6 minute read
Booze & Beats
FODDER
BOOZE & BEATS
THE COCKTAIL - APEROL SPRITZ
Yeah, yeah, real men don’t drink pink drinks. Well, this Italian aperitif is not pink (it’s naartjie, poephol) and it’s one of the best things to drink in the dog days of summer.
Ingredients: 1 1/4 oz Aperol, 2 oz Prosecco (MCC is fine as a substitute), a splash of soda water
Method: Build into glass over ice, garnish with the orange wedge and serve.
THE BEER - ACBC ‘THE JUICE, CITRA’
Head brewer at Afro-Caribbean Brewing Company, Rochelle Dunlop, keeps hitting it out the park and her latest, ‘The Juice’ is an all Citra hopped IPA with punchy aromas of orange rind and passionfruit. This beer is rounded out by a clean, pithy bitterness. 5.8% 330ml can. Get your orders in now for those dog day afternoons.
acbc.co.za
THE BEATS - SUMMER GOLD
Longtime music contributor to The Mission, John Pienaar serves up another sublime mix featuring South AfricanCanadian Orville Peck, Death Cab for Cutie, The National, Dan Mangan, The Tallest Man On Earth, Spoon, Band Of Horses, SOHN and a whole lot more.
TO LISTEN PRESS
THE WINE CLUB - HAN DRINKS SOLO
Bored by the same old plonk week-in week-out? Perhaps you need to freshen things up with a wine club like Han Drinks Solo? We chat to owner Jono le Feuvre (who is also co-founder of Cape Town coffee kings Rosetta Roastery) to find out why this is not your Uncle Jamie’s fuddy-duddy wine club.
Tell us about the name - we assume you’re a lonely Star Wars fan?
Well, the name is multi-levelled and misleading and, almost always, leads to awkward silences after I have to repeat it twice and then explain it. My wife is a teetotaller, so all my drinking is done solo. And my full name is Jonat(han). I am also a Star Wars fan but not in the way that many people think, which is why I often get into trouble with hardcore fans for being a little light on my Star Wars trivia. What I love about Star Wars is what it achieved in pop culture. To me, it feels like it was one of the first movies to legitimately live larger in the speech, and the lingo and the references of the everyman than it ever did when it was confined to the screen. The significance of Star Wars is the ability for cinema to shape how we think and speak. That is exactly what I’ve been hoping to achieve with my wine club, to take wine out of the “niche artefact” space, and to turn it into something that we can reference and discuss in depth. I guess I want to broaden its significance to our everyday life. Too grandiose? My bad.
What are the biggest misconceptions about South African wine, both at home and abroad?
I think there are two misconceptions at home, but they are connected. The first is that wine is an elitist drink. But if you sat around a braai with winemakers and grape farmers, you would get a very, very different view of wine. Wine is, at its core, about raw earth, alchemy, grubby hands, veldskoene, and sunburn. But it’s hard to use those elements in marketing pitches. The second is that wine is too expensive. Consumers all seem to understand that coffee needs to be fair-trade, and that the farmer needs to get paid more but, when it comes to wine, we’ve almost forgotten that farmers are even involved. The situation in South Africa is that wine grape farmers are among the worst compensated of the whole bunch (lolz). Apples, pears, and citrus are significantly more profitable. But, until consumers can experience that value, they won’t be willing to pay more for the drink. I’m not sure how to solve either one of those problems. Internationally, the biggest misconception around South African wine is that we don’t make great wine, we just make great value wine. The truth though is that we have already managed to impress international wine critics and journalists on every continent with just how superlative our wine can be. BUT, we are still waiting for those opinions to trickle down to the consumer. If you speak to wine writers like Neal Martin, Alder Yarrow, Jancis Robinson or Tim Atkin, they all know that South African wine is one of the hottest properties on the planet right now. But, when you speak to a fine wine consumer who has money to spend and is filling her cellar with Burgundy and Bordeaux and Napa Cabs, then, man, we’re not even on the radar.
Wine clubs have been around in South Africa for a while - how is yours different?
There are a couple of elements that I think are rare, if not unique. Our club slogan is “Wines that will make you sound smarter at dinner parties”. To achieve this, we attach a QR code to every bottle in the monthly mixed case. If you scan this code, it will take you through to a video made specifically about that wine where we discuss who made it, how they made it, and perhaps even a little bit of history or controversy around some of the elements in the wine. The idea is that, by the time you’re done, you should have both learnt something new about the glorious alchemy of wine but also, at a far less geeky level, you should have something to talk about when that awkward silence pops up during dinner with your in-laws. Also, people have definitely been anthropomorphising wine for millennia, but I feel like the way I talk about wine is something a little fresher. If I say, “Guys, don’t cellar this bad boy, you need to drink it now, because it’s far more Mickey Rourke than Raquel Welch” then you’re going to learn something about how a wine ages, and hopefully have a chuckle, too. And if you have no idea who either of those two people are, then you’ll Google them and learn something about pop culture as well. Tri-winning!
After a baking hot day fly fishing on the Cape streams, you head to a Winelands restaurant with loved ones, find a piece of shade under an oak and order a picnic. Somewhere a dove coos. All you need now to punctuate this perfect day is to open a bottle of…?
Ha, this is epic. I love the scene. I’d open a bottle of Olifantsberg Old Vine Chenin Blanc. It has a screw cap, so you don’t need to pack a pesky corkscrew, and it also costs about R130.00, so if Uncle Jamie trips over the picnic blanket and spills everyone’s shit (I hate Uncle Jamie), then the financial loss is bearable.
You’re at Thrift Dam in the most frigid corner of the Eastern Cape in July in balmy -10C weather. You’re still in your waders from the day’s fishing, huddled in a leaky cabin, about to feast on a 12-hour oxtail potjie. If this was Valhalla, you’d be happy. What bottle do you open?
Given the scene you just set, I think I’d need two bottles. The first would be the Van Loggerenberg Graft Syrah from Polkadraai Hills. I’d polish that off on its own, without the distraction of food. But once the oxtail is ready, I’d crack a Warwick Trilogy 2018.
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