A wine fest in Gugs, just what the liver ordered...

Journalist get a bad rap about drinking too much. Some of us have no choice but to wear it as a badge of honour even though we don't drink that much *cough, cough*.

One Sunday afternoon not long ago, a very good friend of mine who is from Gugulethu told me about the Itownship Wine Festival being held there and so I jumped onto a taxi, can u believe it costs only R7?

I was a bit nostalgic because part of me always feels guilty that I don't go to the township more besides the fact that I live in shitty neighbourhood with lots of hippies, drug-dens and tik-heads, I never go to the hood. So as I sat there waiting for the taxi to fill up, with a toddler kicking my seat (so I rock back and forth like a useless drunk) I was very excited. I was smiling at everyone, and not once during the entire taxi ride did I feel like choking the seat-kicking toddler or her parents.

With that overated monument of the Cape, Table Mountain, slowly receding behind, we sped off though the N2 heading towards Gugulethu (or Gugs if u trying to sound like a local). My only snag was that my friend's directions were a bit vague, something like "it is in a white tent behind the mall, you will see it man, the new shopping mall". It obviously did not occur to him that I had no idea what Gugs looked like (during the day *giggles*)? where this bloody mall was but hey I got there safe.

I paid R50 for my ticket (yes, journalists don't always freeload at least we pay at the end of the month) and I got a free glass (by the time I left I had a set of these) and hit the ground running. Really low turnout but who cares? more red wine for me. I decided to be civil and ask the lady how to "taste" the wine properly, what the proper etiquette was etc. She gave me a blank stare so I swallowed the Pink Shiraz and carried on like that for the rest of the afternoon till I bumped into my friends.

They were in the thick of things, buying wine and asking all sorts of relevant questions. I just handed my glass over and depending on how interesting the person at the stall looked and sounded, I stuck around to hear about the "tannins" and "aging processes" and "grapes" and all that stuff the wine-snobs like to bore us with at dinner parties. After some Shiraz, Merlot, Port and Champagne.

No actually I lie, because I leant at the Wine Fest from the laBourie lady that Champange is a region in France and so our stuff can't be called Champagne, so it may taste the same but basically u look retarded to wine-snobs if calling it Chamgapne with confidence. So we might as well call our stuff "Gugulethu or Paarl or whatever" just not Champagne, don't U just love how anal the French are about their alcohol?

At the end we went to Mzoli's. Mzoli's is very famous. Everyone excepr me has been there. It is on the list of things to do when u get to Cape Town. And that is why I hadn't been. Because it is a bit like every other hang-out spot "chisa nyama" I have been to in SA, be it Mamelodi, Attridgeville, Mabopane hell at some point the rowdy people reminded me a bit of Pimville in Soweto and even Hammanskraal.

So there, all hoods are the same, it is just that the Cape Town people speak Xhosa and we speak Tswana etc. So Mzoli's was a bit of a "been there, done that" experience, "nothing new in the hood". But I had samp and veges and while they will never taste as good an my my sisters it wasn't bad either...