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MICHAEL FRIDJHON: Cape vineyards slowly yielding to urban land demand
Whenever there’s a story about some collector paying a fortune — usually on auction, and mostly where people with bucket-loads of hard currency shop — the media picks up on it with a kind of tweezer-lipped disapproval that suggests something as frivolous as wine should never fetch that kind of money. You could argue that the oil paint applied to a canvas by some long-dead artist, or even a bowl produced by a Chinese potter 800 years ago, has no greater intrinsic value. Equally, the R200m paid in 2008 for Damien Hirst’s Golden Calf, a cow preserved in formaldehyde, makes any auction price for a bottle of wine seem positively parsimonious.There is, of course, no connection between what it costs to make a bottle of wine and what someone will pay for it. Just as sought-after collectables are produced for a fraction of what they sell for, so everyday drinking wines sometimes sell for a fraction of their true cost of production. VinPro, the organisation that works with the country’s grape...
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