Green & Blue Sommelier Scholarship
Jude and I go to South Africa to choose the winning candidate for the inaugural Green & Blue Scholarship.
Jude and I go to South Africa to choose the winning candidate for the inaugural Green & Blue Scholarship. The Green & Blue Sommelier Scholarship – August 2nd to 6th 2007
Jude and I are going to South Africa. Barely functioning after the first month of life of our brand new baby (Clapham), this trip is mainly work – albeit of the very best kind – with 2 days off in Hermanus, hopefully for a spot of whale watching. We had, early on in the year, hoped to spend 2 weeks abroad but then Clapham came along. After much debate we have stretched it to 10 days as we are both at the point of being of little use to anyone and we are hoping this short rest will make all the difference.
There were numerous reasons for the timing of the trip – the 2 main ones being that from September, taking even a week off will be impossible with School of Wine in two different places starting then and also, the first weekend in August is my 20 year high school reunion. This is an extraordinary thing to me to even begin to think about – can it really be 20 years since I was at school? From certain vantage points, it seems like several centuries ago and from others, no more than a few years.
First stop though, the Spier estate just outside Stellenbosch, where we are to conduct interviews with the short-listed candidates for the scholarship. The Green & Blue Sommelier Scholarship is something I have wanted to do for as long as I have wanted to run my own business. While the wines of this country that remains so completely embedded in my heart have come on in leaps and bounds in the years since 1994, wine service in most restaurants, on the whole has not. It is not just wine service – South Africa undoubtedly has restaurants in what are some of the most beautiful settings in the world and access to unbelievable produce and yet they still don’t get it right on so many levels. I wish more than anything that this were not so, but time and time again dishes are badly executed– over cooked meat and fish being a particular complaint – or just over complicated. Too much fiddling and showing off and not enough understanding of the ‘less is more’ philosophy. And then to top it all, wine service which is generally woeful – everything from incomprehensible wine notes (to be fair – hardly a phenomenon unique to South Africa) to waiting staff who generally really don’t have any idea of what it is they are selling.
The scholarship will bring a young person over to the UK in January 2008, to work with us at Lordship Lane for 6 months as part of the team there. They will do School of Wine as well as the regular, daily training that all our staff undergo – tasting and tasting and tasting again. They will have access to the tastings with wine makers that we hold regularly, both just for our team and for customers, and they will go on a wine trip to Europe in that time as well as accompanying me to trade tastings in London. At the end of this time, they will go on to work as a junior sommelier in one of the Gordon Ramsey restaurants for a look at how wine service at a very upmarket level operates for a further 6 months. The aim is not necessarily to turn them into sommeliers although they should be more than equipped to fulfil that role at the end of the year. More importantly though, they will hopefully have not only a thorough grounding in seriously good wine service in a variety of environments, but also all the benefits of a years exposure to the international wine market and wine styles.
This scholarship is also very much about giving opportunities to those who would not have access to them in any other circumstances. Many young South Africans travel to the UK every year and subsequently end up working in bars and restaurants on their 2 year visas but only a small number of these are from any group but the white ethnic minority. What this also means is that (allowing my imagination and most fervent hopes free reign) Green & Blue will be an important starting to point for a succession of talented young people from a range of different ethnic groups and backgrounds in successful careers in the South African wine industry – as buyers, marketing people, educators and even, yes, Sommeliers.
Jude and I were introduced in 2005 to a young South African called Tim Schultz, living and working in London. He came down to Green & Blue a few times and during a visit last November, I mentioned to him how we wanted to start this scholarship when we had the money to do so. Tim thought it was a marvellous idea and said that he had contacts in South Africa who would be interested in working with us, most notably at Spier Estate and in the Provincial Government of the Western Cape. You can have a look at the wonders of Spier at www.spier.co.za.
I sent him a proposal for this that in early 2006 but subsequently, got so caught up in first the expansion and then getting Clapham open, that I really had no time what so ever to devote to this. Jude and I still can’t quite believe how much work and effort Tim has put into it on our behalf for no reason other than he believes in the project, but he subsequently, pretty much single-handedly, arranged the South African side of things. Compared to absolutely every other little step we have taken with Green & Blue, each of which has felt like crawling, painfully slowly over white hot coals, the scholarship seemed to fall into place with almost no effort and so quickly, it really caught us quite by surprise. Of course, if you are looking to give something away rather than fighting to build something up, it is always going to be easier, but still. Tim has excelled, fixing us up with very impressive South African partners. The Spier Estate just outside Cape Town – wine tasting centre, deli, picnic grounds, theatre, hotel, conference centre, wild life sanctuary - is now the second most visited tourist attraction in the Western Cape. We are also hoping that the contacts in the Provincial Government of the Western Cape will be instrumental in helping us to grow the project in later years.
