in the world. South Africa is one of 90 countries that have benefited from Orbis’s training of more than a quarter of a million medical professionals and the provision of tools and technology to treat around 12 million people. Omega created the Hour Vision Blue (worn by Daniel Craig below) to celebrate its partnership with Orbis and pledged to donate at least one million US dollars from its sale to the cause. Its signature Co-axial calibre 8500 is set in a classic 41mm stainless-steel case, topped with a sun-brushed blue dial and 18ct white-gold faceted hour, minute and seconds hands.

For further details, visit omegawatches.com.

Isn’t it time you rewarded yourself with a Platinum life?

Good things come to me wherever I go.

It’s little things like redeeming Membership RewardsTM points for travel, being offered hotel upgrades, having a dedicated team of service experts to make restaurants reservations and arrange airline tickets, enjoying warm welcomes in airline lounges and turning ordinary purchases into extraordinary rewards.

My life is full of my favourite things my Card is The Platinum Card®.

• 1543 | PE–Nov | #3

To apply for the Card call 0800 004 244 or visit www.americanexpress.co.za/platinum.

American Express® is a registered trademark of American Express. American Express Cards is operated under licence in South Africa by Nedbank Limited Reg No 1951/000009/06, VAT Reg No 4320116074, 135 Rivonia Road, Sandown, Sandton, 2196, South Africa. Nedbank subscribes to the Code of Banking Practice of The Banking Association South Africa and, for unresolved disputes, supports resolution through the Ombudsman for Banking Services. Nedbank is an authorised financial services provider. Nedbank is a registered credit provider in terms of the National Credit Act (NCR Reg No NCRCP16).

psst watches

SECOND SKIN Prized by icons of stage and screen and watch collectors worldwide, the Tank’s classic appeal endures The challenge encountered by early 20th-century aviators, who couldn’t quite get the hang of telling time in flight with the pocket watches of the time, gave rise to the masculine take on the wristwatch. And it was Louis Cartier’s subsequent design of the classic Tank watch, with its apparently square and rectangular face and the seamless integration of lugs and case with the strap, that set an enduring trend in watchmaking.

Coveted and desired by men and women alike, the Tank is said to be modelled on the aerial view of the heavy-artillery machine – the treads are reflected on the brancards and the case represents the cockpit.

The 2012 launch of the Tank Anglaise completes the Cartier collection that includes the Tank Américaine and Tank Française. The Anglaise retains Cartier’s design ethic while pushing the bounds for aesthetic, streamlined design. Its characteristic Tank features are enhanced with a side profile that shows the winding crown set flush to mimic a tank’s wheel. The Tank Anglaise is available in three sizes and three shades of gold; the large models reveal the Manufacture Cartier movement, 1904 MC, through the open back.

For details, call Boutique Cartier in Sandton City on 011 666 2800 or visit cartier.com.

COMMAND PERFORMANCE The AMVOX2 DBS Transponder is a landmark in chronograph design If you’re constantly perplexed at the ability of your car to camouflage itself on a whim the moment you try to locate it in a packed parking lot, the solution is simple. Buy a new car and a watch to match. More specifically, it would have to be an Aston Martin DBS and a Jaeger-LeCoultre AMVOX2 DBS Transponder.

The manufacturing masterpiece incorporates a transmitter designed not only to respond to a ‘find me’ request from the car’s owner by initiating the vehicle’s headlamps to light up for a few seconds (without unlocking it), but also to open and close the car at the push of a button on the watch glass. It’s oh-so-Bond.

The challenge? Miniaturisation of the transponder module – the result of 18 months of meticulous engineering. Only Aston Martin dealerships can authorise the timepiece to sync with the owner’s DBS. For more information, visit jaeger-lecoultre.com.

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psst MOTORING

NO BEATING THE BENTLEY Lavished with a more youthful, contemporary and fashionable style, it’s the Continental reimagined Here’s a sports car you’ll want to buy a few drinks and take home with you for a long weekend – if you could catch up with it. The Bentley Continental GT V8 coupé, unveiled in SA in 2012, is a gorgeous creation, curvacious and muscular, but it can belt off with head-spinning velocity, reaching 100km/h in 4,8 seconds and, in a few more, its top speed of 303km/h. The 4.0-litre, twin-turbo-charged GT coupé exemplifies the Bentley hallmarks of elegance and power, yet it’s being hailed as a new departure, from the chrome figure-eight exhaust tailpipes and the black matrix grille, to the lustrous interior with Dark Fiddleback Eucalyptus veneers. Under the hood it features a wealth of innovations and environmentminded techs and specs. This latest model delivers a 40 percent improvement in CO2 emissions and fuel efficiency – you can travel an astounding 800km on a single tank. For further details, visit southafrica.bentleymotors.com.

BALANCE OF POWER The new Mercedes-Benz SL 65 AMG It’s a rare roadster that delivers style, performance and fuel economy. The words ‘leaps and bounds’ come to mind when taking a closer look at the iconic Mercedes AMG 6.0-litre V12 Bi-Turbo from all angles. It’s considerably lighter thanks to the all-aluminium bodyshell (with a clever 5kg saving in the boot lid alone) and features excellent fuel consumption – a 17 percent saving on the previous SL 65 AMG. Fuel consumption is also reduced by the AMG Speedshift Plus 7G-Tronic transmission and ECO start/stop function. The sports car also pushes the boundaries in vehicle safety. The light yet rigid bodyshell

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offers exceptional protection for driver and passengers. As for performance, it makes a powerful and exhilarating leap from 0 to 100km/h in four seconds, with an electronically limited top speed of 250km/h. AMG fans familiar with its design lines will notice that there’s a more distinctive look to the radiator grill on this model. The Mercedes star is mounted on two blade-like louvres with a distinct aviation hint to the lines, a style element that gives the new AMG brand face its character.

Visit mercedes-benz.co.za for more information.

Short, powerful, quirky and unforgiving, with a rough voice – the Stallone of sports cars must be the 2013 Aston Martin V8 Vantage Coupé. The pumped-up 4.7-litre engine shoots 313kW through two rows of four barrels to the rear wheels.

At last, an ‘affordable’ Aston Martin that retains all of the handmade charm characterising the British firm’s best work…

It lives up to its status as a high-performance icon, although it’s not the leanest when it comes to emissions. The sevenspeed ‘automated manual gearbox’ takes getting used to. It’s best to unengage automatic and go for manual where you can slide into each gear with a touch of the paddle shift: in manual mode, you move from 0–100km/h far more seamlessly than in automatic mode. The Vantage is a snappy dresser – it goes for high-grade leather and wood inside a short but awesome (in supercar terms) 4,38m sculpted body, and on the road its footwork is faultless. It’s the smallest of the Aston range but, compared with the owner of a mass-produced rival such as a Porsche 911, you’ll be unique at the party. For further details, call 011 301 7100 or visit astonmartin.co.za.

TEXT: KATHY MALHERBE AND ANDRÉ WIESNER. PHOTOGRAPHY: supplied

DYNAMITE IN A SMALL(ER) PACKAGE Snappy standout from Aston Martin’s stall

psst FASHION

ISLAND STYLE 100% Capri captures the spirit of summer Antonino Aiello’s 100% Capri is a highly successful line of Italian linen that now brings the Mediterranean lifestyle to South Africa. At 23, Aiello moved to the island of Capri and founded the prestigious fashion and household linen brand. Known as the prince of fibres, linen is cool in steamy climates, non-allergenic and antibacterial. These qualities make it the ultimate in modern fabric, even though it has a lineage that dates back to 8000 BC – the Egyptians called it ‘woven moonlight’. It’s light and pale, as perfect a summer accompaniment as crisp Sauvignon Blanc, sea air and sorbet. The entire family can be outfitted in ecologically friendly and breathable linen designs, from dainty frocks for little princesses to men’s shirts, inspired by the colours, shapes and lifestyle of Capri… 100% Capri is available at Delaire Graff Estate. For more information, visit delaire.co.za.

What do you do when you have oodles of style and an eye for the right look for the occasion? Team up, like Ava Edwards (right) and Jules Mackenzie did. Mackenzie has been a notable stylist in London and Cape Town. Edwards, a trained image consultant, moved to Cape Town from London to join Woolworths as a knitwear buyer and designer.

They’re the founders of personal styling agency Adress. They started by hiring out special-occasion dresses and then helped clients style them up for parties.

Their bespoke service, for men and women, now includes anything from an image overhaul and personal shopping (local and international) to travel packing.

Visit adress.co.za for more details.

NOTHING TO SEE If you’ve got it, float it There’s something to be said for a frame that rests so lightly on your face that it’s barely there. Silhouette eyewear takes it further into micro-light territory with its Titan Minimal Art range that weighs just under three grams. In terms of matter, that’s as near to zero as you get. The magic’s possible because the eyewear has no frame, no hinge and no screws; its design is low-key and light. Deeply anchored in the credo of minimalism and completely independent of fleeting fashions, Silhouette is the ambassador of an easy-going lifestyle.

For further information, visit silhouette.com.

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WHAT’S IN A BAG? North meets south in fine tradition For the best-dressed Italians, it’s easy to agree on one thing. Appearance matters.

The formula? Perfect grooming, classic dress sense, attention to detail and clever accessorising. Lorenzi combines centuriesold design tradition from Italy with African resources in conceptualising its range of handbags. Exotic skins sourced from Africa are luxuriously soft and supple, brightened with Italian handmade brass studs. The material for this handmade handbag (above), available in an assortment of rich colours, is sourced from the world’s foremost tanners of ostrich leather, the Klein Karoo Cooperative.

For more information, go to lorenzi.co.za or visit one of the boutiques in Sandton City, Nelson Mandela Square, Sun City or the V&A Waterfront.

TEXT: LES AUPIAIS AND DEBBIE HATHWAY. PHOTOGRAPHY: supplied; IMAGE OF AVA edwards AND JULES mackenzie BY Hannah Mentz

Style council Two smart cookies mine the gap

TREND

NAMING RITES Iconic collections to covet Louis Vuitton’s savoir-faire in the realm of luxury travel accessories puts panache into the practical. But behind every bag, there’s heritage; in every name, a story. The Noé travel bag is an ode to a Champagne producer who desired a carrier for five precious bottles. It was named after Noah, the biblical character who built an ark to save two of all living creatures from a flood and thereafter planted vineyards. Another favourite, the Neverfull holdall (carried below), combines the concepts of the Speedy (inspired by Audrey Hepburn), the Lockit and the Keepall. The latter was measured by its capacity to hold 50 copies of Vogue magazine for months, and is valued for its adaptability as an extra travel bag or a smaller city bag via a clever leather laces system. For more details, visit louisvuitton.com.

EVEN STEVENS: investment

Veni, Vidi, Vintage Champagnes are born, not made – and, like iconic leaders, stand head and shoulders above the rest.

Words STEVEN LACK Photography FIONA ROYDS/INFIDELS

The search for the Top 100 began with 4 000 bottles of the best Champagne produced in the last 100 years. Vintage Champagnes from 1955 and 1928 were high scorers

I arrived home early from work with a new puppy in one hand and a bottle of Philipponnat Clos des Goisses Champagne in the other. While battling to find a suitable name for the puppy, I looked for inspiration for this column in the best of the best − a glass of Philipponnat Clos des Goisses.

