According to this over-sized ornamental wine barrel, which was a gift to Bergkelder/Distell, the first South African wine was launched by Jan van Riebeek on a Sunday, back in 1659. That's kind of ironic, given that we still have such antiquated laws around buying alcohol on a Sunday.

(As an aside, Jan's wine wasn't very nice apparently. That's what happens when you try to grow vines practically on the beach. Fortunately the Constantia vineyards were established in 1685.)

I was visiting Bergkelder thanks to winning a competition run by Ultra Liquors at the end of last year. (Thank you!) Bergkelder is the home of Fleur de Cap wines - which buys its grapes in from all over the country. It is also the industrial heart of Distell, which owns pretty much every wine and spirit label in South Africa you can think of, from Durbanville Hills, to Nederberg, to Two Oceans, to JC Le Roux, to Three Ships Whisky, to Amarula. It even owns distilleries in Scotland.

There is no doubt that wine is an industry in South Africa. These tanks hold 46,000 litres of wine each, but are babies compared to 174,000 litre tanks elsewhere at Bergkelder. The bottling plant handles 12,000 bottles per hour, from filling to corking or capping, to labelling and even boxing the wine in automatically folder cartons.

The cellar has something like 3000 barrels housed in it, at a cool R8,000 per barrel. This is not small change.

The tour itself is pretty slick, and would be a nice intro to South African wine, especially for tourists. Personally, having done the rounds of both large and small vineyards and wineries, and been lucky enough to chat to a number of winemakers, I prefer a slightly less formulaic approach. But I guess it's horses for courses and Bergkelder certainly is a polished representation of brand SA wine. The tour through the underground cellar is quite fun, moving from alcove to alcove for each tasting (2 whites, 2 reds and a delicious dessert). So much it made of the unfiltered wine-making process that I would have quite liked to do a comparison of the filtered and unfiltered wines.

Well worth the visit however, and I'm fascinated by the thought that the first wine in SA was launched on a Sunday.

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Four more training sessions in week two and still loving it. The step up from running one minute to running for two shows me just how much I need to work on my cardio though - but I am sure that will come with the gradual build-up. I added a pilates class into the mix on Thursday(just being careful not to overdo the stretches) and was still comfortably able to go out again on Friday morning. That's what has struck me the most since migrating to my Vibrams - I never feel like I have over-trained or overdone it, I'm never hobbling around barely able to walk, but I can also feel and see results much sooner that I would have previously. I've also started running off the paving, in the grass and over inclines, and I can see it's going to be lots of fun hitting the trails in these shoes.

Being kept company by a pod of dusky dolphins every morning just off Mouille Point has been an added bonus.

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According to Tim Ferriss in the 4-hour Body, it's important to do something 5 times to change behaviour and start forming a habit. So I'm glad to have completed 5 Vibram train sessions in week 1, and enjoyed every single one of them.

I definitely am getting a more well-rounded workout, and am getting more benefit out of what essentially was 27 mins of walking with 3 mins of running spread in between. I'm used to walking so don't really feel like I get much out if it anymore, but that has changed in my Fivefingers. Interestingly though, my muscles never get so stiff that I can't comfortably carry on with the programme the very next day, but at the same time am already noticing the difference to my fitness and strength.

The ultimate proof of the pudding was having 2 of the best surfs of my life this weekend. Not only did I feel fitter and stronger, there is a lot to be said for the confidence  from being back in my body thanks to the Vibram programme.

I realised this morning that week 1 to week 2 is relatively the largest jump in the programme - I'm doubling the amount of time I am running this week to 2 mins run and 8 mins walk. I dropped my speed down a little after ramping it up a bit at the end of last week, but somehow I think this week is going to be about improving my cardio to run for a bit longer each time.

