Tasting the Cape is a guide and travelling companion to the world-renowned Cape Winelands. Filled with insights from one of South Africa’s most influential food and wine critics, the book offers the wine lover a new and accessible approach to South African wines by grouping the featured estates by character – the formal types, the wacky ones and the quiet achievers.
Tasting the Cape will not only introduce you to the legends of the Cape Winelands, and the history of the estates they call home, but will also show you how to navigate your way through the region depending on your interests and the type of wine you are interested in tasting – suggesting routes that combine wine with scenic drives and history.
About the author
Jean-Pierre Rossouw has been a wine columnist for the Cape Times, Condé Nast House & Garden and BestLife and is the creator, author and editor of Rossouw’s Restaurants, an independent guide to dining out in South Africa. He decided to get serious and write about wine and food after law and literature studies and a career in advertising.
In a climate in which companies are frequently painted as social outlaws, and where much pressure is exerted on them fundamentally to change their ways, business for the most part takes the line of appeasement and acquiescence. In corporate circles this acquiescence is evident everywhere and has given rise to the burgeoning industry of “corporate social responsibility”. Should business be going along with this?
The current conversation about business and society is dominated by the perspectives and interests of those who live in rich western countries. Activists, analysts and others – however well intentioned – do not grasp the realities of poverty and the hard choices of development outside the rich industrialised world. As a result, the debate about business, “responsibility” and corporate involvement in development is distorted, with few voices from developing countries being heard and the positive legacy of business remaining unacknowledged.
In The Case for Business in Developing Economies, Ann Bernstein argues forcefully and cogently that a new approach and a new discourse are required to cut through an increasingly flawed conversation, one which has potentially dangerous consequences for the poor and for developing countries in particular. Informed by many years of living, working, and championing the role of business in growth and development in a middle-income developing country, Bernstein urges business not to let such attacks stand unchallenged. It must find the confidence and strategic vision to stop apologising, develop its own public agenda, and start propagating the phenomenal benefits of competitive capitalism for the less developed countries of the world.
About the author
Ann Bernstein is the founding director of the Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE) in Johannesburg. She is acknowledged as one of South Africa’s leading development experts and is a strong proponent of the importance of economic growth in promoting democracy and sustainable development. Well known internationally, she travels extensively, regularly addressing conferences and other meetings both in South Africa and abroad. She is a regular commentator on radio and television and frequently contributes articles to journals and newspapers on a wide variety of issues.
Cooked in Africa author Justin Bonello has an adventurous spirit that’s captured in both his cooking and his travels. Fellow foodie Hilary Biller recently chatted to him about his favourite vacation. If you have it in mind to experience something enticingly different - have a look at his responses:
Where did you spend your last holiday? On Koh Phangan in Thailand. It was part honeymoon, part family get-together.
What was the best thing you did while there? My wife and I caught a ferry across to Mu Ko Ang Thong National Marine Park. We hired a tent and a kayak and spent a couple of days kayaking around completely deserted islands. Brilliant. No tourists and complete freedom.
Your favourite city abroad and why? Bangkok. Whether you’re a foodie looking for a gastronomic eye-opener or a photographer looking for good deals, Bangkok, once you get used to the hustle and bustle, is brilliant.
By freeing Mandela, Carlin writes, de Klerk helped South Africa take a first step into becoming a place where “respect has replaced hatred”. He was at Mandela’s first post-imprisonment press conference:
FW de Klerk, South Africa’s last white president, stunned the world on 2 February 1990 when he announced the lifting of the ban on the African National Congress, after three decades of illegality, and the imminent release of its leader, Nelson Mandela, after more than 27 years in prison. Black South Africans reacted with joyful stupefaction; white South Africans, programmed to view Mandela as the vengeful terrorist who would thrown them all into the sea, were in shock, none more so than the parliamentary caucus of the far right Conservative party.
The caucus held an emergency meeting at which their leader, Andries Treurnicht, better known as “Dr No”, read a thunderous passage from the Old Testament, preparing his co-religionists for holy war. A conservative MP there recalled later that they had long been fearing the day might come when they would have to unleash “the Afrikaner tiger”. “And, well,” the MP said, “this was the tiger moment.”