When Richard Juhlin, one of the world’s foremost Champagne writers, decided to tackle the formidable task of discovering which were the Top 100 Champagnes ever produced, it began with his request for the collection of 4 000 bottles of Champagne from the Grand Marques. All of them submitted the best Champagnes they produced in the last 100 years (dating back to the early 1900s).

Great Champagnes have timeless character and distinction; like industry icon Madame Lilly Bollinger, they age gracefully and beautifully. Philipponnat’s iconic Clos des Goisses 1955, from a small house that has been in the hands of the Philipponnat family since the 16th century, was one of many vintages sleeping peacefully in the

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tunnels that are their cellars. Here lies their ‘library’ of old vintages, perhaps referred to as such because each vintage is a testament to a year in history. These libraries know nothing of clocks and time, as described by fellow columnist Steve Kocher overleaf. Champagne vintages add new chapters to a timeless story with the passing of years. We reap the benefits of that patient cellaring and nurturing, and are handsomely rewarded.

Philipponnat Clos des Goisses was given the honour of being voted the best of the best

by Juhlin. It shared the discreet limelight with a Pol Roger Grauves 1928 and a Krug 1938. Not far behind in 14th spot was the Philipponnat Clos de Goisses 1959, just a spot ahead of the Bollinger 1945. These four great Champagne houses dominated not only the top 20, but the list itself, with the 1955 vintage in particular owning that decade.

I won’t bore you with the details of a weather forecast more than half a century old, but clearly Mother Nature was in her element then and played her trump card with

the creation of some perfect vintages. She was certainly celebrating: the end of the war, with an iconic bottle of Bolly ’45 and, later, the birth of some icons of our own South African culture in 1955. One of the fathers of our democracy, who spent many years on Robben Island, is a leader and role model in business today. We could easily celebrate his birth with the perfection of 1955 vintage Champagne. I would never give away a lady’s age, so suffice it to say that South Africa’s very own ‘Christiane Amanpour’ (she knows who she is, and you probably do too) can celebrate with a similar bottle.

In the words of Madame Bollinger, ‘I only drink [Champagne] when I’m happy and when I’m sad. Sometimes I drink it when I’m alone. When I have company, I consider it obligatory. I trifle with it when I’m not hungry and drink it when I am. Otherwise, I never touch it − unless I’m thirsty.’ Whatever the reasons you’re drinking it this festive season, may all your pleasures be true pleasures, and all your pain… Champagne.

The art of sleep – perfected, by hand, since 1852.

At Hästens, we make our beds entirely by hand. Always have. Always will. The reason is simple: If you want to make the best beds in the world, there’s just no other way.

That’s why your Hästens bed really isn’t just a bed. It’s a hand-made work of art. And it’s an art that we know everyone can appreciate. Because the art – it’s called sleeping.

HÄstens store Cape town 55 Somerset Road, Cnr Somerset & Highfield Road, Green Point, 8005, Cape Town, Tel: 021 418 0434, info@hastenscapetown.co.za HÄstens store JoHannesburg CRB House, Cnr Kramer & Desmond Street, Kramerville, Sandton 2148, Tel: 082 561 0174

hastens.com

EVEN STEVENS: investment

The Cutting Edge The saying ‘never too rich or too thin’ applies to the dress watch – now pared down to almost nothing.

‘Suit up’ is the new trend. Previously it was cool for girls and guys to have a night out in jeans and T-shirts; the more casual the better. Not so today. Suits, dress shirts and ties (or not) might have been a curse back in the day, but they are now the younger generation’s preferred uniform for work and pleasure. Not surprisingly, this has had an influence on fashion accessories and, in particular, watches.

Dress watches are experiencing a revival.

In short, men’s watches are again thinner and more elegant, and leather straps are ‘in’; and ladies’ watches are adapted to the changing fashions by incorporating precious stones.

The Swiss watch industry has engaged itself in a race for thinner and thinner movements for many decades. This has not only been an ongoing battle for manufacturers of mechanical timepieces, but also for quartz watches, since the late seventies. The thinnest ever timepiece, the Delirium (an ETA movement made exclusively for Concord, Eterna and Longines), measured 1,98mm – the case back was part of the movement, which eliminated the need for a main plate onto which the components were mounted. When the Japanese countered with an equally thin

quartz watch, ETA presented the Delirium IV, at 0,98mm. Although perfectly functional, this timepiece could never be commercialised as it would bend too easily!

Numerous legendary designs in watchmaking have been created with elegance as a main characteristic. Cartier’s Tank, which dates back to 1919, has become a sign of elegance and good taste, and underlines founder Louis Cartier’s talent as a designer and manufacturer of watches and jewellery. Many variations of the Tank have been introduced since the first appearance of this rectangular watch, although none directly connected to an armoured vehicle.

The Reverso from Jaeger-LeCoultre, another rectangular classic, was launched in 1931. The design was initially conceived to allow the sporty wearer to protect the fragile glass face from polo sticks and cricket balls by reversing the case back to the front. The reversed case back offers an ideal surface for personalised engravings. Very ‘Art Deco’, this design has moved with the times by using different mechanical movements and changing size without sacrificing personality. The elegant timepiece allowed Jaeger-LeCoultre to

evolve from a famous movement manufacturer to a significant haute horlogerie brand.

The Patek Philippe Calatrava first appeared in 1932 and is another one of those instantly identifiable classics with its elegant round look, slender hands and unmistakable clous de paris bezel.

Girard-Perregaux is going through a major revival of sales and international recognition with its Classic 1966 ultra-flat collection of automatic mechanical timepieces. Exclusive in-house movements are used in this thin, round case – versions include a threehand date, a small second, a full calendar, an equation of time and a chronograph.

Girard-Perregaux is also one of the few haute horlogerie brands offering ladies’ complications in the thin and elegant Cat’s Eye collection (see below).

Finally, the Piaget Altiplano, launched in 2010, must be mentioned if one talks about extra-thin elegance and haute horlogerie.

This is today’s thinnest automatic (5,25mm), with a movement measuring a mere 2,35mm and a decentrique sunk-in rotor. Invented and introduced by Buren Watch Co in the fifties, this is a micro-mechanical masterpiece.

Girard-Perregaux’s Cat’s Eye is a feminine interpretation of mechanical complications: automatic movement, power reserve with small second hand and date display, set in 18ct pink gold. It features a motherof-pearl dial set with nine diamonds, 68 diamonds on the bezel and antireflective sapphire glass.

Call 011 372 6000 for more information 38

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photography of product: supplied

Words STEVE KOCHER Photography FIONA ROYDS/INFIDELS

A HOTEL FOR YOU From the moment you enter the lobby, you sense a sophisticated yet classical atmosphere and discover a hotel that combines all the elements of luxury and great attention to detail.

54 on Bath is contemporary, boutique, and a hotel for you.

54 Bath Avenue, Rosebank, 2196, Johannesburg | P.O.Box 3046, Saxonwold, 2132 Tel: +27 11 344 8500 | Email: 54onbath.reservations@tsogosun.com Follow us on Twitter @54onBath

www.54onbath.com

TREND

Vault Couture Words TABITHA LASLEY

A £10 000 storage system, complete with mystery location and tight-lipped staff, may put paid to wardrobes for good.

Tucked away in a warehouse, on an anonymous industrial estate in West London, are some of the world’s most covetable wardrobes. Not that you’d ever know that. The space, sandwiched between a vast TV studio and a rubbish-strewn embankment, hardly screams wealth. But then, that’s the whole idea.

These are the Vault Couture headquarters.

The company offers a discreet package that falls somewhere between a members club, a concierge service and a watertight storage system. For £10 000 a year, the Vault will catalogue your clothes, stash them in one of the climate-controlled, closely guarded units, and hand you back a virtual wardrobe in the form of an iPad app. From there, you can scroll through and style up your collection, then recall the pieces whenever you need them. If you live in London, they can be back with you within half an hour.

What started out as a tiny, invitation-only service (founded by Kazakh mining magnate Mounissa Chodieva, who has several houses and was always losing track of her clothes) has snowballed into a word-of-mouth phenomenon. All three storeys of the warehouse are now hung with breathable garment bags and boxes lined with acid-free paper. There’s talk of expanding into the Asian and Russian markets.

In London, new collections are arriving all the time.

The morning I meet managing director Olesya Sanchez, a fresh consignment of clothes is being catalogued. On one table stand 12 pairs of immaculate Louboutins: olive suede courts, jade sequined sandals, black lace ankle boots. Opposite them sit four unmarked Birkin bags in plum, mint, brick red and pristine white. On a nearby rail, a row of silk cocktail dresses are arranged by colour, the spectrum moving from purple-and-cyclamen Herve Leger through jewel-toned Pucci to emerald-green Lanvin. Pinned on a dummy, ready for its close-up, is a Vivienne Westwood ball gown: boned, plunging, scarlet as a scream.

White-coated assistants move noiselessly around the haul, making adjustments, taking photographs, printing barcodes. The atmosphere is one of clinical calm, like a laboratory. Sanchez, coiffed and sleek in salmon-pink tailoring, offers coffee, green tea, several sorts of mineral water.

‘We wanted to position ourselves not just as storage, not just as a concierge,’ she says. ‘Ours is a

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TREND

[This page] White-coated assistants prepare a dress for its shoot, pinning it to a mannequin so that it falls as it will when it’s worn

unique service that allows you to have your wardrobe literally on the palm of your hand. You remember in the old movie Clueless, when Alicia Silverstone was sitting there matching her garments? We made exactly the same function on our clients’ accounts.’

Evangelical about the job, Sanchez is terse on other stuff. (When I ask her whether the coral suit is

by Whistles, she simply says ‘no’; when I press her about famous clients, she silences me with a look).

But it’s this level of discretion that clients are paying for. A large part of her role is keeping schtum: the exact address of the Vault is a secret, while customers’ identities are known only to Sanchez and a handful of her employees. On the system, they’re listed under assumed names. Deep in the vault itself, collections that crowd the chilly corridors are sorted by pseudonym: Diamond, Topaz, Crystal. Clients don’t even see the premises; they manage their wardrobes via the app and never need venture west of Harrods.

One thing Sanchez will disclose, though, is that their best customers are not the ‘ladies who lunch’ they initially targeted.

‘We get a lot of business people,’ she says. ‘Men and women. People who travel to London once a fortnight or once a week and need a set number of shirts, suits and ties to be delivered to their hotel.’

And while she readily admits that most of them have at least two homes, plus the wherewithal to fly their clothes out of the country with a courier, the Vault’s services are not solely for the super-rich. They start at a not-completely-unfeasible £2 000. For that, you can get 100 pieces catalogued and uploaded onto the app, a move that ultimately pays off.

With all your clothes in front of you (rather than scrunched up in a ball at the back of the closet), you’ll never buy the same thing twice. Seeing pieces styled up on the app makes them look new again. And if you do tire of them? Make your money back at the Vault Boutique, an online store where clients sell pieces at high-street prices. I went there and spotted an Anna Molinari slip for £73, a Stella McCartney pencil skirt for £72 and Céline knitwear for £66. Did I succumb to temptation and buy them? Well, that really is classified information.

For further information, visit vaultcouture.com.

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PHOTOGRAPHY: supplied

[Previous page, top) Vault Couture’s intelligent filing system is designed to ensure that clothes remain in perfect condition. (Below) Garments are mended, photographed and given a barcode before they’re collated online

The Ultimate in Music

FEATURE

Eco-nomics

SA’s biggest draw card is its diversity. Just ask one of the smartest scientists and thinkers on the block.