The Gordon Ramsey Group involvement also proved wonderfully simple to arrange. Ian Waddington, the group wine buyer, is an old colleague of mine from Conran days and it was a matter of speaking to him a few times to get them on-board.
So, despite the usual tiredness and stress, it was with a feeling of enormous excitement and optimism that we touched down in Cape Town early in the morning of the 2nd of August and drove immediately to Spier just outside Stellenbosch for the first of the interviews due to start at 2pm. After a quick lunch at the deli, surrounded by the most amazing array of strident bird life – self important ducks having noisy exchanges with each other while they pecked at my boots and tiny black birds with bright yellow faces and bibs (one of whom swooped down and made off with a large chip from Jude’s bowl) – we drove to the HR offices on a neighbouring farm and met with the team of ladies who had been organising everything here. In my experience, it is the personality of business owners and leaders of companies which bears the most responsible for creating the personality of the company, exemplified by the sort of people who work for it and their attitudes to their customers and others they work with. Given that, the owners of Spier must be very wonderful people. It is far more common, sadly, for Jude and I to complain bitterly about service and attitudes, so this is not just vacuous gushing. We were both inspired and profoundly impressed by everyone we met, starting with Heidi, Sumayya and Charlene in HR - all very wonderful ladies who were instrumental in pulling it all together.
At 2pm sharp, the first candidate arrived and we saw 3 others the same afternoon. Not having slept for far too many hours no doubt had something to do with it, but 3 of them almost moved me to tears. It is difficult to explain this without sounding like again, a gushing idiot, but almost without exception, the candidates we met had a drive to better themselves and an energy about doing so that was incredible to see. Most of them had similar stories – one parent families, having to forego tertiary education because of a lack of funds or at least having to work amazingly hard in order to get through it; having to support younger siblings, sick parents or children of their own and yet not once did we encounter even the suggestion of some sort of entitlement because of their situations or indeed bitterness. It seemed that every challenge any of them faced was met with pure determination to succeed in spite of it, to build a better life and time and again, they said the same thing – if we only get the opportunity, we will really show what we can do. Just give us the chance.
For 2 people who have only ever really worked in the UK, recruiting and training people there, these interviews felt amazingly….foreign. Please be completely clear that we are amazingly happy with our lovely Green & Blue team and of course I have worked with talented, driven people at all levels in my various jobs. But the profound wanting to do this and the pure energy here was a phenomenon I have not seen before.
By Friday lunch time, Jude and I were very seriously considering extending the scholarship this year to 2 people. The intention is, all being well, to extend the number of candidates as Green & Blue grows, but we were trying to work out whether we could afford to personally pay to bring another over this year. Narrowing it down to one seemed utterly impossible. In the end, it was decided for us – Heidi pointed out that it may cause all sorts of complications extending it at this stage, so difficult at it was, 2008 would see just one candidate after all.
And so, at a lunch for all the candidates and press on Monday the 6th, we announced the first winner of the Green & Blue Sommelier Scholarship. Thandisizwe Meyi (who’s first name means ‘one who loves his country’) was born in the Eastern Cape and went to school there, moving to the Western Cape after he matriculated. At the time, he knew nothing about wine – not even really understanding the difference between this and brandy apparently. He has worked for the last 5 years at Spier, starting out carrying boxes and stacking shelves in the Wine Centre, trying to learn as much as he could along the way. For someone who had never even drunk wine until relatively recently, he has come a long way – he was the only candidate to correctly identify one of the grape varieties in the wine he tasted with us.
Again, technology permitting (so far, thanks to us having a high definition DVD camcorder, it has not permitted, being completely incompatible with all of the editing software we have tried), we hope to have mpegs of Thandisiwe and some of the other candidates on the blog at some stage. If it never permits however, at least not given the limited time we have to devote to this and you are one of our London customers, you will meet him in the flesh from January 2008. Quite apart from anything else, it is going to be a huge pleasure working with him for 6 months and we very much look forward to it. Jude and I might also fulfil a long held ambition to learn Xhosa – Thandisizwe’s home language. Lessons in return for really nice wine, perhaps.
