Just Fancy That

From the Arniston Bay Blog, posted 21 September

A roast rack of Karoo lamb is just the right dish to prepare on Heritage Day.
This dish maybe time consuming to prepare but the result is an amazingly delicious dish which is well worth the effort.
To keep within the heritage theme, serve this meal with a uniquely South African Pinotage. The Arniston Bay Pinotage 2008 is a well balanced wine with vanilla tones and savoury flavours. This wine is a great match for the South African Karoo lamb.

From the Kumkani blog, posted 21 September

A roast rack of Karoo lamb is just the right dish to prepare on Heritage Day.
This dish maybe time consuming to prepare but the result is an amazingly delicious dish which is well worth the effort.
To keep within the heritage theme, serve this meal with a uniquely South African Pinotage. The Kumkani Pinotage 2006. This well balanced wine has a ripe berry fruit nose and French oak aromas adding vanilla and spice with a excellent finish.

Both blogs posted Sally Schneider's December 1969 recipe copied from a US site and although temperatures have been converted to Celcius from Fahrenheit the lamb pictured is not Karoo but "American lamb, because it is corn fed, is milder in flavor than Australian or New Zealand lamb, which is grass fed."

How come both Kumkani and Arniston Bay blogs happened to post the same thing on the same day? Seems that the brands have outsourced production of their blogs to the same PR Agency, Bivio Consulting.

Bivio Consulting also run the blogs of several other wine brands including Boschendal , Four Cousins ,Tall Horse and Versus . Content is mostly cut and paste items from other websites with minimal original content or news about the winery, it staff or its products.

No doubt Bivio managed to impress the wineries with the importance to a business of blogging, however Bivio themselves are not leading by example. Bivio's very own blog, hosted by the free Blogger service, has had only 3 items posted this year, the last one on 10 April declared "Our site is currently under construction".

I think these wineries are missing the point. Surely a blog is a way to communicate with their customers and to let us who cannot visit the winery to know what is going on throughout the seasons. It isn't rocket science and it needn't cost money. I can imagine the winery MD smugly boasting that 'Oh, yes, we have a blog' but I don't think that paying a PR agency to post content culled from the web that has no connection with the wine brand that owns the blog makes sense.

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