Words KATHY MALHERBE Photography WARREN RASMUSSEN

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FOCUS

Professor Eugene Cloete is an ideas man − the ultimate lateral thinker.

The former director of the Edward de Bono Institute for Creative Thinking is sought after internationally as an advisor and problem solver. His career bristles with national and international breakthroughs, directorships, honours and inventions.

One invention that particularly captured the imagination and attention of the media, his peers and international scientists, was his 2010 hi-tech ‘tea bag’ invention that can purify polluted water instantly at a cost of just three cents a litre. Scientific America listed it as one of the top 10 world-changing ideas in 2010.

The ‘tea bag’ water purifier coincided with an initiative, the Hope Project, which combines the scientific expertise of several departments at the University of Stellenbosch to address the country’s most pressing problems, including energy challenges, poverty and the need for clean water.

Perhaps then it shouldn’t come as a surprise when an inventor and lateral thinker, rather than a political idealist, finds a scientific basis for his belief that South Africa has all the ingredients for success and that the country’s ‘diversity will ensure its survival’.

He reverts to science to make his point: the principle of a successful ecosystem where diversity means survival illustrates the way the differences in our country, that may be considered limiting, are the essence of our future. ‘In an ecosystem,’ he says, ‘diversity means resilience and the ability to overcome challenges. If you extrapolate biodiversity in nature to a biodiversity of people in terms of culture, intellect, languages and religious beliefs, you’ll find that our country has a healthy ecosystem.

‘This diversity is a source of ideas and allows for the emergence of concepts that didn’t exist before,’ and leads, he believes, to the ultimate out-of-the-box thinking − which could be South Africa’s salvation. ‘We have to rethink the norms around problem-solving drastically and I believe that by tapping into our differences we will dig South Africa out of the hole it’s in and bring the country power.’

Cloete reminds us that it was a similar point in history, when Europe was recovering from the calamities of the 14th century, that brought about the Renaissance.

He says the appetite for enlightenment was stimulated by the wealthy bankers of

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the Medici family in Florence. People from different walks of life − scientists, philosophers, musicians, merchants and entrepreneurs − were invited to discuss the issues of the day.

With no agenda other than ‘let’s imagine how the world could be’, the different perspectives and diversity of ideas resulted in the birth of new concepts. South Africa, he says, needs this renaissance of innovative thinking.

‘The need for a new way forward is the mother of innovation and leads to revolutionary problem-solving,’ says Cloete.

‘And we are in the perfect position in South Africa to do this. Leader, thinker and author Frans Johansson explored one simple, yet profound, insight about innovation in his book, The Medici Effect, where he writes “in the intersection of different fields, disciplines and cultures, there’s an abundance of extraordinary new ideas to be explored”.’

‘Imagine,’ says Cloete, ‘the different perspectives we could put in the melting pot if we could bring our differences together.

It will culminate in an explosion of ideas.

This is where the future of our country lies – our intellectual diversity, indigenous ideas blending with Westernism. We need a simple yet adaptable way forward. We are so caught in ‘isms’… capitalism, socialism… What if there’s another way into the future?’

This is what excites him about South Africa.

His family arrived here in 1652 and he describes himself as an ‘absolutely indigenous’ person. ‘It is the mix of people that excites me. Generally speaking, there are fantastic people living here and they are still smiling… How is it possible?’

He reels off the positives: we have more than enough land, very few natural disasters, a diversity of climates, from Mediterranean to desert to subtropical, the ability to grow food, and plenty of labour. ‘Our country is massive and brimming with possibilities. If we go back to the concept of an ecosystem – if we are able to let the homeostatic mechanism regulate its internal environment, we will maintain a stable, constant milieu.’

With the American Dream in tatters and Europe in a self-perpetuating decline, why should South Africa survive? Cloete again refers to the natural state of things: ‘Every ecosystem has a limiting factor, which determines the yield. The closer you come to depleting the resources, the more instability there is in the ecosystem. Countries that developed fairly rapidly reached their limiting factor earlier.

FOCUS

‘We have to rethink the norms around problemsolving drastically and I believe that by tapping into our differences we will dig South Africa out of the hole it’s in and bring the country power.’

It’s the slow growers like Africa that’ll survive.

Africa is like an indigenous organism that grows more slowly – our relatively slow, plodding economic growth is what will enable us to keep our ecosystem in balance.’

Cloete believes in the increase in wealth, not the eradication of poverty. He uses ‘wealth’ as an acronym: W (water), E (energy), A (agriculture), L (land), T (technology) and H (health). ‘We need to create a HEALTH index for each country, instead of using GDP to compare countries. If we have those elements in place for everyone, if they become our objective, we will move towards a better and more sustainable future. Our ecosystem will work and stay in harmony.’

Cloete is naturally optimistic about the future. He says the National Development Plan drafted by Trevor Manuel holds the key to South Africa’s future. ‘It is an apolitical plan developed by people who were brought on board for their intellectual abilities, not for political reasons. This group of diverse and accomplished people follows my theory that diversity in thinking will lead to innovation and solutions,’ he says. ‘We are inventors, and resilient, and it is time for South Africa to be proactive, not reactive, while there is still a window of opportunity.’

Professor Eugene Cloete is the Vice Rector for Research and Innovation at Stellenbosch University in the Western Cape.

[Above] Stellenbosch University combined expertise to generate one of the top 10 world-changing ideas in 2010. The formula? Part invention, part lateral thinking, underpinned by science

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TRAVEL

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INSIGHT

Embedded Brands With the Loerie Awards’ dust settled for the year and some cracking good campaigns given a high five, where to next?

Subliminal branding has long been regarded a ‘dark art’ by advertisers. Is this how it will be played forward?

Words TABITHA LASLEY

Brands that get it right sell themselves without even having to try. It boils down to iconography; a subtle yet substantial contribution to the bottom line

Think about the last series you watched on TV. Mad Men. Breaking Bad. The Killing. The Bridge. In this age of television as high art, chances are it will have been excellent.

It’s also highly likely you were only watching TV in a notional sense. You probably didn’t see it when it was screened. These days, schedules have about as much bearing on our viewing as the charts do on our iPods.

We watch shows in a different way: weekend-long marathons, with the curtains drawn and the phone off, via imported box sets, illegal downloads, expensive subscriptions to Netflix and Lovefilm. Complex and at times confusing, these programmes require undivided attention. In a very real sense, the audience is captive – you can’t fiddle about on Facebook while trying to follow Forbrydelsen.

Which should be good news for ad men.

Except that the platforms we watch from mean we can scroll through ad breaks and, most of the time, we do. If the medium truly is the message, we’re dropping advertisers some very big hints.

‘People don’t want to watch commercials any more,’ says Martin Lindstrom, author of Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy. ‘They skip through them. So what’s going to happen is that soon you’ll get commercials integrated into ordinary programming. As a layman, you won’t be able to see the difference.

But eventually there will be a total merger between editorial and commercial content.’

Until recently, it was clear what commercial content looked like. Even when products were placed in films, they were clunky and conspicuous. James Bond would flip his wrist and say ‘I wear an Omega’ (or, in the controversial case of this summer’s Skyfall, down a pint of Heineken), and the audience

would know they’d seen the money shot. But according to Lindstrom, that’s all set to change.

‘Companies are now using what we call “subconscious product placement”. We just see symbolics of a certain brand or product. You might see a certain shape or a certain colour.

Those symbolics are owned by the company, they’re proprietary graphics. The name is never mentioned; you’ll never see the full product.

You’ll just feel the brand’s presence. And that, no regulation can stop.’

You’d assume that, with no logos or slogans to add ballast, the brand’s impact would be diluted. Not so, says Agnes Nairn, co-author of Consumer Kids: How Big Business is Grooming Our Children for Profit. In fact, it’s more potent: these are the icons with ‘brand smashability’ − instant recognition in fractional pieces.

‘When McDonald’s rebranded in Japan, they took away the name but kept the golden arches. They didn’t need the name. The brain tends to process words cognitively, using the neural cortex. If you see a name, you can start to argue against it. But if you just have a symbol, a sound or a colour, you process that in the limbic system. And that makes you susceptible – you don’t build up defences.’

It all sounds a bit sinister: a brave new world of corporate suggestion. Except that it’s not actually that new.

‘Think about the dying days of cigarette advertising,’ says Nairn. ‘When Marlboro wasn’t allowed to sponsor Formula One any more, they just put their colours and shapes on the bends of the racetrack. In some lounges, they would have “Marlboro-shaped” furniture. Silk Cut adverts simply showed a piece of silk with a cut in it.

Everyone knew what it was.’

In the past 10 years, returns on traditional ad placement have dropped off dramatically.

The marketplace is crowded, and passing trade

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INSIGHT

has thinned. Desperate to tap into new revenue streams, the industry has had to channel all the resourcefulness, the wily creativity, that tobacco companies showed 30 years ago.

‘I remember one client, Philip Morris, talking about what punctuation a brand could own,’ says US trend forecaster Marian Salzman.

‘So every time you saw an exclamation point or a semicolon you would think of their product.

But no-one’s ever really made this idea work.

You’d need the budget and the guts. A client who tries it needs deep pockets. They’re also going to take a lot of criticism.’

Salzman reckons that if just one trailblazer takes the plunge, the rest will follow suit. The question is: should they? As Nairn points out, there are serious ethical implications to this sort of subterfuge.

‘These kind of subliminal techniques are clearly working against a person’s will, because they’re working at a subconscious level. If you look at advergames, there’s very good evidence to show children will change their behaviour after being exposed to them, even though they haven’t changed their mind about the content of the game.’

Given that the average US three-year-old can recognise about 100 brands, it’s perhaps inevitable that any debate on ethics within advertising tends to focus on children. But Nairn insists all of us are open to persuasion.

‘It’s something known as “mere exposure”.

As a child, how do you know something’s not going to harm you? You see it a lot. One of the first things you learn to do is recognise

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your parents. If you’ve seen something over and over again, it’ll give you a feeling of safety and security. You form a positive attachment, without processing anything about it. It’s a very deep-seated emotion.’

Marketeers play on the warm associations we’ve spent a lifetime forming. Modern consumers may think they’re too smart to fall for overt marketing messages, but the fact is they don’t need to. As with classical conditioning, our responses tend to become generalised over time. Just as Pavlov’s dogs ended up salivating at bells, buzzers and lights, a fleeting glimpse of say, a shade of McDonald’s gold, will be enough to give us that sense of comfort and calm. We only need the vaguest hint of a brand’s presence to go on soldering early connections.

Of course, we know most of this already.

What we don’t realise is just how far the push to merge commercial and editorial content has already gone. People talk about plans to build scripts around brands as if that’s the future.

But it isn’t. It’s already here.

In 2001, author Fay Weldon (herself an ex-ad woman) wrote The Bulgari Connection, a ‘patronised book’ paid for by the jeweller.

It was supposed to be distributed among favourite customers. Critics derided it as Faustian and people wondered whether Weldon’s reputation as a serious novelist could ever recover.

Seven years on, advertising agency Mother signed up Shane Meadows – a director known for his bleak portrayals of Britain’s liminal

class – to make a short feature called Somers Town. The film, a muted coming-of-age tale set in the eponymous estate around St Pancras train station, drew some criticism with its final sequence, in which the two main characters went to Paris on the Eurostar. The story had been shot in black and white but these closing scenes were in colour, and people complained it felt like a commercial for Eurostar. But the whole thing was a commercial for Eurostar. It had funded the entire film from start to finish (Mother styled it ‘a legacy project’). Without the company’s patronage, it never would have seen the light of day. Did Meadows come in for the same bashing Weldon got? Not at all.

