In the mid-1990s, when Jeremy Clarkson was young and engaging (charming, actually), I turned up to do a TV interview with him. He had a small house in West London, and he couldn’t have been more helpful.

Parked outside was a top of the line black Volvo 850 (the T-5, I think), the family runaround, and also one of the fastest cars in production. His other car was something like a Jag.

Surely, we asked, motoring journalism couldn’t pay so well that he could afford to keep cars like these? And surely too, manufacturers weren’t allowed to give them to motoring journalists? Clarkson laughed. Of course, they weren’t gifts! The cars were “on loan.”

I was reminded of the Clarkson episode reading Neil Pendock’s blog, where he quoted from an article in Afrikaans by noted SA journalist George Claassen:

Cars and wine are the two areas of journalism Claassen accuses of being run unethically, with advertorials – “one of the biggest evils of journalism” – the main problem. He then goes on to quote an unnamed local pundit alleging R10 000 will put a product on the cover of a publication in which paid for comment is often passed off as editorial.

R10 000 seems to be the quantum as this was the monthly payment one winery owner told me he makes to a journalist for “marketing strategy advice” (he was planning to halve the amount after being left out of a benchmark tasting arranged by the writer) while a figure ten times larger was the annual retainer one winemaker reported his company paid another hack. The conflicts of interest of some published pundits make a mockery of transparency and devalue SA winespeak currency.

Claassen then looks at the state of play outside SA and moves on to a piece I wrote for www.winenew.co.za earlier this year. Called “when everything has a price,” it quotes extensively from a feature in Il Mio Vino by Gaetano Manti alleging that one of the major international wine magazines … offers stories for sale. I wrote the piece in response to complaints by several local winemakers about the coverage of [its awards] …where the form in which results are printed is a function of how much you pay.