Jude and I are going to South Africa. Barely functioning after the first month of life of our brand new baby (Clapham), this trip is mainly work – albeit of the very best kind – with 2 days off in Hermanus, hopefully for a spot of whale watching. We had, early on in the year, hoped to spend 2 weeks abroad but then Clapham came along. After much debate we have stretched it to 10 days as we are both at the point of being of little use to anyone and we are hoping this short rest will make all the difference.
There were numerous reasons for the timing of the trip – the 2 main ones being that from September, taking even a week off will be impossible with School of Wine in two different places starting then and also, the first weekend in August is my 20 year high school reunion. This is an extraordinary thing to me to even begin to think about – can it really be 20 years since I was at school? From certain vantage points, it seems like several centuries ago and from others, no more than a few years.
First stop though, the Spier estate just outside Stellenbosch, where we are to conduct interviews with the short-listed candidates for the scholarship. The Green & Blue Sommelier Scholarship is something I have wanted to do for as long as I have wanted to run my own business. While the wines of this country that remains so completely embedded in my heart have come on in leaps and bounds in the years since 1994, wine service in most restaurants, on the whole has not. It is not just wine service – South Africa undoubtedly has restaurants in what are some of the most beautiful settings in the world and access to unbelievable produce and yet they still don’t get it right on so many levels. I wish more than anything that this were not so, but time and time again dishes are badly executed– over cooked meat and fish being a particular complaint – or just over complicated. Too much fiddling and showing off and not enough understanding of the ‘less is more’ philosophy. And then to top it all, wine service which is generally woeful – everything from incomprehensible wine notes (to be fair – hardly a phenomenon unique to South Africa) to waiting staff who generally really don’t have any idea of what it is they are selling.
The scholarship will bring a young person over to the UK in January 2008, to work with us at Lordship Lane for 6 months as part of the team there. They will do School of Wine as well as the regular, daily training that all our staff undergo – tasting and tasting and tasting again. They will have access to the tastings with wine makers that we hold regularly, both just for our team and for customers, and they will go on a wine trip to Europe in that time as well as accompanying me to trade tastings in London. At the end of this time, they will go on to work as a junior sommelier in one of the Gordon Ramsey restaurants for a look at how wine service at a very upmarket level operates for a further 6 months. The aim is not necessarily to turn them into sommeliers although they should be more than equipped to fulfil that role at the end of the year. More importantly though, they will hopefully have not only a thorough grounding in seriously good wine service in a variety of environments, but also all the benefits of a years exposure to the international wine market and wine styles.
This scholarship is also very much about giving opportunities to those who would not have access to them in any other circumstances. Many young South Africans travel to the UK every year and subsequently end up working in bars and restaurants on their 2 year visas but only a small number of these are from any group but the white ethnic minority. What this also means is that (allowing my imagination and most fervent hopes free reign) Green & Blue will be an important starting to point for a succession of talented young people from a range of different ethnic groups and backgrounds in successful careers in the South African wine industry – as buyers, marketing people, educators and even, yes, Sommeliers.
Jude and I were introduced in 2005 to a young South African called Tim Schultz, living and working in London. He came down to Green & Blue a few times and during a visit last November, I mentioned to him how we wanted to start this scholarship when we had the money to do so. Tim thought it was a marvellous idea and said that he had contacts in South Africa who would be interested in working with us, most notably at Spier Estate and in the Provincial Government of the Western Cape. You can have a look at the wonders of Spier at www.spier.co.za.
I sent him a proposal for this that in early 2006 but subsequently, got so caught up in first the expansion and then getting Clapham open, that I really had no time what so ever to devote to this. Jude and I still can’t quite believe how much work and effort Tim has put into it on our behalf for no reason other than he believes in the project, but he subsequently, pretty much single-handedly, arranged the South African side of things. Compared to absolutely every other little step we have taken with Green & Blue, each of which has felt like crawling, painfully slowly over white hot coals, the scholarship seemed to fall into place with almost no effort and so quickly, it really caught us quite by surprise. Of course, if you are looking to give something away rather than fighting to build something up, it is always going to be easier, but still. Tim has excelled, fixing us up with very impressive South African partners. The Spier Estate just outside Cape Town – wine tasting centre, deli, picnic grounds, theatre, hotel, conference centre, wild life sanctuary - is now the second most visited tourist attraction in the Western Cape. We are also hoping that the contacts in the Provincial Government of the Western Cape will be instrumental in helping us to grow the project in later years.
