Cleaning up the Cape

(JancisRobinson) - Bidding is always fierce for the most distinctive lot in the annual Cape Winemakers Guild auction, the giant 18-litre bottle filled with a special blend of the best wines of the most recent vintage produced by members of this elite club of South Africa's top vintners. At this year's sale, held three weeks ago in Stellenbosch, the winning bidder, Czech wine merchant Zdenek Lang, declined to take his booty back to Prague. Instead, he declared, he was leaving it with the Guild, to be opened only when the first black winemaker is elected as one of their members. The 2009 blend will probably last a good 20 years but even that may not be long enough to see the cork pulled. Equal opportunity, black empowerment and transferring expertise to the previously disadvantaged may be the convoluted names of the Cape restitution game but, 17 years after the creation of the rainbow nation, there are still pitifully few black or Cape coloured winemakers. The Guild has a highly publicised protégé programme, but so far a total of only five particularly promising students at the local wine college have been sponsored (although admittedly their first graduate, Howard Booysen, is already making waves).

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