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My mild obsession with Vibrams started at the end of last year when my sister got a pair and they just looked fab. Not only that, they seem to make sense, especially for someone who is most comfortable in a pair of flip flops over any other shoe. Finally, as a somewhat cynical marketer, anything that goes back to basics, before big brands and profit margins got involved, gets my vote (having said that, Vibrams aren't cheap). My hatred of shopping malls meant that it took until yesterday and a workshop held by Vibram South Africa and Benita de Witt for me to get my first pair.

Aren't they beautiful:

This also coincided with me wanting to get back into shape for a whole lot of reasons, including improving my surfing. So my plan is to follow the 12-week beginner's convert to barefoot running programme - getting fitter and stronger along the way.

For once my couch potato lifestyle of 2011 has paid off, I can go straight into barefoot running, unlike regular runners who need to follow a conversion plan. I do need to build strength in my backline, especially calves, in order to run in Vibrams and stay injury free.

The first week consists of 6 days of 30 mins each, consisting of 1 minute running and 9 minutes walking x 3. Each week this is adjusted - so next week I'll be running 2 mins and walking 8, until the 12th week where I'll be running 5km/30 mins non-stop.

I'm aiming to run between 4 and 6 times a week. It's less than an hour a day, so should be doable.

So this morning I headed out for my first session along the Sea Point promenade and I loved every minute of it. The feel of the ground beneath my feet was unusual but not unpleasant. Walking felt very comfortable, running even more so. Instead of running heel first, the ball of your foot strikes the ground first and after about 3 seconds you realise this is a far more natural style - like a child's. I didn't have any of the wading through thich mud trying to wake up my muscles experience I usually feel when starting to run after a break. What's more, your knee is bent on impact, meaning way less jarring up your leg and into your hip. I would often run for longer than the minute, just because it felt so comfortable.

Around half way through I could feel the stabilisers along the inside of my leg begin to engage. Immediately after I definitely felt my backline had worked harder than usual, even though this had been a relatively gentle and very manageable 30 mins. My feet too felt like they had worked. Now, at the end of the day, my hamstrings are tired and I can feel my calves have had a workout. Be interesting to see how stiff I feel tomorrow morning when I get up for session 2.

Summary:

5 min walking warmup and cool down

1 min running, 9 mins walking x 3

Sunny and calm morning

Sea Point promenade, west

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I love this description:

When I first met her around Camden she was just some twit in a pink satin jacket shuffling round bars with mutual friends, most of whom were in cool Indie bands or peripheral Camden figures Withnail-ing their way through life on impotent charisma. Carl Barrat told me that “Winehouse” (which I usually called her and got a kick out of cos it’s kind of funny to call a girl by her surname) was a jazz singer, which struck me as a bizarrely anomalous in that crowd. To me with my limited musical knowledge this information placed Amy beyond an invisible boundary of relevance; “Jazz singer? She must be some kind of eccentric” I thought. I chatted to her anyway though, she was after all, a girl, and she was sweet and peculiar but most of all vulnerable.

Read the rest of Russell Brand's tribute to Amy Winehouse here.

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Love this wine label. And the wine's pretty fantastic too. A delicious blend of viognier and chenin from the Swartland.

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One of the commentators in the documentary on Tretchikoff's life and work, found in the middle of the main exhibition room, says something along the lines of: Tretchikoff was the artist Andy Warhol set out to be. Controversial for a number of reasons, it seems that mostly the elite art establishment hated that Tretchikoff actually made money while alive, mostly because he made his work available to anyone via affordable prints. Apparently he has sold more prints than any other artist.

There used to be a bar in Notting Hill in London in the early 2000s called Trailer Happiness that had a couple of his prints up, and I don't think anyone entirely believed me that Tretchikoff was South African. (Oh look, the bar is still there, as are the pictures! Yay.) Apparently he was wildly successful abroad and had a lengthy tour of America and Canada in the 1950s, and took over the ground floor of Harrods in the early 1960s where 205,000 people saw his work. Included in the Cape Town exhibition is a letter from a Canadian buyer. She agreed to pay $6,000 for the painting, on the provisor that it was delivered to her house within two weeks of the tour ending, she was so desperate to get her hands on it!

