November, 2005
"Your wine right — your drinking duty"

THE website of the Quixote winery in California asks a pertinent question: “Has modern man inadvertently transformed wine, a beverage of consummate pleasure, into an absurdly serious pursuit?”

As Stephen Digby points out on the www.winenews.co.za website, the back label of a local wine supplies an answer: “This hand-crafted wine has a bouquet of greengage fruit with a hint of galia melon. When served slightly chilled the wine is a superb accompaniment to salmon, charcuterie, and asparagus.”

To prick the bubble of wine snobbism, Quixote hired Austrian architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser to design their winery. Hundertwasser was the Austrian Gaudí, rejecting straight lines (“the devil’s tools”) in favour of biomorphic forms. His artistic style had three elements: sufficient soil on the roof to allow trees to grow; a jaunty use of ceramic tiles and a profusion of gold-leaf onion domes. As he told the Quixotians: “Your life will change when you work under a gold-leaf onion dome.” He was also a performance artist who would appear in the nude to promote his eco-friendly flushless toilet.

His architectural manifesto Your Window Right — Your Tree Duty appeared in 1972 and stated: “A person in a rented apartment must be able to lean out of his window and scrape off the masonry within arm’s reach. And he must be allowed to take a long brush and paint everything outside within arm’s reach. So that it will be visible from afar to everyone in the street that someone lives there who is different from the imprisoned, enslaved, standardised man who lives next door.” What a pity he never designed wineries in the Cape.