I flew into Bahrain yesterday, via Dubai, only to discover that the visa rules have changed here. On each of my two previous visits I’ve paid for a visa on arrival. Yesterday I was detained by Immigration for well over an hour. After an overnight flight I was tired, desperately in need of a shower, and not very much looking forward to the prospect of getting back onto a plane some time later to return to Dubai.

What you also need to know is that the +- one hour flight from Dubai is possibly the most expensive short flight one can buy. I was staring down the barrel of not only wasted time, but also wasted money. The additional complication was that I’d missed Andrea’s birthday party to get here (one has to be either stupid or feel very secure to miss one’s wife’s party).

After more than an hour of me sitting dejectedly outside the office they finally let me through. Perhaps part of my salvation lay in me not losing my rag.

The main purpose of my visit was to pour Cloof wines at a consumer show for one of the major licensees here, BMMI, who must have the friendliest staff complement I’ve encountered anywhere in the world.

As with the St Johns wine festival I reported on last month, I was well entertained. A man tasting our reds commented that the flavour was nice, but there was just too much of the wines. In his view, huge hangovers lurked beneath each of the screwcaps, which I vehemently denied.

His wife then arrived, wanting to taste Inkspot. Needless to say she loved it, but her husband then tried to tell her how severe a hangover one may get from the wine. Then followed one of the most priceless interactions I’ve ever witnessed.

WIFE: So what if I get a hangover? Sometimes one has to pay for one’s pleasure with a little pain.

HUSBAND: If I had to pay for all the pleasure I’ve had I’d be dead.

WIFE (delivered in dry monotone): That can be arranged.

I got the feeling that he preferred his experiences (certainly the taste ones) to be smaller and more watered down than what he was getting from our wines. Did that have anything to do with his choice of a skinny five-foot woman has his wife? Who knows, but she is one of the most spirited, feisty, fun-loving people I’ve ever met.

The volume of wine we sell in Bahrain is quite amazing. Fortunately, it would appear, people like the husband described above are part of a very tiny minority.

The dishdasha-wearing Arabs at Immigration are an intimidating looking bunch. Their very pores seem to ooze haughty disdain. Like Mr Husband, I unnecessarily anticipated the worst.

The conclusion was very much better than I thought it would be, but Irish immigration officials remain my first choice.

I commented several months ago (here) about South Africans’ non-access to iTunes and Amazon downloads. At last, in the form of Nokia Music, I thought, we had a solution.

Despite my disgust at them charging R10 per track, which implies a USDZAR rate of 10:1 instead of something around 7.50:1, I bought R300 worth of credits and downloaded a few tracks.

All fine, except that I then couldn’t transfer them to my Nokia XpressMusic 5310. Despite the valiant efforts of Hicham in the local Nokia customer service (he really has tried very hard) those tracks are still sitting on my laptop.

Along the way we’ve established that the Nokia 5310 appears to have a compatibility issue with Nokia Music, which I would regard as being more than a little embarrassing for the company. The newer Nokia 5800 works just fine, but why should I buy a new phone?

I now await the outcome of the techies’ efforts. I’m not hopeful of a positive outcome, but at least I’ve only tied up R300, which I’m feeling confident would be refunded to me in the case of total failure.

I’ve often asserted that there is no such thing as an empirical measurement of either a wine’s quality or flavour profile. For all the pleasure one derives from wine, judgements cannot be anything other than subjective.

Leonard Mlodinow’s article A Hint of Type, A Taste of Illusion takes a fascinating look at the fallibility of humans as they judge wines. It’s well worth reading.

The potential for differentiation makes wine unique amongst agricultural products; the farmer has the opportunity of adding value by virtue of cellar processes, packaging and marketing. Compare this with farms that produce grains, various fruit or beef. The price is entirely dependent upon the relationship between supply and demand.

Cloof's "family of brands"

The French AOC system, which regulates and controls not only which grape varieties may be planted in certain regions, but also the volume of wine that can be made from each hectare, appears to carry out the principles of the concept of terroir. Notwithstanding the logic of preventing the planting of Cabernet Sauvignon grapes in Burgundy, or Pinot Noir in Gigondas, the AOC system has the side effect of limiting the supply of wine with various denominations. Given that this limitation is based upon geographical boundaries, it suggests that French wine marketing becomes more an exercise in real estate than anything else.

There is no question that certain vineyard sites are not only better suited to particular grape varieties, but also have the potential to produce better wines than neighbouring plots. However, one of the consequences of the AOC system has been to lull producers into believing that the name of the region is the brand. The attitude – and I’ve witnessed it on numerous occasions – is that one should be buying the wine because of its region of origin, regardless of any other consideration.

The result of this has been lazy, often arrogant marketing on the part of many French wine producers.

So, when the Aussies came along with cheerful, easy-to-drink and well-priced wines that were not only clearly branded but also aggressively promoted, they easily took away market share from France. This highly praised strategy worked so well for so long that South African producers devoted entire seminars to creating their own version of this proactive commercialism.

The gist of the plan was that the ‘mother brand’ – like Hardy’s, Rosemount, Lindemans, Wolf Blass or Penfolds – could be extended almost infinitely to sell a huge assortment of wines at various price points. In recent years the plan has hit headwinds as consumers have become fatigued, not only by the incessant discount-based promotions needed to maintain sales volumes, but also by the sameness of the wines. The Fosters wine businesses are now on the block as they attempt to exit the industry.

