Friday 15 June 2007

Drink a Dink

I'm gonna stop being bitter for a second here and address some things.

Somebody's mother posted a bit ondodgy marketing and thus lead to a discussion on South African wine, which as you all fucking know, has been talked about by some awesome people all over the place on the 'tubes.

Which to me is refreshing. South Africa is... A blind spot for me. But this escalating conversation on ethics (of marking -> product -> production) has got me thinking about what I drink. My sister Lmo actually called me up from her work yesterday, where she pimps out rollin' e-class to old grannies up in the W1 to W4 baby babaah! Anyway. She calls me up, worried as hell, going Oh Christ J, is all South African wine bad? How am I supposed to know?

You see, Lmo, like many young women our age, is a wine drinker - ideally she goes for a nice, deep, oaky red - just typically she goes for the cheapest. Like us all! So now I'm all like, woah, she is right. How are we supposed to know when we buy our South African wine at the local Co-Op, if it's been watered with blood?

WIETA - or South African's Wine Industry Ethical Trade Association, has acode of ethics which many UK supermarket chains, including Tescos follow -- but... The code seems a little funny to me, because it seems very difficult to enforce. I don't know! How often is it checked?

There are a list of accredited and audited SA wine makers/fruit growers, which I don't see Stormhoek listed on -- but does WIETA not cover all the wine making regions? Or maybe Stormhoek is owned by somebody else? Maybe I'm missing the whole point, as my usual experience with wine is drinking something French and cheap, not making it or getting it passed by some ethics board.

I agree with what Golby said about Stormhoek -- if they want to be advertised by bloggers, as they are being right now (be it for the wrong reasons perhaps...) they should just open up and express now how cheap their wine is, but how it's made.

As somebody's mother always told me, when we were selling our warez on eBay so we could eat -- it's not the product that sells, it's the story.

Tell me the story of production, truthfully and without 'funny' cartoons, and you won't have to give me free bottles of cheap booze. I'll spend the £4.99 myself, if it means the dudes and dudettes planting, feeding, picking, washing, crushing, fermenting and bottling the stuff is getting a fair slice of that cash, rather then free bottles of cheap booze. Ya diiig?

Hell. Maybe I'd blog about it.

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