The exhibition also gives a fascinating glimpse of Cape Town in the 1950s and 1960s: from paintings of the Cape flower sellers, spice sellers and fishermen, to the receipt from Garlicks department store in Adderley Street for an exhibition there. Tretchi paid £30 per day for the priviledge and Garlicks ran full page ads in the Argus and other newspapers to promote the show.

Go see the exhibition, now!

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Birthday plant from my lovely sister :)

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We've come a long way

In 1979 I was four, going on five. The biggest event in my live was going off to nursery school a couple of times a week. It was in a nice leafy Cape Town suburb, there were two cool dogs there, I got to play and paint, and we had cups of Oros at lunchtime.

Life was pretty damn good.

Little did I know I was living in a country where the majority of the population was viciously, irrationally and often violently discriminated against. 30 years ago, we would have all been breaking the law by being at this meeting – how insanely crazy is that?

And if we pan out a little wider, we would see we were living on a planet in 1979 divided in two by a Cold War between two bully nations, America and Russia, slugging it out for global domination in a global playground. There’s no denying, we’ve come a long way in 30 years!

So in honour of Peninsula Toastmasters’s 30th birthday, let’s hop into a time machine and go visit 1979.

We’ll start by turning on the TV – yes that is Riaan Cruywagen presenting 30 years ago! And his hair hasn’t changed. On the news, we see Prime Minister PW Botha saying that the bright flash over the South Atlantic, picked up by satellite, was categorically not a nuclear explosion, and that Israel and South Africa are definitely not testing nuclear weapons.

The news goes on to talk about Margaret Thatcher, who has just been voted as the first female prime minister of Great Britain. The news does not however, go on to talk about Nelson Mandela, serving his 15th year on Robben Island, and with another 12 years in prison ahead of him.

But now it’s time for sport –Bjorn Bjorg and Martina Navratilova have won Wimbledon this year. Of course Martina had to defect from her native Czechoslovakia in order to play, thanks to the Cold War that has been simmering away for decades. Now the Cold War wasn’t all bad – we have it to thank for numerous James Bond movies – Moonraker starring Roger Moore was released in 1979. This along with movies like Alien and Star Trek, also released this year, give us in inkling of the paranoia and fear that characterised this period of international politics.

Specifically in 1979 the stage of the Cold War known as détente (or relaxing) came to an end with a hotting up of conflict. In Angola, a bloody civil war had been raging for four years that had sucked in the superpowers as well as South Africa. Back home white South Africans in any case were terrified that a flood of communists would descend on us from the North.

Further afield, 1979 saw Russia invade Afghanistan, starting 10 years of war. Like in Angola, the USA jumped in and supported the rival mujahidin – and we all know what happened a couple decades later when that ticking time bomb exploded. Next door to Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein takes power in Iraq, and the Ayatollah Khomeini kicks out the Shah of Iran and becomes names himself supreme ruler of the country for the next ten years, setting in place a chain of events leading to the second oil crisis.

But world affairs weren’t all doom and gloom 30 years ago. Idi Amin’s reign of terror, which cost up to 500,000 people their lives, ended in Uganda in 1979. And a power-sharing government in Zimbabwe set the scene for the first democratically elected government the following year.

On the science and technology front, in 1979 small pox became the only disease to be totally wiped off the face of the planet. In 1979 Philips demonstrated CD technology for the first time and Compuserve offered the first email service. The Japanese telephone company NTT launched the first city-wide cellular phone network.

Let’s stay in 1979 for a moment longer. Now bearing in mind I am definitely a “the glass is half full” kind of a girl …. Who would have thought, in 1979 that South Africa would be 15 years into a vibrant, if like most teenagers somewhat temperamental, democracy in 30 years time. The Berlin Wall would be a thing of the past. That tourists would be taking cruises to Russia and visiting Moscow and St Petersburg. That James Bond would still be going strong in the shape of Daniel Craig. And that thanks to email and other ways of communicating online we’d be getting real time reports about the recent election in Iran.

