Game night on 7 October was Nemesis. The crew wakes up on a damaged ship, and each player carries a secret objective that may or may not include getting everyone else home. The thing in the vents does not care who wins the game, and nor did the wine.

The wine was the 2022 Fat Bastard Merlot from Thierry & Guy, a name that makes the bottle either a promise or a joke. I rated it on Vivino at 20:38 with the board already out on the table, and gave it four stars.

That is well above what I usually give a South African Merlot, which averages 3.6 across the ones I have rated. My ratings already favour Merlot over Cabernet Sauvignon, the softer and rounder style that the Guild’s Bordeaux evening taught me to call Right Bank, so a Merlot that beats my own average by that much is worth writing down.

Background: Wine Tasters’ Guild of South Africa tasting notes. Game and wine cards: BoardGameGeek and Vivino.

I have been to England a few times in the last few years, and I have learnt that its trains run within a narrow band of acceptable weather. In July they stopped because it was too hot. In January they stopped because it was too snowy. In between, now and then, they stopped because of leaves: not leaves in general, which are expected in autumn, but the wrong kind of leaves, on the wrong bit of line.

I am home in Cape Town, a hemisphere away from all of it, and the railway is still trying to ruin my day. This week an email arrived: “Dear Francois, we’re getting in touch to let you know that major engineering work is taking place in the Havant area from Saturday 24 to Friday 30 October.” Buses will replace trains between Havant and Southampton Central for the weekend, and then between Chichester, Portsmouth Harbour and Southampton Central for the week. I have no plans to be anywhere near Havant. I read it twice anyway, the way one reads a forecast for weather one is not standing in.

Still, the British have perfected one thing: when the line is down, somebody lays on a bus and gets you there. Late, and slower than promised, but there.

The Guild’s Wines of the World evening on 21 October was about Bordeaux blends, and whether ours can stand next to the French, the Italians and the Americans. Justin van Wyk, the winemaker at Constantia Glen, presented the tasting and brought his own Constantia Glen 5 as one of the South African wines, in a line-up that averaged more than R900 a bottle.

A Bordeaux blend is made from the grape varieties typical of the Bordeaux region in south-western France. The red blends are built mainly on Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Cabernet Franc, often with smaller amounts of Petit Verdot and Malbec and now and then Carménère, and they are known for their structure, their depth and how well they age.

The part I had no idea about was the banks. Left Bank wines are mostly Cabernet Sauvignon, with firm tannins and dark fruit, while Right Bank wines are Merlot-led and come out softer and rounder, with plum and red berry in the glass. I would have guessed north and south if anyone asked, so I learned something. That probably means I’m not proper Guild material yet, but it is a good reason to keep going back.

My own Vivino ratings have a view on the Guild’s question. The South African Bordeaux blends I have rated average 3.7, against 3.5 for the Bordeaux reds from France, so on my palate the Cape is already slightly ahead. The single grapes lean the same way: South African Merlot sits at 3.6 and South African Cabernet Sauvignon at 3.1. By the Guild’s description, that makes me a Right Bank drinker who never knew there was a Right Bank.

Background: Wine Tasters’ Guild of South Africa tasting notes.

At Karmøy, on the Norwegian coast, I spent a while watching the SC Connector go about her business. The two white columns in the photograph are not funnels. They are sails.

Norsepower fitted this Sea-Cargo ro-ro with two 35-metre Rotor Sails — spinning cylinders that turn wind into thrust. The clever part is that they tilt. Her run from western Norway to the Netherlands and the UK passes under bridges and power lines, so the sails lie flat to go beneath and stand up again on the other side. They were the first tiltable set in the world.

The numbers are faintly ridiculous. In testing the pair produced the equivalent of 7 MW at the propeller shaft — more than her own main engine — and she touched 19.6 knots with the engine chipping in about 3. The crew report less roll and a schedule that survives weather which would otherwise cost them a day. One North Sea crossing saved ten tons of fuel, and a ton of fuel burned is better than three tons of CO₂ — so call it thirty tons that stayed out of the air, on one trip.

I am quite sure you do not want me to explain the mathematics. Stand back and appreciate how extremely cool this is.

All right, the mathematics. You did not ask. Here it is anyway, and it is prettier than you expect.

Bernoulli — fast air is thin air

p + ½ρv² = constant

Spin a cylinder in a breeze and one side drags the air along with it while the other shoves against it. One side is quicker, so one side is thinner, and the column is pushed sideways. That is the Magnus effect — the Venturi you were thinking of is the same Bernoulli seen in a narrowing pipe; this one happens in open air. The spin is measured as circulation:

Γ = 2πR²ω

and Kutta–Joukowski turns circulation into force. Per metre of rotor, and then over the whole height H:

L′ = ρv_∞Γ  →  L = 2πρR²ωv_∞H

Read it and the ship makes sense. Thrust climbs with the square of the radius, which is why the columns are so fat; and straight in step with ω, which is why they hum. The only thing you spend is the electricity to keep them turning. Everything else is weather.

Idealised, of course — real air is sticky and the honest figure is lower. The shape of the thing is right.