Dear Miss White:
The good thing about getting to 30ish is you don’t need to impress anyone with your dinner-party wine like you did when you were 20ish. That said, there is no point in drinking shit wine - so here are a couple of options on the R45 Rands mark: Glen Carlou Tortoise Hill or Darling Cellars DC Six Tonner. Two vile wines in contrast, that I would not consider drinkable in any civilized society are: Beyerskloof Pinotage or Woolftrap.
To clarify the wine glass wise crack: I’m not saying that everyone should drink wine out of wine glasses, or that they should be matchy matchy. Glugging wine out of a robust tumbler can be very nice, as can miscellaneous sort-of-country-kitchen-shabby-Chic crystal glasses. But surely serving wine in those nasty WINEX frosted-logo mini glasses is just not cool. Go and buy 12 matching R10 tumblers from Wollies. Oh, and that reminds me: after 30 surely we should have more than 4 plates!
Once read this book trying to theorise the way people eat, and it said that, from a sort of social anthropology point of view, vegans are closest to cannibals. I'm not sure how they reached that conclusion - something to do with the transformation of what you eat becoming your body. Dunno. I was once vegan, but I've never been a cannibal (unless you count chewing the occasional fingernail).
Anyway, Jono: you're right about Winex-frosted tasting glasses. Urgh. But Bourneville: wrong. Flourless chocolate cake. I dissed it till I tried it. You too can see the light (or the dark, so to speak).