Feast and festivities at the Spier Wine Harvest Festival

On Saturday 26 February, Spier will celebrate the grape harvest on the banks of the Eerste River, in front of its acclaimed farm-to-table restaurant, Eight. The restaurant will be transformed into a market offering delectable treats to create the ultimate picnic, while the adjacent lounge will offer tastings of Spier’s award-winning premium wines.

Grab an old-fashioned basket and fill it to the brim with homemade breads, cheeses, dips, salads and cold meats. Relax with your picnic and bottles of wine under the trees while the kids play interactive games including puppet shows, magicians, face painting and popular vineyard tours via tractor. For the more energetic adults, boules and croquet will take place on the bamboo lawn.

In the Private Collection Lounge, Spier’s new MCC will be on offer with oysters, while the award-winning Spier Creative Block blends will be available for tasting outside on the stoep.

Spier’s celebrated Cellar Master, Frans Smit will bless the harvest and his winemaking team will lead the charge in the annual grape stomping challenge! Three bands will play during the day, filling the air with bluesy tunes.

The Spier Wine Harvest Festival runs from 10h00 to 16h00 and costs R60, which includesa wine glass and five tickets that can be used either for wine tastings or games. Tickets can only be purchased at Spier on the day.

For further info, visit www.spier.co.za or call 021 809 1100.

Dealing With Assange and the WikiLeaks Secrets. Bill Keller NYT writes

This past June, Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian, phoned me and asked, mysteriously, whether I had any idea how to arrange a secure communication. Not really, I confessed. The Times doesn’t have encrypted phone lines, or a Cone of Silence. Well then, he said, he would try to speak circumspectly. In a roundabout way, he laid out an unusual proposition: an organization called WikiLeaks, a secretive cadre of antisecrecy vigilantes, had come into possession of a substantial amount of classified United States government communications. WikiLeaks’s leader, Julian Assange, an eccentric former computer hacker of Australian birth and no fixed residence, offered The Guardian half a million military dispatches from the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq. There might be more after that, including an immense bundle of confidential diplomatic cables. The Guardian suggested — to increase the impact as well as to share the labor of handling such a trove — that The New York Times be invited to share this exclusive bounty. The source agreed.

Was I interested? Read on: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/magazine/30Wikileaks-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all