It’s regarded as one of his best films and took the highest award at the 2008 Edinburgh International Film Festival.

Which just goes to show that audience’s memories are short and selective; we come round very quickly in the face of good work.

It also goes to show that content marketing doesn’t have to compromise artistic integrity.

But does that make it alright?

‘People see things happening, and they think because they’re happening, they must be okay,’ says Nairn. ‘They think there must be some law to stop it if it’s wrong. In fact, there isn’t any law that can stop it. We’ll just wake up one day, look around and say “Oh yeah, there’s a lot of sponsorship, isn’t there? There’s a lot of product placement in books and songs and films. That’s not really a problem, is it?” But I think it is a problem. Because it’s taking away people’s choice.’

TJDR/MetropolitanRepublic/53935/E

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everywhere you go

FEATURE (Opposite) The subjects of this painting are more than likely two versions of the San ‘princess’, painted in the artist’s Montagu studio some two decades after his visits to the Kalahari

Into the Light

François Krige’s little-known paintings of the San are the product of a remarkable adventure that started more than half a century ago. The rare collection is now up for sale.

Words and photography JUSTIN FOX

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ART COLLECTION

ART COLLECTION

One of South AFRICA’s foremost postimpressionists, François Krige, had a dream of living painting the San. During a series of expeditions to the Kalahari in the late fifties and sixties, he made this dream a reality. These astonishing works were never exhibited during his lifetime; he kept them locked away, far from prying eyes.

After the artist’s death in 1994, the paintings were found lined up facing the walls of his studio in the Little Karoo village of Montagu. Now, nearly two decades after his passing, the Krige family has decided to put the collection up for sale.

The story begins in 1957. The artist’s first journey to visit the San was the longest and most affecting. Krige was the travelling companion of Jens Bjerre, a Danish ethnographer undertaking a seven­month expedition to the Kalahari under the patronage of the Royal Geographical Society in London. Krige’s task was to sketch the San, copy their rock art and act as Bjerre’s Afrikaans interpreter.

During this and subsequent journeys to the Kalahari, Krige visited a !Kung clan in a government-restricted area of north-eastern Namibia where isolated groups gathered at water holes during the dry, winter season.

The artist aimed to capture as much of this threatened way of life as he could with pencil and sketchbook… and later with oil and canvas.

Bjerre and Krige set off from Cape Town, heading north via the Fish River Canyon and into the western Kalahari. They wanted to find San who had little or no contact with the outside world. At Rundu they were advised to make for Saman Geigei, a water hole deep in the Kalahari, so they headed into the wilderness using a compass to guide them.

When they reached Saman Geigei, Bjerre and Krige encamped for a four-month stay with a clan of about 50 San living in rough shelters made from branches and grass. They exchanged rolls of tobacco, beads and salt

(Opposite) The San ‘princess’, wearing a tortoise shell holding cosmetic powder around her neck, poses with an ostrich-egg water container

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with them, and were gradually accepted into the community.

Bjerre shot footage for a documentary film while Krige spent his days sketch­ing.

There was old Kau, the storyteller, who fea­ tures in many drawings, and the hunters Tsonoma, Keigei, Narni and Samgau. We see group portraits of the young women, Nau, Ngum and Nusi, while the heavily wrinkled grand­mother, Gausje, is the focus of numerous studies. The sketchbooks provide a startlingly intimate picture of a San world relatively untouched by modernity.

Krige made a further three trips on his own to the San in 1960, 1962 and 1968. He was not only interested in recording images of the San way of life, but also in capturing anthropological details. His sketchbooks are filled with the names of his subjects as well as the words they taught him for the objects he was drawing: mouth bow (gaeing), five-string harp (guashi) and wooden bowl (neu).

In his images we see little boys learning to use the bow and arrow, women drilling holes in ostrich eggshells and girls grinding corn.

There are many sketches of a beautiful San woman, whom Krige called the ‘princess’. She strikes vari­ous poses, decorated in her finery, holding a calabash or ostrich-egg container, with a tortoise shell containing her cosmetic powder hanging between her breasts. Most of the !Kung drawings are executed with a wonderful economy of line, often without any shading. A few strokes of the pencil convey the essence of an entire encampment. They are works of great beauty and sen­sitivity.

During the 1980s, two decades after his Kalahari journeys, Krige turned to his old sketchbooks and used them as inspiration for a body of remarkable studio paintings. There are the same domestic scenes of San women and children he’d sketched in the late fifties and sixties. Naked boys hunt the desert sands like adolescents on a Greek frieze; men track antelope over a dry, open plain. At the time, nearing the end of his life, the artist journeyed

back into his past and revisited in his creative imagination a people whose own way of life was also coming to an end.

It is the !Kung ‘princess’ who emerges as an iconic figure in the studio work. She stands alone in the desert, staring back at the artist with a faraway expression, adorned with ostrich-eggshell jewellery. Yes, she is perhaps an exotic and remote Other, but she’s also a passionate figure alive in Krige’s imagination. The princess becomes an aching symbol of loss.

Another set of equally astonishing, and exotic, paintings is that of the Barakwena people. The sketches of this clan, a ‘branch’ of the San, were used as inspiration for the grand Gauguin-like works painted in his studio during the 1980s. The Barakwena, or ‘River Bushmen’, live in the region of Rakops, southeast of the Okavango Delta in Botswana.

Like their Bantu neighbours, they grow crops, fish and keep livestock, but they’re also hunter-gatherers.

A series of large paintings of figures seated beside a river is quite breathtaking. The banks are verdant, goats graze in the shade of tall trees while a flautist plays for reclining female figures. An idyllic village of round mud huts lies in the background. We are in a timeless realm of the artist’s recollection, an old man in the last decade of his life turning away from the present and revisiting his past.

These Barakwena paintings are so reminiscent of Paul Gauguin’s work that comparisons are easily drawn. Krige’s adaptation of impressionism was similar to Gauguin’s – his use of strong outlines and colourful parallel brush strokes. Both artists were romantics who rejected the modern world and tried to find something pure in the past and in the ‘native Other’. Their journeys are highlights of postimpressionist art.

Krige’s San collection is currently for sale through the Everard Read Gallery Cape Town for an undisclosed amount.

FEATURE

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HOMAGE (Left) The mirrors are placed edge to edge and, looking down, guests see for the first time a magnificent reflection of the ceiling decorated by 17th-century painter François Le Moyne

Sipping the Light Fantastic

Dom Pérignon vintage Champagne... music by a master... interpreted by magicians of design. What a night.

Words LES AUPIAIS

The piano notes, like finely connected bubbles, rise to the painted vault ceiling. The two-storey chapel was Louis XIV’s last commission for the Château de Versailles and where the masters of their field − architects, painters and sculptors of the late 17th century − brought biblical scenes to life for the king. Here royal children were baptised and the voices of men rose to chant the victories of the day.

On this night in September 2012, the space is devoted to different masters: classical pianist Lang Lang closes his eyes and sways, lost in the work created for the occasion by acclaimed composer and Oscar nominee Alexandre Desplat. Around him in the Chapelle Royale, costumed

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figures move in a liquid choreography; at times controlled and measured, at others quick and spirited. The characters, set and choreography are the work of legendary designer and director Robert Wilson, who’s woven together his magical exploration of movement, dance and light to ‘help the audience hear the music better’. The night belongs to the Champagne house that chose to celebrate three vintages, this time the work of another master, Dom Pérignon’s Chef de Cave, Richard Geoffroy.

The concept, titled ‘The Power of Creation’, was a performance in three acts set in Paris at Versailles, on an evening hosted by Stephane Baschiera, President and CEO

[Opposite] The staging and set for this unique contemporary performance and tasting experience at Château de Versailles was designed to the tiniest detail

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HOMAGE

of Dom Pérignon. The music and direction captures the spirit of Dom Pérignon 2003, Dom Pérignon Rosé 2000 and Dom Pérignon Oenothèque 1966, all explored through the five senses. When more than 200 guests move to the Salon d’Hercule on the same level as the royal apartments, there’s an expectant hush. The theme is air, fire, earth and water, we’re told, but the tables are bare save their forest-green cloth: no silverware, glassware or napery. We wait. And then, in what must go down as one of the most theatrical culinary moments of the decade, 2011 Chef of the Year and owner of a double-Michelin-starred restaurant Jean-François Piège sends out a legion of servers, carrying bevelled mirrors laid with delicate tastings of food to match the first vintage, Oenothèque 1966. Think crushed anchovy/crystallised lemon/iced cube of radish; French toast dipped in lobster stock/chopped whole baked lobster; grated hazelnut/green apple/olive oil/curry/chanterelles... a parry-and-thrust game of taste. We dine on the plump angels, robed gods and clouds of L’Apothéose d’Hercule, one of the largest ceiling paintings in the world. The servers approach again, this time holding urns of water that they pour onto square moss-covered boxes set at intervals along the centre of the tables. Suddenly, heavy dry-ice clouds swell and surge and the table is covered in a roiling white cloth...

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At the end of the evening, after a Rosé Vintage 2000, we end with a Vintage 2003. Our servers bring silver candelabra to the table, each holding what at first glance seem to be tall, pale candles of creamy wax. Curiosity overcomes us all, and one by one we reach out. One guest has the courage to take the first bite of what turns out to be chocolate, filled with egg blancmange and perfumed with jasmine... It is splendidly, decadently standing-ovation stuff. We all did; Charlotte Rampling, Laurence Ferrari, the lot of us.

Earlier that day, I tried with limited success to coax from Geoffroy, Chef de Cave since 1990, the secret behind declaring a vintage year. ‘You need some confidence, but don’t question yourself forever. Life is about making a decision.’ Geoffroy says it lightly but it is he who holds the fate of the Champagne house in his hand. He’ll declare it a vintage year when, together with a perfect combination of grapes, rainfall, sun and serendipity, he finds the mysterious balance between Chardonnay and Pinot Noir grape varieties. ‘The off years,’ he says, ‘are part of the business... the penance you pay between vintages. The other part is the magic of the unknown.’

Geoffroy is a charming man, witty and omnivorous in conversation that veers from sport to what he wryly believes is the daft notion of using maths to predict how financial markets work. And so, in 2003, a year Champagne makers

[Above) Between the arches, the shadowy figures of the audience for Lang Lang’s recital become the cast of a magnificent Renaissance painting. Dramatic light spills across the faces of some of Europe’s most distinguished men and women: it’s part opera, part living artwork and part history in the making

HOMAGE

photographY: supplied

[Below) Dom Pérignon’s Chef de Cave Richard Geoffroy threw the dice in an ‘off’ year, creating a Vintage that turned up trumps

in the area declared an ‘off’ year, he swam upstream and gambled. The only way to make 2003, he said to his team, is to have no preconceived ideas. ‘I told my people, you cannot drop the ball here. I won’t allow any compromises.’

The sweat and physicality of sport against the delicacy and alchemy of Champagne-making may seem worlds apart, but again Geoffroy draws the conversation back to the connection. ‘It’s about a psychological mindset and timing,’ he believes. ‘At the highest level of sport, it is about that 1 000th of a second, the difference between failure and success. If a sportsman is too stressed they cannot perform.

You need calm. It’s your call.’

