It's all about a good whine

I heard a rumour from an unreliable source that trouble is brewing in the ranks of the Western Cape's grape-pickers. I felt a surge of solidarity because I, too, was once a picker of grapes.

- BEN TROVATO

Not here, of course. Our wine farms would never hire white pickers, especially not from Cape Town, because we'd make snotty remarks about the quality of the wine instead of shutting up and drinking it in lieu of wages.

My career as a grape picker began and ended on the Greek island of Crete. Please do not confuse me with one of those mewling brats spawned by the idle rich who spend a year sashaying around Europe acquiring "life experience" by doing the kind of jobs usually reserved for the darkies back home.

For a start, I never had a gap year. Well, there was a gap, but it was longer than a year. A lot longer. And I was travelling because, even though I single-handedly lost us the war in Namibia, the army still thought it a good idea that I go on camps. Ah, camping. What fun, you might think. You would be wrong.

My money ran out in Spain but the idea of being destitute in the land of Alexander the Great was a lot more appealing than being pretty much anything in the land of PW Botha, the Not-So-Great.

A friend living in Barcelona said there was money to be made in watermelon picking, but later I realised he must have been on drugs because all the Greeks I subsequently spoke to not only knew nothing about watermelons, but frequently became enraged and chased me down the street.