So let’s fast forward 30 years into the future from 2009. I wonder what apparently unsolvable and insurmountable problems that we face today will be a thing of the past in 2039? And what technology will have been invented that hopefully makes our lives easier, not more difficult.

You’ll have to come along to Peninsula’s 60th birthday party to find out from part 2 of this speech.

Naturally I will still be 34.

In the meantime, happy birthday Peninsula – may there be many more.

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Last week I delivered the third in my series of Toastmasters Competent Communication presentations. Project 3 involves getting to the point and your objectives are to determine the general and specific purpose of the speech; organise the speech accordingly; project sincerity and conviction; and control nervousness and not use notes. Because it is coming up to the end of the Toastmaster's year, I missed out on a speaking slot at our last meeting - understandably preference is given to people near the end of a level. Fortunately the brilliant Evadne Kortje arranged a Speakathon - where six of us had the chance to speak and be evaluated. Also nice was the fact that members of other clubs joined in. My speech was entitled Build a digital village. Its general purpose was to inform, and its specific purpose was to give people tips on how to control the massive amount of information we receive daily. Here it is:

BUILD A DIGITAL VILLAGE

Every day I check out the Facebook photos of a baby belonging to someone I worked with 10 years ago, and haven’t spoken to since. I receive adverts via MMS on my cell phone for things I don’t want from people I never gave my number to. I receive tweets on Twitter about French wines I am unlikely to ever taste. I get LinkedIn requests from people who took a liking to my profile pic. Oh, and of course, don’t forget about all the lotteries I have won, and embezzled central African funds I get news of via email. Good thing too, because somehow I’m going to have to pay for all the Viagra I’m being offered.

Good grief, it’s a quarter past 10 and I am only starting work now!

You’d think from this that I am a bit of a Luddite and would rather go back to the days of news arriving by mail boat, six months out of date. “Oh so we beat the Germans then did we? Jolly good!”

Not at all. I find the whole idea of a connected society and information economy tremendously exciting and filled with possibilities. Not only from the practical point of view:  I can do business with anyone in the world, to the more philosophical: it’s really hard to hate an entire nation on the other side of the world and go to war with them, when a bunch of my friends on Facebook come from there.

But I do need to manage the flood of information that arrives at my doorstep every day.

A few years ago I went to Sao Paulo in Brazil for a business trip. As I approached the city, I noticed something a bit strange. Bear in mind that at the time Sao Paulo was one of the world’s 3 largest cities. Unlike most cities, which gradually grow as you move from the suburbs towards the business centre, Sao Paulo seemed to be one huge monstrosity taking up the entire horizon.

After a few days of sitting in traffic for hours on end, I asked our local MD, Felipe, how on anyone survived living in this crazy place. I’ll always remember his explanation: “you carve out a triangle with where you live, work and play at the points, and build your own village” – now this is in a city of just under 20 million people.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently in the context of managing the vast quantities of information that we are bombarded with, thanks to that fabulous thing called the World Wide Web. And I think this village idea might be a good way to help us deal with this information overload.

We need to make this information bombardment work for us, not against us.

This is where the advice of Felipe in Sao Paulo becomes incredibly useful. We need to carve out an online village for ourselves that allows us to live, work and play – and stay sane.

Fortunately, the technology that has caused the disease, gives us a few useful tools for the cure as well.

Here are a couple that I try to use.

Only connect to and engage with people who add value. Just like Felipe isn’t friends with all 20 million people in Sao Paulo, don’t try and be a friend to all - get rid of the time wasters.

Use alert tools or readers to automatically monitor subjects you are interested in – and then once a day or once a week have a quick read. Similarly Felipe might read a local community newspaper, to find out what is immediately relevant to him and his village.

Switch off your email or turn off your mobile phone for a few hours at a time. The sky won’t fall in, I promise.

Here’s a bit of a scary one, but I’ve tried it and it works. Have a media black-out. Ignore the news. If you have your village set up correctly, any news you need to know will come to you.