In the last few days before picking, there’s a tension in the air, something like the great collection of energy before a storm. The air is heavy with the promise of 2012. Geoffroy will taste the berries and perhaps give a small nod. And then, between the picking and the crushing will lie a scant five hours or less. Two hundred pickers, assembled for days in anticipation of the ‘sign’ will descend on the vines...

The night before the grand feast at Versailles, we dined at Château de Saran, overlooking the Marne Valley with views from Épernay to Châlons-en-Champagne, and tasted Dom Pérignon Oenothèque 1996, the 1990 and a sublime Rosé 1990 both en magnum. That was the year Geoffroy took the ‘crown’ and it remains one of his favourite vintages.

It’s a bizarre, almost otherworldly contrast to tour the great cellars of Moët & Chandon in Épernay, the heart of Champagne country. We’re told about the visionary young monk Pierre Pérignon, a 30-year-old genius who invented, perfected and made famous a taste sensation that would have the landed gentry and royal court of the time quite dazzled by the Dom’s wine. Twenty eight kilometres of cellars lie in a state of permanent chill beneath the town. There are a staggering number of bottles, the dark symmetry of the stacks disappearing into what seems like infinity. There can be no starker contrast between where the bottles ‘kick their heels’ in the gloom for years and the final giddy and exuberant escape of the Champagne into glass.

On the other hand, theatre maestro Wilson spoke about his art as an ‘endless pursuit of questions with no exact answer’. He is the quintessential less-is-less man, preferring the sublime proportions of an empty room caught in a play of light, and confessed that, for him, a work is never quite finished. Geoffroy, of course, must commit.

He must name the day, the year. Captured in the bottle is a Champagne that needs no further ageing. It needs only an opening ceremony, a celebration, for us all to know that we are tasting something that is a full expression of absolute harmony. We must finish what earth, sun, rain and the cellar master began.

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INVESTMENT

Gentlemen of the Press

The olive oil game’s not for the shallow pocketed.

Find the passion, prepare for a tight return on investment and you might just make it to the salad bowl.

Words: ANDRÉ WIESNER

It began, in a way, with an inconvenient truth. The year was 1992 and Giulio Bertrand had attained a lifelong dream: buying a Cape Dutch farm on which to retire. For a man like him, a textile magnate who owned factories in South Africa, who always dwelt in cities – Milan, New York, you name it – the notion of living in the countryside… why, this, he says with seigneurial élan, was paradise. The sod of it, though, was that paradise had a drawback.

Nothing severe, but still irksome and the sort of itch a retired industrialist might get it in mind to scratch.

Bertrand, you see, enjoys salads. He eats them ‘365 days a year’ and considers them incomplete without a dressing of olive oil. In those early days he was obliged to import his oil because the local product… let’s say he felt there was room for improvement. Acquiring the stuff he liked to have in his pantry was a mission; something had to give.

Then, more resplendently, there was the farm itself: Morgenster, the ‘morning star’ of his sunset years. This beautiful vineyard estate in Somerset West reminded him of his native Italy and seemed to call out for a grander, more productive destiny than simply being a garden for his home. ‘I thought that because of Morgenster’s situation – a fantastic setting with a wonderful terroir – it would be nice to produce French wine and Italian olive oil.’

A nice idea, indeed. It spelt the end of his plans to spend two months per year in the Cape

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and the balance abroad (nowadays it’s vice versa), yet in turn marked an auspicious new beginning: nothing less than the revitalisation of what until then had been a modest, smallscale industry.

At the time, South Africa was negotiating peace at home and re-entry into the world, in the process emerging also from a culinary Dark Age in which a dab of Spanish rice alongside the Sunday chops could be regarded as outré and foodstuffs like olive oil as faintly subversive, faintly ‘other’. The country was starting to internationalise its tastes, and these developments would work in tandem with Morgenster’s rising star.

Not one for half-arsed measures, Bertrand travelled to France and Italy – to France to recruit its best winemaker, and to Italy to secure leading expertise at the Institute of Olive Oil Research as well as scour the homeland for choice olive cultivars. In 1994, 3 000 of these imports were planted at Morgenster.

Today there are 30 000 of them, under harvest for paste and table olives but largely for the product category where the estate, although a relatively small producer, has made its heftiest impact: in the elite, rarefied niche of EVOO – extra-virgin olive oil.

In 2006 Morgenster was rated ‘The Best Blended Olive Oil in the World’, and in 2007 it won an international award for ‘Mill of the Year’, but these are just samplings from a litany of accolades. The estate has not only

put the local industry on the map, it’s also helped it spread roots into the soil, literally and figuratively. According to the brochures, Morgenster supplies tens of thousands of its trees to farms across South Africa, and in 2012 Bertrand was honoured once more, this time with an Absa Lifetime Achiever trophy acknowledging the contribution he’s made to the industry.

All perhaps for a zesty salad to make a dream complete. Bertrand proved a fruitful influence on the EVOO world, yet he epitomises a wider success story too – the city slicker whose countryside fantasy becomes reality, the urban businessperson who yearns for a more true lifestyle and finds fulfilment in crafting an elixir ripened from the earth. Add to that the prospect of earning income from honest artisanal work, and the question might be asked: if this chap Giulio could do it – hey, why can’t I? Because the effect of those historic developments resulted in internationalising tastes in South Africa, Morgenster’s rise can be summarised in one word: growth.

‘An amazing number of people have entered the olive-oil field,’ says Linda Costa, a blender, consultant and co-director of Olives Go Wild. ‘Whereas for many years the industry association, SA Olive, had about 100 members, it has grown to more than 200, and not all farmers are members either. If we look at labels on the shelves, they’re also exploding.

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(Left) Small producers; best cultivars. Perry Chaloner of Falcon’s Nest farm says South African olive oils score on both counts. However, they have to compete on price with European imports. Local consumers need to develop the taste for quality for that to be immaterial

(Below) Andries Rabie’s ancestors have farmed in Worcester’s Langeberg mountain territory since the late 17th century. In the last 10 years, he’s cultivated 280 hectares for the production of extra-virgin olive oil under the Willow Creek label. As chair of SA Olive, he’s confident about the future growth of this niche industry as well as the prospects for his own venture. A word of warning to new players, though: often the only return on investment is ‘return on ego’

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INVESTMENT

At a conservative estimate, there are easily 60 different labels out there.’

In particular, market demand is expanding, bringing with it fresh opportunity.

While South Africa’s consumption of olive oil is small by world standards, it is nonetheless a doughty 3,5 million litres per annum, and industry folk are optimistic that it will increase. Junior Burger, general manager of the farming company Tokara, echoes Bertrand when he says the future of EVOO, ‘a naturally cholesterol-free product’, lies in heightened consumer awareness of its health benefits.

The Olive Shed at Tokara was a sideline to its vineyards until 2008, when a decision was made to ‘sweat the assets’, build the brand synergies between their wine and olive oil, and offer the market ‘a more complete basket of products’. Burger describes Tokara as a ‘young, up-and-coming brand’ but Andries Rabie, MD of Willow Creek Olive Estate, is bolder in his self-description.

‘We’re the biggest local brand on the shelves,’ he says, and while he believes competitors often make the mistake of

of oil, but [local market share] is growing fast.

Five years ago it was 80 percent imports to 20 percent local, and before that, 90 to 10, so we’re steadily eating at the imported figure. We can grow the industry; we can create massive numbers of jobs.’

Growth attracts investment; investment drives growth. Although this virtuous circle has been spinning like a bugger, Rabie says it wound down in 2011 as an after-effect of the recessionary slump in world olive-oil prices. The terrific news is that Spain’s recent crop was ‘a total disaster’ and, with prices ‘rocketing’ against imminent shortages, he predicts investment will soon normalise.

But let no-one accuse Rabie of leading the unwary into perdition. The EVOO world remains a niche sector with only ‘five to seven big players’; most newcomers are boutique operations and he is wryly sceptical of their chances. Some are one-hit wonders never heard from again; others stay the course or even rise to success. For many more, as Costa says, it’s ‘hand-to-mouth’, and lifestyle satisfactions are the chief reward. Or, as Rabie

The fixed idea in consumers’ minds is that ‘olive oil is olive oil’, which is as disconcerting for the EVOO crew as it would be for winemakers if everyone believed, ‘Plonk is plonk, old pal’. working only a single market segment, Willow Creek does them all: the retired Good Lifers, the Daily Providers (mums in supermarket aisles) and the Kitchen Artists, ‘guys who love to entertain, who like an oil with a story to it’.

Undergirding the brand is a network of agents selling to delis and restaurants, along with a company that handles sales, distribution and merchandising to smaller retailers.

Major retailers are serviced directly from the estate, where 175 000 trees stretch across 280 hectares of land overseen by Worcester’s Langeberg mountain range – territory Rabie’s ancestors have farmed in since 1691.

Set against this history, Rabie’s 10-year-old EVOO op is a mere pup, but there is matter-offact determination in his voice and, speaking as the chair of SA Olive, his assessment of the industry is as robust as that of his own venture.

‘Local production is about 30 percent of the consumption. We still import 70 percent

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puts it, the only investment return is ‘return on ego’.

Olives, it should be stressed, don’t grow on seafood pizzas. They come from what are known as ‘trees’; that is, the realm of farming.

And farming, apparently, is not all about wearing dungarees and zoning out on brandy and Coke.

On the production side, it’s an expensive, risky undertaking. On the market side, recovering costs, let alone earning a decent profit, is a battle, because the challenge is to command a price high enough to make matters worthwhile and low enough for products to solicit buyers. The EVOO game is both smaller and fuller than it might seem – if not entirely saturated, as it were, then crowded. It’s a competitive space, sometimes ruthlessly so.

Allowing for myriad situation-specific variables, Rabie outlines the ballpark

outlay and yields. An economical unit is 25 hectares; less than that is boutique territory. Breakeven is at about year eight on capital investment of R75 000/ha, a sum excluding infrastructure costs – tractors, dams, all that – as well as property costs: let’s call the total R250 000 to R300 000.

A normal harvest is 2 000 litres/ha, selling price is roughly R55/litre, so that’s R100 000 turnover; deduct farming costs of R30 000 plus factory costs of R15 000 and you clear R50 000/ha. ‘You’re looking at net ROI of 10 to 15 percent… if everything goes well.’

A fine caveat. Acquiring and establishing a farm requires forethought to factors ranging from climate and soil to cultivars, irrigation and planting density. Adds Perry Chaloner of Falcon’s Nest farm, one of the reasons South African oils win so many awards is because, ‘if you’re small, you can often do things a lot better than the big producers’. The terroir, he says, is also key.

‘A lot of the premium European producers source part of their blends from North Africa, which has a similar latitude to the Cape,’ Chaloner says. ‘One of our advantages is that we’re able to pick and choose the best cultivars.

If you travel around the Mediterranean, for example, you see thousands of beautiful olive trees but, because they’re ancient cultivars, the quality of oil is mediocre at best.’

Running the farm demands adroit organisation, especially in harvest season. ‘As the olive ripens,’ Costa says, ‘its oil content increases all the time but the flavourful components decrease.’ There’s a limited window for striking the desired balance between quality and quantity, so timing is critical. Once the oil is extracted, it must be guarded from air and light or it goes rancid.

The real devils are the unplannables.

‘The biggest challenge,’ Burger says, ‘is the inconsistency in the year-to-year annual harvest.’ In one typical case, a farm dipped and rose on a five-year roller coaster from 14 tonnes to 38, 66 and 14 before tripping the light fantastic at 122 tonnes. ‘The farm manager did exactly the same thing every year.

