Kentridge and Sadie to thank for the package? Well, that explains the price

THE Mail & Guardian called the launch last month of Eben Sadie's Old Vines series of six wines "one of the more significant releases in modern Cape winemaking".

Business Day, though, said the launch "is hardly an event to cause even a ripple on SA's wine lake".

For the confused bystander, the wines have two things that make them unusual: the price (R3504.82 for 5½ bottles) and labels by William Kentridge.

Having famous artists make wine labels is nothing new: Château Mouton has been doing it for years and, closer to home, Tinus van Niekerk arranged for renowned wildlife artist Gordon Vorster to paint labels back in 1982. Nor is it a new thing for Kentridge, whose Magic Flute designs graced half a dozen pricey SA cuvées a few years back.

Strange then that SA artist Marlene Dumas has so far resisted making labels for her brother's Jacobsdal wine estate in Stellenbosch, even though she was born on the farm and enjoys the odd bottle herself.

Dumas was recently embroiled in a messy court case brought by a Miami property developer after she added him to her blacklist of patrons who "flip" art - buy and quickly sell for a profit.

At issue was the principle of droit-de-suite, which entitles artists to a share of prices fetched for their work on the secondary art market. This would open up a nest of hornets if the Kentridge bottles were to later reappear. The judge found for Dumas but was disgusted by what the case had revealed about the fine-art milieu, "a world of self-proclaimed royalty full of black lists, grey lists and astonishing chicanery", as Germaine Greer put it in the Guardian. A bit like the world of fine wine, then.

Of course, if and when the bottles are resold, the question will be how much of the price depends on the contents, made by Eben Sadie, a winemaker last year hailed as producer of the year, and how much on the value of the label. The services of Solomon might be required.

The Kentridge images themselves are curiously conservative, being mostly landscapes - a far cry from the radical labels of the towering modernist sculptor, Joseph Beuys, which consists of the artist's signature, the abbreviation FIU (Free Intellectual University) and the slogan Difesa della Natura (defence of nature)."

As a follower of Rudolph Steiner, the father of biodynamic agriculture, Beuys authenticates the contents of the bottle and transforms it into art. As the Virtual Museum of Modernism notes, "FIU is thus again a certificate of quality but also a political confession. The exhilarating effect of wine as physical nourishment is juxtaposed to the intellectual nourishment FIU."