On a cool April afternoon in Johannesburg, we are at 4th Avenue in Parkhurst – a charming suburb with stylish resto-bars, Afr0-chic boutiques and eateries spilling on to the streets – for a rather heady experience in the middle of the day.
Every tipple, every bit of trivia is crucial for this entrepreneur on the block. At the Bottega Café, which gets full on weekends and most weeknights, owner Saverio Cardillo is always present to offer customers a hands-on experience and bespoke tastings of whisky.
He pulls up a chair and gets talking animatedly about the bottles of the fermented beverage that imperviously fill the glass showcases lining all the walls of his café.
For starters, he says there are two ways to spell it – and that could be a conversation starter at any party. The Irish spell it ‘whiskey’ and the Scots ‘whisky’.
“I call it the heaven journey. It is a little point that no one knows about. Every single person that walks in here and does not know about it, they walk in and say ‘wow!’ because it is like a little onion, that you can just exfoliate all these layers,” says Cardillo.
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The restaurant is small and intimate but the umpteen bottles of whisky in every crevice and the cabinets behind you, make it akin to a distillery, minus the bulky barrels.
Cardillo’s love for whisky started only over eight years ago when he was first gifted a Glen Ord by one of his suppliers.
“I tasted it and it was phenomenal. That is how I got into single malts and started dabbling in all the Ireland malts&#8230;”
A South African with Italian heritage, Cardillo says he has a palate for Scottish whisky. And for this interview too, whisky-tasting is a prelude.
He gets us to taste the Pogues Irish Whiskey, which is very gentle, soft and easy. My colleague tasted the Jameson Distillery Edition with the orange, brown sugar, ginger, peach and salt taste.
As a first-time whisky-drinker, I understood that not all whisky tastes bad, thanks to Cardillo, who knows how to pick the right taste for different palates.
“This is what it’s all about. People come in, sit down and drink their whisky and they don’t get intimidated when they come to my restaurant,” he says.
The Bottega Whiskey Club, which he started in 2013, boasts of over 2,000 members, mostly from the financial sector, lured to the club through word of mouth.
“We have four types of clients – those that know nothing about whisky and we try and educate you and try and accommodate your palate. Then we get the guys that have been to Scotland and have been collecting for years and years and only buy limited editions. Then you get the guys who buy whisky to stock up their bars. Then you also get the collectors that will drink their whisky,” he says.
The restaurant has over 700 malts, which they use for their whisky-tasting events. They pair the whisky with cigars and sometimes come up with different food pairings.
Surprisingly, for a self-taught whisky expert, Cardillo says that he is not a collector.
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“I am not like that. I am the type that needs to know what is in that bottle. I would hate to die one day knowing that somebody is going to be drinking my collection not knowing what was in that bottle,” he says.
But for those that do like to collect their whisky as a form of investment, Cardillo believes they could earn significant returns.
“We have bottles that we bought for R500 ($40) or R600 ($49) and now they are worth a lot of money. The increase in value of the whisky depends on if the distillery closes down. If they are no longer making any more of it, then the demand for that bottle of whisky increases,” he says.
Currently, the Jameson Gold Reserve has been discontinued, so he advises whisky drinkers should buy as many as they can of it, as the value of the bottles are bound to increase by 10%-15%.
“It currently retails at R893 ($73)… So you could look at doubling your money in a couple of years. For example, the Compass Box, they made just over 5,680 bottles; I was retailing them at R2,000 ($163), but I see now three years down the line, they are auctioning them and selling them at R4,800 ($392) to R5,000 ($408),” he says.
However, a whisky club as a business is not as lucrative.
“We turn a lot of stock [from the business], but if I had to do it purely as a business, no, I would not make any money from it. Not when you consider the rentals and other expenses. The club is purely for coming to see what we have and tasting the different kinds of whisky,” says Cardillo.
There is no right or wrong way to drink whisky.
“What you like and what the next person likes are two different things. You can’t get intimidated. You are only supposed to drink the whisky with ice or you are not supposed to drink the whisky with the ice. There are so many rules that are just falling away now,” he says.
The best way to put this to the test is to pour a neat whisky in a glass and drink it. You will be able to taste all the different aromas. Thereafter, pour yourself another glass and pour a bit of water and you will be able to taste the barrel’s wood. It will become spicy as you see the whisky open up, as it becomes cloudy, and you will be able to see the oils release.
<div id="attachment_36577" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-36577" class="wp-image-36577 size-large" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Saverio-656-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="683" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Saverio-656-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Saverio-656-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Saverio-656-600x400.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Saverio-656-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Saverio-656.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />Saverio Cardillo. Photo by Motlabana Monnakgotla.</div>
“This is why I say when people ask me ‘how are you supposed to drink your whisky’, I say ‘it depends entirely on your palate’,” says Cardillo.
“I once had a gentleman who walked in here the other night and he ordered a Johnnie Walker Blue Label and he drank it with cream soda. I didn’t even cringe.”
His is not limited to just tasting whisky, he also resells whisky for collectors hoping for returns on their long-held bottles.
“…[I] am a little bit sceptical about selling their collections. I sell on behalf of them, and I don’t put my name behind it and I don’t sell it using the name of Bottega. I let everyone know that it is somebody else’s collection,” he says. Cardillo receives the commission from the proceeds of the sale.
“If something goes wrong with the lid or counterfeiting in whisky or it leaks, that is my reputation at stake, and that is what I have to be careful about,” says Cardillo.
Cardillo took his hobby and turned it into a calling imparting knowledge to discerning drinkers, making him a limited edition among restaurateurs.

