The nation’s biggest wine seller has now set its sights on this favourite spirit

THE launch of Barefoot Wines at the magical Sondela Nature Reserve in the Waterberg this month was geographically well judged by distributor Namaqua Wines.

But then Namaqua seems to be the only major liquor company that passed matric geography, as they located their head office in Pretoria for the simple reason that Gauteng is their largest market.

The geographically challenged competition sit in splendid bucolic isolation in Stellenbosch and Paarl, but then Namaqua produces the largest-selling box wine in SA and distributes Four Cousins, the largest-selling bottled wine - perhaps their having a chef in the kitchen helps. Of course, given the profusion of stop-and-go roadworks on the 300km from Cape Town to Vredendal, site of Namaqua's largest production facility, having an HQ on the remote West Coast was never really a flyer, even if hot and cold running crayfish are available.

In the property deal of the century, KWV values its palatial La Concorde head office in Paarl at R936000, according to minority shareholder activist Chris Logan. Logan called the company's directors "a bunch of buffoons" in the heat of the fight for control by Pioneer Foods earlier this month and, given the derisory valuation of their luxurious Lubyanka, Wendy Machaniks they clearly are not.

But the importation of E&J brandy from California by Namaqua will certainly give KWV apparatchiks something to talk about on the company squash courts. Well priced below R100 and suitable for drinking neat or with Coke, it is squarely aimed at their KWV five-year-old brand.

E&J has a terrific selling proposition, jettisoning the boere baggage of the apartheid era - when the favourite tipple of the security and traffic police was brandy and Coke - and replacing it with California Dreaming by the Mamas and the Papas, McDonalds, Hollywood movies and Barak Obama. Heck, in market tests in Cape Town, the always-inventive coloured community immediately dubbed it E&J = Ek en Jy, my bra.

Producers E&J Gallo Winery even had to up the alcohol content from 40% to 43% especially for the SA market, an alcoholic excess which should be retired if the industry is serious about alcohol abuse.

The competition, in the shape of Distell's Oude Meester brandy, is encouraged to embrace the Nigerian nickname for its spirit, Dudemeister, without further ado. For when it comes to drink, the customer is always right, as Namaqua is finding out in Faerie Glen.

Pretoria is ground zero for sales of Barefoot Moscato, a sweet and fruity white that Pick n Pay sells by the pallet load. While anoraks may turn up their retroussé noses further at the sweet and simple flavours of the Barefoot offering (Zinfandel, Merlot and Moscato), SA consumers simply can't get enough, as the 10000 case sales since November confirm.

And that's something else for Boland marketing mavens to ponder as they watch exports of their too-dry-and-tannic offerings stagnate, strumming on their riempie harps.

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