Nine days later, Mandela was out and the next morning he gave a press conference which I attended in the garden of Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s Cape Town home. If Mandela had ever been a “terrorist” – he was jailed for founding and leading the armed wing of the ANC – he did not look much like one now. A fit, good-humoured, serene and kingly figure aged 71, he committed himself to finding a negotiated solution to a conflict that had been threatening during the violent Eighties to spill over into civil war.
This interview with Damon Galgut about his latest work, The Impostor, has just surfaced on the web:
Mark Thwaite: What gave you the initial idea for The Impostor?
Damon Galgut: There was no single initial idea for The Impostor. Rather, as with most of my books, a number of disparate images and strands came together. For one thing, I did live for 2 years in a small house in the Karoo, not entirely dissimilar to Adam’s set-up in the story ( I was also engaged in intensive weed-clearing there, likewise to little effect). Some of the characters, like the Blue Man, bear a superficial resemblance to some of the people I encountered there. The central nexus of the story, between Adam and Canning, comes from an encounter I had with somebody who came up and greeted me in the street, who claimed to be someone I knew from school - though neither he nor his name meant anything to me. The fascination with that episode, and the loss of memory which seems to accumulate as life goes on, spread sideways in my mind to a fascination with the larger scenario of national memory, and what’s involved there - the importance that gets placed on remembering certain things and on forgetting others. All of this, one way or another, melded with other events that are purely imaginative, to “make” the story of The Impostor.
MT: How long did it take you to write your novel? Is this a typical length of time for you?
DG: It took me a year to find my way into the story and what I wanted to say, and then another three years of writing to complete it - a total of 4 years. Sadly, that’s more typical than not of the way I work…though I have written some novels in 6 weeks (Small Circle of Beings, for example). Generally speaking, the further the subject material is from myself, the longer it takes to explore and elaborate. I still have hopes of becoming a Faulkner and throwing out a novel in 3 weeks, as he claimed he did with Sanctuary.
The pictures in the Independent Newspapers’ “Spud Around the World” competition - click here for a sampler - are in, and it’s time to judge who will win the hamper of signed books from author John van de Ruit. (He will help with the judging, and will hand over the prize personally!) Sally Scott, who initiated the competition, summarises the results and the next steps:
From the top of Kilimanjaro to Paris, London, New York, Crete, Berlin, Zimbabwe, Egypt, Vancouver, Bolivia, India, Mauritius to Thailand, young Spud has been there and done it. Spud author John van de Ruit and a small panel of judges will be making the difficult choice (we even had an underwater pic), tomorrow, on who our winner will be.
Joburg is a big city with lots to do and see. If you’re feeling a tad overwhelmed or, simply want to try something new, take a look at Chic Jozi by Nikki Temkin. This handy guide will tell you about the best places to shop, visit, eat and drink. Temkin recently chatted to Out & About on Zoopy TV about the book and its inspiration, the city of gold:
An extract from an essay collected in Achebe’s forthcoming The Education of a British-Protected Child:
Nigerian nationality was for me and my generation an acquired taste – like cheese. Or better still, like ballroom dancing. Not dancing per se, for that came naturally; but this titillating version of slow-slow-quick-quick-slow performed in close body contact with a female against a strange, elusive beat. I found, however, that once I had overcome my initial awkwardness I could do it pretty well.
Perhaps these irreverent analogies would only occur to someone like me, born into a strongly multiethnic, multi lingual, multireligious, somewhat chaotic colonial situation. The first passport I ever carried described me as a “British Protected Person”, an unexciting identity embodied in a phrase that no one was likely to die for. I don’t mean it was entirely devoid of emotive meaning. After all, “British” meant you were located somewhere in the flaming red portion of the world map, a quarter of the entire globe in those days and called “the British Empire, where the sun never sets”. It had a good ring to it in my childhood ears – a magical fraternity, vague but vicariously glorious.
Tasting the Cape is a guide and travelling companion to the world-renowned Cape Winelands. Filled with insights from one of South Africa’s most influential food and wine critics, the book offers the wine lover a new and accessible approach to South African wines by grouping the featured estates by character – the formal types, the wacky ones and the quiet achievers.
