he beauty and brains behind some stellar wine-marketing coups now has her sites on China

'YOU'RE a West Coast meisie," growled SA winemaking legend Jan "Boland" Coetzee to marketer Marita de Beer. "You need a beach-house at Gonnemanskraal."

That put her alongside other Cape wine royals, such as Johann Krige, seigneur of Kanonkop, who spend festive seasons and as many weekends as they can in the private nature reserve north of Saldanha, gorging themselves on kreef (crayfish) and bemoaning the fate of wine farmers.

So now Marita, who commutes monthly between Stellenbosch and the Netherlands, where her Great Grapes import/export company sells 8-million bottles of wijn a year, spends her West-Coast nights in a 19th-century farmhouse on the beach as the Atlantic breakers provide inspiration for her next big venture: to sell South African wine to Bric countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) in an export scenario that is changing faster than West-Coast weather.

Marita is the beauty and brains behind the most successful wine marketing activity around last year's Fifa soccer World Cup. The industry body, Wosa (Wines of SA, the exporter's mouthpiece), scored a succession of own goals with their badly executed plans, such as the Fundi project to train 2010 sommeliers in time for the games.

Anyone who has eaten in an SA restaurant will agree that the sommelier situation remains as dire as the performance of the French team on the field.

For Marita, the secret of selling wine is chefs, so she imported a luxury bus, a mobile Michelin kitchen, equipped with the hottest Dutch kokke for a tour taking in KwaZulu-Natal, the Garden Route and the winelands. That the Netherlands made it to the final comes as no surprise to those who tasted the food prepared on Marita's magic bus, nor that David Higgs, the chef at Rust en Vrede, won every cooking award in the country after his involvement in the project.

Blind tasting is the secret for selecting her portfolio, a rule reinforced by two blind tastings late last year.

"My chefs were by far the best tasters, better than many so-called experts" - which could be a solution for an industry-wide problem identified by UK wine guru Remington Norman, who shocked the tasting establishment when he accused them of being the single biggest problem facing South African wine.

For currency-shocked exporters to Europe, De Beer has some simple and effective medicine.

"Trade up to higher price points. If the whole industry changed to light-weight bottles immediately, a saving of as much as à0.50 could be achieved. If this is not possible, low-price producers should investigate high-quality contract bottling in Europe as a temporary measure to keep costs down."

China is a great opportunity and De Beer will be adjusting her own label wines to accommodate the Asian palate.

"Asian people prefer a bit of sweetness, but not necessarily sugar. I'll be using more chenin blanc and chardonnay and less sauvignon blanc. Those delicate, lower-alcohol wines with high acidity will work better in Europe. I sold just about the whole production of Paul Cluver's 8.5% alcohol Close Encounter riesling to Michelin three-star chef Jonnie Boer in the Netherlands last year. He loves it."

That's the kind of clean sweep SA wine will be hoping "Mariets" achieves again this year.

Read Pendock Uncorked at http://blogs.thetimes.co.za/pendock