So don’t try and consume all the information that is out there - just like Felipe carved out a section of Sao Paulo and made it work for him – carve out areas of interest, specialist knowledge and value and make the information overload in 2009 work for you.

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WOULD YOU LIKE SOME CHEESE WITH THAT WINE?

A few weeks ago I arrived for afternoon drinks with a client of mine. Now the client is a winemaker, and we were meeting the head of communications for Wines of South Africa – which promotes South African wine abroad. So far so good – I was just thinking how much I love my job – when they passed me the wine list to choose the wine. Choosing itself was not the problem, the problem was when the waitress returned and asked me to taste the wine before she poured. How embarrassing would it have been to have slurped the wine, nodded enthusiastically and then later realised there was something wrong with the wine that I had given the thumbs up to.

So this got me checking up on when you can legitimately send a bottle of wine back in a restaurant. What should you look out for so you don’t end up spending good money on an unpleasant drinking experience?

There are SIX main faults that could creep into your wine. Here’s how to spot them.

First, DAMP CARDBOARD or MUSTINESS usually points to the wine being CORKED. This doesn’t mean that the waiter has mangled getting the cork out the bottle, rather that a fungus called TCA has entered the wine from the cork and it is off. This is the cause of the move to using the dreaded screw cap recently.

A BARNYARD or ANTISEPTIC smell indicates the yeast has done something odd and a type of yeast called Brett or Brettanomyces has developed. This is a bit of a bugbear for South African wines, as our Pinotage naturally smells a bit barnyardy – so international judges get a bit confused and think our wine is contaminated with the stuff.

Next, still on smell – MATCHES or EGGS. Both are bad and both mean something went wrong with the sulphur that was added to the wine. Most wine has sulphur in it – it’s an anti-oxidant and an antibacterial. But too much smells of lit matches. Another way sulphur can spoil your wine is when hydrogen sulphide is released by the fermenting yeast. You’ll know about this when you get a whiff of rotting eggs. Neither of these will kill you – but it won’t be much fun drinking the wine.

Fourth, you’ve made it on to tasting the wine, but your red wine seems a bit FIZZY and tastes peculiar - the wine might have undergone a second fermentation in the bottle. This is normal, but not very nice, so most winemakers ensure this fermentation – called MALOLACTIC FERMENTATION – happens before they bottle. You won’t die, you just won’t have a very enjoyable bottle of wine – and what is the point of that?

And finally – in my book the two biggest no no’s because these can be avoided simply by restaurants knowing something about wine, and looking after the wine properly.

If your wine smells like SHERRY, it’s been open for too long or is passed its sell by date and has oxidised. This often happens when restaurants sell wine by the glass and have the bottle open for far too long.

The second mistake restaurants make is storing their wine badly, and especially in too warm conditions like next to the pizza oven. This can COOK the wine and make it smell a bit like caramel and look brownish around the edges. A dead giveaway is if the cork has started coming out of the bottle.

So there you have it. If any of the following things pop up in your wine you can confidently send it back as faulty:

WET CARDBOARD BAND AIDS MATCHES OR EGGS FIZZ SHERRY THE CORK POPPING OUT

Back to my client meeting - fortunately the De Grendel Sauvignon Blanc was crisp, fruity and delicious, had none of the problems we’ve been talking about, and everyone was happy.

So here’s to fault-free wine drinking.

Mr Toastmaster

Quite a fun speech in the end. Used a couple of cool props to illustrate each of the examples, and secretly also to help me remember the 6 faults. The next speech in the series involves getting to the point. Am waiting to be struck by inspiration for a topic idea.

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So Nic Harry from SA Rocks came up with this cool idea to post a whole lot of pics of South Africans and their inky thumbs today. The ink shows that you have voted in the national elections today, 22 April 2009. I'll link to his post as soon as it is up, as it will be fascinating to see. UPDATE: here it is! In the meantime, here's my inky voter's thumb, clutching a celebratory glass of South African vino - of course.

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