Meanwhile, Champagne has gone from strength to strength, no doubt boosted by the booming world economy (until recently, that is). The difference in this part of France is that it’s impossible to make any other style of wine than the low-alcohol, high acid base wine that’s so suitable for a second fermentation in the bottle. Furthermore, there hasn’t been the kind of brand extension that the Australians attempted. At most, a range of Champagnes under any label will consist of a non-vintage, vintage, rosé and perhaps demi-sec. The top-of-the-range prestige cuvee is often branded slightly differently. Apart from this level of focus in terms of product range, the Champenoise are also unique in that their marketing is based upon lifestyle drivers.

Put differently, in Champagne they sell the sizzle, not the steak. Brands like Moët and Veuve Clicquot sell really high-priced wines in volumes that would make an Australian producer of low-priced wine salivate.

On the other hand, the balance of the wine industry gets very much more hung up on the technical side of things; the stuff that’s interesting to wine geeks, but less so to the person just wanting to enjoy a glass of red wine on a Saturday night. It is no coincidence that marketing and branding guru Al Ries views Champagne labels as the only brands in the wine industry.

When I started marketing Cloof wines nearly seven years ago the operation sold very little bottled wine and a lot of bulk wine. I needed to create avenues for selling all this wine in bottle, with a Cloof label. I began from the point of creating a brand ladder similar to the Australian method. However, it wasn’t until I started down the road of Cloof’s “family of brands” that sales took off in a meaningful way.

At the heart of this strategy is the view that individual wines should express something unique. If so, this uniqueness should be encapsulated in the wine’s packaging, which is different for each product. Hence we have Daisy Darling, Inkspot, The Dark Side, The Very Sexy Shiraz, The Cloof Cellar Blend and others. Each wine is a kind of rock star – or celebrity – in its own right, not overshadowed by the main brand. The Cloof logo is on each of the labels, but the individual products are allowed to speak directly to the segment of consumers that would find them interesting.

Of course, the wines wouldn’t be what they are if it weren’t for the unique combination of soil and climate in Darling; the terroir, if I may be allowed to use a clichéd expression. One can dress up the marketing any way one wants to, but if the juice in the bottle doesn’t do the job, the product won’t sell. It is at this point that I truly cannot resist borrowing from Shakespeare: Daisy by any other name would taste as sweet.

The Cloof manifesto brings together fabulous raw material in terms of fruit quality, a classically schooled attitude to winemaking, and lifestyle-orientated marketing that worships at the altar of brands; the best of both Worlds – Old and New.

I thought the God of Words (with Lynne Truss as high-priestess) was just playing a sick joke on us. How can it be that travel (denoting excitement, exploration and various other romantic notions) could be so phonetically similar to the word travail (as in hard work, toil and discomfort)?

These thoughts flash through my brain at once both lucid and mired in exhaustion. I left Regina 14 hours ago for Toronto. There I caught the flight to Frankfurt – notionally overnight, but with flying time of six-and-a-bit hours at the body clock’s wrong time for sleeping, hardly a wink was caught.

In the Lufthansa lounge I chased down three cappuccinos in 15 minutes, accompanied by really good croissants. I then made my way to the gate for my flight to Copenhagen, only to discover that the local foggy conditions have delayed the departure of the SAS flight.

I could be here for a long time.

When I eventually get to Copenhagen I’ll be catching a train to Nyborg (about two hours), followed by a 45-minute bus ride to Svendborg. This evening I’m presenting a wine tasting to 120 people.

Then I discover that both travail and travel derive from the same word travailler (to torment), which in turn is derived from the Latin trepalium (torture chamber, or instrument of torture made with three stakes).

That makes sense. 

Welcome back to airline wilderness, I hear a fiendish voice cackling somewhere in the distance.

It is impossible to eat at a highly rated restaurant without a sense of anticipation, even if may be possible to temper oversized expectations. The dinner is a Big Event; the culmination of a lifetime of experimentation on the part of the chef and dozens of man hours of preparation by his team.

In a sense, the diner’s role can be likened to that of a sportsman taking part in a big event. Being in the physical state of being able to enjoy eating the meal requires careful planning. A glass of orange juice in the late afternoon could induce an adverse reaction to acid in the food. While eating too much during the day could blunt the appetite, eating too little is also not good.

It requires a finely honed consciousness of the state of one’s body and how the day’s meals are going to impact on one’s enjoyment of the Big Event.

So, how did I prepare for meals at two of New York’s top Michelin-starred restaurants? Dinner at Restaurant Daniel (8.45pm booking) was preceded by an unusually late breakfast of fruit, yoghurt and muesli at 11.00 am. Then, having spent the day on my feet trawling the discount stores, I snacked on excellent fish and chips in the bar of The London at 5.30 pm.

I didn’t have any difficulty enjoying eight courses, with wines to match, despite the day’s haphazard eating.

The following morning I awoke in a dreadfully hungover state. We had coffee, lazed around and eventually headed out for breakfast at about 10.30 am. This condition called for nothing less than eggs and bacon, which we had at Carnegie Deli, New York’s monument to Super-Size.

The lunch reservation at Jean Georges was for 1.30 pm. I was still feeling rotten, but took that in my stride, opting to go for three courses involving raw fish and one cooked. Four cooked courses would probably have been beyond me, but the bottle of Condrieu from Yves Cuilleron went down very well indeed.

In much the same way as rest days are included in the Tour de France, I then had to take it easy for a day. If only in a figurative sense, eating nearly 15 courses (including amuse bouche) of that kind of food in less than 24 hours was my Mont Ventoux. And I did it without drugs.