There were no hurricanes, no major spells of heat or cold, no environmental impacts…’

Farming costs, however, remain constant, making every year a boom-or-bust gamble.

Marketing the oil presents further issues. It needs to be packaged, warehoused, distributed – all of which could add to the

photography: GETTYIMAGES.COM; SUPPLIED

When Italian textile magnate Giulio Bertrand decided to retire to the country, he chose a vineyard estate destined to become more than a garden for his new home. Morgenster’s terroir has put the local olive-oil industry on the map

asking price. ‘By the time the oil gets to the shelf,’ Costa says, ‘it could cost three times as much. At the same time, you want to keep it at a price consumers can afford. The producer is squeezed at every turn.’

She believes that cooperatives and amalgamated brands might remedy matters; the downside for some producers is that it would entail relinquishing the overarching objective: return on ego. For consumers, the profusion of labels is a mixed blessing.

Although prices are competitive, the variety of choice can be almost as ‘confusing’ as it is tantalising. For producers, it’s just plain tough. ‘Putting out a new label doesn’t mean it will start selling immediately.’

If at all. The major impediment to local olive oil is one that casts a continent-sized shadow over it: Europe, the largest importer into South Africa. ‘We struggle to compete in price with the Europeans due to the subsidies they receive under the European Economic Community’s Common Agricultural Policy.

Under their Single Farm Payment system, the farmers are paid a subsidy per hectare of land owned whether they grow anything or not. Hence they can sell their olives into the market at less than true cost and still make a living,’ says Chaloner.

Although most of South African olive oil is ‘in the higher end of the market’, from ‘a volume perspective the majority of consumers are price-driven in their selection and, in this category, it’s hard to compete with cheaper, inferior oil from abroad’.

Putting it differently, given the choice between a classy yet pricier local oil and a European product, the average South African will grab the latter and not think twice about it.

The problem doesn’t end there. In the long run it teaches consumers habits of bad taste in that they’re desensitised to the discriminations on which a growth in consumption of quality olive oil depends. The fixed idea in consumers’ minds is that ‘olive oil is olive oil’, which is as disconcerting for the EVOO crew as it would be for winemakers if everyone believed, ‘Plonk is plonk, old pal’.

Imports have a distinct price advantage then – but according to Rabie there’s more to it than subsidies: he contends that ‘fraudulent marketing’ is rife.

‘What happens in the European Union is that they take old oil and put it through a charcoal filter that removes all the flavours and blend that oil back into some extra-virgin oil.

They then sell it as extra-virgin olive oil when it is not so any more. That creates a lower price point, which is brought into South Africa, with the result that retail buyers want to compare our prices to those of imported oil – and you can’t compare them.’

Rabie supports his allegations with tests SA Olive conducted in 2010 of products marketed as EVOO. Whereas 90 percent of local oils passed it, only 23 percent of imports were up to spec.

Evidently some oils are not so much extra virgin as extra harlot, and perhaps many entrants to the industry, lured by the

opportunities but beset by the challenges, would say they know just how that feels. For prospective newcomers, especially those owning a smallholding with an olive orchard, Burger offers this advice: be realistic, start with small-quantity pressings, outsource oil processing, and see whether the market’s interested before scaling up the capital outlays.

Do things progressively and position yourself in the seed-to-shelf value chain rather than trying to do it all yourself at the outset.

In other words, you can skin an olive in more than one way – a point Rabie takes up. ‘There are three steps to investing in the industry. If you want to go into production, the first step is acquiring a farm and selling the fruit to a processor. The second is to set up your own factory and sell in bulk to another entity that markets the product (under its brand). The third is to create your brand and take it forward. Here you don’t really need a farm or a factory. You can buy oil in bulk and create a blend.’

Investing in the EVOO countryside fantasy: good deal, bad deal? Costa speaks a great truth in half-apology. ‘It’s trite to say this, but it won’t work if you come in just to make money. You need passion.’ She laughs.

‘Lots of money, lots of passion.’ And Rabie observes: in life many things catch the eye but few the heart. Return on investment; return on ego. Sometimes you can’t have both – indeed, sometimes you can’t have either. It’s then that you’re acting from soulful desire: a morning star calls and you follow.

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Experienced pilots like Jeff Ayliffe hardly look at their wings when in flight, because they can feel exactly what they’re doing.

For extra sensitivity to pressure changes, Ayliffe never holds the toggles but controls the lines with his fingers

PHOTOGRAPHIC ESSAY

Where Eagles Dare Learning paragliding basics is easier than you’d imagine, but – as with most things worth doing – they’re difficult to truly master.

Words jazz kuschke Photography and captions craig kolesky/Nikon/Lexar

‘An attempt to escape land by means of the air…’

A narrative on free flight need not – as they so often do – contain a reference to mythical Icarus. In fact, paragliding (in its basic form) is so inexorably tied to landmass and localised weather conditions that, for it to happen, it needs the earth.

Geographers all ‘How high and far you’re going to get depends almost entirely on the pilot’s understanding of the weather, the local geography and the wing he’s flying,’ confirms Jeff Ayliffe, who’s been dangling his legs from under skydiving and paragliding canopies for more than 30 years.

‘You need either thermal lift, where columns of air rise due to heating – the strength and severity of which depends on where you’re flying – or dynamic lift, in coastal conditions [as at his beloved Wilderness], where you fly on a breeze blowing in off the sea and forced upward by a mountain slope,’ he says.

If it sounds simple, well really it is. According to Ayliffe, anyway. He believes he can have a newbie airborne and proficiently safe within two days. The wing and the lines and the harness are the easy bits. ‘To get really good at it, though… to really develop an affinity for weather lore and wind laws – that takes proper time.’

Ayliffe had a parachute-packing licence by age 13 and jumped from a plane (with special permission) for the first time just before his 16th birthday. Time dues he’s paid in full, and then some.

Blue beginnings Ayliffe was witness to the birth of modern paragliding when he went to France in 1985 to compete in the World

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A helmet and eyewear are standard safety gear. The sunglasses to ward off glare, insects and windburn, and the helmet – much like in skydiving – for bumps and knocks during takeoff or in flight rather than for serious protection in the event of a crash

With this rainbow of lines (each with a specific function), it’s clear why getting one’s lines tangled is one of the most common ‘incidents’ in paragliding

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PHOTOGRAPHIC ESSAY Wilderness on the Garden Route offers both thermal-lift and dynamic-air flying conditions from various sites.

The views are rather special too

Skydiving Championships. ‘We saw French skydivers running off mountains with skydiving wings and brought the technique home to KwaZulu-Natal. If I look back, we had to fly in almost gale-force winds just to stay in the air.

And if I think about how little we knew about the weather conditions, it’s pretty scary,’ he muses. ‘We understood parachutes but we knew nothing about the weather.’

As tied as paragliders are to the whims of the weather and the lay of the land, so they remain slaves to gravity.

It is far from a daredevil’s folly then, and today the sport of parapente is strictly regulated, with pilots requiring licencing to fly. It’s also self-policed in a manner only possible in sports where the pack is relatively small and the stakes lethal.

Ayliffe, like many pilots of his distinction and air miles, has been to the edge of risk and back. ‘In my skydiving days I was a little bit of a lunatic – we went crazy there for a while. Then, when the paragliding thing started, we used to run off buildings in Durban.’ He infamously scammed his way onto the roof of the Umhlanga Sands Resort under the guise of being a Panorama magazine photographer. ‘I landed on the beach and, ironically, they asked me to do it as an Easter demo every year. I have a son now, so I’m a lot more conservative.’

What may seem a throwaway statement is rather a fundamental insight into what could be seen as a highly selfish endeavour. After all, you don’t really go anywhere, you can’t take passengers (aside from a tandem client) and, indeed, there are things that make more noise and a lot more sense. ‘I’ve had an attachment with the sky since I was very young and, if I don’t fly, I become a helluva nasty oke to live with,’ smiles Ayliffe.

Freedom, a need for adrenaline, a desire to push the limits, a floating feeling that can only be compared to being underwater – all valid reasons Ayliffe won’t deny, but the real reason he flies is because it makes him happy.

FOR THE BIRDS And what makes him most happy is flying with birds.

‘I was right down, about to land, when I saw a fish eagle take off out of the trees,’ he recounts his most memorable experience. ‘I committed for the trees and followed her, and got up way above the take-off when she disappeared.

That was pretty special.’

If you’re interested in learning to fly, contact Jeff Ayliffe on 082 798 1100.

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Pilots are slaves to localised weather patterns and spend years tuning their amateur climatological skills.

Experienced wingmen like Ayliffe can read the weather and predict short- and longer-term changes simply by looking at the sky. They also have wind readers at most of the sites from which they get updated reports via mobile text message

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PHOTOGRAPHIC ESSAY

High five – Ayliffe passes close on the ridgeline near Wilderness. He’s no longer a competitive pilot but rather flies purely for enjoyment – and therefore, so he says, he doesn’t push the limits too much any more. ‘But I still have a very strong connection to my skydiving background where I like to fly fast and, sometimes, close to the ground’ 74

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post-production: jean-pierre gouws at blink

PHOTOGRAPHIC ESSAY

Bird sense – pilots have a variometer that indicates when they’re climbing, but they’re always in tune with their surroundings, watching trees, the sea and the birds for clues of wind shifts and weather changes With thanks to Nikon and Lexar ISSUE 18 P R I V A T E E D I T I O N 7 5

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AN MTN INITIATIVE

Winning Streak

Stealth, sweat and strength juxtaposed with elegance and luxury. This was the heady mix on and off the field on the final leg of the 2012 BMW International Polo Series. Words RIEKIE HUMAN

It was like a scene from a modern-day aristocratic memoir: gloriously crisp and sunny weather; sleek thoroughbreds musclejittery before the game; spring fashion on parade. Entrepreneurs, big-business icons, sporting giants (including Chad le Clos, newly bathed in Olympic glory) and South African celebrities (Kerishnie Naicker and Zuraida Jardine) assembled for one of the highlights of the polo calendar: the final leg of the BMW International Polo Series, held at Waterfall Polo Park in Johannesburg at the end of August 2012.

An annual highlight not only for the polo set but also part of MTN’s line-up of invitationonly events for clients on the MTN Prestige programme, the international between South Africa and India attracted a record number of spectators. The boys in green and gold – as perfectly toned and game savvy as the ponies that strode out – clinched the series with an impressive 15-7 win after walloping the same opponents 11-6 in Durban the week before.

The players were on a roll and the weather, the fields and the gods were all aligned. Yet, as Megan Ashman, MTN’s General Manager for Customer Management, pointed out: ‘Just imagine what it would’ve been like had the event been held two weekends ago, when all of Johannesburg was covered in snow!’

MTN’s box at the BMW International Polo Series finale is an annual institution, with the calibre of the players on the field well matched by the guest list.

Sporting agility, tenacity and sheer athletic

greatness. That pretty much sums up man of the match Duncan Watson (the eldest son of South Africa’s most capped international polo player Russell Watson). Duncan teamed up with talented captain Bryan Hein and Leroux Hendriks, recently judged most valuable player at the SA Championships, to compete before some of the City of Gold’s most dynamic business icons. Guests in the meticulously themed MTN box were able to network in a prestigious yet relaxed environment, effortlessly interspersing business conversations with parenting advice and tips on shoe-shopping abroad.

match before, it’s been on their to-do list.

