One of the issues that South African producers of gem-quality wines can learn from De Beers is that they will not be able to get their money back without controlling the market. Will Bordeaux ever drop the ball?
Sometimes it is rewarding to stay at home when everyone else is running away for a holiday break.
I listened to a fascinating interview on 702/567 where Eusebius McKaizer was talking with Professor Ben Turok, Chairman of the South African Parliamentary Ethics Committee. Fascinating stuff. Especially when a few telephone callers landed some heavy blows that were deemed by the Prof. as below the belt.
Ben Turok, ethics watchdog
It’s my view, reviewing the discussion, that Professor Turok will one day have to choose between his party and his principles. And that this day may not be so far off.
Grace Huang’s Cape Times article, “Shoddy homes a health hazard” on low-cost Cape Flats housing, this week, raises a multitude of questions.
First of all, why does the headline seem to imply that the homes of poor people might infect us all, and miss the whole point: the provision of accommodation for poor people is a scandal of major proportions?
Here are just a few more questions derived from this tale of discomfort.
If a house that is a haven from cold, wind and rain can be built from the subsidy paid by the Department of Human Settlements (what a name!), and we have to presume that it can, the shocking picture of two out of three RDP houses having cracked walls and nearly 80% with leaking roofs points to endemic and widespread ineptitude or corruption in our Housing Departments. How does this continue?
The houses referred to in the article are recently built houses. Their faulty walls and roofs are not maintenance problems. They result from inadequate construction.
Is the subsidy insufficient to make a secure foundation (cracking walls) and provide a functioning roof?
Is the policy that a rotten house is better than no house? (Be grateful. Sleep in a dry corner).
Or is it possible that not all of the subsidy gets spent on building the house. The house would therefore be the best job that a builder could do with the money that is left over from the subsidy.
Part of the problem may be that poor people have no voice. The people with voices do not see or hear them.
Just look at the title of the story again. It points to a “health hazard” and “children…affected”. Of course this is important but the real stories are ‘how did the provision of bad houses happen?’ and ‘why is it still happening?’. This is editorial material. Instead the story finds its way to page 6 on a public holiday in the slimmest Cape Times of the year.
What does it take to make a scandal in this ‘two cities in one town’?
How is it that we are regaled by lavish spending by politicians and their friends while no one makes a comment about the apparent cancer in the provision of Human Settlements? Is it just that the residents of one city have no interest in the lives of the people in the other one?
I want to thank Grace, for your scholarly essay and I am grateful to Jo, Thashlin and Clarissa for your research work. And thank you Editor for finding space on this no-news Freedom Day to publish this piece of scandalous non-news.
There are no brands in wine, except old ones.
These are artificially restricted in volume, like diamonds, continually inflating the prices.
Prices of these old, great brands have ballooned to absurd levels. Every vintage gets sold out, so they must give a value for money reward. But this type of customer sees money as a fluid, extendable concept.
There are hundreds of great winemakers who make wine just as good as these aged star brands, but they are unknown and virtually unavailable to those who would be most keen to buy them.
Why shouldn’t there be more brands; why wouldn’t an ordinary customer like to have something to rely on and feel a loyalty relationship with wines?
Brands are made by contact between the producer and the consumer ( view the rise of brand-retail businesses like Guess, Mulberry, Dunhill, creating new brands in other luxury fields).
Wine brand creation stopped in the period after 1970, when retail self service (RSS) – incorporating wine – flooded the consumer market – and in the process created a whole new interest in and exposure of wine, but removed any direct link between producer and consumer.
In this period – 1970 to 2010 – the effect was like an Ice Age.
The wine Ice Age has left the middle market in the UK, for instance – £15 to £100 per bottle – like tundra. Or sheet ice where pastures once pleased the eye.
The businesses that had provided the brand-building link in all markets pre-1970, the wine merchants, eventually faded away under the ice of RSS. In the UK they are no longer anything but a cherished memory for the old folks.
Buying wine in RSS is like buying margarine.
Wine is one of our favourite luxury products. What are we going to do about this?