The Gordon Ramsey Group involvement also proved wonderfully simple to arrange. Ian Waddington, the group wine buyer, is an old colleague of mine from Conran days and it was a matter of speaking to him a few times to get them on-board.
So, despite the usual tiredness and stress, it was with a feeling of enormous excitement and optimism that we touched down in Cape Town early in the morning of the 2nd of August and drove immediately to Spier just outside Stellenbosch for the first of the interviews due to start at 2pm. After a quick lunch at the deli, surrounded by the most amazing array of strident bird life – self important ducks having noisy exchanges with each other while they pecked at my boots and tiny black birds with bright yellow faces and bibs (one of whom swooped down and made off with a large chip from Jude’s bowl) – we drove to the HR offices on a neighbouring farm and met with the team of ladies who had been organising everything here. In my experience, it is the personality of business owners and leaders of companies which bears the most responsible for creating the personality of the company, exemplified by the sort of people who work for it and their attitudes to their customers and others they work with. Given that, the owners of Spier must be very wonderful people. It is far more common, sadly, for Jude and I to complain bitterly about service and attitudes, so this is not just vacuous gushing. We were both inspired and profoundly impressed by everyone we met, starting with Heidi, Sumayya and Charlene in HR - all very wonderful ladies who were instrumental in pulling it all together.
At 2pm sharp, the first candidate arrived and we saw 3 others the same afternoon. Not having slept for far too many hours no doubt had something to do with it, but 3 of them almost moved me to tears. It is difficult to explain this without sounding like again, a gushing idiot, but almost without exception, the candidates we met had a drive to better themselves and an energy about doing so that was incredible to see. Most of them had similar stories – one parent families, having to forego tertiary education because of a lack of funds or at least having to work amazingly hard in order to get through it; having to support younger siblings, sick parents or children of their own and yet not once did we encounter even the suggestion of some sort of entitlement because of their situations or indeed bitterness. It seemed that every challenge any of them faced was met with pure determination to succeed in spite of it, to build a better life and time and again, they said the same thing – if we only get the opportunity, we will really show what we can do. Just give us the chance.
For 2 people who have only ever really worked in the UK, recruiting and training people there, these interviews felt amazingly….foreign. Please be completely clear that we are amazingly happy with our lovely Green & Blue team and of course I have worked with talented, driven people at all levels in my various jobs. But the profound wanting to do this and the pure energy here was a phenomenon I have not seen before.
By Friday lunch time, Jude and I were very seriously considering extending the scholarship this year to 2 people. The intention is, all being well, to extend the number of candidates as Green & Blue grows, but we were trying to work out whether we could afford to personally pay to bring another over this year. Narrowing it down to one seemed utterly impossible. In the end, it was decided for us – Heidi pointed out that it may cause all sorts of complications extending it at this stage, so difficult at it was, 2008 would see just one candidate after all.
And so, at a lunch for all the candidates and press on Monday the 6th, we announced the first winner of the Green & Blue Sommelier Scholarship. Thandisizwe Meyi (who’s first name means ‘one who loves his country’) was born in the Eastern Cape and went to school there, moving to the Western Cape after he matriculated. At the time, he knew nothing about wine – not even really understanding the difference between this and brandy apparently. He has worked for the last 5 years at Spier, starting out carrying boxes and stacking shelves in the Wine Centre, trying to learn as much as he could along the way. For someone who had never even drunk wine until relatively recently, he has come a long way – he was the only candidate to correctly identify one of the grape varieties in the wine he tasted with us.
Again, technology permitting (so far, thanks to us having a high definition DVD camcorder, it has not permitted, being completely incompatible with all of the editing software we have tried), we hope to have mpegs of Thandisiwe and some of the other candidates on the blog at some stage. If it never permits however, at least not given the limited time we have to devote to this and you are one of our London customers, you will meet him in the flesh from January 2008. Quite apart from anything else, it is going to be a huge pleasure working with him for 6 months and we very much look forward to it. Jude and I might also fulfil a long held ambition to learn Xhosa – Thandisizwe’s home language. Lessons in return for really nice wine, perhaps.
