Dave Hughes Honoured by Pinotage Association

Dave Hughes has been awarded Honorary Membership of the Pinotage Association.

Beyers Truter, Chairman of the Pinotage Association, handed the honorary membership certificate to Dave and called him South Africa's best wine friend. Dave's career includes distiller, winemaker, wine auctioneer, international wine and spirit judge, writer on drink and allied subjects, consultant to Nederburg Annual Wine Auction, Veritas Wine Awards, South African Airways Wine Selections and the International Wine and Spirit Competition.

One of the first times he showed Pinotage overseas, was in September 1976, for a Wines and Vines magazine tasting in San Francisco. One of his first overseas presentations of a range of only Pinotage wines was at the Wine Educators Conference in Santa Rosa California in 1981, where he presented eight different Pinotage wines to an audience who had never heard of the grape.

According to Dave it was difficult to promote South African wines in those days because of international sanctions, due to our politics. In 1985 he was barred from talking at the Roseworthy Campus in Australia, because a few students objected to the presence of a "racialist South African". The tasting was held in Wolf Blass cellars and instead of 30 odd students, there was a crowd of about 100 students, winemakers and consumers.

My congratulations to Dave; may your socks never match!

Pictured above, left to right, are are De Wet Viljoen (Chairman of the Absa Top 10 Pinotage organising committee), Dave Hughes and Beyers Truter (Chairman of the Pinotage Association).