‘This is exactly the kind of event we love to attend. It’s such a great mix of our interests: great food, fascinating company and new experiences, such as polo – all under the umbrella of an elite occasion,’ he said. ‘When they say life is good, this is what they refer to.

There’s no doubt about it.’

He also highlighted the powerful networking potential of the event: ‘This is clearly the cream of MTN’s corporate crop.

MTN and BMW are in the upper echelons of brands, and this kind of synergy just makes so much sense.’

‘Polo’s gone from being the domain of the horsey set to being favoured by the fashion set. This is where the top strata – the who’s who of the chic clique – come to strut their stuff.’ – Megan Ashman While the horses are there to sweat and stretch their legs and the men to pit themselves against team-mates and rivals, many guests attend this event just to be seen. As one wellheeled guest remarked to her host: ‘It’s all about the experience. I know nothing about polo but that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy this.

On the contrary – this is sublime!’

Kingsley Juma, a Gauteng-based entrepreneur who owns a number of supermarkets in the urban hub, echoed this thought, pointing out that even though he and his wife, Gqibi, had never attended a polo

Zanele Mapisa, Marketing Manager at Express Verification Services (a subsidiary of Empowerdex Group) concurred: ‘Such an event shows that MTN really cares about clients – and it gives me the opportunity to rub shoulders with other prestige clients.’

Perfectly in line with MTN’s objectives, these sentiments ring true, said Ashman.

‘Polo’s always been regarded as an elite sport and very much the domain of the top end of society, so it’s a perfect opportunity to mingle with our most esteemed clients. This specific event has become a bit of an institution in

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Johannesburg – and for us. It’s an annual function that’s synonymous with MTN.’ She said that MTN wanted to go beyond the game and offer select clients an extraordinary experience. Taking a thematic cue from the visiting side, India, the box was decorated with intricate fabrics and adorned umbrellas.

There was also a pop-up henna tattoo parlour and a seemingly endless array of treats – Veuve Clicquot by the bucketful, fresh oysters (shucked at your table to spare them sun and air), delicate samoosas, pungent lobster curry presented in little bamboo cups…

All the pampering didn’t go unnoticed and Mapisa remarked afterwards: ‘It was such a thrill to dress up, socialise, kick back

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and feel very important for a few hours. I was also blown away by the service levels and the beautiful layout of MTN’s area.’

With the industries represented on MTN’s guest list for the day ranging from IT to BEE-rating firms, Ashman said that it provides the kind of eclectic and vibrant mix that’s perfect for unusual networking opportunities. ‘Over the years, I’ve seen a transition. The people who come here have changed, and nowadays “black diamonds” have a formidable presence at polo events. It actually makes sense, if you consider polo’s popularity in Africa. Also, polo’s gone from being the domain of the horsey set to being favoured by the fashion set. This is where the

top strata – the who’s who of the chic clique – come to strut their stuff.’

Tying in with MTN’s strategy to bring customers experiences they wouldn’t normally have, it’s the little touches that provide the golden thread through the Prestige programme, said Ashman. ‘Some of our guests wouldn’t ordinarily come to this kind of event, so it offers them the opportunity for a whole new experience – and it opens up new doors to boot.’

Schmoozing the goalposts, shall we say?

For more information, visit www.mtnprestige.co.za.

photography: courtesy of MTN and grant difford

AN MTN INITIATIVE

Uniquely Luxurious Cape Town’s latest fashion icon, situated at the foot of Table Mountain

The stylish and sophisticated African Pride 15 on Orange Hotel is the perfect luxury destination for a special night away.

Individual design, exquisite luxury and first class service make way for a superior guest experience. The ultra-spacious suites are tailored for leisure travellers and those looking to stay in style in the city that put style on the map.

SAvOUr THE MOMEnT ExCLUSIvE OFFEr: r1099* PEr PErSOn SHArInG, PEr nIGHT. Includes: One night stay in a Deluxe Suite for two people including breakfast, a 2 course candlelit dinner for two at Savour restaurant, champagne and chocolate platter on arrival, a romantic turndown, complimentary late check-out and a 15 minute couples massage. *Terms & Conditions Apply. Subject to availability. valid until 30 April 2013

Corner Grey’s Pass and Orange Street, Cape Town 8001, South Africa Tel: +27 (0) 21 469 8000 - Fax: +27 (0) 21 469 8001 Email: reservations@15onorangehotel.com africanpridehotels.com/15onorange

PHDS 25702/12

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[Opposite] International conservationist Dr Ian Player says once you’ve spent a night under African skies, you’re never the same. At Shamwari’s Explorer Camp, headlamps are provided to illuminate the dimly lit path to the ablutions

[Opposite below] Hot water can be piped to the openair shower on request; the construction of an expansive wooden deck on top of this largely granite rock was no mean feat

Ways of the Wild Food, water, mates: it’s the bush survival kit.

Words DEBBIE HATHWAY

Two nights. That’s the minimum you need to spend at Shamwari Game Reserve near Port Elizabeth to allow the essence of the environment to enter your being. Three days is the least amount of time it takes to fully explore the 25 000-hectare private game reserve with its magnificent wildlife in the kind of space they should be in; to shed the pressures of a workaday existence and start becoming a nice person again. Nice to your partner and nice to the people trained to give you the kind of experience that feeds body, mind and soul.

Sure, it might take longer for some to unwind, but they may have time on their side and the capacity to book a longer stay.

Specialist guides Geran Ellish and Johann Lombard joke that a safari is the greatest test of a relationship. But there’s a serious undertone.

After almost 20 years each in the field, they’ve seen and heard it all. They’ve become as expert at reading people as they do the spoor they track daily while they educate their guests to the ways of the wild.

On the reserve, and especially on a guided bush walk from the recently opened Shamwari Explorer Camp, it’s an animal’s world. The camp is Ellish’s domain, a back-to-basics approach that’s almost been lost for the superluxury market. It’s camouflaged by dense bush and protected only by two strands of electrified wire at night. (‘We had to put it up after a lion killed a warthog outside one of the tents soon after we opened.’) The camp comprises four

two-man tents for guests, one open-air shower and a flushing toilet. Nutritional sustenance revolves around an open fire.

‘The best way to experience the bush is on a guided walk. Follow the rules and obey the guide’s signals. It’s not negotiable. Animals that feel threatened don’t care if you’re the CEO of a large corporate, and if you’re of prey size, you don’t stand a chance either – hence the age limit of no under-16s,’ says Ellish.

As we walk through the renosterveld, crossing animal highways and open roads while consciously avoiding the dense thickets, the drying sand reveals evidence of baboon, hyena, jackal, warthog, red hartebeest, oryx, gemsbok, giraffe, aardwolf and elephant.

Our small group takes a break under a milkwood (there are four with nationalmonument status in South Africa) and inspects the territorial rubbings of a rhino on the bark of a nearby tree. Silence is encouraged. ‘Let’s sit and enjoy where we are; just absorb the peace and quiet,’ says Ellish. It’s almost palpable.

Some black harriers fly overhead – they’re a nationally threatened species and Shamwari has about 10 breeding pairs – and then, unusually, a group of crowned lapwings (plovers), which are normally seen in pairs.

As the walk recommences, we’re reminded of the interdependence of fauna and flora – the evidence of seeds eaten by elephant that only germinate once they’ve been through their system, and an abandoned aardvark hole

where a warthog has taken up residence. These holes can be three or four metres deep, large enough for a brown hyena or a porcupine, or an African rock python to hibernate in during winter. Even ant-eating chats and the South African shelduck like to lay their eggs there.

We stop at a water hole to listen to the satellite calls of frogs – males advertising for females. ‘They can only tell each other’s sex when they mount each other,’ Ellish says. ‘So there’s a call for catch and release; males mount males before realising it’s a bad decision.’

Later, the group travels about an hour north through the reserve to Villa Lobengula.

At the base of a mountain three valleys and a few ridges away, lies Lombard’s idea of heaven. ‘We saw lions two days ago; a resident female with cubs,’ he says.

They don’t appear again, but having spotted two cheetah brothers the day before, we had the big-cats box ticked in our search for the Big Five, and aren’t too disappointed.

Even though most conservation efforts are focused around rhino, Lombard warns that, with a decreasing number of tiger skins and bones available to the Asian market, people are starting to target the African lion. ‘It’s probably the next endangered species on this continent. There are fewer than 30 000 lions left, compared to more than two million a century ago,’ he says.

Illegal activities on the reserve are kept to a minimum by a former organised-crime

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specialist, who is ‘very effective at seeking intelligence and getting it through’.

En route, we pass Shamwari’s Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre, which provides a haven for wild and rescued lions. A solitary lioness suns herself in one of the reserve’s two Born Free Animal Rescue and Education Centres.

Saved from unspeakable abuse elsewhere in the world, lions and leopards that wouldn’t survive being released into the wild retire here.

As we proceed to Nola’s Open, we get close to giraffe, zebra, impala and springbok, including several yearlings with the black recessive gene. Surprisingly, many have evaded predation. There are more, along with black wildebeest, in the distance. ‘I’m still trying to figure out who Nola is but there are always animals here. I’ve spotted seven different

mammal species in a 180-degree view, the birdlife is exceptional and the cliff ecosystem is phenomenal. There’s a resident leopard that moves from here to the villa and beyond,’ says Lombard. ‘Purple and yellow flowers explode here in spring – you can’t see green. And that koppie on the left is littered with stone tools and San paintings. It’s the most beautifully preserved open-air museum.’

Along the route there’s a lot of lichen, which only grows where there is little air pollution. No surprise then that the night skies are magnificent too.

Villa Lobengula is the result of a revamp of an existing lodge. It’s now an holistic retreat, its structure designed to mirror an African kraal, comprising six suites (one with an extra lounge and two with their own plunge pools).

[Below] Player emphasises the spiritual enrichment that guests gain from spending time in game reserves. Villa Lobengula’s location and offering delivers even more

[Opposite above] Player’s conservation efforts in South Africa were inspired by the white rhino.

[Opposite below] Geran Ellish leads a bush walk near Explorer Camp

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Families are welcome. It’s safe to walk freely around the property by day; at night guests in the furthest room are escorted ‘just in case’.

Thai massage, reflexology and yoga top the bill at the spa while organic fresh produce is favoured in the kitchen. Meal times revolve around guests. ‘We’ll wake you with coffee at a decent hour if the yellow-breasted finches don’t get you up first, invite you to breakfast, and leave when it’s warmer and the animals have come out of the bush. That way, you’ll appreciate it more,’ says Lombard.

The villa is a special, sensual place with a great rejuvenating energy. It’s where you can just be… and feel (without being too dramatic about it). In this environment and with this level of hospitality you’ve no choice but to leave feeling nurtured… and extremely privileged.

PHOTOGRAPHY: SHAMWARI GROUP

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HOW TO GET THERE If you’re travelling by air, your destination is Port Elizabeth Airport. From there it’s about an hour’s drive to Shamwari’s main gate. If you don’t want to attract the wrong kind of attention from predators, wear shades of blue or earthy tones, not bright colours. Pack walking boots for the bush walk, as thorns will penetrate sneakers.

Oh, and no oranges, please. There’s no telling what an elephant with a citrus addiction might do to get at them.

Tariffs: The bush camp costs R2 800 per person per night, all inclusive. The entire villa can be hired for R48 500 per night, excluding drinks, throughout 2013.

