So when she raved about New York novelist Jay McInerneys latest offering, a Hedonist in the Cellar (Bloomsbury, 2006), in the Christmas Eve edition of the Financial Times, it became a definite Christmas stocking possibility: 'I have to admit that [it] is a rollicking read, and chimes even more with my own opinions than its predecessor Bacchus & Me. The boy can write as well as drink.'
And he certainly can, with his Cellar prose studded with more paeans of praise to that 'extremely snappy dresser' Mrs. Robinson than a Christmas pudding has raisins: 'JR, the excessively modest and exceedingly attractive wine authority' or rephrased 'although I found her dauntingly attractive, I was relieved that she was modest and unpedantic' is definitely the heroine of this collection of columns culled from the American Home & Garden magazine.
In fact their mutual admiration extends to his posting 'what I drank on my 48th birthday' on 'her excellent Web site' as well as including it here, twice. Just like the story of how he correctly identified a Ch. Haut-Brion '82 blind in a Manhattan restaurant. Such an amazing feat, he tells it twice, perhaps because his hostess was an 'Asian princess'.
For Jay has become the Truman Capote of the wine scene: a celebrity tonguemesiter with forelock tugged to any passing celebrity or supertaster Michel Chapoutier (a 'diminutive and fiercely ambitious wine baron'), Olivier Humbrecht ('big enough to create his own weather'), Randall Grahm (a 'posthippie who regularly gets his chi adjusted') even rehabilitating some in the process, like the R20 000-a-day 'superstar consultant' Michel Rolland, who is laughingly called a 'Mondovino star'. Which for anyone who has actually seen the movie, is either deeply ironic, brilliantly cynical or wrong.
With WOSA targeting the US for export sales now that their Europe campaign has collapsed, perhaps a business class (at least) air ticket should be e-mailed to Mr. McInerney. For reading his column on SA reds, he surely needs help. It kicks off with: 'Nelson Mandela, Charlize Theron, and Pinotage are among South Africas distinctive contributions to global culture even if the last named can sometimes smell like nail polish remover au poivre.'
But Cape Wine Masters will surely bristle to read that Kanonkop has twice won Frances Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande trophy (which is actually a London wine competition award sponsored by a French grande dame who recently swapped a Chteau of the same name in Bordeaux for a building site on the Simonsberg) while saying that Hamilton Russell Vineyards is 'less than two miles from the Indian Ocean' confirms the American clich of terminally confused geography.
I'll take his word for it that proprietor Anthony is a 'whirling dervish' on 'dance floors from Cape Town to Manhattan'. Even if he is the second dervish to whirl into sight, after Michel Chapoutier and although Anglo American is indeed 'Hydra headed', the one that owns Vergelegen is not called Anglo American Industries.
Unfortunate slips for someone who started out as a fact checker on New Yorker magazine until the fickle finger of fate snatched him up to a life of fame and first growth freebees.