Saverio-663

The Whisky Whiz On How His Whisky Took Him Far

For 127 years, the Rand Club, in the heart of downtown Johannesburg, has been home to the rich, ambitious and gentlemanly. It was born in 1886 when Cecil John Rhodes, the colonialist extraordinaire, walked from the mine diggings, marked a small dusty spot and said ‘This corner will do for the club’.
In those days, £10 bought you membership and in flocked the Randlords, the millionaires who mined Johannesburg’s gold and turned it from bush to the biggest city in Africa. On raucous nights, behind its oak doors, Rhodes would walk in and roll handfuls of rough diamonds like dice on the green baize of the billiard table to show everyone the fruit of his mines.
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There could be few clubs who can claim to have accomodated Rudyard Kipling and Winston Churchill, when he was a young journalist.
Conspirators met in the Rand Club to hatch the Jameson Raid in 1895. They plotted for a bunch of armed horsemen, lead by Leander Starr Jameson from Pitsani, in Botswana, to stage a coup against Paul Kruger, President of the Transvaal Republic, who controlled the gold mines. The Afrikaaner rulers raised taxes and controlled the treasury but refused foreigners, who worked the mines, the vote. Jameson hoped to ride in and foment an uprising in Johannesburg among disgruntled mine workers but only got as far as Krugersdorp where marksmen captured them.
These days, the membership is $1,200 a year. But down the years fewer have taken it. With an aging membership, the welcome is getting warmer. The club is changing to attract a new generation to liven it up.
“In 125 years, much has changed in the business center. Most of our core members have moved out of the city center of Johannesburg going to Sandton or closer to their mining operations. As a result, there are not enough people using the club anymore. In 10 years, the club has not made an operating profit. We want people to use the club, especially with the inner city revival, but we haven’t had the outsource capacity to do that,” says David Williams, Rand Club deputy chairman.
Williams announced in August that it would sell the catering business for $0.01. A new private banqueting company will operate from within the club. It will try to rejuvenate a tired marketing strategy for a building, as much a museum as a club, with Africa’s longest bar.
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Every second Thursday evening, you’ll find David Lobban taking new members around the club to learn its history. But, unlike a lot of museums, the building has changed little since 1904. Not even a fire in 2005 changed it, says Lobban.
“I remember that day so well. As the building was burning, we had two of our oldest members at the bar. I remember them saying ‘we’re going down with the ship’, they refused to leave ‘their spots’ at the bar. In the end we convinced them to finish their drinks on the balcony, whilst the smoke was coming out the windows,” he says.
It was a sign of meaner times when the club was forced to increase its security after a $205,000 book was stolen from its library.
Lobban has worked for the club for 15 years, after he left his old job as a bodyguard for the most famous Rand Club member, Nelson Mandela.
“He was one of the hardest people to look after. I used to hate it. The man had no sense of security. Often he would stop in the middle of a street to get out and talk to people,” says Lobban.
A painting, donated by the great man, hangs above the stairwell, to commemorate his membership.
As the club struggles to survive, surely Rhodes would approve of the one last roll of the diamonds.

Tag: Club

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The Whisky Whiz On How His Whisky Took Him Far

The Last Roll Of The Diamonds