September to early December is the best time to visit, weather-wise.

Shamwari has launched a Celebrity Ambassador Rhino Calendar to raise funds for the Wilderness Foundation and to increase awareness around the plight of the rhino in South Africa.

The perpetual calendars are available at Shamwari Group properties.

For bookings, call 041 509 3000 or visit shamwarigroup.com.

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[Top] The tug pilot of the Super Cub increases revs on a Worcester runway, ready to tow the Grob Twin Astir aloft.

In ideal conditions, a glider can travel a thousand kilometres at up to 280km/h

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[Below] A Cape Gliding Club trainer soars towards Queen Victoria Peak, the highest part of the mountain range hugging the Breede River Valley

Thermal Dynamics

To soar like a bird. It’s been an enduring dream since the beginning of our species. Gliding comes just about as close to that dream as is humanly possible.

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Words and photography JUSTIN FOX

The parachute’s clipped on and you’re buckled into the tiny cockpit. A towrope’s attached to the nose below your feet. A helper lifts the end of the wing and gives a thumbs up. The tug pilot increases the revs. The line grows taught as the dinky plane accelerates.

Your mouth is dry; there’s a drumbeat in your chest. It’s your first flight...

The glider begins to rumble down the runway. Bushes and carpets of wild flowers stream by. You hold your breath. With an unexpected rush of lift, the glider is airborne.

You swing round in the seat with an enormous grin on your face to find your expression mirrored by the instructor.

The 180hp Super Cub banks southwest and drags you towards the mountains, climbing steeply. Wind buffets the glider: you’re a fish on a line, struggling to be free.

‘We’re going to find some ridge lift on Queen Victoria Peak,’ shouts the instructor. ‘Then you’ll be taking over the controls.’

Serrated crags draw closer. Perilously close. The instructor taps you on the shoulder. It’s time for release. You pull hard on the yellow toggle. There’s a jarring ‘thunk’.

The loose line snakes away and the tow plane banks to starboard.

So now you’re a bird. There’s utter silence, save for the whoosh of the wind. No engine: just these great white wings bearing you aloft.

You’re in a bubble strapped to the back of a mighty bird.

The variometer shatters the silence as the glider loses altitude, dropping towards the cliff face. Your jaw clenches; you press back in the seat. This doesn’t feel good. Then suddenly the glider finds ridge lift and you’re soaring upwards. Now 4 000 feet, up and up, now 4 500 feet. Could this be the most beautiful elevator ride on earth?

Pulling Gs The glider comes to the end of the Kweekkraalberge ridge and you bank hard round, pulling Gs that press you back into your seat. The mountain pours past the Perspex bubble in a blur of jumbled rock.

‘Okay, now you take her,’ says a voice behind you.

You reach forward apprehensively and grab the stick. You nudge left and there’s a delay before the glider responds. Little movements are all that’s required. It feels just like a yacht: you’re sailing the air currents.

Pulling back gently, the glider begins to climb and the speed decreases accordingly until you’re down to 80km/h. The glider is almost touching the dark cloud base and the canopy speckles with rain.

Now you push forward and bank. The great bird responds and you’re diving: 100km/h… 120km/h. You whoop for joy, pulling back as the glider soars over Queen Victoria Peak.

Just then, a red light flashes on the Flarm.

You’ve got company. ‘Bandit! Below and behind me,’ or so you think, snapping into World War II mode.

But it’s only the single-seater, released from the tow and slipping past beneath you. The sleek, white fuselage is pure grace against sombre crags and vineyard stripes far below. The bird pulls a steep chandelle, a stall turn and cloverleaf before diving down the face of the mountain in a display of breathtaking aerobatics.

The lowdown Getting into gliding is surprisingly easy.

South Africa’s two largest clubs are in the Magaliesberg and Worcester. They’re active most weekends and run dedicated courses a few times a year. An ‘introduction to gliding day’ gets you flying in no time at all.

I chose the Cape Gliding Club (CGC), based in Worcester, about 120 kilometres from Cape Town. Longtime club member Mike Pascoe showed me round the hangars.

There were tow planes and gliders of every kind, from Grob Twin Astir trainers to highperformance single-seaters.

We took a closer look at the Astir I’d be flying in. There was an aerodynamic fibreglass body and long, thin wings to maximise lift. It had the elegance of an albatross. Pascoe

demonstrated how foot pedals controlled the rudder, while a stick controlled the ailerons and elevator. There was a blue lever for air brakes and a green one for elevator trim. The instrument panel was crammed with gauges for rate of climb, altitude, speed, temperature and Gs. The handy little Flarm device on the dashboard was a GPS, computer and radio combination that warned you of other aircraft in the vicinity and indicated their location.

This is particularly useful when gliders congregate around a thermal and there’s risk of collision.

‘Pilots search for different kinds of lift: thermals, ridge lift caused by wind blowing against the side of a hill, or wave lift over mountains,’ explained Pascoe.

‘In good conditions, a glider can cover a thousand kilometres and reach speeds of up to 280km/h.’

There are two main methods of launching, either by aero-tow or winch. Pascoe pointed out the tow planes and showed me the winch, a strange device that looked more like a farming implement but was able to pull a glider to a height of between 650 and 900 metres, allowing for a short (but cheap and easy) flight.

Out on the runway I got talking to my instructor, Durr Pieters, a passionate gliding exponent. ‘Up there, you’re so aware of the air, the atmosphere, the weather,’ he enthused. ‘Gliding is more graceful than any other form of flying. Compared to its cousins, like paragliding, it’s faster, higher and the distances so much greater. You are like an eagle. You’re at the mercy of the elements, sailing from updraft to updraft, running along the air’s energy lines. There’s a kind of magic in gliding.’

Pieters also told me about the exhilarating challenge of cross-country flying, when glider pilots never know where they might land.

‘There’s a huge thrill in the unpredictability,’ he explained. ‘You might end up in some farmer’s field 500 kilometres from where you started.’

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‘There’s utter silence, save for the whoosh of the wind. No engine: just these great white wings bearing you aloft. You’re in a bubble strapped to the back of a mighty bird.’

Ways and means Most clubs in the country offer introductory ‘air experience’ flights – often in motorised gliders – that would give you a taste of what it’s all about. If you want to take it further, you can join the club and go along for weekend training or for one of the more intensive four-day courses offered a couple of times a year.

You’ll need between 30 and 50 dual-instruction flights before you’ll be allowed to fly solo. You’ll also need to pass a medical exam, get an aeronautical radio operator’s licence and write an exam on South African glider rules and regulations, as well as attend some lectures on airmanship, meteorology and the like. Finally, you’ll get your glider pilot’s licence and be good to go.

An air-experience flight at CGC costs R700 for an aero-tow launch and lasts about 30 minutes. An intensive four-day course costs about R5 500 (which includes all tuition, books, flights and meals). Joining the club costs R3 500. Membership is R255 per month and gives you access to equipment, facilities and instruction. Club members pay R26,50 a minute for an aero-tow and R50 for a winch launch. Flights start from R2,75 a minute.

For more information, call 082 800 2035 or visit www.cgc.org.za.

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[Below] A 180hp Super Cub tows a single-seater glider towards the lofty peaks of the Kweekkraalberge, where it will negotiate air currents way above the vineyards below

AN ELIZABETH ARDEN SOCIAL EVENT

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PHOTOGRAPHY: WERNER PRINSLOO

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ABOVE AND BEYOND A highly unusual property perched in a dizzying setting on Johannesburg’s Linksfield Ridge with neverending vistas of the city below – what better location for a gathering of exceptional brands at the top of their game? 1) Musa Ndlovu (IWC), Riëtte Visser, Carmen Spence (Cartier), Elsa Gouws (Panerai) 2) The distinctive home is perfectly positioned to maximise views like this 3) Judith Kets (TurnKey Media Solutions), Carla Ferreira 4) Praveshni Govender (Elizabeth Arden) 5) Mokgadi Mashaphu, Metja Maloba 6) Exquisite appetisers in jewel-like colours 7) Vivid strelitzias lent a regal air 8) Rens Rademeyer and Zantelle van der Linde (Bentley), Nic Morkel (Private Edition) 9) Environmental skin damage meets its match 10) Bentley was on site to showcase its sleek fleet 11) Anton Pispeki (International Wine Company), Les Aupiais (Private Edition)

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ISSUE 18 P R I V A T E E D I T I O N 8 7

ON A FINAL NOTE

Tone Deft

Meet the man Stephen Stills calls a maestro.

Words and photography TREVOR CRIGHTON

Marc Maingard lifts a thin piece of wood to his right ear and taps it with the middle finger of his left hand. Once… twice… He’s been smiling since the first tap but I only hear it on the third. A musical note drifts across his workshop, audible above the waves crashing onto nearby Scarborough beach.

Maingard produces some of the best handcrafted guitars in the world. What sets him apart is his ability to coax the finest tones from the wood he uses to make his instruments.

He says he’d been making ‘passable’ guitars for 14 years when, one day, he held a piece of wood to his ear and tapped it – and it all made sense.

‘I knew then that I’d gained the knack of being able to tell exactly what I’d need to do to a particular piece of wood to make it into a great guitar, and fortunately I’ve never looked back,’ he says.

Maingard has put his name to more than 330 guitars in his career, at prices topping R100 000 a piece. His guitars are made to measure for clients who know quality when they see it – and hear it. Stephen Stills of Crosby, Stills & Nash has described Maingard as ‘the best guitarmaker in the world’ and clients fly in from around the world to consult the guru at his home studio. Barefoot and

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ponytailed, Maingard radiates a sense of calm that’s helped him build his reputation over 40 years. He’s been playing for even longer than that, and got into guitarmaking when one of his own instruments was damaged on a plane and the luthier he sent it to for repairs botched the job. He took the instrument apart and did his own repairs – surprising himself and impressing musician friends. Word spread and a steady flow of repair requests saw him expand his repertoire.

Teaching himself from books and travelling to learn in the workshops of master luthiers in the US, he eventually worked his way through apprenticeships to becoming a full-time guitarmaker.

Maingard’s premier instruments are made from a stock of incredibly rare Brazilian rosewood he picked up decades ago. He enjoys working with this expensive wood because of the colourful tones it delivers, with better volume and clarity than you’d get from a massproduced model. ‘One of my guitars isn’t going to make you a better player but it will open your ears to a musical spectrum that you’d probably struggle to access otherwise,’ he explains. His signature ‘Maingard Bevel Edge’ is a feature that makes for a more comfortable

playing experience and adds 25 hours to the production of a single instrument.

‘I have a particular sound that people come to me for. My guitars are built for playability, comfort and clarity of sound,’ says Maingard.

‘Each instrument is unique – tuning the body of a guitar is something you learn by experience.

It’s not a given that two pieces of wood cut from the same stock will make two guitars that sound identical – that’s the challenge.’

He’s had lucrative offers to put his name to assembly-line guitars produced in the US and China, which would have made him a household name along the lines of Gibson and Fender, but he declined. ‘I saw a Maingard clone in America once – it was a very convincing copy, but it sounded terrible. I decided that I couldn’t put my name to something that I hadn’t built myself and that was the end of it,’ he says. ‘Each of my instruments takes upwards of 80 hours to build by hand and I wouldn’t have it any other way.’

Maingard is a virtuoso player, and it’s an honour to hear the man play one of his own instruments. Art, science, skill and intuition combine in very few places – but he seems to have yoked them with the tap of that middle finger on rosewood.

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